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| New cover art for the author's novel, The Great Symmetry |
If you’re an author, perhaps you’ve been here: I had finished my novel The Great Symmetry, done a print run for local bookstores and my website, and had sold some copies. Reviews were encouraging. The wider world beckoned. But how to launch? My Kindle edition was selling a copy every few days on Amazon – not exactly conquering the world.
This post is about my first discount eBook
promotion. It turned out well with 600 sales over a 13-day period, due to
working through some mistakes and some lucky accidents as well. The great news
for everyone is that you can read about all my errors, as well as a few moments
when this blind chicken happened upon a grain of corn, to help you plan for your
successful promotion.
As I was looking around for ideas, I read an
enthusiastic post on KBoards from an author who had just done a discount
promotion for her new book. She had signed up for several advertisers at a
small cost such as $10 each, and had realized a nice collection of sales over
several days.
For any indie writer who has not yet joined
the Writers Café on KBoards,
it’s a must if you plan to succeed in the business of writing. On this board,
you get to learn from the experiences of others, and if you ask questions about
your situation, you’ll get very direct (sometimes brutally direct) advice.
Then it’s up to you to decide what you should do.
From that first post I saw plus several others,
I pieced together the concept: Discount your book from its regular price, then
each advertiser sends out an email to their list of subscribers.
Here’s the key: The subscribers on each
list have specifically signed up to be notified about discounted eBooks. How
great is that? You can advertise your book to people who actually want to hear
about it. In order for this to work, you need a real regular price that’s $2.99
or higher, so you’re offering an authentic discount.
I figured I could do a promotion too, so I
shot off some applications to advertise for dates a couple of weeks ahead. When
got my first acceptance from an advertiser (yes they get to choose the books
they want to promote), I was thrilled and promptly paid. I was committed.
Shortly after, I realized my first mistake – lack of advance planning. The best
advertisers require four or more weeks of advance notice, and I had set my
promotion dates far too soon.
Now you know: Plan your promotion in
advance, and apply to advertisers four weeks or more before your planned dates.
The scramble was on. I sent in applications
for the empty days, and after some anxious days was able to put together a
lineup of promotions for each day except one.
As I waited for the first day of the
promotion, I found out more. When you do a discount promotion, the purpose is
not to make money – it’s to increase your readership. At a price of $0.99, your commission goes down to 35%, and it
takes a lot of sales to cover your advertising costs and then have enough to
buy a beer at the end. I set modest goals: Get some new readers, a few reviews,
and a “tail” of sales after the promotion is over.
As the promotion started, I learned the
next hard lesson. Your blurb needs to not suck. My blurb had loads of
fascinating information, none of which screamed out to a potential reader that
they needed to buy this book. The results on the first day of the promotion
reflected this.
After some frantic consultation with other
authors, I refined the blurb twice over the next few days in accordance with a
key principle: Don’t explain your book. Just find the most enticing few
sentences that clearly convey your genre and the idea that it’s a compelling
story. Imagine that a person will only read the first few lines before deciding
whether to read further, or just skip along to the next book. As soon as I
posted my blurb revisions, sales picked up.
When it came to reviews, I lucked out. I
had some good reviews from my paperback version before launching on KDP. This
really helped. Make sure you have those precious first reviews!
With the blurb revised, there was nothing
else to do except watch. Better still: don’t watch. Because refreshing the
screen on your KDP sales dashboard every minute is pretty much the dumbest way
you can spend your day.
Pro tip: Find a way to be off your computer
most of the time during your promotion. You can ask friends to stage an
intervention. Some authors provide their passwords to a trusted friend with
instructions to change the passwords and provide only a daily summary.
In the matter of staying away, I failed
completely. That’s me above. Next time I’m going to make plans to be in a cave
or something.
Yep – next time. I realized that as long as
I’m an author with books available for sale, it’s going to be worth doing
promotions periodically, probably several times a year.
And not just for the tangible results. I
took a screen capture of that moment at #15 on the bestseller list for Hard
Science Fiction, like Icarus taking a selfie before the inevitable plummet
Earthward, to remind myself that I can do this. I belong on that list, and I’ll
be back.
A discount eBook promotion is an important
tool for building your initial readership. But it’s just part of the picture.
Promote what you have, while not losing sight of what matters most – your next
book. Keep writing!
Update
six weeks later: The mythical tail of sales after a
promotion really does exist. For whatever reason, once a book has achieved a
certain level of visibility, readers will continue to find it more often than
before. I didn’t quite break even on my promotion while it was going on, but
the 250+ sales since then, almost all of which I believe would not have occurred
without the promotion, are an enduring and ongoing benefit.
About James Wells:
James R. Wells is the great-grandson of pioneering author H.G Wells, and so naturally he grew up loving science fiction. He writes in very personal terms about the kinds of choices that we all may face in the fast-arriving future.
James is a life-long cave explorer and outdoor adventurer, having led expeditions deep into some of North America’s great caves, including the Mammoth system, longest cave in the world.
When he is not writing or with family, James can be found in a cave, on a mountain, or anywhere else outside.
The author lives in northwest Washington state with his wife and his daughter.
James is a life-long cave explorer and outdoor adventurer, having led expeditions deep into some of North America’s great caves, including the Mammoth system, longest cave in the world.
When he is not writing or with family, James can be found in a cave, on a mountain, or anywhere else outside.
The author lives in northwest Washington state with his wife and his daughter.
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