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Omi no Kami posted:I had been assuming that most of the short stories I was finding in romance were at last semi-rigorously following the same structure as novel-length romances, hence the confusion. e: strayed too close to content discussion.
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# ? Jun 10, 2015 09:53 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 16:54 |
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One of my new books just hit #55 in a paid store subcategory, 30k overall ranking...I'm so excited
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# ? Jun 10, 2015 12:44 |
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Am I correct that if I want to publish works in multiple genres (e.g. romance and scifi) I'm best off using multiple pen names, as the positive effect of name-as-brand ("I feel safe understanding that buying anything more from this author means more of the exact same thing I liked in this book") is more powerful than sales I'd lose by readers buying a violent starships troopers homage thinking they were getting a bodice ripper, and feeling less inclined to make impulse buys from that author in the future?
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 06:43 |
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Pretty much. Some genres are compatible, though, like Sci-Fi and fantasy.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 10:31 |
ArchangeI posted:Pretty much. Some genres are compatible, though, like Sci-Fi and fantasy. You don't even have to vary them that much between those two genres, if at all. Iain M. Banks for sci-fi, Iain Banks for fantasy, etc.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 10:34 |
If you want a way to link all your different works together, create a website with a minimalist, very clear interface and have all your pen names and genres there. Think of it as a portfolio rather than a content-based website - at the end of your book there's a link to the website and on that front page it has all your works separated by genre and pen name. But the exact pen names should differ between genre, even if it's as Drone said above, using an initial or not.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 10:40 |
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Ooh that's a really good idea, thank you... I know it's obvious, but I'm surprised at how much more involved successful marketing is compared to the actual writing process.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 11:20 |
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A slight bump in the road of my BookBub free promo. The price matching by Amazon didn't carry over to UK and Canada, so I'll have to leave those out. But everything else is good to go.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 14:41 |
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I have an ExciteSpice spotlight promo lined up for tomorrow, and BKnights cancelled my order for my book being "too risque," so I guess I'll see how ExciteSpice alone compares to BKnights alone.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 17:25 |
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angel opportunity posted:I have an ExciteSpice spotlight promo lined up for tomorrow, and BKnights cancelled my order for my book being "too risque," so I guess I'll see how ExciteSpice alone compares to BKnights alone. One of the problems with Bknights is that they don't split their mailing lists into genres. So it's just Free Books Yall, and so you have people signed up for diet books, mysteries, romances, self help, etc. I can imagine he gets complaints/unsubs from people who get offended by super-romance stuff. Arguably it doesn't matter because they promote like 50 books a day.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 19:41 |
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Yeah...I'm probably done with BKnights. It seems there's too much other stuff for the same price (or even free) that does a better job.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 22:37 |
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All I know is when I took up a promo with them, the site they said they put my link on was just a looong list of books in no order, mine being somewhere about 20 - 30 titles past the point I would have stopped scrolling. Maybe it's worth it for the Facebook post and mailing list, but the site looked pretty bad.
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# ? Jun 11, 2015 23:43 |
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Woo! The BKnights gripes start just after I pay for them to handle my promo. Does anyone know how to sell a Sweet Romance, so a story with nothing explicit at all in it. The constant feedback I'm getting from anyone reading parts of the work in progress is, "That's so sweet" and "this will sell as a sweet romance." A few of the non-Amazon sites have "Sweet Romance" categories that are distinct from "Inspirational" which seems to be predominantly Christian Romance. However most of my income so far has come from Kindle Unlimited. This is my first novella and I'm not sure I can justify selling it a rate that would match my KU royalty on those other stores, even if they're set up for the Sweet Romance category. Plus everyone says sales are small on them, even though Amazon doesn't have a built in category for sweet romance.
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# ? Jun 12, 2015 01:00 |
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Is it a contemporary romance, sweet or otherwise? Contemporary romance and put sweet romance into the keywords / blurb / model your cover after other sweet romances. Is it a historical? Repeat above, in Historical. Is it between college students, high school students, fresh-out-of-college students handling their first real romances/relationships/whatevers? Put it in New Adult romance, repeat above. Edit: Using keywords, you can put it into like six different romance categories and not choose at all!
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# ? Jun 12, 2015 01:45 |
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Sundae posted:Is it a contemporary romance, sweet or otherwise? Contemporary romance and put sweet romance into the keywords / blurb / model your cover after other sweet romances. That's pretty much the advice I've gotten elsewhere, from sweet romance authors. They say there is a market for it and the market on Amazon know how to use their keywords without having a specific category. Thanks.
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# ? Jun 12, 2015 02:50 |
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a novella? on a new pen name? no sex whatsoever? you can expect many sales.
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# ? Jun 12, 2015 03:18 |
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Not sure if it will affect anyone else, but Amazon is now cracking down on some of it's keyword policies. Specifically, it is requiring authors to remove the phrase "kindle unlimited" from the keyword field if it was there. Early on I'd heard that it would be a good idea to stick that in there, so I spent the early afternoon pulling it out of 111 published works. Other folks are reporting that Amazon is deleting keywords, but this might just be a case of the chicken littles.
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 02:18 |
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 03:10 |
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that graph makes me a little horny
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 03:22 |
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Wait till you see the sexy girl on my next cover, I plugged her into some software that detects her hotness and she scored an HB 8.6666 rating, also I mirrored her face in Photoshop to check for symmetry, and she's pretty drat symetrical
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 03:34 |
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I'll be interested in hearing how responsive those mailing list signups are.
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 13:21 |
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systran -- what is your new pen name? I remember checking out the one you started with. I'm curious to see how you have everything looking in the store and how you targeted the niche you're doing. PM is fine, if you'd rather. You'll probably get a couple unlimited borrows out of it
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 14:14 |
Actually if anybody wants to swap pen names (I write terrible super romance) for KDP borrow then PM me. Happy to throw some goons a few free bucks on their back catalogue, super romance or no, I don't make enough use of my unlimited account and I need to start reading up + researching more, so this'll be good incentive
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 14:58 |
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Since we're on the subject, I have a smutty tumblr I was going to start using to promote stuff, nearly 2k monthly views. If anyone wants to PM me links to a book and when it's free / on offer, I'll add it to the stack so it's not just suspiciously me listing my own books every weekend. Angel Opportunity I am jealous of your graphs and hope someday to have such impressive curves myself.
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 15:37 |
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:I'll be interested in hearing how responsive those mailing list signups are. The last time I sent a blast (on Friday night) I only had 40 subscribers. I'm sending another tomorrow evening when I release two more stories, and I'll have over 90 at that point. The main thing to look at on these is the click-through to books I'm selling: All of those clicks = money
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# ? Jun 14, 2015 17:38 |
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Actually if anybody wants to swap pen names (I write terrible super romance) for KDP borrow then PM me. Happy to throw some goons a few free bucks on their back catalogue, super romance or no, I don't make enough use of my unlimited account and I need to start reading up + researching more, so this'll be good incentive Be careful with reciprocal borrowing, Amazon has been getting cranky about that lately.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 00:53 |
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I don't have anything on kindle yet. If you want to pm me pen names for my research stage I'd be happy to borrow on kindle unlimited.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 01:08 |
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kitten posted:I don't have anything on kindle yet. If you want to pm me pen names for my research stage I'd be happy to borrow on kindle unlimited. It would be helpful to know genre but there's a no erotica rule in this thread so if that's what genre you'd like to publish, I won't be able to recommend any.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 02:18 |
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OK, my free BookBub ran last week, and while I don't have all the figures in yet (still waiting for Kobo and BN), I had over 40,000 downloads. I've made enough off paid sales resulting from this promo so that I've already paid for the promo cost (even though I had to eat the cost of the UK and Canada promo because I screwed up the price matching). And I've gotten a few new reviews for the promo book on Amazon most of which have been four and five star (did have a one-star because of my cliffhanger ending but I'm used to those). I am quite amazed. Now my question is, is a free promo worth doing for a stand-alone? I realize I won't see the immediate sales of the next book in the series (which is what a lot of my sales now are) but I'm guessing there would be sales, I'd just have to wait longer for them.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 03:32 |
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Trustworthy posted:Be careful with reciprocal borrowing, Amazon has been getting cranky about that lately. I agree completely. I know an author who had every book unpublished, amazon account blocked, and the $6000+ earned in previous months but not remitted canceled. The reason given from Amazon was "reciprocal borrows". Be very, very careful in any genre trading borrow for borrow with another author. Amazon is very intuitive in detecting when it happens even months after the fact. It also skews your data meaning the organic sales that you want would be muddled with the ones you traded for. I'm not going to tell someone how to do their thing but if you want to make $$$ of this, please don't jeopardize a a big source of revenue for a few quick dollars. Or go ahead and do it, I'm not your mother.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 04:37 |
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Hijinks Ensue posted:Now my question is, is a free promo worth doing for a stand-alone? I realize I won't see the immediate sales of the next book in the series (which is what a lot of my sales now are) but I'm guessing there would be sales, I'd just have to wait longer for them. It is less good but I think you'll find that when that book you just promo'd goes back to a paid status, you'll find yourself getting a lot more paid sales on it than before because of increased visibility. That's the kind of boost that you'd expect from a standalone.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 04:57 |
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Geez, that reciprocal borrows thing is lovely. Heaven forbid people who admire each other's work actually, y'know, read it.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 05:49 |
Thank you for the warnings re: author collusion, didn't know they would be cracking down on it for small fry. I've heard about book trading rings but figured you'd be talking about people doing it in gangs of 10+ people doing hundreds of books a month
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 10:16 |
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Pinky Artichoke posted:Geez, that reciprocal borrows thing is lovely. Heaven forbid people who admire each other's work actually, y'know, read it. I would imagine their algorithms are pretty good at differentiating organized collusion and people who just happen to read each other's work.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 16:59 |
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May Borrows are in at $1.348 each.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 17:21 |
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Sundae posted:May Borrows are in at $1.348 each. is this good or bad, dunno if i should hate kindle today or not
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 17:27 |
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EngineerSean posted:is this good or bad, dunno if i should hate kindle today or not It's clearly a sign of how Amazon plans to crush all self-publishing beneath their world-dominating boot'o'pain. Either that or it's a good $13,000+ in my bank account.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 17:38 |
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There's a horrible change to Kindle Unlimited borrows, I hate Amazon again now obviously.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 17:41 |
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What was the rate last month? Am I misunderstanding this email that I just got which makes it sound like payment will be based on number of pages read rather than a flat payment for reading 10% of a book?
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 17:42 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 16:54 |
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angel opportunity posted:Am I misunderstanding this email that I just got which makes it sound like payment will be based on number of pages read rather than a flat payment for reading 10% of a book? That's my understanding too.
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# ? Jun 15, 2015 17:42 |