Indie Ebook Publishing Results and What I’ve Learned [Six Weeks in]

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Lindsay

Well, guys, I’m not famous yet, but I’m optimistic about the future of e-publishing and the future of my ebooks! If you’re popping in new, I published two novels and two collections of short stories in the last six weeks (the novels have only been up for four weeks for Emperor’s Edge and a week and a half for Encrypted). The novels are $2.99 and the story collections $0.99.

I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned and experimented with in just six weeks. Here are my results and some of what I’ve learned along the way….

Ebooks sold thus far:

The grand total is 216 with Emperor’s Edge the clear leader.

These sales are from Amazon and Smashwords (I know there have been a few from Barnes & Noble this month, but their up-to-the-minute stats have been flaky for me, with sales appearing, then disappearing, so I’ll wait until the end of the month to figure those in). My ebooks aren’t in the iTunes store yet (brain fart there: Apple won’t accept ebooks without ISBNs, and Smashwords will provide them, but apparently you have to go into the Smashwords dashboard and actually add the free ISBNs to your cart and “check out” to have them assigned — I only recently did this), but I hope that will change soon.

I haven’t counted freebies given away via email or with Smashwords coupons. I’m sure “friends and relatives” account for around 20 of these sales, but the rest belong to the good ebook-reading folks of the internet.

All in all, these sales stats aren’t going to blow anyone away, but I feel it’s a good start. I’ve always known I’m not the aggressive marketer type (I’m definitely that shy introvert who doesn’t want to annoy anyone), so I’m happy with things so far. I’m also tickled with the positive reviews my ebooks have gotten thus far from folks, some of whom aren’t in my crit group or related to me (shocking, I know!)

Where the sales have come from:

Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc. don’t show you any details about how people found your books and made their purchases (i.e. which site or advertising campaign sent them), so there’s a lot of guessing involved here. I’m fairly confident these are in the ballpark though.

  • My blogs (this one and Kindle Geeks) — In another brain fart, I didn’t add affiliate links until recently, so I don’t know how many sales originated from my blogs, but there have been a few since I started tracking. If I’d been smart and started these blogs long ago, they’d likely be more popular now and account for many more sales, but I wasn’t even thinking about e-publishing until early November.
  • Advertising — I’ve written about my Kindle Nation Sponsorship Results, and I’ve also been running Goodreads campaigns for the last three weeks or so. That’s when I started going from 1 or less sales a day to 3 or more most days. I’ll do a post on running a Goodreads campaign, because you pay per click so it’d be easy to waste a lot of money if you weren’t careful. I make it clear in the actual ad that it’s an ebook so as to discourage people from clicking if they’re not ebook-reading peeps. Thus far I’ve spent less on advertising than I’ll make in royalties from these books, but it’ll be months before I make back the costs of cover art, editing, etc. That’s to be expected, though, and even if my sales just remain at the rate they’re at now, I’ll make back those initial expenses before summer is here.
  • My free ebook, Ice Cracker II, which I uploaded to Smashwords and Feedbooks and which recently got listed as a freebie at B&N (via Smashwords distribution)  — I haven’t spent any time promoting my novels at Smashwords, since it’s relatively unknown compared to the mainstream booksellers, so I believe all my sales (about 25) there are a result of this ebook. Unlike the $0.99 collection, it’s a single short story that stars the characters from The Emperor’s Edge. I included an excerpt from the novel at the end with links to encourage folks to go on and purchase the novel if they enjoyed the short story. I’m hoping it will continue to to be found in the months to come and will help introduce people to the series.
  • Amazon — I’m sure some people have found my books by clicking “people who bought this bought this” or whatever that section is, but I don’t sell enough to appear in any bestsellers lists, so I doubt many of the sales are coming from internal searches yet.
  • Honorable mention to guest blogging and article syndication — I don’t think these activities have directly sold many ebooks, but they build links to my blog, which increases my blog’s authority in the eyes of the search engines, which should bring me more traffic as the months and years go on, and which should increase the number of sales that originate here. (Don’t worry — I don’t use the word “which” that often when I write fiction.)

Where these sales haven’t come from:

The following are things that may help a little and may sell an ebook here and there, but I believe they are, given the time investment, relatively ineffective forms of marketing (though they may have benefits outside of book sales):

  • Posting in forums — I’ve been on the Kindleboards, Nookboards, and MobileReads, and I know I’ve created some interest (in my free ebook in particular) from posting there, but it’s a huge time sink. As far as marketing goes, I believe that time would be better spent building up our blogs, writing articles and guest posts to increase links to said blogs, and writing more ebooks. If you like posting in forums and enjoy the social element, then by all means do so (I like to pop in from time to time, for sure!), but, in my opinion, this is a pretty poor marketing plan, especially when the forums are saturated with indie authors trying to sell books. Generally speaking, the easier something is, the more people will do it, and the less effective it will be as a method to stand out and get noticed.
  • Twitter — Twitter isn’t a bad tool, but it’s more about networking than selling books. Now and then I’ll mention my books, but I’ve primarily used it to promote blog posts and meet fellow writers and bloggers, some of whom have allowed me to guest post on their sites. What Twitter isn’t is a Barnes & Noble store where people log in, looking to buy things. It’s more like a Starbucks. People are there to hang out and be social. I’ve not seen much evidence that people tweeting about their books ten times a day make many sales that way (I’m nosy, so I’ve checked the sales rankings of folks with 8,000 follows who tweet about their books day in and day out).
  • Facebook — I don’t do much here, but it seems to be similar to Twitter. Useful for networking and building up blog popularity, but not really a platform for selling ebooks directly. (Feel free to disagree with me and leave comments if you’ve had other experiences — my “six weeks” of being an indie author certainly doesn’t make me an expert.)

My goals going forward:

  • Write Book 2 (and 3 and 4 and more!) in the Emperor’s Edge series — My ebooks are all over the map right now. They don’t star the same characters, nor are they even in the same sub-genres of fantasy. In some ways this is good, because it lets me see which series has more potential to be popular and which I might want to focus on developing first, but if you make a fan of someone on a Book 1, they’ll likely go on to grab the following books in that series. It might be more up in the air with unrelated books.
  • Get some reviews from review bloggers willing to look at indie ebook authors — I have submitted my ebooks to some of the sites out there, but it seems to be a months-long wait in many cases. That’s perfectly understandable, as I’m sure these reviewers are backlogged with requests.
  • Participate in blog tours — I’ll write more about this later, but Encrypted and Emperor’s Edge are both going to appear on several blogs over the next two months. It’s kind of like getting the benefits of a guest post (links to your site/books) without having to write the post. The bloggers usually feature your book, and some may ask interview questions or even volunteer to review your book.
  • Fix up this blog — This is a free theme I grabbed, and it could use some work. I finally added a contact form, but I need to add social media tags (so people can just click a button at the bottom of the post to Facebook/Tweet/Digg something) and fix some quirks.
  • Start a newsletter — It’s sad that I haven’t gotten around to this yet. Having a mailing list means you can easily let your fans know about your new releases. Otherwise they just might forget about you in the time that passes between books. As the marketing pros say, it’s easier to sell again to an existing customer than acquire a new customer!
  • Experiment with more advertising options — I’m going to purchase a banner ad on the Nookboards and a sponsored post on two fairly popular kindle-book-review blogs. My gut instinct is that I won’t earn back what I spend, because none of those sites are genre-specific, but I might be pleasantly surprised (I wasn’t expecting Goodreads to work at all, and it has; even if it’s just a small trickle, it’s earning more more than it costs for that trickle).

I’ve rambled on here more than I expected to, so I hope you’ve found something useful. At the least, thanks for your interest in my progress.

Posted in My Ebooks | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Blog Carnivals Offer Free Links to Your Blog

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Lindsay
blog carnival

blog carnival

I just have time for a quick post today, so I thought I’d tell you about blog carnivals.

“A blog carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly.

Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks to other blog articles on the particular topic. Carnival posts are generally collated by the author by soliciting relevant contributions from interested people. The author collects links to these submissions, edits and annotates them and publishes the resulting round-up to his or her blog. Many carnivals have a home page or principal organizer, who lines up guest bloggers to host each edition. This means that the carnival travels, appearing on a different blog each time.” ~ Wikipedia

Not all carnivals travel to different blogs every month, and not all of them are updated regularly, but, either way, it’s an easy way to get some free links to your site, not just to the main page but to specific blog posts. Most carnival owners only accept one blog post from each blog per session, but whenever you write something particularly fine, it may be worth suggesting.

You can head over to The Blog Carnival Index and browse carnivals by categories. There are some on writing, blogging, and publishing, as well as a couple that feature stories, so there should be several that are relevant to you as an author.

You don’t have to do anything special to participate, just provide your name, email, and link to the blog post you want to submit. You can also check out the site’s FAQ in case you want to start a carnival of your own.

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How You Can Make Money Promoting My Ebooks (and other people’s too)

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Lindsay

make moneyA few people have stumbled across my site by searching for “best way to promote other people’s ebooks” or “how to make money reviewing books on a blog” so I’m guessing there’s some interest in the area. Since I’ve been making money through affiliate programs since 2003, I know a thing or two (maybe even three) about this.

This post will talk about making money promoting ebooks as an Amazon and/or Smashwords affiliate. You can review fiction or non-fiction. I’ll use my novels as an example (I offer a 75% commission at Smashwords) since I’d be tickled if you promoted them, but you can use these tactics to promote anyone’s ebooks.

Before you get excited about getting rich doing this, let me emphasize that doing well as an affiliate marketer is contingent on having a respectable number of daily visitors to your blog. See my link building tips post for ways to increase traffic.

Also, earnings from typical kindle/ipad/nook/etc ebooks in the $1-$10 range aren’t going to make you a lot of money per sale. Of course there are exceptions, but the majority of us aren’t going to make a living promoting affiliate links on our book blogs. That said, I don’t think it’s highly fanciful to think you could reach a point where you’re making a couple hundred extra bucks a month from your blogging hobby.

Okay, let’s get on with things….

What is an affiliate program?

I covered this in Three Ways to Make Extra Money with Your Author Blog, so just a quick explanation here:

Affiliate marketing is like working on commission: you use special links to promote books at Amazon, Smashwords, etc., and if someone clicks on one and ends up buying the book you make a percentage of the price.

You can sign up at the Amazon Affiliate Program and/or at the Smashwords Affiliate Program.

Smashwords pays higher commissions (sometimes much higher if the author has chosen to set it that way), but Amazon has far more offerings, not to mention brand trust. Either way, you’re not going to make a ton of money selling ebooks, but there’s no reason why you can’t make some extra spending cash. Here’s a look at some of my recent affiliate sales at Amazon:

amazon affiliate earnings kindle ebooks

How to make money promoting ebooks at Smashwords

Smashwords makes it super easy. Once you sign up, simply go to the page of the ebook you want to promote. My two novels are here:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/31003 (Emperor’s Edge)
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/37257 (Encrypted)

Once you find an ebook you want to promote, scroll to the bottom of the page. You’ll see a box with a link in it. That’s your affiliate link, so just copy it and use it on your site.

Emperors Edge affiliate link for Smashwords

The Smashwords default is 11%, but I’m not the only author offering more…

How to find authors with high affiliate payouts at Smashwords

  1. Go to your Affiliate Marketer Management page
  2. Click on “browse participating books and get linking code”
  3. Sort by “Best Bonus”

From there, you can browse to find promising ebooks to promote. You’ll probably have better luck selling those with reviews, but Smashwords is a much smaller community than Amazon, so there are a lot of books without reviews. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ebook won’t sell, especially a lower priced one.

How to make affiliate links at Amazon

With Amazon, you log into your dashboard, then search for books by their title or ASIN/ISBN. You can grab text links, image links, or try their fancy widgets. While there’s nothing to say you can’t try playing with the different ways of showing links, text links embedded in the content of your blog posts will work best. (People are good at ignoring banners sprinkled about sites, but text links in the post are right in the path of their eyes.)

Should you promote more expensive ebooks so you can make a higher commission?

Yes and no.

How’s that for confusing? Higher priced ebooks obviously mean a larger payout per sale, but they’re harder to move too. People think nothing of downloading a $0.99 ebook, and even $2.99 ebooks are a pretty easy sell, but things tend to slow down above the $4-$5 price point unless you’re promoting an established author the visitor has already read (and liked).

You can often get away with higher-priced ebooks if you’re promoting non-fiction (you can see in my picture above that the two best payouts for that particular period came from computer books). There’s a lot of antagonism toward fiction ebooks priced higher than paperbacks though. For a popular author, you might be able to make money promoting those books. For lesser known types, you should probably target those with lower priced ebooks.

Many indies such as myself sell their ebooks at $2.99 or even $0.99 (though it may not be worth your time to promote a $0.99 ebook at Amazon since the affiliate cut would be so small), which is quite appealing to bargain-hunting readers. If you promote my fantasy novels at Amazon, you’d make $0.20 or so per sale (your earnings percentage there depends on how many items you sell per month), which is still pretty measly, but if you promote my ebooks at Smashwords, you could take home $2+ per sale. Not exactly quit-your-day-job money, but sell five ebooks at that price point in a month and you’d have your web hosting paid for. Or, if you run your blog on a free platform, that’s latte or book-buying money!

The real potential with affiliate income is when your site gets popular and one blog post about one book gets seen by hundreds or thousands of people. Then, even if only one person out of 250 buys the ebook, you’ll earn noticeable income. I don’t know what Stephen Windwalker over at Kindle Nation Daily makes, but I’d be surprised if, between his affiliate sales and the sponsorships he sells to authors, he’s not making a good full-time income.

The best way to promote affiliate links

Book reviews

I’ve touched on this in other posts, but affiliate marketing is tailor-made for people who run review sites. Reviews attract visitors (especially through the search engines) who are already in “buy mode” and are just trying to make up their minds on whether this particular product is right for them.

Affiliate links should be closely related to the content of your blog post (i.e. you won’t sell many books if you’re just throwing the links into a post about your life), and it doesn’t get any closer than a book review.

Lists

If you don’t have time to do a lot of book reviews, creating lists and writing about new releases or cool finds can be a way to keep your posts frequent while still attracting your target audience (ebook buyers).

I’ve made quite a few sales over at Kindle Geeks with my “lists” posts. People enjoy lists and sometimes you’ll get free links to your site if you put together good ones. Here are a few examples of my posts that ended up selling ebooks:

New releases or cool finds

There are also several ebook blogs, especially for the kindle, that have developed large followings simply by posting new releases, bargain ebooks, or cool finds (this is what I attempt to do with my Kindle Geeks site, though you probably have to be a geek to find these books cool!).

It’s your site, and there are no rules as to what you can and can’t do. Just remember to include your affiliate links in all your posts (maybe twice, once at the top and once at the bottom), so visitors won’t miss them!

Do you have to stick to ebooks?

Absolutely not. You don’t even have to stick to books.

The best money I’ve made from Amazon’s affiliate program came from writing about electric fireplaces, plasma televisions, and security cameras (but I was writing about these things on a home and garden blog, so they were a natural fit; writing about security cameras on a book blog might be a stretch for your readers!).

If you run an ebook blog, you might try some affiliate posts highlighting accessories for e-readers (skins, covers, waterproof cases, etc.) or, if you blog about a certain genre, consider posting reviews of DVDs in that genre as well as books.

That said, I’m finding ebooks extremely easy to sell when compared to other products.

People with e-readers seem to love to load them up! Also, it’s very easy for them to make a purchase. Just click and buy. No worrying about entering a shipping address and no backing away from the sale when seeing how much that shipping will cost. Ebooks are the easiest thing I’ve ever sold as an affiliate, no kidding.

A few more tips on making money with affiliate links

  • Use pictures in your blog posts — covers help sell books, even ebooks
  • Be aware that people who click through to sites via your affiliate links must make their purchases within 24 hours (Amazon) or 48 hours (Smashwords) for you to get credit — a little “pre-selling” can help (a book review does this naturally, but don’t feel your reviews have to be glowing; people trust reviews more when pros and cons are pointed out).
  • Know that you get a percentage of all sales a buyer makes during that 24/48-window, so even if you’re just promoting a 99-cent ebook, you could make more than expected if that buyer makes other purchases (You know that picture up above that lists some of my affiliate sales? I didn’t promote 2/3rds of that stuff, including the higher priced computer books.).
  • Authors, you should use affiliate links to promote your own ebooks too. Not only do you earn a little extra money, but it’s a way of tracking how many books you sell through your own blog/website.

I better end this blog post before it turns into a novella, but if you have any questions feel free to ask them below.

Posted in Blogging, My Ebooks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Promote More, Work Less: Repurposing Your Content

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Lindsay

I don’t know about you, but I’ve felt awfully busy since I published my first ebook.

I’m trying to maintain two new blogs (this one and Kindle Geeks), guest post to promote my books, write articles to syndicate for back links, experiment with various advertising methods, connect with peeps and tweeps on social media outlets, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and I’m trying to write the next novel, too! And let’s not forget the day job. You know that pesky thing that pays the bills.

You’re probably in the same boat. You wish there were more hours in the day for all these activities.

Well, I can’t make the days longer, but I can offer one tip for making your time go a little further. As the “green” folks always say, recycle, reuse, and repurpose. That goes for writing as well as plaid couches and avocado appliances found on Craigslist.

Example, you say? Here goes:

Let’s say you write an awesome blog post on e-publishing. Man that sucker was good. 1,000 words of pure fineness.

Why not take that same post and turn it into an article for Ezinearticles.com or Buzzle.com? You’ll want to change things up a bit to make sure there’s only original content on your blog, but it doesn’t take much to turn the same information into a slightly different article. Don’t forget to stick links to your blog in the bio boxes for those articles.

And then, why not use the piece again? Slap on a new introduction, re-write the core content, and then use it for a guest post on someone’s blog. You might even trim that original blog post down and see if you can start a thread with it on a forum–a forum populated by people interested in ebooks, naturally.

I have to confess I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of an article I wrote on the pros and cons of e-publishing. It’s been turned into two guest posts (so far!) and submissions for various article directories around the web. It hasn’t been reused quite as often as the couch from Craigslist, but it’s getting there!

Needless to say, it takes a lot less time to rewrite an existing article than research and write one from scratch every time. Give it a try!

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What Are “Keywords” and Should You Care?

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Lindsay

Keywords for BloggingIf you’ve read any articles on search engine optimization, then this will be a basic post for you, but if you’ve been hearing about keywords and seo and wondering what it means, then this may serve as a starting point.

You don’t need to learn a lot about the search engines to be a successful blogger (and sell more books through your blog!), but there are a few things you can do when constructing your posts that will make it more likely people will find your site via Google, Yahoo, etc. One is using keywords in your titles, permalinks, and posts.

What are “keywords”?

Hey, glad you asked!

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into the search engine when they’re looking for something. As you might imagine some terms get used more often than others. What you type in when looking for information isn’t necessarily what everybody types in when looking for that same information.

Part of search engine optimization is learning which terms people are using most often in searches related to your niche (or genre for my fiction folks). Then you use those terms in your posts. That way when people type in those keywords, your post is more likely to come up on the first page of the search engine results.

Clear as slug slime, eh?

Let’s use an example related to blogging.

Examples of keyword usage for author-bloggers

Say you’re a paranormal romance ebook author, and you want to attract your target audience to your blog. Since people love lists and often link to them as good resources, you’ve decided to put together a list of paranormal romance ebooks (with your own books at the top of the list, of course!).

We want to see what terms people are Googling to find new authors in this genre. A quick check over with the free Adwords Keyword Tool (this is designed for people running advertising campaigns, but you can also using it for researching keywords and usage frequency for your own purposes) reveals the top searches related to paranormal romance (the numbers are Google’s estimates for global searches per month):

paranormal romance — 27,100
paranormal romance novels — 6,600
paranormal romance books — 6,600
free paranormal romance — 2,400
paranormal romance authors — 1,600
paranormal romance writers — 1,600
best paranormal romance — 1,600

Armed with this information, you can title your book list in a way that uses these words. That will make your post more likely to appear in the search engine results when people type in these terms. (When people are promoting their links on Twitter, I see so many blog post titles that tell me absolutely nothing about the content of the post; this is bad for enticing people to click and worse for helping search engines send the appropriate traffic your way.)

You wouldn’t want your title to look spammy in an attempt to jam lots of keywords in there because ultimately you still have to appeal to human beings (something titled “Best paranormal romance | free paranormal romance | new paranormal romance authors” wouldn’t get me to click). That said, you can certainly design your title so it hits upon a couple of these keywords.

Off the top of my head, perhaps:

  • The 100 Best Paranormal Romance Novels from 2010 (uses three of the keyword phrases listed above)
  • 50 Free Paranormal Romance Books for the Kindle/Ipad/Nook (uses three keywords and lets people know we’re talking about ebooks while using the more frequently searched term books instead of ebooks)

I’m sure you can come up with better titles. Just remember the idea is to get people to want to click while telling them and the search engines exactly what the post is about.

Note: It helps to use the keywords in the content of your posts too. Don’t overdo it (keyword “stuffing” is frowned upon and will get you dinged by Google), but sprinkling the chosen terms in where appropriate will help. The search engines strive to deliver the most useful results, and keyword frequency is one of the things that helps them decide why one page is a better match than another.

Note: You may naturally be inclined to go for the most popular keyword phrases (i.e. paranormal romance), but more popular terms tend to be more targeted by other bloggers. Shooting for a less frequently searched keyword (i.e. best paranormal romance) may let you rise to the Number 1 spot for that search term.

Last note (I promise!): Remember my post on link building? It helps to get other people to link to your post using your keywords in the link text. A lot of times, people just link using the title you created, so this is another reason it’s good to have your keywords in the title.

The end result of using keywords

At the end of the day, using keywords can mean bringing more traffic to your blog, so the answer to the question in my post title is, yes, you probably should care about them, at least a little.

The cool thing about search engine optimization is that what you do today to “optimize” your blog can have long term payoffs. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, where traffic disappears as soon as you stop promoting your work, blog posts can and do continue to rank in the search engines for years.

Taking a few seconds to research and use keywords related to your post can mean a little more traffic to each of your entries. And more traffic should mean more book sales in the long run!

Posted in Blogging, Tips and Tricks | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Interview with Successful Indie Author Lexi Revellian

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Lindsay

Today, in my first ever interview at Ebook Endeavors, we’ll be talking to (typing at) Lexi Revellian, a UK-based author who sold more than 4,000 copies of her ebook Remix in December.

Remix

Please tell us about Remix and how you got into e-publishing.

Remix is my third novel; the first two are untypical fantasy, which I concluded were not genre-specific enough to get published. Remix was my attempt to write a publishable book – though ironically, it too crosses genres. I tried to write as much of a page turner as an early Dick Francis, with a naïve yet intelligent heroine.

I gave myself a year to submit to agents before self-publishing. I submitted to 38 agents and four publishers; two agents approached me, four asked for the full typescript, two said they’d like to see my next novel. None of them offered me a contract.

I set up my own micro-press, Hoxton Press, and self-published for Kindle and Smashwords; I also produced a paperback with Lightning Source.

I can definitely sympathize with producing stories that don’t fit neatly into one genre (or two or three or four…). Did you have any trouble finding categories for your books on Amazon?

Yes – at the start I tinkered around with the Amazon categories, and never figured them out. You choose, then they put it somewhere else. They’ve got Remix under Romance, which is not how I’d describe it – and I worry that will put off male readers, though many men have enjoyed it. But then I share the category with Jane Austen, so can’t complain.

You’re doing quite well at Amazon, especially Amazon UK! What have you done for book promotion?

My total ebook sales since August are over 8,000 so far, and 7,000 of those were November onwards. Mainly on Amazon UK, where Remix has been in the Kindle top 100 for three months, but it’s selling respectably in America too. I’ve had only a few sales on Smashwords, not sure why.

I think you need luck in any type of publishing, and I’ve been lucky. I was the first author to join KUF, and the members chose Remix for October’s book of the month. My book has been reviewed on several blogs. I go on the UK Amazon forums – not the US ones much, can’t seem to get a toehold there – and though I seldom plug, I always have a link to Remix below my signature.

I’ve had a writing blog and a website for years, and have recently joined Twitter.

You do a nice job maintaining an interesting blog. Do you have any idea how many books you sell through your blog and website?

No – though I have noticed in recent weeks many more people have reached my website and blog after searching for Lexi Revellian. I think that will be useful when I have a second book to sell, I hope before the middle of this year.

Did you hire an editor and a cover art designer, or did you handle things yourself?

I proofread, edited, and formatted the text, and designed the cover. I enjoyed learning how to do this, particularly the formatting. I’m fairly obsessive about getting things right, and there’s a lot of help available on the internet. Beta readers were invaluable for picking up on plot holes and details I’d got wrong.

Do you have any suggestions for new indie authors trying to build a name for themselves (and make sales!)?

Write a book that people enjoy reading. Make sure your editing and formatting is perfect, your cover appealing and your blurb enticing. You will need to let readers know your book exists. Look at indie books and authors that are doing well and analyse why they are successful. Don’t overprice your book; what matters is not what you think it’s worth – it’s what the buyer is prepared to pay for a book by a writer she’s never heard of. Write another good book.

This is a terrific time for indie writers; with the advent of the Kindle we can compete for the first time with mainstream authors, on a nearly level playing field. This just isn’t possible with paper books.

Do you think it’s important to show up in a category Top 100 bestsellers list?

I’m sure it helps, but I’m not there yet in the US! I can only speak about the UK Kindle Store, where Remix is in the overall Top 100. That gives your book huge exposure. Amazon rewards books that sell; you spot your title cropping up all over the site.

You have the kindle version of Remix listed at $0.99 right now. Have you tried experimenting with price? Do you have any thoughts on the great pricing debates going on around the web?

I’m an unknown writer, and I want to build a readership. Readers are naturally reluctant to pay much for a book by someone they’ve never heard of, or seen in a bookstore. I want them to give me a chance, so I price Remix as low as I can. That’s not a reflection of my estimation of the book’s worth, it’s a deliberate policy to maximise sales. And, though I put time and effort into writing it, selling a thousand e-copies costs me the same as selling ten.

It’s more fun selling a lot of books.

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Ice Cracker II — Free Fantasy Ebook Now up at Barnes & Noble for the Nook

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Lindsay

Barnes & Noble and Amazon won’t let us indie authors upload free books directly to their sites, but there are some back doors. If you upload your freebie at Smashwords, such as I did with my fantasy short story Ice Cracker II, and click the “distribute to B&N” option, the ebook will eventually make its way to their store (you can check this button for Amazon, too, but it sounds like you’ll be holding your breath for a while).

I have also heard of people getting their ebooks listed for free at Amazon by uploading their ebook for $0.99 at Amazon while listing it for free with Smashwords. Since Amazon price-matches, they supposedly will eventually get the price dropped to free.

I may try this with Ice Cracker II, though it’s only a short story (about 6,000 words), so I’d hate to list it for a buck at Amazon. We’ll see.

In the meantime, give it a read at B&N or Smashwords (kindle and epub versions here) if you like fantasy!

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Three Ways to Make Extra Money with Your Author Blog

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Lindsay

You’re selling three books a day, but it’s not quite enough to pay the bills yet. Drat!

If you’ve been blogging and working at building traffic (you have been doing these things, riiiiight?), there are some ways you could earn a few extra dollars. They all relate to books, too, so don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you to start writing sponsored posts for reverse mortgage companies!

Here are three ways to make a little extra cash with your author blog:

Sign up as an Amazon/B&N/Smashwords Affiliate and Promote Books/Ebooks

Affiliate marketing is the internet version of working on commission. You sign up, create links to product pages (with your special tracking ID embedded), and post those links on your blog. You can earn anywhere from 4-8.5% of the book’s price (Amazon) to 11% and up (ebooks at Smashwords) for each product you sell.

Hint: use this to promote your own books too! As of December, Amazon pays affiliate commissions on ebooks. As an indie author, I make 70% of the sales price of Emperor’s Edge at Amazon and another 7% if the ebook is sold through one of my affiliate links. This is also a nice way to track how many people are buying your book through your sites.

The best way to make money with affiliate links is to stick text links directly into blog posts that are related to what you’re trying to sell. For example, a book review for a new Suzanne Collins novel would be a great place to add an affiliate link for said novel.

If you already review books on your blog, this is an easy and unobtrusive way to add a little income.

Keep in mind, any method for making money from your blog requires you to get traffic to your blog! If you haven’t read my link building tips, now would be a good time. Getting more visitors to your blog should bring the added bonus of selling more of your books too.

Add Your Blog to the Kindle Store

For $0.99 or $1.99 a month, people can subscribe to blogs listed in the Kindle Store. This means they can get all the posts automatically delivered to their kindles. Sure, they could read the blog for free online, but some people are willing to pay for convenience, so you might get a few subscribers if you write informative content.

If people subscribe to your blog, you’ll make 30% of the “sticker price.”

I added Ebook Endeavors last week, and it’s live in the store now. At this point, I’m more interested in having another outlet where people can find my blog than the money, but I’ll keep an eye on things and see how it goes.

One of the downsides is that Amazon chooses the price point, seemingly arbitrarily from what I’m reading in the publisher forums. Some people wish their blog was set at $1.99 while others would prefer their blog was $0.99 to attract more people. I admit I’m in that latter category. Amazon chose $1.99, and I’d prefer to list mine at $0.99.

Although Amazon is close-lipped on how prices are chosen, my guess would be it has something to do with bandwidth costs. If you post often and use a lot of pictures in posts, it may cost them more to wirelessly deliver the content to people’s kindles. I haven’t hunted around to see other people’s theories though.

If any of you decide to give this a try, let us know how it turns out. I’ll post an update myself at some point down the road.

Notes:

  • If you really want to do well with this, consider adding a footer to the bottom of each of your posts, linking to your blog’s kindle page and letting people know they can sign up.
  • Make sure you’re committed to your blog and post regularly–people aren’t going to be happy paying a monthly fee for an infrequently updated blog.

Sell Advertising to Other Authors

If you combine those link building tips I mentioned above with quality content that attracts a certain target audience, you could end up with a popular niche blog that other authors would like to be promoted on.

This doesn’t mean you can’t still let people guest post for you or that you can’t mention your friends’ works free of charge, but there might be authors you don’t know who’d be happy to pay $10 or $20 a month for a link/banner in your sidebar that highlights their book.

You may want to read my post, “Should You Buy Advertising on Book Review Blogs?” for some guidelines on what would make your site more appealing to authors with money to spend.

Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments