Just a quick post today to let you know that the first few chapters of The Emperor’s Edge podiobook are online for your listening pleasure. It’s free to download them, and we’ll be running the whole book through over the course of the fall.
You can listen online or (more fun) subscribe and get the episodes automatically downloaded to your iPod or other mp3 player.
Thanks for checking it out!
If you feel like you’re sending lots of visitors to your Amazon ebook pages, and it’s not resulting in many sales, you may want to make some changes. While you’re probably not going to tinker with the story itself (although some ebook authors do!), it’s a simple matter to upload a new cover image or blurb, or to change the price.
At the beginning of August, I uploaded new cover art for Encrypted and trimmed a couple of sentences from the blurb (more details on the changes I tried in this post). While I can’t say that my tweaks drove sales through the roof, they did resulted in an increase.
Prior to August, Encrypted’s best sales month came in June where it sold 340 copies on Amazon. It broke that number a couple of days ago and will probably end up selling about 400 copies by the end of August. (No, that doesn’t include sales at Barnes & Noble and Smashwords and such, but those guys don’t break down monthly sales for each ebook, so it’s a little more work to calculate totals. Also, Amazon is the big kahuna and represents 80-90% of my sales, so I worry most about them.) Since I make about $2 on each sale, that means the new cover art will already be paid for with the increased sales from this month.
In case you’re wondering, sales for the rest of my ebooks remained fairly steady for August. With one exception (which I’ll touch on in a minute), they may even end up down a smidgen. (I’ve heard summer isn’t typically as busy of a time for book sellers, so we’ll see if things pick up this fall.) I also didn’t promote Encrypted any more than usual. It came out in January, and I don’t tend to plug it as much as The Emperor’s Edge or Flash Gold, since those two are Book 1s in series I’m working on. In short, I believe it’s safe to credit the new artwork and perhaps, to some extent, the new blurb for the increased sales.
I’m not usually great when it comes to “split testing” and making these types of changes (I’m always hesitant to try something that might harm sales), but it’s worth tinkering with the “packaging” if you’re wondering why your book isn’t selling more copies. It’s one thing if you’re just not marketing it, but if you feel like you’re putting a lot of work into promotion and nothing is happening, some changes may make a difference.
Ask friends, too, to give you their opinion on your book’s sales page. It’s hard for us to judge these things ourselves. You could run a couple of different blurbs by them to see what strikes a cord. I’ll be the first to admit that writing a blurb doesn’t necessarily come naturally to authors. It’s more akin to copywriting than storytelling.
My other improved seller for August
Because I know you’re wondering, the other ebook that saw a noticeable increase in sales this month was my children’s short story collection, The Goblin Brothers Adventures. I haven’t marketed that one at all since I switched my focus to my adult fantasy novels, and it usually only sells about 25 copies a month at Amazon.
The Goblin Brothers have sold 46 copies so far this month (more than they have since their release back in December when I was bribing all my friends and relatives to buy them).
What changed? Not much. Just a tweak to the title.
Before, I’d titled it “The Goblin Brothers Adventures (middle grade fantasy stories),” figuring that adding the parenthetical aside would help it place in Amazon’s internal search engine (in case someone was looking for middle grade reading material). As I recall that worked, and it was the first result for “middle grade fantasy,” but the sales numbers suggest there aren’t all that many people searching for “middle grade fantasy.” So, I took that aside off, and it’s now just The Goblin Brothers Adventures.
I changed the title because I thought more of my adult fantasy readers might give it a try if it wasn’t labeled as something for kids. It’s still apparent from the blurb that the characters are young and the stories are suitable for all ages, but I’ve had lots of adults like them, so why pigeonhole these poor goblins?
It seems to have worked, for that little change has nearly doubled sales for that title this month. Sure, the ebook is still my least impressive seller by far, but every little bit counts when you’re dreaming of writing for a living someday. It’s easier to make more money from the books you already have out than to write all new ones (though, of course, I’m doing that too).
For those of you still reading (how do my posts always get so long?), have you tried tweaking your “packaging” to increase sales? Do you have any success stories to share?
Last week, we had a guest post on a simple way to get your ebook formatted without worrying about dinking around with HTML or special software tools. Today, Paul Salvette is going to give us a more in-depth version for those who like to control every aspect and don’t mind reading some guides and getting into the nitty gritty of customizing their ebooks.
This kind of ebook formatting is a big topic for one guest post, so many of the links here will take you over to Paul’s site where he’s written up detailed formatting guides. While you’re there (or here), check out his first novella, America Goes On.
Ebook Formatting with HTML and Calibre
Thanks to Lindsay for letting me out of the cage here in Thailand to do a guest post. I write this eBook formatting post, not as an eBook author, but as a reader. I am getting a bit perturbed by all the eBooks out there with that have shoddy formatting: changing fonts, goofy page breaks, busted hyperlinks, etc. Self-publishers get ridiculed for being unprofessional by the suits in New York City, but I’ve found these errors in eBooks I shelled out $9.99 for from major publishing houses! There is no excuse to treat the customer with such contempt.
That is why those of us who self-publish have a real chance to set the standard for proper eBook formatting. You don’t have to be a nerd (although it helps) and you don’t need to spend a lot of time. If you have spent months writing, marketing, and updating your twitter feed 40 times a day to make it big as a self-publisher, you can take the time to format an eBook properly. I did it with my debut novella, America Goes On, and you can do it too.
First off, you have to think about eBooks differently from regular books and even the manuscript sitting in your word processor. While your word processor has a defined font, defined number of pages, and a fixed layout, and eBook has what’s called reflowable text. That means no matter what the dimensions of the eReading device, the text will wrap neatly into the next line. Not coincidentally, this is how a web browser reads HTML code. Try pressing Ctrl-U right now to see the source code of Lindsay’s most excellent blog. It may look a bit daunting, but you basically want to turn that manuscript in your word processor into this type of code.
There are two basic types of eBook formats that are commonly in use right now. There are the MOBI/PRC/AZW formats, which are primarily the domain of the Amazon.com Kindle Store. And then there is the EPUB format, which is used by everybody else (iBookstore, Barnes & Noble NOOK, etc.) It should be noted that Smashwords is a special beast, because it requires that you upload a document in Microsoft Word for their meatgrinder, which converts your manuscript into the major formats for distribution. Both MOBI and EPUB are based on old and simple HTML code that geeks were using to write Star Trek fan fiction on the internet back in the mid-90s. It’s really nothing too advanced.
The first step toward getting your manuscript converted into an eBook is obtaining some free tools. This includes a good text editor (I like Notepad++) and an open source program called Calibre which converts HTML into EPUB and MOBI. Next, you need to learn a little bit about HTML programming, and more specifically XHTML programming (XHTML has more robust standards than its cousin HTML). Don’t worry, you don’t need to be like Matthew Broderick in WarGames and hack into the computer at NORAD. You just need to have a basic knowledge of XHTML to include properly wrapping text in paragraph tags (<p> and </p>), adding styles to text (such as different font-sizes), adding margins around text, aligning text, and maybe even how to add images. Basically, every basic function you do in your word processor, you need to learn how to do in XHTML. I whipped up an XHTML tutorial for those of us who didn’t receive daily wedgies in high school, and it’s very easy to follow. If you get confused, drop me a comment and I’ll be happy to help.
Once you know the basics of XHTML, you need to take the entire manuscript out of your word processor and into a text editor. Once you are in a text editor, you can guarantee that you will have perfectly clean XHTML code. Word processor’s like to leave nasty bits of formatting and corruption within your seemingly beautiful manuscript. This crap that gets hidden in your word processor will make your eBook look all screwed up on certain eReaders, guaranteeing that your readers will NOT come back and purchase your other works. If you work from a simple text editor, you can guarantee a perfect eBook. There are some tips, tricks, and best practices regarding copying a manuscript into a text editor and then coding XHTML inside the text editor. You can learn more about taking a sloppy manuscript and turning it into perfect XHTML in another tutorial I prepared for indie authors.
Once you have the XHTML file for your book, you can run it through Calibre to get a MOBI and EPUB file that is ready to upload to the major markets. Calibre has some features on it that you need to familiarize yourself with, but I whipped up another tutorial that helps indie authors work with Calibre. However, it is a very user-friendly program. If you really want to geek out, you can even learn about regular expressions, which helps find and manipulate complex strings of text inside your text editor. This knowledge can cut your formatting time in half. You can also get real fancy and learn about building an EPUB from the ground up (without Calibre) and converting it into MOBI with a free program called KindleGen.
Whatever path you choose, there is no excuse for a sloppy eBook. It takes years to learn how to write well, but it only takes a few days to learn how to format an eBook well. hese knuckleheads charging $150 to format fiction should be ashamed of themselves. It took me less than an hour to format my first novella, and you can watch me do it on these video tutorials. I can only think of one other job where you can make $150 for less than an hour of work, and I don’t look that good in knee-high boots and a pink skirt.
I hope this gives you a decent overview of what’s in store for you when formatting an eBook, and these tutorials I hope will be useful for those of us in the self-publishing community. Please let me know if you have any questions, and drop me a line on Twitter or at my website. I’m happy to help, and I won’t charge you a $150. Good luck formatting your eBook!
Your books are published, you’re building a social media presence, and you’ve got an official author website and/or blog. You’re rocking it! But…do you have a newsletter?
I know what you’re thinking:
What? More book promotion I have to do? When will I have time to write the next book??
But keep reading. It’s worth starting a newsletter, and it needn’t be a big time investment.
First off, what is a newsletter exactly?
Glad you asked. A newsletter is when you add a form to your website (or blog) where visitors can sign up (opt in), thus agreeing to receive periodic email messages from you. Their names and email addresses are compiled into a mailing list, and you can then “broadcast” a message to your entire list at once.
What you write in those newsletters is up to you. If you’re an author, the people who sign up are going to be fans, probably fans who’ve read many of your books and enjoyed them enough to hunt down your website and give you their email addresses.
Think of your newsletter subscribers as your inner circle. What cool things can you do to reward them for being fans?
At the very least, you can let them be among the first to know when you have a new book coming out. Maybe you can even give them coupons for discounts or let them take advantage of a low initial ebook price (i.e. you might sell your novel at $2.99 for the first couple of weeks before raising the price to $4.99).
I haven’t had my newsletter going for very long, but I’ve been trying to send out a note once a month. If I’m releasing a new ebook that month, the subject of the email is a no-brainer. In June, I released Dark Currents and sent my subscribers a Smashwords coupon to download it for free (a lot of them bought it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble anyway). This was nice for them, and it also helped me get some early reviews of the book.
I’ve also given away other people’s ebooks for free (in July, I asked a couple of other indie fantasy authors to give me Smashwords coupons — a way to help promote their books to my readers — and I sent those out to my subscribers). In September, I’m planning to do a giveaway, since I should have paperbacks of The Emperor’s Edge and Dark Currents ready to go by then. I can’t wait to sign some copies and send them off to folks.
What’s in it for you?
Okay, you’re thinking, you could start a newsletter, and you could give things away, but why? How is that helping you sell books if you’re just writing to people who are already fans?
First off, as I mentioned, a newsletter is a way to let your core fans know when you have a new book out. More than that, having the emails of hundreds of readers can give you the power to get a bunch of people buying your new releases at once.
Authors more popular than I am (hey, maybe I’ll be there someday!) have used their newsletter subscribers to shoot their latest books to the tops of the bestseller lists at Amazon. This gets their books noticed by lots of other people (who aren’t newsletter subscribers and just happen to browse the bestseller charts, looking for new books to try). I’ve heard it’s nice up there at the top of those lists. đ
Sending newsletters out to your fans is also a way to keep your name in their minds, something that can be especially useful if you’re not the most prolific writer. They’ll probably be more likely to recommend your books to friends if you’re able to stay on their radar. Otherwise, they might forget all about you in the interim between publications. And if they forget about you, they won’t remember to keep an eye out for future books from you.
Always remember, it’s easier to sell to an existing fan than to convince a new reader to try your work.
I’ll cover how to start a newsletter in a future post. In the meantime, please let us know if you’ve started one of your own or if you’re planning to soon.
The other day, someone forwarded me an email because the original sender had wanted to contact me but hadn’t been able to find my address on my Facebook page. That original sender even included a link to a blog post about how authors should be approachable.
My initial thought was an affronted, “What? I’m totally approachable. Why were you looking for my email on Facebook of all places instead of just Googling my name, which would take you to this blog, which not only has a contact page but a big green contact button that stalks you down the side of the entry as you read?” Naturally, all I wrote back was a “thank you.” The customer is always right, after all. (I also added my email address to the “info” tab on my Facebook fan page, which is what I hope people will stumble across, rather than my personal page where I mostly B.S. with my tennis buddies.)
Anyway, I didn’t think much more of this “approachable” thing until this weekend, when I was catching up with some of the folks who had left comments on my blog recently or who had linked to one of my posts. If I have time, I try to comment back or thank someone for linking to my site.
Well, I ran into a few blogs where a) comments were turned off, b) I couldn’t find the button to press to leave a comment, or c) I couldn’t leave a comment because this option was only open to members of Webs, Livejournal, etc. and I don’t have accounts there. There was another blog where I almost said forget it and left because I failed the Captcha twice.
Outside of the blogosphere, I’ve run into authors who protect their tweets (so only followers can see their comments) and others who keep their Facebook pages private (that’s fine, but at least consider putting up up a public author fan page).
Here’s the point: little things like that might leave a fan with an impression that an author is unapproachable. No comments or contact page might imply, “Oh, this author isn’t interesting in talking to me. Well, maybe I’ll just check out another author who is….”
Now, as an author myself, I know that the way your blog is set up may have nothing to do with how friendly and approachable you are (if you’re like me and making do with a free template, it’s not always easy to get all the features you want on there). And I’ve certainly had days (weeks) where there’s just too much going on, and the social media stuff is the first thing to get dropped by the wayside — with email a close second (I always answer emails about my books, but I sometimes have to put the questions about e-publishing and book promotion to the side; sorry guys — triage and all that).
Though we’re all busy, I think it’s important to make an effort to be approachable in our various online venues. Sure, most of us have jobs and families, and there’s only so much time in the day, but the fact of the matter is people prefer to do business with people they like.
When you’re a bestselling author with bazillions of fans lined up for each new book, you can probably be a hermit or a snob, but most of us aren’t there yet. We’re at a point where one reader can matter.
One reader can become one of your 1,000 true fans and someone who talks up your books to other people, thus helping you establish yourself as an author (and, as you might imagine, someone who takes the time to look up your site and wants to talk to you is exactly that kind of person). You don’t want to alienate those readers simply because they’re not able to get in touch with you.
So, what can we do to be more approachable online? Here are a few suggestions (and I’m open to hearing more in the comments, because, hey, I’m still learning all this stuff too!):
Tips for Being Approachable Online
All right, those are my suggestions for being more approachable online. Do you have any to add?
I’ve had a few folks ask me about the nitty gritty details of ebook formatting, so we’ll have a couple of guest posts coming up on that topic (my way of formatting my ebooks is having someone else do it for me, so I figured I’d bow to the expertise of others). We’ll have a post coming along that details the way to get in and tinker with the html and such, but today’s post offers a simpler solution.
Thanks, Jeff Dvorak, for writing this up for us.
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I just published my first book 2 weeks ago. Once my work was done I knew I had three more steps before I could get my book out there; commission a cover, get it professionally edited and format it for the Kindle and Nook. As I write this, tomorrow, August 18th will be my 14th anniversary working for eBay so I would consider myself a computer guy but even I didnât want to have anything to do with formatting my own book. Itâs hard enough making the words presentable, I had no desire to make the text presentable also.
Before I started down the ePath I did a lot of research and when it came to formatting, what everyone said was how difficult it was. Kindle doesnât read Microsoft word, it will put in weird characters and weird breaks, it will look horribleâŚyou must have a professional format it! The problem is, the people saying that are also the ones saying, âI can do it for you!â So I drank the kool-aid and when I was ready, I contacted a formatter off a well known blog and sent them an email. What I got back was that if I got them my manuscript within two weeks, they SHOULD be able to have it back to me in six to eight weeksâŚ.thatâs how far out they were. Not to mention it would cost $150. After five minutes of staring at the screen, dumbfounded, I knew I needed to bite the bullet and learn how to format.
Now Iâll admit, it took me the better part of two days to get it right but mostly because I didnât write it correctly. As I wrote, I double spaced every paragraph, I didnât indent the first line of each paragraph and when I finished a chapter I skipped a line, wrote chapter X, skipped another line and kept going. So the first thing I had to do was clean up my text. I removed each extra line from between the paragraphs, I indented each paragraph and at the end of each chapter I inserted a page break. Those are very easy to do. On the Word toolbar, go to âinsertâ, then âbreakâ, make sure the radio button for page break is chosen and hit ok. Once youâve done all that, on the standard toolbar there is a paragraph icon, if you click on that it will show you every break, return, spaceâŚeverything you have put in your document. Once youâve enabled that you can go through and take out any extra line breaks or miscellaneous spaces that you added by mistake. Thatâs pretty much it folks.
Once youâve done all that you want to resave it as a âwebpage, filteredâ document. Go up to âsave asâ and when the save box appears, under the heading âsave as typeâ, change that to âwebpage, filteredâ. There is a lot of coding that exists within a Microsoft word document which enables the document to function in the Word environment that could cause problems out on the web. By saving it as âwebpage, filteredâ, it will strip out the unneeded code which makes it easy for Amazon to read.
Now comes the fun part. If you have a Kindle, great, if not, get the Kindle app. When you register your Kindle or Kindle app, Amazon gives you a unique email address where you can send your own documents. The first thing youâll need to do is go into your account on Amazon and authorize your personal email so they will allow documents from that email to your Kindle. Once youâve done that, email it to yourself. In a minute or two, it will show up on your Kindle and you can read it just like you would any other book. From there you can review the formatting and tinker with any changes you want. In my case, two of the chapters ended naturally at the end of a page so with the page break there was an extra blank page. I went back in, removed the break after those two chapters, emailed myself again and it was fine. Once youâve completed this, the document works well with both the Kindle and the Nook.
As Iâm writing my second book now, Iâm making sure to do the minor things I didnât do with the first book and when Iâm done, the only thing Iâll have to do is save it as âwebpage, filteredâ and thatâs it. Itâll be formatted. Now Iâll admit, this is just the basics of formatting. If you read my bookâŚ.which I would LOVE!, you will see that it is only the book. I didnât embed the cover on the front page, I didnât put a title page, copyright page or any of the affiliated items. My book is strictly the book but it is perfectly formatted like any slick legacy published book. Once you have these basics, you can tinker with the others. This weekend I plan to include my cover and create a title page and see how that looks. Iâll go through the âemailing myselfâ phase again and if I like how it turns out, itâs really easy to change your document on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You just go to your author page and upload the new document. Usually within 24 hours they will swap out the old document for the new. People who have already bought your book can even go and download the new version for freeâŚbut thatâs a different blog topic entirely.
Anyway, thatâs about it. I hope this information proves useful and if you have any questions for me please leave a note and Iâll respond as soon as I see it. Thanks for your time and good luck.
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Thanks, Jeff! If you guys get a chance, check out his novel, The Trinity Murders, or pop over to his blog or say hi to him on Twitter.
When it comes to promotion, whether we’re talking books or blogs, there are some tedious chores that sometimes don’t get done just because they are so tedious.
For example, there are dozens (hundreds!) of blog directories where you can submit your site. You provide the title, link, and a description, and eventually they add you to their listings.
These directories occasionally deliver traffic, and they also offer up back-links for your blog (as we’ve discussed before, the more links pointing to your site, the more “votes” it’s getting in the eyes of the search engines; that means you’re more likely to appear near the top of the results when people search for things related to your blog). While these links from blog directories aren’t worth a lot, every little bit can help, so submitting your site can be useful. But tedious.
Here’s where Fiverr.com comes in. This is a site where people list all the crazy (and, in some cases, I do mean crazy!) things they’re willing to do for $5. As I write this post, someone on the front page promises, “I will play bluesy Happy Birthday on guitar and harmonica wearing personalized name card and upload video… for $5.” Okay, then.
If you search around, though, you might be able to find some tasks that are useful. I hired someone to submit my blog to 130 directories. Unlike me, these folks have tools for automating a lot of this, so it makes sense to hoist this unpleasant task off on someone else.
Something else I’ve used Fiverr for is having someone upload articles to syndication sites, such as EzineArticles.com, for me. (This is where you write an article, include a bio with a link back to your site, and post it to various sites). There are a lot of sites that accept articles, and creating accounts and uploading them can be time consuming.
Other examples of uses for Fiverr? Fellow indie, Reena Jacobs, once mentioned that she hired someone to do the voice-over for her book trailer there. I’ve also seen folks offering to perform various advertising duties (i.e. hand out flyers on a college campus) for $5.
It probably goes without saying, but I’d avoid the people offering to leave 5-star book reviews and the like. Ethics aside, it probably doesn’t take Amazon long to wise up to that sort of thing!
That said, you can probably think of a few legitimate tasks that it might be useful to outsource to folks via Fiverr. If there are any you’ve done that have turned out well, let us know.
If you’re an author, you’re probably trying all sorts of things to promote your books. A guest blog post here, a tweet there, a Facebook entry over there… But how do you know which of your efforts are paying off?
One thing you can do is use one of the link-shortening services (which can turn the long and unwieldy https://www.lindsayburoker.com/guest-posts/tracking-bitly-links-with-nicholas-olivio into http://bit.ly/ozszrm) to track your links. Nicholas Olivo, author of Imperium, is here to tell you more about the process.
Tracking Bitly Links in 3 Easy Steps
Itâs always good to know what areas of your website or blog are getting the most traffic. Most hosting providers give you tools that allow you to analyze which parts of your site are being hit, and how often theyâre accessed. But what about those times when you link to something that’s not on your site? For example, if you create a link to your book on Smashwords, you donât know how many people are following that link. However, there is a way to track that by using a service called bitly. You might know bitly as a URL shortener that’s used with Twitter, but you can make bitly links for anything, and once you’ve created a bitly link you can track how many times it’s been clicked, as shown in the below image.
So, how do you get this marvelous information? Easy. Here we go:
Step 1: Get the Bit.ly Bookmarklet
Head on over to http://bitly.com/pages/tools and scroll down until you see a link called Shorten with bitly. Drag that link onto your browserâs favorites/bookmarks bar, and youâll see it turn into a little button called (creatively enough) Shorten with bitly.
Step 2: Shorten a URL
Now head on over to a page that you want to track clicks for. Maybe itâs your bookâs page on Amazon, maybe itâs a link to a guest post you did on someone elseâs blog, maybe itâs a picture of Wil Wheaton on a Unicorn Pegasus Kitten. Once youâre on that page, click your new Shorten with bitly button and a new tab in your browser will open, displaying a bitly link for that page. Share that link on Twitter, use it in a link somewhere on your site, email it to people, whateverâs going to get folks clicking.
Step 3: Track It
Okay, so youâve shared your link and now you want to know how many people have clicked it. Just type your bitly link into your browserâs address bar and add a + to the end of it.
For example, the bitly link for my urban fantasy novel IMPERUM is http://bitly.com/jJnxM6. By typing http://bitly.com/jJnxM6+ into my browser’s address bar I get the page shown above.
Tracking links is a great way to know not only how many people have clicked your links, but where those clicks originated from. Youâll be able to see if the post you did on Goodreads generated any interest, or if more people are coming to your site from Twitter. Thatâll help you focus your attention on those places where folks have the most interest, and ultimately, perform more strategic marketing of your work.
