Ebook Pricing for Short Stories and Novellas?

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Lindsay

As we’ve talked about before (How Well Does Short Fiction Sell in Ebook Form? and Novellas and Short Stories — Ebooks Not Just for Novels), there are no rules when it comes to word count on ebooks. I enjoy writing novel-length fiction, but those 100,000-word beasts do take a while to pen. It’s nice to whip out a short story or a novella here and there, both because it makes you feel terribly productive by releasing ebooks more often and also because it gives you a break from your main projects.

I started my Flash Gold Chronicles, a series of steampunk novellas, for those reasons. One thing I’ve wondered about is pricing. With novels, there are a lot of them out there in any and every genre, so it’s easy to get an idea for a baseline price. We’re seeing more and more short stories, too, and those often go for 99 cents — the lowest price you can set an ebook at without making it free. With novellas (defined on Wikipedia as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length), there are fewer examples in the Kindle Store and elsewhere.

Long-time author, Dean Wesley Smith, suggests the following pricing scheme for ebooks:

Short stories. 99 cents. Author gets about 35 cents per sale.

Short novels and short collections (Anything from 15,000 words to 45,000 words) $2.99. Author gets around 65% or about $1.95 per sale.

Novels or long collections (45,000 words and up) $4.99-$5.99 range. Author gets around 65% or about $3.25-$4.50 per sale.

This seems like a good guideline to me, especially for short stories and novels, though the ebook-buyer in me wonders if $2.99 is a little high for something in the 15,000-20,000-word range. Most folks can zip through a story that length in about an hour. Also, if they can get a whole novel (my novels are all over 100,000 words) for $5, then isn’t $3 on the steep side for something 1/5th of that length?

Perhaps $1.99 would be a more fair price point, but herein lies the dilemma for e-publishers:

At price points of $2.98 and below, you only receive a 35% royalty from stores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble (Smashwords offers a higher royalty for any price point, but their marketplace sees a fraction of the traffic of Amazon, and many authors have low to non-existent sales there). So, on a $1.99 ebook, you’d only get about 70 cents whereas charging a dollar more lets you get well over a dollar more on your cut.

Receiving 35 cents for a 6,000-word short story doesn’t seem too shabby because it probably didn’t take that long to write, but with a 20,000-word novella, you’re getting into different territory. There are more words to write, more words to pay an editor to proofread, and a more intricate story to work out overall.

I’ve been doing some mulling of late on the prices for my Flash Gold novellas, and I’m planning to test things a little when I release the third one in a few weeks.

Testing price points for novellas

Here’s what I’m doing right now with my Flash Gold Chronicles:

  • Flash Gold (18,000 words) — 99 cents
  • Hunted (27,000 words) — 1.49
  • Peacemaker (38-40,000 words) — to be determined

Because Flash Gold is on the short end for a novella, I don’t think 99 cents is too low. I really think of it as more of a short story (a long short story if you will). I based the price of Hunted on the 99-cent price of Flash Gold, figuring it had roughly 1/3rd more words, so I’d charge 1/3rd more. It makes sense, but at the same time 50 cents per sale seems kind of weak when a $2.99 price point would bring in $2. Would people pay that much more for a story of that length though? That’s the question, and I haven’t yet tested it out.

I think I’m going to play it safe and try the $2.99 price on Peacemaker, since it’s even longer than the other two, almost novel-length in its own right, at least according to Wikipedia. I plan on raising the price on Hunted to $1.99, mostly so it’ll make the jump to $2.99 seem less drastic to readers.

Proposed future price points:

  • Flash Gold — 99 cents
  • Hunted — 1.99
  • Peacemaker 2.99

I’ll make the price adjustments when I release Peacemaker (so, if you’ve been thinking of buying Hunted, now would be the time to do it! :D).

In the end, we just have to test things and see what the market will bear. For an established author, with a fan base built up, $2.99 may work just fine for a 20,000-word novella. For a new author, without any sort of fan base built up, getting $2.99 for an entire novel can be a challenge.

Earning more for short stories and novellas while keeping prices low

You and I may find that we simply can’t get people to buy short works at $2.99 a pop. Or, maybe we can sell some, but sales are so much lower that it’s not worth it overall to charge more. Here’s an option for us:

Bundling short stories and/or novellas to create an omnibus.

Soon after I release Peacemaker, I’m planning to publish the Flash Gold Chronicles I-III in a single ebook volume, probably for $3.95 or so. This would be a good deal for readers who want to simply grab all three at once (it’ll be cheaper for them to buy all of the stories in one ebook, and the combined word count will equal that of a full-length fantasy novel), and it’ll be a good deal for me because the higher royalty rate on a $4 ebook will mean I’m making about $2.70 per sale. Compare that to 35 cents on Book 1 plus 50 cents on Book 2 plus 50-70 cents on Book 3 (if I find I have to price that at $1.99 instead of $2.99 to make sales).

Ah, who knew writing involved so much math?

I’ll write another post later on with details on how the pricing experiment and the novella-omnibus goes. In the meantime, authors, what are your thoughts on pricing for short stories and novellas? Are you following Mr. Smith’s guidelines or doing something else? Readers, what are you willing to pay for ebooks of those lengths?

 

Posted in E-publishing | Tagged , , , , , | 31 Comments

Ebook Pricing: Why 99 Cents Might Be a Mistake for You

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Lindsay

A lot of new independent authors will e-publish their first novels and set the price to 99 cents, thinking that’s where they have to be because they’re unknown authors. Then they’ll go out and promote the heck out of their books (spending hours on blog tours, forum posts, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), all in an effort to sell copies of that single 99-cent title.

The problem?

If you’re selling your ebook for 99 cents, you’re only making 35 cents per sale. Nobody ever said being an author was the road to riches, but that’s an awfully poor return on a novel that probably took you six months to a year or more to write, edit, and publish. What’s worse is that, with only one ebook out, you can’t make more than 35 cents per customer (more on why that’s a problem below).

This is why, if you ask me, I won’t recommend the 99-cent price tag for authors with one book out (short stories or short novellas, being a possible exception).

Wait, you’re thinking, isn’t my first ebook currently free? Isn’t it a 105,000-word, full-length fantasy novel that’s less than 99 cents at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Itunes, and Smashwords? (Yes, I can work plugs for my stuff into any blog post! 😉 ) And didn’t take it take me a year to write that puppy? (Actually, it was more like seven years in the making, but that’s another story.)

The answer is yes, I have a free novel out there, and there was a time when I had that novel priced at 99 cents too. The difference is that I have books 2 and 3 (with 4 coming this spring) in the series out as well, and those are $4.95. I’ve tinkered with the price on Book 1, and I’m finding that, right now, I make more overall by giving that novel away for free, because more people try the series and go on to buy the following books.

But, if you only have one book out, then it might not make sense to sell it for 99 cents — or less. The problem with 99 cents is you have to sell six times as many copies as you do at $2.99 to make the same amount of money.

You’re welcome to test things (I encourage it, in fact), but if you’re not writing in a popular genre (i.e. thrillers and romance), then you may find it tough to sell enough books for it to be worth it (“worth it” is subjective, of course, but most of us want to at least break even on our editing and cover art costs in a timely manner). Even writing in a popular genre is no guarantee of success. Many people find that their sales increase at 99 cents, but not enough to be significant. They may sell 50 copies a month and think, “Hey, that’s not bad” only to realize that only earns them $17 or about $200 a year. It’s hard to stay excited about your writing and the promise of a writing career on such paltry earnings, and many new indies don’t even sell that well. (I didn’t my first month.)

Is marketing worth it if you only have one 99-cent ebook?

If you only have the one book out, there’s nowhere for a new reader to go after buying your first novel. You’re putting all this time into marketing and guest blogging and hand-selling books, and all you’re going to get out of it is a maximum of 35 cents per customer. Ouch. Not many businesses make it on returns like that.

If you wait to go hardcore on the marketing until you have more books out (perhaps even a series, eh?), you now have the potential to make $10 or $20 per “customer,” depending on how you price your books. It’s still not a lot (see my earlier note on how most authors don’t get rich), but the numbers start to look a little better. Maybe you’re averaging $10 or $20 per hour of promotion you do, as opposed to 35 cents.

At that point, putting hours into promotional efforts begins to make more sense, especially if you start a newsletter and encourage your readers to sign up. In the business world, people talk about the “lifetime value” of a customer, and it’s not so different with authors and readers. Say you’ve sold someone your series and made that $10 or $20, but you’re working on your next series. If you have that reader on your mailing list, then you can shoot him/her a note when you have a new book out. That person may buy the new one and continue to buy your books for many years down the road. Ultimately, this means that your hour of promotional efforts can end up being worth much more than $20, but only if you have multiple books out and only if you encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter (don’t assume that readers will just remember your work, because they have lots and lots of authors they follow!).

You may be thinking that you can do the newsletter thing and try to snag lifetime customers based on your one book, and that is true, but you’ll probably find that it takes more than one book for readers to decide they love your work. After one book, they may decide to look for others by you, but if there’s nothing else out there…well, it’s asking a lot at that point for them to come to your site, read all about you, and sign up for your newsletter (that said, it’s never to early to get started with that stuff).

In summary, I recommend pricing your first ebook at $2.99 or above and not worrying a whole lot about sales and marketing until you have more books out. Even if you only sell 10 ebooks a month at that price, you’re making more than if you’d sold 50 at 99 cents. Then, when you have more ebooks out, you can play around with “loss leaders” (AKA pricing your first book at free or 99 cents to get more people into your world).

A short cut to getting more ebooks out there

If you’ve just published your first novel, and it took six months to a year (to seven years) to finish it, you may be groaning at the idea of not making much money until you have another one out. Well, I started out in the same boat. I’m envious of these new indie authors who pop in with five or ten “trunk novels” they can drop into the marketplace. But what about the rest of us?

Write some short stories to bulk up your list of titles. You can absolutely turn short stories, novelettes, and novellas into ebooks, and they don’t take nearly as long as novels to write.

I’ve talked about this many times on here (so those of you who have heard it before can skip this paragraph), but when I published my first novel, I didn’t have any of the following books in the series written. I did have a short story that featured the heroes from the novel. I uploaded the story to Smashwords as a free ebook (I didn’t even think of charging since it was only 6,000 words), and I included an except to Book 1 at the end. The ebook was distributed to iTunes, Sony, and Barnes & Noble (at the time I didn’t know how to get a free ebook into Amazon, or I would have done that as well), and lots of folks found it, read it, and went on to buy my first book (at the time I had my first novel priced at $2.99). How many people? It’s impossible to say, but over the last year, I’d guess that 500 to 1,000 sales came my way because of that short story.

Do you have thoughts on free/99-cent ebooks? Let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Posted in E-publishing | Tagged , , , , | 25 Comments

New Map for The Emperor’s Edge World

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Lindsay

I’ve been wanting to have maps for the Emperor’s Edge books for a while now, but my artistic abilities are…well, they just aren’t actually. You don’t want to see how badly I can mangle a stick figure… Fortunately, EE reader and fellow indie author Jenna Elizabeth Johnson agreed to help me out. She likes to draw. She illustrated the cover art for her YA fantasy series with colored pencil and used the same style for my map.

Here’s the first one we (more her than me) put together for the region where the EE stories take place:

Some of the cities and terrain in the south will be appearing in the next couple of books (EE4 has a big train adventure and there might even be some flight…).

We’re also going to do a map of the capital, since lots of the adventures take place in the city, but I need to re-read the books first and make note of all the districts and landmarks mentioned (note to self: in the future, make a map as you go, even if it’s ugly as sin and no one else will ever see it). I’m hoping to have both maps ready to go by April so I can include them in the next ebook.

In case any of you are looking for an artist to help you with custom maps for your world, I believe Jenna is willing to take on some commissions. You can contact her through her website.

Posted in My Ebooks | Tagged , , | 29 Comments

What Can We Learn from JA Konrath’s $140,000 E-Publishing Sales Month?

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Lindsay

If you’re at all into self-publishing or e-publishing, you’ve probably heard of J.A. Konrath. He was one of the first authors to turn his back on the traditional publishing system and start enrolling his new titles (and old ones where the rights had reverted back to him) into the Amazon Kindle Store. For more than a year, he’s been sharing his impressive sales results, and earlier this month he posted that he’d made $100,000 in the three weeks around Christmas (he eventually made $140,000 over a 30-day period).

Most of us would be tickled to make that much in a year, and it’s mind-boggling to imagine making that much in a month from selling $0.99 and $2.99 ebooks. Really. I’m boggling right now. Feel free to take a moment to do the same before moving on.

Ready? Excellent. So…what can we learn from Joe’s success that can actually help us? The little guys?

I’m sure we could learn a lot from going back and reading his old blog posts, but I thought there were some worthwhile nuggets just in the *screenshot he posted of his Jan 1 to Jan 11 Amazon sales report. Here it is (click on the picture for the full-size version):

*He has fifteen more titles that didn’t show up in the screenshot

Here are a few things I noticed and that I think can be helpful for us:

Joe has a butt-load of books out

I see a lot of indie authors getting frustrated when they’re working their tails off at marketing, promoting, social media networking, etc. and it’s not doing much for their sales. I’ll check out their author pages and see that they only have one or two ebooks out.

I understand their impatience (one of the big reasons I got into e-publishing is because I’m impatient too — spend two years to query agents and pursue the Bix 6? No, thank you.), and I also have a long ways to go before I have a huge pile of books out there, but I’ve definitely noticed that sales have improved with each successive novel I’ve released. It’s not a guarantee, of course, but the more work you have out there, the more chances there are for people to stumble across your work. Once they do stumble across it, they can go on to buy many more books by you if they enjoy the first.

How many books is enough?

It’s true that e-publishing is just taking off, and there are some opportunities for quick success, but most of us will have to publish many books over several years before we get to the “doing this for a living” level. Traditionally published mid-list authors often have 10 or more books in print (not counting out-of-print titles) before they get to quit the day job. Maybe with e-publishing, you’ll get there sooner, but if you expect for it to take years, then you won’t be setting yourself up for disappointment.

It looks like Joe has 35-40 titles out there, and I know a lot of them, if not the majority of them, are novels, not short stories or novellas.

Joe’s books aren’t all in the same series

I’ve also come across indie authors who have a lot of books out, but they’re all in the same series. This can be good if people really get into Book 1 and go on to devour the rest of them, but a downside of a series is that all of the books represent only one doorway into your world (few people are going to stumble across Book 5 and decide to start there). If the majority of the people who try your first book don’t fall in love with it, then you might have dedicated a lot of time to hiking up a dead-end trail because sales of the following books will be mediocre.

If you’re an author who likes writing in series (and there are a lot of upsides to writing continuing story lines), it might be a good idea to start out with two or three different books where any one could be turned into its own series. With e-publishing, you can quick results (within a few days of publishing, you can start getting reviews, sales numbers, reader feedback, etc.), so you can soon see which book is your most popular one. Then you can choose to build a series out of that one.

Though it was purely by accident, I followed that route when I published my first two novels (Encrypted and The Emperor’s Edge) last year. They’re set in the same world, but they’re different story lines with different sets of characters (though a certain assassin does show up in both novels). It was always my plan to turn EE into a series, but I had a sequel in mind for Encrypted as well. If that book had turned out to be the better seller, I might have rearranged my writing plans and turned that into a series first.

You don’t want to get into a state of mind where you’re trying to chase trends or write what you think will be popular, but there’s nothing wrong with focusing on one of your story lines over another if one turns out to have poor or “just okay” sales numbers while the other becomes a hit.

That leads me into my next point…

A small number of Joe’s books make up the majority of his sales

In the chart, you’ll notice that he has one mega-seller, then a few more ebooks that sell very well, then a whole lot more that are in the “just okay” camp. If you’ve had some success in e-publishing, you might think, “Gee, I have titles that sell more copies than a lot of his books” (even allowing that Joe’s screenshot only covers 1/3rd of a month). And yet he’s making $100,000+ per month and you’re…probably not. (If it makes you feel better, I’m not either.)

You might think that this sales distribution is odd, but numbers and marketing people will tell you that it’s quite normal. The oft-cited Pareto Principle, sometimes called the 80-20 Rule, informs us that it’s common for 80% of the yield or earnings to come from 20% of the products or services. So, in the ebook world, if you have 10 ebooks out, 2 might be your big sellers that account for most of your earnings. This can be true in other business areas as well. For example, people who keep track of things often learn that 80% of their sales are a result of 20% of their marketing efforts.

You’ll probably find that it’s hard, if not impossible, to predict ahead of time which books will be your big winners. That’s why we get back to the idea that it’s important to spend more time writing than promoting, especially in the beginning. Of course, talent comes into play, but the numbers tell us that the more books you have out there, the more likely you are to have a couple of “winners” that can take you from meager earnings to stellar earnings (or at the very least from pocket change to making a mortgage payment!).

Do you agree, disagree, or can you think of other lessons we can learn from these numbers? Let us know in the comments!

Posted in E-publishing | Tagged , , , , , , | 30 Comments

A Checklist for Self-Publishing by Rose Andrade

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Lindsay

Bleedover Curtis HoxMost of us who decide to self-publish have to handle the ebook creation, book blog tours, social media marketing, and just about everything else ourselves. Sometimes, though, you get lucky and you have a husband, wife, or significant other to help with all the work. Today we have a guest post, a “self-publishing checklist” from Rose Andrade, who is out in the blogosphere helping promote her husband’s new sci-fi/fantasy novel, Bleedover.

I’m not sure if she has a website of her own, but if you like what you see, you should be able to contact her through Curtis’s site or the blog that they maintain together. I am sure that she’d be tickled if you checked out Curtis’s book. It’s a 99-center for now. They’re also running a $5o-gift-card “blog tour giveaway,” so be sure to check that out as well.

A Checklist for Self-Publishing     

Many authors are deciding to self-publish their novels. And often, along with the excitement of that decision comes an overwhelming feeling of everything that needs to be done: create covers, edit manuscripts, formatting, creating web platforms, participate in social media, etc. The list is so huge it nearly made me give up before even starting. Now, a few months later, I realized there’s no need to run and hide. It may be scary at first, but it’s doable. Here’s a general checklist and timeline that will help you prepare for each milestone.

What stage are you?

1) I just finished my manuscript.

If you’re here, you should be thinking and planning to:

1.1) Hire a cover designer: Your e-book cover is one of the most important promotional tools you’ll have. So make sure you have a great cover. It’s possible to design your own cover, but I’d advise otherwise unless you’re very comfortable with digital design. (There are plenty of affordable cover designers on the market.)

Duration: 4-5 weeks. Plan to spend a week or two quoting and negotiating with designers. They’ll ask you for two weeks to get the first cover draft, one week for applying your recommended changes (if any), and another week for final approvals/receipt of final artwork.

1.2) Hire a professional editor: This is a crucial step to creating a professional e-book. Lindsay recently posted an excellent piece entitled “How editing works for independent authors” that details the types of editing services available, average costs, etc. The article is a must read that will help you make an informed decision when hiring editing services.

Duration: 5 weeks to 3 months. Allow two weeks for quoting and negotiation with editors. Once you’ve selected and hired one, depending on the scope of your project, the level of editing you’re contracting, how many rounds, and the availability of the editor—it can take anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months to have the editing completed.

2) I just got my book professionally edited and designed.

Your product is complete, congratulations! Now you can make it live for sale, right? Wrong! There’s a whole new world you must understand.

2.1) E-book distribution channels selection: At this stage, you have to decide where and how to distribute your e-book. You can select each e-book retailer individually or use a free distributor such as Smashwords to deliver your work to e-book retailers. Some authors rely solely on Smashwords for distribution. Most authors, however, use Smashwords to reach a larger number of e-retailers, then sign-up individually with the most popular ones such as Amazon, Apple, and Barnes and Noble. They do this to have more control over the quality of the e-book design.

Duration: 1 – 2 days to make a decision on distribution strategy.

2.2) E-book retailer sign-up and manuscript formatting: You’ll have to create an account in each e-retailer of choice, as well as perform the next steps for each one. You’ll be asked to upload your formatted manuscript. Each e-retailer has specific file requirements. Check out author Curtis Hox’s guest post, “How to Generate Your First Professionally Formatted Mobi File,” to see an example of how to create a .mobi file (required for Amazon).  Smashwords requires your manuscript in a .doc file with very specific formatting. They provide a guide to help you achieve a perfect file that will work with their infamous meatgrinder (although, I’ve heard they’ll start accepting .epub formats in 2012).

Duration: 1-5 days per retailer. Depending on your computer and HTML skills, formatting your manuscript and outputting the required files can take a few hours for each retailer, or weeks of frustration. If you’re not computer savvy, you can hire professionals to format and create .mobi files, .epub, files and Smashwords’ .doc files for as little as $25. Those professionals also offer packages where they’ll output multiple types of files for a set fee. Many people attempt to design Smashwords’s .doc files on their own. I’m proficient at MS Word and it took me two days in the first time. The next time, it took me six hours. If you’re not very savvy or have an e-book with lots of different font, formats, images, and boxes, I highly recommend that you hire someone who can format it for you.

2.3) Upload a formatted manuscript to e-book stores: Here you’ll “assemble” your virtual book for each retailer, which means, you’ll upload the cover artwork and the formatted file and submit for the particular e-retailer review/approval. Assuming there are no errors in your files, your product gets generated and made live fairly quickly (less than 24 hours). (If you chose Smashwords as a distributor, after your e-book is live on their site, you’ll need to submit a request for it to be included on Smashwords’ premium catalog—the catalog distributed to other e-retailers—and the approval can take up to 14 days. Once approved, Smashwords then begins delivering your e-book, which can take up to 2 weeks to complete.)

Duration: A few hours per individual retailer.

3) My book is up for sale on e-book stores of my choice.

Congratulations! Now you’re ready to create a web platform to promote your product.

3.1) Build an online platform: The first thing you should do is to build an online presence by joining social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, Goodreads, etc.), building a website, and/or starting a blog. * The process of creating an account on the differing social networks is simple and cost free. The creation of a site and/or a blog can be cost free, but it requires some knowledge of HTML and web design, and usage of free web templates. If you’re not savvy about web development, or want to have a more customized look to your blog, you can hire a freelance web developer to create your blog and site.

Duration: 2 – 4 weeks. Allow those weeks to focus on the creation of your blog and/or website, test your pages, build content, stylize your Facebook page, etc.

* Creating a web presence can be your first step, even before you begin writing your manuscript! Interacting with your potential readers is a great strategy to gain readership and build momentum so that when you finally publish your work, you have a group of expectant readers eager to purchase your e-book.

4) My e-book is up for sale, I’ve built my web platforms, and I want to focus on marketing

Here you’ll have to leverage all the web platforms that you’ve created to help drive sales to your e-book. This is an extensive topic that requires a whole post about it. But if I could provide only one bit of advice, it would be that you create a marketing plan. A marketing plan will help you see what strategies work, what needs improvement, and where you should focus your efforts. I have just finished my own marketing plan where I detailed goals to be reached, where I created an overall strategy, and where I listed smaller marketing actions that’ll help me achieve my objectives.

It’s also crucial that you study the market and learn from other successful writers and bloggers. Bloggers such as Lindsay Buroker and sites such as Savvy SelfPublishing will provide excellent insights.

Duration: You’ll keep at this step as long as your e-book is up for sale. It should be a constant, ongoing part of your journey as a self-published author. Marketing plans and strategies will change, grow and evolve along with your career as an independent author. Good luck!

 

Posted in Guest Posts | Tagged , | 15 Comments

Contest Winners and Maldynado’s New Last Name

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Lindsay

We had over a hundred entries in the Give My Character a Last Name Contest last week, so thank you for the support! Now it’s time to pick a winning name and reward two folks with gift certificates.

There were lots of great suggestions for Maldynado’s name (some of you put some real thought into this!), and many of them could have been winners. In the end, there was a bit of Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe involved in the selection, and I decided to go with some alliteration because it sounded more pretentious, and that’s just perfect for Maldynado. 😉

Before I announce the winner, here are a few honorable mentions (they made the list either because they were almost chosen or because they made me laugh):

  • Gigolocrest from Erwin S.
  • “Ridencrest (Riden = laughing in Latin)” from Susie
  • “Feathercrest (would explain his hats)” from Tara
  • Warcrest from Jen (and others)
  • Battlecrest from Lisa
  • Mountcrest from Snagglewordz (“Alliteration and the word mount could be interpreted in a number of ways.” Yes, yes it could… :D)
  • Falconcrest from Valicia (and others)
  • Sabercrest from Victoria (and others)
  • Moltencrest from Candace
  • Daringcrest from Gail
  • Ludicrest from Kate (sounds like ludicrous, eh?)
  • Spirecrest from Tiff
  • Thistlecrest from Liana
  • Brightcrest from Dawn
  • Arrowcrest from Chandra
  • Silvercrest from Robin (and others)
  • Hedoncrest from Amy
  • Ardencrest from Jenna (“the ‘arden’ coming from the word ‘ardent’ – and who can argue that Maldynado isn’t ardent?”)
  • Stagcrest from Mariah
  • Thewcrest from Khaalidah
  • Milkenhoneycrest from Stacey

And the winner is…

Maldynado Montichelu Marblecrest submitted by Kate.

I know, I know, with a set of names like that, it’s a wonder he didn’t run away from home before his family could disown him!

So, if you remember from the original post, I said there’d be two winners, the one whose name I chose and then another random participant.

The winners are Kate and…

(I like making things dramatic with all these ellipses)

Abbie A.

Thank you, everyone else, for taking the time to enter!

Posted in Ebook News | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Finding Success with Serialized Ebooks (by Gregory J. Downs)

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Lindsay

In the world of e-publishing, you don’t have to worry about the economics of print where a book needs to be between such-and-such number of pages to keep publishing expenses down. It’s not surprising that we’re seeing more short stories and novellas coming out as ebooks, and I’m also seeing more authors trying serialization.

As with the old-style radio shows, and even with some of today’s tv shows (any Lost fans out there?), stories are broken into several pieces, often ending on cliffhangers, and they’re published as separate ebooks. When Gregory J. Downs offered to write a guest blog post sharing his experiences with serialization, I said yes right away. He’s had an Amazon sales ranking as low (lower is better, remember) as #900 (I shall not be bitter when I point out that I’ve only briefly reached those levels with my ebooks and only because of ads purchased on popular blogs!) and is closing on 10,000 sales overall.

So, let’s here from him, eh?

Serial Fantasy

Brother Thief Cover ArtI was talking to a friend one time. Funny how many interesting (and/or awkward) things start out that way.

Anyway, we were talking about writing. See, he’s this incredible short story writer who wins just about every contest he enters. I had just finished a few novels during high school, and had self-published one of them. It was doing… not so well. Anyway, we were thinking how cool it would be to build an ongoing short story series, sort of like the old serial novels people like Charles Dickens wrote, publishing chapter-by-chapter in a newspaper. I even hear that Tolkien guy sent serials of his book to his son during WWII.

Our idea (okay, it was my idea, I’ll be humble about it) was to use the new indie e-book market, graciously pioneered by Amazon, to re-vitalize the old serial formula. Basically, we’d write a story every week, e-publish it for cheap, and see what happened. It could be a series of short adventures, or bits of a bigger story, or both.

Well, as so many things go in life, it never ended up happening. But I swear there’s a reason for telling you about it. Really.

This past September, I made ready to self publish my second novel. It was something like 600 pages/ 150,000 words. When I showed it to my mother, she read the first third, turned to me and said, “This could be the whole book right here.”

Oh.

Here’s where I actually get to my point. The thing about serialization is that generally, you’re taking an 80,000 word-or-so story and splitting it into 8-or-so sections. I follow a Facebook page called Timeslingers that does serialized podcasts in the thriller/time-travel genres. That’s what you normally think of when you think ‘serial.’ Action/adventure. Thriller. Horror.

I propose two things to you. One, that serials are not dead. If you’ve got a good story and you’re willing to try something new and unproven, serialize it. Sections of 10k or 20k work, and I’ve seen it done in other genres than Action. Look up B.V. Larson (and I actually have Lindsay Buroker herself to thank for this), and you’ll find that he serialized one of his fantasies into like 6 parts. And it worked!

The second thing is about fantasy itself. Usually, your average fantasy novel will be way, WAY longer than your average thriller. The genre doesn’t exactly lend itself to serializing- especially if the book in question is a George R.R. Martin or Stephen Erikson wannabe. But think about it… you have options.

This is where this long ramble ties back into my own adventures. I ended up publishing my second novel in three 50,000 word sections. Luckily it’s plot already split along those lines (almost exactly), so there wasn’t much re-writing needed. The novels have done much better than I expected, though I believe some people read past the first book only because I ended it on a nasty cliffhanger…

Do you see what I mean? Fantasy isn’t the easiest genre to serialize. But it can be done, just in larger fragments. As long as you have something in the first installment- something to get the reader ‘hooked’ as it were- they’ll keep reading. Oh, and price that first one cheap, say $2.99 or even $.99. Then the rest can get more expensive, but the reader will (theoretically) already like you enough to pony up the cash.

Now, granted, technically my stories were still individually long enough to be considered novels. But that’s a bonus! If you go into a long writing project, say the next fantasy-political-epic of the century, plan on writing it in segments. 30k, 40k, 50k… big enough chunks to count as a full story, but small enough to keep the reader wanting the next installment. Have an idea of where you’re going, so that you can create believable ‘hooks’ every time.

I’m not saying I know everything about this (obviously) untried method. And yes, people will complain sometimes that your story’s ‘too short.’ But you know what? It gets mentioned a whole lot less than you’d expect. Through trial and error, I’ve deduced that when a person reads your first ‘episode,’ one of two things will happen.

A: They will dislike your story. This will prompt them to leave you a crappy review on Amazon or Goodreads, saying how it was too short and bland and la la la.

B: They will like your story. They will proceed to buy the next episode, even if it is priced significantly higher. They will probably not leave a review. Silence = approval.

Those are results I can live with… especially when 97% of my sales result in option B. Speaking of which, I’m not doing too badly with this new method. I’ve got 5 installments out so far of my epic fantasy, Song of the Aura. The 6th and final installment comes out next month, bringing my total words in the project up to 320,000 or so.

If a kid like me can do it… so can you.

Bio:

Gregory J. Downs is a not-quite-college student currently enjoying life as a self-employed author. He wrote and published 6 books during high school, and when they started selling he started telling people how he did it. Gregory lives in Number 3 Bagshot Row, Hobbiton, The Shire, where he is working on the final book in his fantasy series. He can be found tweeting on Twitter, blogging at Epic Blog, and you can check out his nasty cliffhanger novel at Amazon.

 * * *

Thanks for stopping by, Gregory! Authors, have any of you tried serializing your novels? Readers, do you enjoy stories that are broken up, so long as they’re a good value, or does it drive you crazy?

Posted in Guest Posts | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

The Importance of Keeping in Touch with Fans (and how to find them in the first place)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Lindsay

Have you ever seen authors sell well with their first book and then disappear from the radar with subsequent titles? I’ve seen a lot of that in the e-publishing world over the last year. Independent authors would pop onto the Amazon bestseller charts with a bang and sell thousands of copies a month of their first book or series, but then fizzle into nothingness. When they published new titles, nobody noticed.

Why is that? They failed to turn one-time readers into fans.

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily assume that’s a quality-of-writing issue (after all, something got them to sell in the first place), but you’ll probably agree that, in most cases, it takes you more than one exposure to an author to turn you into a rabid fan who will constantly check back to see if that author has published anything new.

So how do you start the process of turning a one-time reader into a fan? Naturally it helps if you have multiple titles out and the reader can go on to enjoy them all, thus cementing your name in his/her mind. But what if you’re publishing your first book?

You need to make an effort to get readers who enjoy the story to come find you online as soon as they finish. Most e-readers have web capability, so this is more of a possibility today than ever before. With ebooks, you can easily add your website and social media links to the end of the story and encourage the reader to stop by.

That’s not all you have to do though. You need to be doing something on those sites to get the reader to stick around and subscribe to your newsletter or blog feed.

Remember those successful-then-but-not-now authors? When I’ve looked at their online presences (what can I say… I have stalker tendencies), I’ve seen some common threads:

  • Though they’ve been publishing for a while, they don’t have a substantial blog built up where they post often. Or they blog about things nobody cares about.
  • They don’t have a newsletter (a way to email fans all at once).
  • If they’re on Twitter and Facebook at all, they’re just digital billboards, constantly trying to sell you something.
  • They may post often in some of the author-centric forums and communities out there, but they don’t seem to be out there where they can interact with their readers (Goodreads is one such place where it’s good to have a presence).

In short, these authors haven’t done anything to turn one-time readers into fans who want to follow their books and connect online.

If you want to have a career, then you need people to keep buying your books. I know, duh, right? But you can’t just assume this will happen. One key truth from the business world is that it’s easier to keep an existing customer than find a new customer. But you have to keep in touch with those customers, periodically reminding them that you exist and that they like doing business with you.

With those thoughts, I bring you…

How to Keep in Touch with Your Readers

Note: Before you start reading my suggestions, I want to point out that everything mentioned below is designed to let you write one message for many people, so you’re keeping in touch without spending hours a day doing it. I’m always happy to answer readers who send email (getting fan mail never gets old!), but I tend to direct folks to my blog, newsletter, and social media pages first, because lots of answers to potential questions are already there, and posting information in these places is the most efficient use of my time.

The newsletter

If you do nothing else I write about here, I suggest starting a newsletter and putting a sign-up form in a prominent position on your site (I have mine on my “book news” page and also in the side bar of each page — honestly, it could be even more prominent, and that’s something I’ll do when I get around to redesigning the site).

Why a newsletter? You can email your subscribers and let everyone know at once when you have a new release out. You can also ask your subscribers for a hand if you ever need it for something special. I wouldn’t do that often, but these folks are most likely going to be some of your most dedicated fans (the types of readers who not only buy your books but tell others to do so as well), and they may be open to helping you out. In return, you can reward them for signing up for your newsletter by giving them coupons or insider information on your books.

The best thing about newsletters is that messages go right to a person’s inbox, so your subscribers are almost guaranteed to see it. The other methods I’m going to list can have their place, but they aren’t quite as special as a newsletter (not only does a letter to your mailing list go right to someone’s inbox, but with some mailing-list services, you can even personalize it with the person’s first name). You won’t find a successful internet marketer in the world who doesn’t have a mailing list.

That said, there are other ways to keep in touch with people too. The newsletter may be king, but you’ll find that some readers prefer other ways of following you, so these methods can be worth pursuing as well.

The blog

I think most authors start a blog, but many fail to update it often (or at all) because they’re not certain what to write about. Others post less than scintillating material, such as positive reviews about the book the visitor has already read. Guys, you hang those reviews on the fridge; you don’t copy and paste them to your blog. You post interesting things to your blog (things that are interesting to other people, not just you).

The way to get blog followers is to inform or entertain. Maybe you can even do both.

I used to say that you should write posts related to your books (i.e. if you write science fiction, then you might review SF books and movies, interview genre authors, or talk about fun science stuff), and I still think that’s a good idea, but I also believe you can keep people interested by writing about less obvious topics as well, so long as your posts have value to people who buy books.

For example, in the beginning, my blog here was all about e-publishing and nothing about fantasy. Oddly enough, I did sell quite a few of my fantasy novels through the site (I use affiliate links so I can track which sales originate from my blog). As I sold more books and actually started having fans stop by who wanted to hear about my upcoming projects, I grew worried that those readers wouldn’t be interested in the e-pub talk, so I tried following my own advice and started blogging about fantasy-related topics. What happened? I started getting less traffic to this site and was selling fewer books!

Now I do a mix of posts. Some are about fantasy and my books (I’ve got a contest going on right now where readers can help me name a character), and some are about e-publishing. Book sales from my blog are back up again.

You just never know what kind of blog posts might work for you, but the important thing is to a) make sure there’s something in it for the reader and b) be passionate about what you’re talking about (maybe that’s part of why I didn’t do as well blogging about fantasy — even though I’ve been a fantasy reader for more than twenty years, I’m more obsessed with e-publishing and book promotion right now, so it’s more fun for me to blog about this stuff).

No matter what you do with the blog, make an effort to get people to subscribe (I need to be better about this myself). You can’t assume that people will remember to check back often, but if they have your blog in their feed aggregator, they’ll see any new headlines you post.

If you pay for web hosting and have your own WordPress blog, there are numerous plug-ins you can get that throw in a tagline, suggesting people subscribe to your feed. If you’re on a freebie blogging site, you can choose a theme where the subscription buttons are prominent.

The Twitter account

I’ve been a fan of Twitter for a long time. Something about only being able to type short messages appeals to me. I can make updates quickly and check on people without spending a lot of time on the site. And (this is what matters) lots of other people like Twitter too. You might find, as I have, that you’ll find readers who follow their favorite authors on Twitter even if they don’t necessarily go into subscribing to blogs or newsletters.

Once you have followers there, they can help you promote your books. Because people can “retweet” your updates, and those RTs can spread far and wide, Twitter can be a great way to drive traffic to your blog or get the word out about freebies (I hardly ever plug something that costs money, as I figure people are there to socialize, not to whip out their credit cards, but I’ll often link to free ebooks or excerpts). I know I’ve gained blog readers and book buyers that way.

Note: if you find yourself overwhelmed as your Twitter followers grow, try sorting people into lists. I’ve been using lists forever, but it only recently occurred to me to start one specifically for “tweeps” who have read my books. I should have been doing that from the beginning, because it’s easy to use a program like Tweetdeck (I prefer this for my iPhone) to watch the conversations on a certain list. Then I can send someone an @ message if they say something that brings a comment to my mind. (I don’t know about you, but I’d be tickled if my favorite authors sent messages to me!)

The Facebook fan page

I wasn’t a huge Facebook fan before I got into publishing, so I was slow to get involved on Facebook, but I’m glad I finally did create an author page there. I have people who comment and “like” my updates there who aren’t newsletter subscribers, don’t follow my blog, and don’t know why on Earth anyone would want to “Twitter.” Facebook is their chosen place to hang out and interact. By being there, I can keep in touch with them. If I wasn’t there, I’d miss out on a certain group of fans (Facebook has hundreds of millions of members!).

By the way, did you know that you can run advertising campaigns on Facebook that only target people who have liked your author page? If you get a lot of fans there, but find they’re not checking back often, a quick advertising campaign would be a way to let all of them know about your latest book or series. (Advertising within Facebook — i.e. sending folks to a tab on your author page instead of off-site — is quite affordable as well.)

I could go on about places to be and ways to keep in touch with your fans, but these are my main ones. Also, this post is getting long, so let me address one last concern:

How do you get people to subscribe/follow you to start with?

If you’re just starting out, this may be what’s on your mind. Of course you want to do a newsletter, blog, social media, etc., but how the heck do you get people to follow you or subscribe to your feeds?

Lots of folks try to do this in a backwards way. They try to build the online presence (i.e. building a platform) first. That can work fantastically if you write non-fiction. But with fiction…the proof is in the pudding, eh? It’s possible to get random readers to follow your blog (especially if you’re writing useful posts), but most people have to read your stories before they can decide whether or not they’re fans.

If you write fiction, you can try to post some stories or do a web serial, but I think the fastest way to find fans in this day and age is to put your stuff out there in ebook form and get it out on Amazon, iTunes, B&N, Smashwords, etc. Those are the huge marketplaces where people already are, where they’re actively looking for new things to read.

I also think you’ll find the rows much easier to hoe if you have at least something available for free (short stories are fine). At the end of that freebie, you can plug your other non-free books, and you can also encourage readers who enjoyed the story to visit your site and subscribe to your blog, newsletter, etc. Remember, not everyone will be into doing each thing (some might follow you on Twitter while others want to subscribe to your newsletter while others want to track you on Facebook), so it’s good to be follow-able in a number of places.

All right, now I know I’ve talked for too long! If you have comments or questions or want to see me cover something in more depth, please let me know below.

 

Posted in Book Marketing | 28 Comments