Secrets of Publishing

TRY A BOOK TRAILER

5/22/2018

Writer Tom McAllister wrote recently online at The Millions, “Before I ever published anything, I’d assumed that if I ever finished a book, there would be so much demand from family and friends alone that we’d have to go into a second printing before the release date. But I am here to tell you: most people in your family will never buy your book. Most of your friends won’t either.”

True. I once wrote a short story entitled “Academy Award Afternoon and Evening,” but I was hesitant to publish it because it was based on some friends. Then I remembered that no friends or family ever bought a literary magazine that I was in, so don’t worry.

The story was published twice, and then it became the first story in my first collection, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea. My friends have never mentioned reading the story.

Author Christopher Dewan (and my former student) wrote on Facebook that the above article is “a glimpse into the sometimes stark gap between what we expect and hope as writers, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. People spend more on their lunch than they will on most books.”

How, then, are we to get strangers to buy our books if our friends and family don’t? That’s what I’ve been trying figure out since I started the series of articles in this blog. This week, I’m trying a book trailer. It’s just not any trailer but the trailer.

A book trailer should not be talky or dull. Some are long, however. People won’t watch long. The first trailer I ever did was long—a seven-minute mini-movie—which I learned from. (You can see it with a click here. I loved what we made, but after three years, it’s had only 405 views as I write this.)

In other words, I envisioned my ideal book trailer as two minutes or less, fast-paced, engaging, and from the heart. Our novel, The Chords of War, pulses with tension, sadness, and love. The trailer needed to distill that, too. It had to offer the sense of young Americans going to war after 9/11.

Thus I turned to my co-author, Samuel Gonzalez, Jr., who served in Iraq and is now a talented director. His first feature film, Railway Spine, a story of three childhood friends drafted into Vietnam, will be distributed soon. He’s made film trailers, too. I figured he’d carve an awesome trailer for us. He did.

You can see the book trailer on YouTube by clicking here.

If you like it and buy our book, well, it worked. If not enough people do, then I’ll keep trying. Heck, Don Quixote had his windmills, and filmmaker Terry Gilliam had his Don Quixote movie, which was stalled in production for over twenty years. I have my war novel that resonates with the meaning I’ve found in life, echoed in those battling and playing music in Iraq.

Heck, maybe even more of my friends might buy it.

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KINDLE NATION DAILY

5/4/2018

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After fitting in two April weekends of skiing at Mammoth Mountain, I’m back to trying book marketing schemes, isolating them to see the results. This is a prime example, by the way, of the challenges in publishing. So much about publishing is waiting. I may as well ski.

The novel I’m promoting, The Chords of War, has been out seven months, so it’s not brand new. My overall big plan that I followed a few months ago was to submit it for a few awards, and, if it wins anything, promote like crazy. Recently, the book made the finals for Foreword Magazine’s INDIE Award. In promoting that award, I thought it was time to try out Kindle Nation Daily (KND).

I had not tried it in years, so I wanted to see if it still had a positive effect on sales. KND is a combination website and Facebook page that promotes special deals among Kindle books. Kindle is Amazon’s version of eBooks. You need a Kindle reader or a free app for your phone, tablet, or computer to read a Kindle book. People subscribe to KND to find books at bargain prices in a category they love.

For KND to be most effective, you need to price your book low, say $1.99 or even 99 cents, the lowest price for a book on Kindle*. To try it out this time, I priced it at $1.99.

A few things you need to know about selling eBooks vs. print books. An eBook does not have paper or printing costs. Thus, at least for a short time, you can sell your eBook at a very low price. With printed books, you are more limited by the cost of printing and shipping, which can be significant.

Nonetheless for eBooks, you still need to do everything else, such as write masterfully. You have to have the manuscript edited and proofread well. As I former senior editor at a publishing company, I came to one big truth: you cannot be a great editor of your own book. You don’t have the objectivity for it. This means you still have costs if you pay for an editor.

For your eBook, you also need a great cover, and it has to look professional inside, including copyright information. Some self-publishers do it all, but there’s a lot to learn to be a great designer

Then come the advertising costs.

As with all advertising, you pay up front and hope it does some magic. As anyone conversant in advertising will tell you, one ad alone won’t do it for you. Ideally, you create an ad campaign, and your book comes at people from multiple angles.

I’m not doing that per se in this blog as I want to see the effect of individual schemes. If one scheme works particularly well, then adding others at the same time may do the trick.

With Kindle Nation Daily, you have various options on how your book is seen. When you go to the promotion page, you get a dozen different choices. Most of them cost $120 for a one-day promotion. According to KND, your promotion goes out to up to 288,000 readers. If your book is a thriller or romance or children’s book, it can be the Thriller of the Day, the Romance of the Day, or Kid’s Book of the Day, which gives you a clue about the most popular genres.

Before selecting which one I wanted, I went onto the Writer’s Café in KindleBoards (now called “KBoards”), which is a chat room peopled by eBook writers who ask questions or give answers. I searched for “Kindle Nation Daily” and came up with a half dozen fairly recent threads about using KND. Most said they had disappointing results. Still, I needed to see for myself. No one said which deal was best.

I chose the Kindle Daily Deal, as in the past that one was the most effective for me—the first post out of the day. When you buy a deal, you’re given a calendar of what days are taken and what is available. In the past, I’ve found Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays seemed the most effective—probably because people were more free then, or perhaps they feel the week is ending and are starting to consider what they’ll read on the weekend. I found Mondays were the weakest for promotion.

The first available date was April 12, a Thursday. I took it.

How did it do? First, I had to make sure to change the price from $8.99 to $1.99. Amazon said it can take up to 24 hours for a price to change, so I changed the price late in the day on April 10. All day of the 11th, the price was at $1.99. The book’s ranking did not change that day at all, so simply changing your price without telling anyone does nothing. That day, the book was ranked low, beyond a million on the bestseller list, more specifically around #1,600,000. That’s low. That means I hadn’t sold a single copy for weeks.

On April 13th, I went onto Amazon and saw this happy ranking:

Kindle Nation daily offers something called an eBook Tracker—a free way to track the history of any book’s sales ranking—your own book or anyone’s book. You can sign up for it by clicking here.

I found my best ranking was #32,702. That’s wonderful, rising in rank by over a million. How many sales did that take? As a publisher on Kindle, I found that information. I sold ten books that day to get that rank.

That also means each book sold cost me $12, and I made sixty-six cents on each of those sales. Clearly, this did not pay for itself. Still, it’s the first thing since I started this blog to have an effect.

In contrast, I found on KBoards someone who tracked her sales using Bookbub, which is a similar service, but lets you sell not only on Amazon but also on other formats such as Nook and Apple iBooks. Click here to see that post.

On Bookbub, the author paid $420 for promotion, and then made over $18,000 in revenue. Not all was thanks to Bookbub itself as the book was selling well on its own, but it was still a significant bump. It took her three-and-and-half years and 61 submissions to get onto Bookbub for a single day. Thus, you can’t count on Bookbub for your campaign. But Bookbub is gold.

In short, you can get on Kindle Nation Daily assuredly, but Bookbub is mostly taken by big publishers so it is nothing you can count on. I’ll write more about Bookbub later, particularly with its new Facebook-like advertising option, which I’m trying out now.

There are many other areas I still have yet to explore to promote my book, such as Facebook ads and pages, newsletters, Goodreads, building a database of readers, and more. Come back to this site for future explorations.
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*You can also make your book free on Kindle by making it free on Smashwords, and then Kindle matches the price. Thus, there are a lot of free books available on Kindle. While people by the thousands may download your book, will they read it? I’ve learned that only a few percent of people seem to read a free book all the way through. There’s something about spending money, even 99 cents, that commits people to reading.

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HOW TO PRICE AND ANNOUNCE

4/10/2018

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As I wrote when I started this series, I’m doing my best to isolate each marketing thing I try, but marketing is a confluence of forces. It’s much like the Sauk River meeting the Mississippi River way up near St. Cloud, Minnesota. Rapids occur. The nearby town is named, appropriately, Sauk Rapids. Here, I’m aiming to make Book Rapids.

Putting a book on sale is one way of getting attention for a short while. Merely changing the price does no good if no one knows about it. You need to announce it. That may mean using an advertisement, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as emailing or sending out a newsletter.

COST VS. PRICE

First, let’s consider what you can reduce in price for a special sale. There’s not much to do with the price of printed books. The production costs are cut-and-dry. If you use printing-on-demand, as we do at White Whisker Books, it costs about four times what big publishers get for printing in a big run.

Of course, big publishers then need to warehouse the books. Their sales force has to get book orders, and then books are shipped in bulk to stores and to distributors such as Ingram. Follow-up visits to the stores assure that the books are placed well. Small publishers can’t do any of this. They rely on distributors alone, and those prices are fixed, too.

In short, a trade paperback book brings in two to five dollars for us when the retail price is $16.95. That’s not a huge profit, and cutting the price by a buck will have no bang.

By the way, when bookstores return books, all the profits go away. One book, in particular, still is in the red for us. That’s because the book received such great reviews that bookstores ordered in quantity and then returned in quantity when they did not sell.

Nowadays, we don’t allow books to be returned, which means they are not ordered by bookstores. That’s the print book business.

EBooks, however, have none of the printing and distribution costs of printed books. Still, there is the editing, proofreading, cover design and marketing costs to pay for, so eBooks are far from cost-free. Still, when it comes time to offer a bargain, you can drop the price for a short time.

SPECIAL PRICE

Ebook pricing is the area that brings conflict and discussion. When Amazon first brought out its Kindle, Amazon pressured all publishers to price eBooks no higher than $9.99. Amazon reasoned, correctly, that if people were going to change their reading style, they needed incentive. This made many publishers furious, though. If they were selling a hardback at $29.95, then $9.99 seemed incredibly cheap. The publishers did not like “new.” They only went along because Amazon sold so many of their printed books.

At some point, the big publishers rebelled, and that’s when Steve Jobs jumped in with his iBooks, telling the publishers they could price eBooks at any price they wanted, and he’d sell them that way.

On the other end of the spectrum, self-publishers were willing to sell their books at 99 cents each—and then free—just to get their books out there. If they did everything themselves—researched, wrote, edited, and designed—then their costs were low. Of course, people who edit and proofread their own work usually have a fool for a client. Still, there are geniuses out there.

DARCIE CHAN

I met one such genius, Darcie Chan, about seven years ago. She was an attorney working for the U.S. Senate. She found herself with six months off before her job started, so she wrote the book she always wanted, The Mill River Recluse. It’s about a shy woman who secludes herself in her house years after she had married a wealthy young man, and the woman harbors a secret.

Darcie found an agent right away who loved her book, and when the agent couldn’t get it published, she urged Darcie to self-publish it but not in print: eBook only. That’s because, the agent said, big publishers don’t see eBooks as being published. Price the eBook at 99 cents. The agent hoped it would find an eager audience and prove to a big publisher that it needed to print this book.

Boy, did Darcie’s novel get noticed. Her book was #4 that year on the USA Today best seller list. Darcie was also great at advertising. Even though she only made 33 cents a book, she was making more money than as a lawyer. She was getting interviewed everywhere, and when the New York Times and Wall Street Journal interviewed her, I knew she’d done something extraordinary.

Soon she had a publisher who didn’t want to publish The Mill River Recluse, but, rather, two new books. That changed over time. The original book is now available in hardback, paperback, audio, and eBook. She wrote two sequels. Darcy quit the Senate, had a child, and writes full-time.

ME

I’m not that genius. My books, I’ve learned, are just quirky enough to not be mainstream. It’s also why people like them. You have to like the oddball Gunner Gunderson, physics genius, who takes three days off from his research to find a wife using the Scientific Method in Love at Absolute Zero. Chaos ensues.

With The Chords of War, however, I’ve hit on a book that hits at the gut level. With humor and horror, we experience the Iraq War from a musician’s sensibility. That’s why I decided I had to find a new way to market it. Other people who tried inexpensive or “free” after Darcie’s model flooded the system. You can find over 60,000 free books at any given time on Amazon. What people forget is that Darcie’s book had ardent followers. She has over 2,100 reviews for The Mill River Recluse, most of them five-star. That’s a clue: get reviews.

I’ve experienced over the years that too low a price early on means no one buys the print version. I’ve learned that people who buy the print version are more likely to read it than someone who gets a free or 99-cent book, now that there are so many of them. (When Darcie did it, it was unusual.) If people read your book, you’re more likely to get people to like it and write a review. If they write good reviews, you might have readers for your future work. I’m thinking long-term.

FOR THIS EXPERIMENT

For The Chords of War, I realized most big publishers still price their eBooks at $9.99 or higher. Thus, $8.99 could say two things: a) It’s a serious book worth that price, and 2) It’s slightly less expensive that other serious books.

It also allows me to drop the price to $1.99 for a few days, which it is a good bargain. I’ll raise it $1 a day until, maybe $5.99, and I’ll see how it does there. Also, I’m still hoping to use Bookbub for a special sale, but Bookbub looks up what your book has sold for during the last several months, and if $1.99 isn’t special, they won’t let you use their service.

To announce this new price, I’m using Kindle Nation Daily, who will promote my book for one day, on Thursday, April 12th. Kindle Nation Daily is a service that promotes Kindle books through email, through its website, and through social media. Free, 99-cents, or $1.99 are encouraged. Readers sign up to get announcements.

When Kindle Nation Daily first started, there was nothing like it, and to pay $50 to get your 99-cent book announced brought results. When I first tried it, I had over 500 books sold in a day. That brought in $165, minus the $50, so I made $115. Plus the ranking of my book went way up. Then the site started offering more and more spaces and deals, and its effectiveness went down.

Along came Bookbub, and one of its mandates was that the books they promoted had to be really good. That meant a certain number of reviews and high ratings, even though they never gave the exact requirements. I remember the first time I tried them. I had to pay something like $150, which seemed a huge risk, but it brought in something like 1500 sales in a day, and my ranking jumped into the top 100 for Kindle books. Plus Bookbub also sold to Nook, Kobo, Smashwords, Google Play, and Apple iBooks. I had a larger audience. I wish I remember those exact figures, but the income was good on all platforms.

One could only use Bookbub for a book every three months, but I did so religiously, for my and all my authors’ books. It was great for a while.

Then Bookbub stopped taking my books. What happened is the big publishers found Bookbub, and so a John Jakes or Michael Connelly or Margaret Atwood book on a special price became a tremendous thing. I’d be thrilled to try them again.

I haven’t tried Kindle Nation Daily for a few years now. I paid $119 for a one-day ad, which will also appear for no extra charge on Book Gorilla, another Kindle reader site. Below is the ranking of The Chords of War on Kindle as this goes out. My goal is to sell at least 180 copies, which will pay for the cost of the ad. If I get that many, my ranking will go way up, too. The actual number sold, I won’t get a report for at least six weeks, but I can intuit sales from the ranking.

#1,153,406 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#7124 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#13574 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#69598 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult

Let’s see what happens.

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ANALYSIS AND THINGS TO CONSIDER – The Many Variables of Book Publishing

4/6/2018

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Now that I’ve started this series, I’m inundated with choice. I’m seeing many things to try. I’m also seeing there’s much to consider in interpreting data.

After my first week of experimenting, sales have not changed. An inexpensive Facebook boost and a much more expensive press release at PRLeap have not led to more sales of The Chords of War. PRLeap did give me metrics: 977 page views. That means my press release was viewed 977 times, most likely from nearly 977 unique viewers. Still, if it did not lead to sales, it didn’t pay for itself. There were no Facebook likes.

One positive thing is that over 70 TV stations across the country put the press release on their websites. It doesn’t mean any station ran a story on it, but if someone went to a TV station’s webpage, he or she might see it. The release also appeared in 63 newspapers including, I was happy to see, the Mammoth Times, a newspaper near the ski resort that I skied at last week.

In PRLeap’s report, I could click on any TV station or newspaper’s link to see how my press release appeared there. The number of page views does NOT include clicks on those independent sites. That could mean hundreds of more views. I like the idea of being on all those sites. The trick is in whatever press release you do, make your headline and subhead so interesting that people who stumble onto your release MUST click to find out more. If I were an average reader on any of these websites and I had fifty press release titles to click on, would I click on ours?

Perhaps no sales occurred because being a finalist isn’t big enough news. Perhaps if the book wins any bigger awards, some of the 977 who saw this release might think, “Okay, now I have to buy it.”

There’s so much more to try in marketing. In fact, here’s a list of some of the things I’m working on:

Pricing: While prices for printed books do not have a lot of wiggle room because the costs for printing and distribution can’t be lowered, there’s a lot of wiggle room in eBooks. Right now The Chords of War is priced at $8.99, which is a dollar cheaper than most eBooks from the big publishers. However, it’s a lot more than most indie publishers.

Our thought in the pricing of the eBook was two-fold. We had a lot of publishing costs—editors, proofreaders, and designers from the publishing industry (i.e. professionals)—as well publicity that we had to pay for. We also wanted to like a bargain compared to big publishers, who price their eBooks at $9.99 or higher.

Now, of course, we’re thinking we need to appear as a bigger bargain. We’re competing with eBooks at $2.99 and less. We will drop the price April 12 in conjunction with an ad.

Kindle Nation Daily: This is one of the major ad channels for getting the word out for a bargain price. This is the ad we will try on April 12. Bookbub is even a bigger channel but more difficult to get in. Still, I will try that, too.

Social Media: Twitter seems to work for President Trump—why not for book publishing? I’ve been a Twitter user for years and know firsthand that “Buy my book” has absolutely no effect. However, Twitter is a great platform for channeling people to blogs, such as this one. The number of unique users and page views are something that can be measured, and Twitter increases readers. There are MANY subtle variations in using Twitter. It’s worth exploring. I’m trying new things. There is also Instagram and Facebook to explore.

Amazon: For small presses and independent and self-publishers, Amazon is the biggest and most important distributor. What most people don’t realize is that Amazon offers a lot to help new books find success—but only 30 days worth. There are things you can do to use this help to best advantage. Our first 30 days for The Chords of War were fabulous, but now that it’s past 30 days, Amazon with his secret algorithm is now merely a distributor for us, not a promoter. Therefore, all these other things we’re trying is to funnel sales toward Amazon and other eBook distributors. Also worth considering: advertising on Amazon.

Ingram/Lightning Source: At White Whisker Books, we use Ingram/Lightning source to get our printed books out. When we started in late 2005, printed books were the only way to go. Print-on-demand (POD) changed the playing field for us in a hugely positive way. We didn’t have to do a big print run but merely have Lulu Books, then later Lightning Source, which was an arm of Ingram, the biggest book distributor in the country, print our books. Books would only be printed when a bookstore, Amazon, or an individual reader orders printed copies. It’s more expensive per unit than a big print run, but there is no waste.

EBooks: When eBooks first start getting noticed and popular around 2007, many experts thought it would take over the publishing world. Perhaps eventually over 80% of books sold would be eBooks. When eBooks were about 6% of the market, we dove in, and soon our sales matched our printed book sales. Shortly afterward, our biggest profit came from eBooks. Now, years later, eBooks in the publishing world have settled in at about 25%. This is to say most people still read printed books. If you're at Target, Walmart, or Costco, you're not buying an eBook. Even though eBooks are only 25% of the market, it’s where we make most of our money.

We can’t compete with the big publishers on printed books for a variety of reasons. One is that we don’t have a sales force to go to over 4,000 bookstores across the country to oversee our books. The second reason is the biggest: returns. In order to get books into stores, Ingram (the distributor) needs permission to accept returns. If a bookstore can’t sell your book, it wants to return it for its money back. This can cripple and even bankrupt a small publisher, especially as we discovered that great reviews make bookstores order a book, but buyers don’t show up. Printing-on-demand (POD) costs four times what it costs per unit for a big print run. Big print runs and warehousing of books is what the big publishers do. Thus, we have to concede most of the print market to them.

However, now one can print hardback books on demand at Lightning Source (before it was only paperback). We tried going harbback for the first time with The Chords of War. Our thought was that libraries prefer hardbacks, and libraries don’t return books. The hardback version of The Chords of War is gorgeous because I’ve been using the same book designer for years, a woman who used to oversee design at St. Martin’s Press, a big publisher. Our books look as if a big publisher produced them.

There are other eBook platforms besides Kindle. There is Nook (Barnes and Noble), iBooks (Apple), Kobo, and Smashwords, an important outlet for eBook publishers. I’ll get into these in a future blog.

Advertising: This is the single biggest question mark for small and self-publishers. How much money can you afford to shout about your book? How much “shout” will you get? Will advertising pay for itself? We’ve found usually not. The first place we’ll examine is Kindle Nation Daily, but the premiere place to use is Bookbub – if only you can get in. It’s tough. There are other places to consider, too, which will be in a future blog.

Goodreads: This site is now owned by Amazon, but it’s a different platform and it’s worth exploring.

Kindleboards Writers Café: This is where many authors, small publishers, and self-publishers go online to get ideas and even promote their books. The board changes so rapidly, it’s hard to use it as a place to promote, but it’s a great place for finding ideas and even asking questions. It’s worth a longer look in a future blog.

Other ideas will surely come up as this series continues. People may write in with suggestions by clicking on the Contact tab at this site. I’m working now on an article about Twitter.

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THE PRESS RELEASE

4/2/2018

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As I mentioned when I started this series, my latest novel “The Chords of War,” written with Iraqi vet Samuel Gonzalez, Jr, has earned an award. Now I’m trying to get the word out. My notion is that this news gives me a wedge to market the book, something I haven’t done yet. That’s the essence of this series: to find the marketing secrets.

With this second post, I’m writing about trying a press release. The award is fresh news, so I have to trumpet it, hoping someone who is in the news will use it. The traditional press release was something I did in the publicity department at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). In the late eighties and early nineties, I was the Institute Writer there. I wrote hundreds of press releases each year, as well as articles. If a faculty member, student, or a visiting artist did something noteworthy—or had an upcoming event—I’d write about it in a way that was compelling. The idea was news organizations churn with voracious appetites. They have space to fill. They might write about our news.

My press releases aimed to be a page or less long. People didn’t have time to read. Another CalArts staff member would photocopy a few hundred of each of my releases. Others, often students on work-study, would fold the releases, stuff envelopes, add address labels and postage, and send them out. A few days later, my adept boss, Anita Bonnell, would call various media outlets to see if they received the release and, usually because they had not, she would pitch the story in the release.

Sometimes a release would be hot news, and several editors would call Anita. Stories that were then published would be put outside on a cork board. In those days, CalArts seemed to be in the news often.

These days, press releases go out through a web service. Instead of releases being sent with postage, they go out in email. As you can imagine, most email isn’t read, but if you want to do a release, you still need to write a compelling one. Does your headline grab? Do you have a subhead?

My challenge now is that the book’s award is NOT the Pulitzer Prize or something huge—and the winners have not been selected yet. My book is a finalist. Still, my hope is that people reading about it may think, “Hey, I’ve got to get this book. It sounds interesting.”

What service to use? If you’re a corporation such as Coca-Cola or a big name such as Rhiana or George Clooney, their publicists will use PR Newswire, which often costs over a thousand dollars per release. Alone, it costs $195 just to be a member of PR Newswire, and then you are charged for how many words, photos, and links you include.

Because it’s so expensive, the editors receiving releases are often curious what news is worth all that money? You’d have to sell a lot of books to pay for that. Realize, your release isn’t going to book readers directly but to people who cover news about books or publishing. Your hope is that they’ll take your news and make it as if they came up with it as news.

There are free services out there, but despite the promises, you pay for what you get. Over the years, I’ve tried PR Newswire ($1600), as well as less expensive options such as PR.com, PRLog, PRWeb, and PRLeap. I can’t say I’ve ever been bowled over with how amazing any have been, but my feeling is if you have news, you have to get it out there.

For this blog, I used PRLeap, simply because I like their interface the best, and you are not burdened with add-ons. You get to add a few links and photos with each release. It cost me $135. Will I sell 35 books (figuring an average of $5 profit per book)? Something tells me I won’t.

You can read the release I wrote and see its presentation by clicking here.
The press release went out early this morning. Has anything changed in the course of less than a day? Here are my book’s latest rankings on Amazon:

Paperback:
#1,520,899 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#11747 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War

Hardback:
#1,620,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#12238 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#45819 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary

Kindle:
#1,063,944 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#6753 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#12714 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#64502 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult

The answer is NO. Then again, remember, this has not gone out to the reading public yet. It may take a day or two for someone to mention it in their own blogs or on the news. I know my reading public will be in large part people who read war fiction. Perhaps a military organization will pick it up. However, I am seeing my Facebook announcement and boost ($10) have led to no sales.

The secrets still lay out there for me to find.

What’s next? I’ve already set up an ad on Kindle Nation Daily on April 12, which goes out to people who read books on the Kindle. I’ll try something else before then. Look to this space in a few days to see what that is.

(NOTE: The photo was taken in Iraq of Sam, playing in the band he formed there. The book is loosely based on his experiences in Iraq as a musician and fighting soldier.)

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The Secrets of Publishing Books (Or What to Do When All Marketing Baffles You)

3/30/2018

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Publishing is like a river in the rainforest. It’s mysterious. It can be generous. It can be treacherous. It can change. As the head of White Whisker Books, I used to take certain marketing approaches that brought sales, tried and true, to my own books and my other authors. I started with a good book that I mailed to many reviewers four months before publication day. Great reviews can make publication day strong. If a book received great reviews, that was the fuse to a sales explosion.

Now everything has changed. What used to work no longer works. Quality books and reviews are still needed, but alone, they bring nothing. Most advertising for books proves to be squandered money. Most social media is a waste of time.

I now have a dilemma. I’ve co-written a powerful war novel, The Chords of War, with Samuel Gonzalez, Jr., an Iraq war veteran, published last September. The book earned honest and emotional reviews, which have moved me. Publication day brought strong sales. We landed in the top 200 books on war sold that day. Then sales went down until our Amazon ranking today at the end of March:

Paperback:

#1,379,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#10976 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War

Hardcover:

#1,238,481 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#10159 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#35655 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary

Kindle:

#1,016,785 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#6543 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#12245 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
#61830 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult

The book has just become a finalist for Book of the Year in the prestigious INDIE Awards from Foreword Reviews. How can I get more attention and sales for the book?

With all the incredible reviews, and with Veterans Day last November and Christmas and Hanukkah in December, I had hoped word-of-mouth and the holidays to carry the book high. It didn’t happen.

I’d always thought the hardest part of publishing was writing a great book. It’s not. Marketing is harder. As a writer, I want to write, which is what I’ve been doing since October, hoping The Chords of War found its audience on its own. A big audience didn’t happen. Now I have another chance with being a finalist.

Thus, I’m starting this blog. The idea is I’m going to try different things and see the real-world results by measuring my Amazon ranking and sales.

My First Foray

The thing about marketing is that it’s difficult to purely isolate one thing, but I’ll do the best I can. For instance, I’ve started with an announcement on Facebook that this book is an INDIE finalist. I did that yesterday, and I boosted it on Facebook on my author’s page for $4.16 so far (up to $10). Facebook says I’ve reached 129 people, I’ve “engaged” 19 (people who clicked on “Like"), and my Amazon ranking has gone down in all three categories (hardback, paperback, and Kindle), meaning there have been no sales in 24 hours.

From experience, it generally takes reaching a thousand people for one sale. That’s the reality of online marketing. Reaching 129 is barely anything.

Seasoned marketers will say people need to see something an average of seven times before they buy something. Let’s say you’ve never heard of Coca-Cola. The first time you see an ad for it, would you buy it? Probably not. Maybe after the seventh you would. If a friend tells you it tasted great and gave you energy, you might try it sooner. If someone reads your book and raves about it, maybe that will cause faster sales, too.

Next, I’m going to do a press release announcing the INDIE Award. It costs money to send out a press release, and each service promises results. There are free services. There are many offering results in the $20 to $150 range. And then there’s the top dog, PR Newswire, which can easily cost over $1500 per release. I’m going to try using PRLeap.com, which I’ve used in the past. I consider them pricey at $135 per release, but I found their software very friendly and their releases show up in searches on Google easily.

I’m not anticipating the release will pay for itself, which would mean I’d have to sell 22 eBooks or about 45 printed books – which doesn’t sound like a lot, but, again, this is coming from a vacuum. Ideally, this press release will generate some sales. Also ideally, people will read the book and then write a short review on Amazon, which can help. I will write a blog later this week to tell you if there are any immediate results.

Many Dollars

It’s easy to spend more money marketing than you make back in sales. I could get a New York publicist for $6000 a month or more. Will that investment pay for itself? Probably not, especially without more awards and higher sales.

My goal here is to find things that bring a profit. I imagine this journey is much like investing in the stock market. I started out investing in stocks by taking small steps and investing in companies I knew about, such as tech and entertainment companies. If something didn’t work, I wasn’t out a lot of money. What I discovered was as you make money, you invest more and more.

Since I started White Whisker books in late 2005, I’ve come across many publishing promotions, promising riches. Writers and publishers seem to be rubes to hucksters. I will try some of the more inexpensive ones to see if my sales or Amazon ranking rise. If that works, maybe I’ll try more expensive things. I will write about all my attempts here.

Things I'm considering is taking out a promotion on Bookbub and Kindle Nation Daily. I plan soon to spend time on Kindleboards, a place readers go to find books and where writers go to talk about their books. I'll probably make the EBook a special for a day at $1.99 using a service to announce it. Sam and I will also be speaking at Santa Monica College on April 17, so perhaps we'll have a good audience there.

Write me if you have found something in marketing that works, and perhaps I’ll try it. I don’t want to do this alone. Your experience can guide me. Perhaps I’ll publish some of the more interesting notes. Write to me using the “Contact” tab on this website.

In short, I have to be Lewis and Clark heading into the Western woods. I want to learn the new publishing secrets. I will bring you along.

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TRY A BOOK TRAILER

KINDLE NATION DAILY

HOW TO PRICE AND ANNOUNCE

ANALYSIS AND THINGS TO CONSIDER – The Many Variables of Book Publishing

THE PRESS RELEASE

The Secrets of Publishing Books (Or What to Do When All Marketing Baffles You)

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TRY A BOOK TRAILER

KINDLE NATION DAILY

HOW TO PRICE AND ANNOUNCE

​ANALYSIS AND THINGS TO CONSIDER – The Many Variables of Book Publishing

THE PRESS RELEASE

The Secrets of Publishing Books (Or What to Do When All Marketing Baffles You)

Author

Archives

Categories

ANALYSIS AND THINGS TO CONSIDER – The Many Variables of Book Publishing