Tag: launching a book

Like Icarus Taking a Selfie — Observations from a Discount eBook Promotion by James R. Wells

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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. This discount promotion was a huge learning experience for me!

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.

From this and other posts, 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.

Here’s another key point: 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.

Discount Promotion Steps

1. Get everything ready: cover, blurb, reviews
2. Set a regular price: $2.99 or more
3. Decide your promo period, usually 1-2 weeks duration
4. Apply to advertisers for spots
5. Commit, pay, set advertising dates
6. Set your price to $0.99, a full day before start
7. Step away from the computer!
8. After the promo: analyze what worked or not –

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! 

Editor’s Note: 

We want to thank James R. Wells for sharing his experience and findings with the Chanticleer Community of Authors

James R. Wells writes about the intersection of humans and the natural world. A life-long caver and outdoor adventurer, he has explored and mapped new passages in many of North America’s great caves. When not writing or with family, James can be found in a cave, on a mountain, or anywhere else outside.

James has recently published The Great Symmetry. His work “echoes the timeless social messages of truth, freedom and sacrifice embraced by science fiction greats like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and the author’s own great grandfather H. G. Wells. Its powerful premise gives voice to the perils and challenges of our current society and reminds the reader that even the smallest person can change the world. A great read!”

Click here to read the full review.

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When you are getting ready to self-publish your book, two questions loom over your project and, in fact, your entire life:

– Who will read my book?

– How will I find them?

You’ll find lots of advice online about how to promote your book. Typical ideas may include setting bargain days (especially for the ebook version) and then paying promoters to send out thousands of emails about your opus to their subscribers. You are advised to set up your website and Facebook page, and flood the ether with tweets (doing your part to alleviate the serious shortage of tweets out there).

Some sites may advocate a kinder, gentler version of self-promotion, where you locate online groups who might be interested in things similar to your book and so you join, making a point of doing enough to be recognized as a contributor before you do much mentioning of your great work. Conducting the delicate dance of promoting while seeming not to. Flying casually past the imperial star destroyer of being perceived as selling or spamming.

There is another approach to consider: Community Marketing.

One of your best opportunities to get your book started is to bring it, directly and honestly, to the communities where you already are a contributor and a known friend. You’ll be surprised how many people are willing to give your book a chance, and, if it’s excellent (that part’s up to you), they will tell their friends about it or write a review.

This may seem to be in conflict with another piece of advice that you’ll see – to seek out people interested in the subject matter of your book, rather than people you simply know.

Here’s how that apparent conflict resolves:

The people you choose to spend time with probably think about similar themes as you, and hopefully what matters about your book is theme – those ideas that you care mostly deeply about – just as much as the overt subject matter.

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Here’s an example of community marketing from the launch of my science fiction novel The Great Symmetry. A reasonable person would think that it’s important to find science fiction enthusiasts – that’s the overt subject matter. But that posed a problem, because as much as I love science fiction, it happens I have not become part of scifi affinity groups.

Rather, my community is defined mostly by the groups shown in the Affinity (Avvenity) diagram below.

Luckily, there’s some alignment going – more than I would have thought. Out of each population, some people like science fiction. Others care about freedom of ideas and social equity, which are strong themes of the novel. Others just like an adventure story in any setting.

It’s really worth evaluating which of your communities may be interested in your book, even if you initially don’t see any alignment. For example, members of all six of the groups I list above have bought my novel.

Now you need to learn how to tell people about your book. It’s scary. Nobody wants to sell to their friends.

Here’s the key realization to help you through this stage: You are probably not going to make money on your first self-published book.

It’s not a commercial venture. Some day in the future? Okay, maybe. But not today, or next week, or next month. The selling price of your book isn’t income, not by a long shot – it’s cost recovery.

This is actually good news.

Your book is your art. It’s your labor of love. And that changes everything.

Instead of selling, you are sharing a part of yourself. People respect that. Once you embrace this idea, suddenly you can ask where you never could before. Go for it – tell people about your book. Ask them to come to your book launch. If they read it and liked it, ask them to post a review on Amazon or elsewhere.

You can ask because it matters. The ideas in your book matter. Sharing those ideas with your friends matters.

My friend Kurt told me this one day, as I was pondering how many Facebook posts about the book launch was too many:

“James, DO NOT apologize for promoting your book! Use any legitimate means at your disposal to get the word out!”

As the date of my first public reading and the official  book launch date approached, I faced a level of social terror that I don’t think I have ever experienced before. I had spent years on this project. But – no matter what I might do to get the word out, what if nobody other than my mom showed up?

So I asked.

I wrote individually to friends to tell them about the event. I asked a local talk radio host for a radio interview. I asked the editor of our local paper, The Cascadia Weekly, to profile the book. I made a Facebook event and invited everyone in the known universe. The results were encouraging.

Attendee count: 123 people, the third highest in the history of the bookstore (Tom Robbins and Ivan Doig outdrew me). Mostly because I asked. And in case you were wondering, my mom did make it.

Community Marketing won’t work forever. After a while, you’ll run out of friends who don’t yet know about your book. In the long term, it can’t be your only plan. But I believe Community Marketing can be very effective in helping your book get started: getting some copies out into the world, having an encouraging first reading event, and accruing those all-important first few reviews.

Just remember – it’s okay to ask for something you think is important.

Helpful Notes:

All the community marketing in the world won’t help your book if it’s not good enough. See this post The Kübler-Ross Stages of Editing about the process of getting ready for publication.

Song Lyrics from “Paperback Writer” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

CBR Editor's Note about James R. Wells, the author of this post:

James R. Wells is the author of The Great Symmetry, a science fiction novel set 300 years in the future, but is definitely about the world we live in here and now.

“In an asteroid in the Aurora star system, exoarcheologist Evan McElroy has made a discovery about the Versari, a long-departed alien race. He doesn’t realize that his findings will reawaken the long-buried struggle of the Infoterrorists, who believe that all knowledge screams to be free, against those who maintain the True Story that holds all of civilization together.”

With its Kafka-esque view of an escalating, dominant corporate presence, James R. Wells’ The Great Symmetry echoes the timeless social messages of truth, freedom and sacrifice embraced by science fiction greats like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and the author’s own great grandfather —H. G. Wells. You may find out more about this stunning debut sci-fi novel and its author at www.TheGreatSymmetry.com.  

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