Category Archives: Marketing

Why Sign Up for KDP Select?

January 27, 2012 – 1:00 am

Because, it works.

For giggles, I decided to sign up my latest release, Nickels, for KDP Select in mid-January. I first released Nickels in mid-December and had a pretty strong opening week. Sales trickled in through the rest of December, but came to a screeching halt at the new year. After only 20 dismal sales, I decided to pull Nickels from B&N, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, & Diesel.

Once I was certain Nickels was only left in paperback and on Amazon, I signed up. The process was really easy – just choose “enroll”.

If you’re not familiar with KDP Select, here’s the basics:

Agree to go exclusive with Kindle for digital book (ebook) for 90 days
Book becomes available for Amazon Prime Members. They can borrow 1 book for free every month. Authors get paid a royalty on borrows (see KDP Select Terms & Conditions for details).
Author can list the book for free for any 5 days during the 90 day exclusive window.

The Plan

I knew right away that I wanted to use some of the free days as soon as possible. After all, my sales needed a shot in the arm. But, I wanted to be strategic about how I used the days.

See, here’s the thing: Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays are traditionally the highest book sales days. I’ve seen this with my own numbers. So, I knew I didn’t want to offer my book for free when readers were more likely to buy it any way.

My plan? Go free on Wed & Thurs to boost sales ranking. Then the book goes back to regular price ($4.99) on Friday. No matter how hard it was, I avoided the temptation to drop the price. I mean I just spent two days flooding the internet with messages about my book. The word was out. So, there was no need to offer a reduced price (thereby losing money) because I didn’t have to draw traffic to my book. I already had traffic. Now I wanted to maximize profit.

For more detailed information on my plan, see my post with this KDP Select Checklist for Free Days.

The Results

	Free Days	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Total
Highest Kindle Ranking	#3	#809	#153	#127	#131
Sales	29,500+ (downloads)	70+	500+	490+	310+	1370+ sales29,500+ (downloads)
Borrows		70+	80+	110+	50+	310+

Stay Tuned

Over the next four Fridays, I’ll have two guest authors each week share about their experience with KDP Select so you can get a better idea of how the program is working for multiple authors across multiple genres.

Maximize Your Free Days

If you missed my earlier post on how to maximize your free days on Kindle Select, check it out. I’ve included a great checklist with helpful tips.

Self-published author, Karen Baney, enjoys sharing information to help authors learn about the Business of Writing. She holds a Masters of Business Administration from Arizona State University and has worked in various business related career fields for the past 20 years. She writes Christian Historical Fiction and Contemporary Romance novels. For more information about Karen’s books, visit her Amazon Page.

Tags KDP Select, Kindle DIrect Publishing Select, kindle select, self pub, self publishing | Permalink | Comments (3)

Marketing Writing

Author Marketing Guide

January 20, 2012 – 1:00 am

Whether you’re a new author or you’ve been around for years, looking for new ways to market your book is probably on your list of things to do this year. Here are some ways I market my books and the kind of results I’ve had with each approach. Please keep in mind that even if something has a low “sales generation ranking”, a huge part of marketing is getting the word out which will eventually lead to sales.

Type: Blog Tour

Goal: Get the word out

Cost: $0 – $1,000 (includes fee for booking a tour and cost to provide free copies of your book)

Sales Generation Ranking: 1 star

If you’re not familiar with blog tours, there are many different kinds. Some organizations charge a fee for organizing a tour, others do not. Some schedule tour dates over a period of time (i.e. every day for two weeks) and some schedule all the tours for the same date.

My experience with blog tours planned by an organization has been very disappointing. Out of the bloggers who signed up (and received a free copy of my book, which costs me money), only 33% actually posted anything on their blog. Out of those, only 25% actually posted a review on their blog. An even smaller number posted a review on Amazon, etc., even though that was part of the blog tour agreement.

This particular blog tour was one that posted all on the same day. During three separate blog tours, I did not see any change in sales.

Type: Book Reviews

Goal: Book Reviews on major sites

Cost: Just the cost to provide free copies of your book to reviewers

Sales Generation Ranking: 1 star

Instead of blog tours, I now focus my energy on getting bloggers to review my book. Whenever I send out free copies, I expect they will post their honest review on their blog, Amazon, and other key sites. While this doesn’t necessarily lead to a big increase in sales, it helps generate future sales by getting the word out and by adding reviews to your Amazon product page. Many readers won’t even think about buying a book with no reviews at all.

Type: Twitter

Goal: Get the word out & generate sales

Cost: Free

Sales Generation Ranking: 3 stars

If you really learn how to use Twitter, it can be a great way to get the word out about your book and to generate sales. The key is having a nice mix of push vs. pull type of marketing (i.e. Buy My Book vs. Here’s this really helpful article I read/wrote about pricing). It takes some time to learn Twitter. There are tons of great resources out there, but one I found particularly helpful is: http://www.copyblogger.com/ultimate-twitter/

My experience with Twitter has been very positive. I have a few author groups where we help cross promote each other. I also tweet about my blog posts (probably how you found this article), lines from my book, snippets from reviews of my books, and tips for authors. Some people tweet quotes of famous sayings, scripture, etc., and have very good success with it.

The primary goal of twitter is to get the word out. The secondary goal is to generate sales. Whenever I tweet about my books, I include a link to Amazon or B&N. Always take the reader straight to where they can buy it. The more clicks they have to go through (i.e. to your website then to Amazon), the less likely they are to buy.

Type: Paid Advertising

Cost: $1 – $50

Goal: Get the word out / generate sales

Sales Generation Ranking: varies

I’ve tried a few avenues of low cost advertising. I’ve placed a $10 ad on a book blogger’s site. I wasn’t able to get any direct stats, but it certainly helped get the word out.

Another thing I tried was getting my $0.99 book listed as a Bargain Book on EReader News Today. For a $25 donation, I got one full day of exposure as a bargain book. I saw a huge spike in sales over a 2-day period (most sales were within the first 12 hours), totaling about 700 sales that I attributed to this advertising.

I also tried paid advertising on Novel Rocket. For $50 my book is on their side bar for the entire month of January. Since I haven’t seen any sales for my book (and I mean nothing at all), I don’t think this advertising was worth it.

There are a few other low cost things I’ve tried. Most have been good at getting the word out, but not generating sales.

Type: Goodreads Giveaway

Goal: Get the word out

Cost: Just the cost of giving away and shipping books to winners

Sales Generation Ranking: 1 star

If your book is available in paperback, anytime within the first six months of sale, you can list it on Goodreads as a giveaway. I like this as a way to get the word out because I can actually see how many people have entered to win my book and I can see how many people put my book on their “to read” list. “To read” means there’s some chance they will buy my book in the future.

Here are a few more free ideas for marketing:

1. Author Central On Amazon – set up your author page on Amazon Author Central for each country (.com, .uk.co, .es, .fr, .it, .de). It’s free and it lets you set up your picture, bio, and profile. It also lets you link to your blog and twitter accounts.

2. Your Website / Blog – You should really have just one site that acts as both your website and blog. This helps optimize how you appear in search engine results. If you’re spread across too many sites and have stale content on those sites, you’re not getting the full effect of having either a website or blog.

3. Goodreads – be sure you set up an author account on Goodreads so you can manage your image. Upload your photo, add your bio, and link it to your blog. Even if you don’t use it for anything else, it is good to be on Goodreads. For the more adventurous, you might consider joining some of the groups and actively participating. Concentrate more on building relationships and contributing to discussions rather than pushing your book.

Do you have a marketing avenue that worked well for you? Please leave a comment to share with other authors.

Tags marketing | Permalink | Comments (11)

Business of Writing Marketing Self-Publishing Writing

How to Price Your eBook

January 13, 2012 – 1:00 am

One of the most common questions I hear from indie authors is: “How do I price my eBook?”

First, let’s deal with some wrong thinking about price. There is no one method or approach to pricing that will work for every book. That’s right. There is not a single answer to this question.

So, the real question becomes, what is some way I can determine a price for my book that the market will bear?

Let’s consider some of the information you’ll need to come up with a good pricing strategy.

1. How many titles do you have available?

2. What are other comparable eBooks in your genre selling for?

3. What are your distribution channels?

4. What are your sales goals? Are you looking for a short, big burst of sales or are you looking at building a steady stream of sales over a period of time?

Number of Titles Available

If you only have one title available, your pricing strategy will probably vary from an author who has multiple titles. For example, when my first book, A Dream Unfolding, was released, I priced it at $2.99 until the second book in the series came out. I chose the $2.99 because a lot of authors talk about that being the sweet spot price for eBooks (more on my thoughts about that later). My sales were okay – not really reaching over 100 books per month at that price point.

When I released my third book in the series, I dropped the price of the first book to $0.99 while pricing books two and three at $2.99. I was still working on building my marketing strategy, but I sold over 200 copies of the first book that month and another 150 between the other two.

After a month of some very strong marketing, selling over 700 books between all three titles, I decided to come up with a better strategy for pricing books two and three. I left book one at $0.99 to reduce the barriers for new readers to try my books as a new-to-them author.

My answer for books two and three? I priced them both at $5.99. Before you cringe and say that my sales tanked, let me offer you the next point.

Price of Comparable Books in Your Genre

I did a pricing study of the top 100 best selling eBooks in my genre. You know what I found when I did that? The average price for my genre was $5.29 with some eBooks as high as $9.99 and others as low as $0.99. I decided to go up a little from the average and price them at $5.99.

The results? I didn’t see any drop off in sales. Instead, I saw a marginal increase, which I attribute to better marketing efforts, closing out the month with 1740 books. That number has been steadily increasing each subsequent month.

Distribution Channels

How do distribution channels affect pricing? Well, if your eBook is on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors, be aware of their rules. Amazon has a strict policy (see KDP’s Terms & Conditions for the most accurate info) that your eBook cannot be priced lower on another distributor than it is on their site. Apple has a rule that the book must end in 99 (i.e. $0.99, $1.99, etc). These rules must play into your pricing strategy.

Sales Goals

Lastly, your sales goals are a part of your pricing strategy. If you’re looking for a short term burst, try lowering your price for a short period of time, like for a 99 cent sale.

If you’re looking for long term, steady sales growth, consider doing a pricing study or pick a price and stick with it for awhile. Price alone will not provide long term sales Marketing plays an important role to the success of your novel.

The Sweet Spot Price

Given my own results with books priced higher than $2.99, I disagree with the idea that there is a one-size fits all sweet spot price for all eBooks of all genres. My historical novels are doing well at the $5.99 price point.

Conversely, my new contemporary novel is not getting as much traction at $4.99. My approach to this? I’m working on beefing up my marketing efforts for it—leaving price alone. If it’s still not doing well in its third month of release, then I might play with price.

Remember, price is just one of the tools at your disposal for selling your novels. Don’t forget about advertising, distribution, and promotions.

Tags marketing, marketing book, marketing tips, price, pricing, pricing strategy | Permalink | Comments (17)

Marketing Writing

500 Books in 12 Hours

January 6, 2012 – 1:00 am

Huh? Is it possible for an indie author to sell 500 books in 12 hours?

The answer is yes. On Dec. 6th, my novel, A Dream Unfolding, appeared on Ereader News Today’s Bargain Kindle Book list. This website accepts $0.99 books that have a rating of 4.0 or higher on Amazon. I initially submitted the request toward the end of October, so it takes some time to get in the queue.

But the results were well worth it. For $25, I sold 500 copies of A Dream Unfolding in 12 hours.

That’s not all. During the first 24 hours after my book first appeared, it shot to #1 on Amazon’s Kindle Best Seller list in Religious Fiction. It also shot up to #165 on Amazon’s over all Kindle Best Seller list. This was huge! Never before had this title reached such amazing heights.

Another great perk of climbing so high on the Amazon best sellers list is that my book started appearing more and more when customers purchased similar books in related genres. You know: Customers who bought this book, also bought…

What’s the moral of this story? You can market effectively for very little cost. If you do a little digging, sometimes you’ll find a gem like Ereader News Today. I first learned about them from an author community that I belong to online.

Not every opportunity will pay off this big. But, with a little effort, you can find low cost or free marketing avenues online that help get your book in front of readers. Just think outside the box.

To learn more about Ereader News Today, visit: http://ereadernewstoday.com/an-opportunity-for-authors-to-promote-their-books-at-ent/

Tags marketing, marketing book, marketing novel, marketing times, writing | Permalink | Comment (0)

Marketing Writing

Crafting a Great Character Interview

November 25, 2011 – 1:00 am

Today author, Staci Stallings, joins us to share her tips on crafting great character interviews. Welcome, Staci!

Character interviews are hard. Let’s just get that out of the way first. At least they are for me. The only reason I’m good at it is because I hate boring. I hate my writing to sound just like every other thing you’ve ever read. So when I was first asked to write a character interview, I knew I wasn’t going to take the tried-and-true, Q&A type route.

I wanted my characters to stand out, and they couldn’t do that by being just like everyone else.

So should yours. Here are three tips on writing character interviews to help your characters stand out too.

Know Your Character

By this, I don’t mean just what their favorite color is or what kind of car they drive. No. You have to know what type of interview would suit them the best. For example, the first character interview I did ended up being a four-character interview. In the books “Cowboy” and “Lucky” which are both about fictional country music stars, there were two couples. At the end of “Lucky,” Kalin (the hero of the second novel) went on tour with Ashton (the hero of the first novel). So I did an interview as if they and their wives were being interviewed for a national television program (again fictional).

In the interview, I revealed a little of each one’s story. You can read that character interview here.

The idea is not to interview the character as a character, but to figure out why that character might really be interview in real life. Then write that.

Be Creative

This is probably the most creative, imaginative, out-of-the box thing you will ever do as a writer because it forces you to fictionalize fiction. You wrote the character, now you have to write about the character as if they are real. It takes some mental gymnastics to get around that mind-bender!

But don’t panic. The same wonderful creative mind that came up with the character in the first place can handle this challenge too.

A second character interview I did involved Jaylon Quinn and Camille Wright from “Dreams by Starlight.” In this story the characters were in a high school play. I considered writing a review from the high school newspaper, but I had already done that for another story (more on that one in a moment). What I finally came up with is to have a “big time” newspaper review the play. This guy, the reviewer, is cynical and jaded from his years of reviewing movies. So it was interesting to see these two young actors and their performance through his eyes.

Here is that one. Notice how different it is than the Cowboy/Lucky interview.

Leave the Readers Wanting More

When you write a character interview, the main purpose is to get people to click through to see more about your book. So don’t answer every question in the interview. Have the character hint at things that are in the book. In my final example, this character interview came from “The Price of Silence.” In the book, the heroine is a member of the newspaper staff, but in the midst of it all, she becomes part of the story. Of course, the kids in the school would have been interested in what was going on with her at the time of the incidents that had occurred. So I had a fellow reporter do a story on her.

Again, this involved knowing the character and the story and WHY people would be interested in reading about her story in an interview. This story was actually written as a news story (thank goodness for former journalism training!).

To read that one, you can go to: http://spiritlightworks.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/robyn-lockhart-hero-or-villain/

When writing your own character interviews, try to be more creative, think about the story and why this person might be having the interview, and always, always, leave your readers wanting more!

Staci Stallings is the author of 11 novels currently available on Kindle and Nook. She is also the founder of Grace & Faith 4U–an alliance of Christian authors dedicated to helping each other bring the very best in Christian writing to the reading public. To see more about Staci, please visit:

http://spiritlightbooks.wordpress.com

http://stacistallings.wordpress.com

To read more about Grace & Faith, go to: http://graceandfaith4U.com

Join Staci and 9 other Christian authors as they celebrate best-selling author Karen Baney’s new release Nickels.

Tags character, character interviews, marketing, writing | Permalink | Comment (1)

Marketing Writing

Work Smarter Not Harder: Marketing Quick Wins For Authors

November 23, 2011 – 3:08 pm

As an author, it’s hard. I know. You spend eighty percent of your time marketing, tweeting, facebooking, writing guest blogs… And only twenty percent of your time doing what you love: writing. Or maybe you beat yourself up for slacking off on the marketing because it all just feels overwhelming.

Well, here are a few tips on how you can work smarter and not harder in your marketing efforts.

Quick Wins – Amazon Author Page

If you distribute your book on Amazon in any format, have you set up your author page? This only takes 15 minutes to set up and is a quick win in your world of marketing efforts.

What does an author page on Amazon allow you to do? You can add your bio, picture, a link to your twitter feed, your blog rss feed, and you can make sure all of the books you authored are properly associated with you. You can also send in a request using the help page to have your paperback and kindle versions of your book combined so when readers shop for one, they will see all available formats.

A little side note: You must set up your author page once for each country Amazon has made available. Currently, there is a separate site for the US, UK, Germany, and France.

Other Quick Wins

Spend a few minutes out on Goodreads getting familiar with the site. This is an online book readers community. As an author, you should at least open an account, set up your author profile, and upload a picture. For more information, visit http://www.goodreads.com.

LibraryThing and Shelfari are also similar to Goodreads. It’s a good idea to manage your information as an author so someone else doesn’t put out incorrect or bad information about you.

Twitter

Getting a handle on twitter can be a full time job. But here are a few things I do to help make my life easier.

Use a twitter client to schedule tweets. This lets you get maximum exposure during all hours of the day (yes, even when you’re sleeping). Check out HootSuite, SocialOomph, TweetDeck, and TweetAdder. Most of these have free features that will work for scheduling or managing followers.
Schedule different kinds of tweets all throughout the day. Schedule tweets promoting your book. Promote specific articles on your blog. Tweet about other people’s topics that have helped you.
Create lists in Twitter to manage your followers. I have lists for cross promotion groups I’m involved in. I also have lists for authors in my genre, book reviewers, and even a list for IT/Tech people turned authors! This lets you engage personally with followers and helps you remember what you share in common.

Manage Your Time

My last bit of advice for working smarter not harder: Manage your time. Set aside specific chunks of time for marketing versus writing. Then hold yourself accountable.

This past weekend, I promised my husband that Saturday morning and afternoon I would ignore twitter, facebook, and email and just focus on my work-in-progress. The results? I got 5,000 words done. Then in the evening, I set aside an hour to two to catch up on those things I was ignoring.

Tags marke, marketing, marketing novel, writing | Permalink | Comment (1)

Karen Baney

Category Archives: Marketing

Why Sign Up for KDP Select?

Author Marketing Guide

How to Price Your eBook

500 Books in 12 Hours

Crafting a Great Character Interview

Work Smarter Not Harder: Marketing Quick Wins For Authors

Buy “A Life Restored”

Buy “A Heart Renewed”

Buy “A Dream Unfolding”

Buy “Nickels”

Categories

Karen Baney

Category Archives: Marketing

Why Sign Up for KDP Select?

Author Marketing Guide

How to Price Your eBook

500 Books in 12 Hours

Crafting a Great Character Interview

Work Smarter Not Harder: Marketing Quick Wins For Authors

Subscribe

Buy “A Life Restored”

Buy “A Heart Renewed”

Buy “A Dream Unfolding”

Buy “Nickels”

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