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I've been kind of light on the promotions this year, as I'm saving up for a big push in December/January. What venues are goons having success with these days? I'm not in KU, if that helps narrow it down.
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# ? Aug 3, 2016 18:52 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:23 |
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Thanks, Popular Human and Bardeh. I've been going through old pages of the thread. You guys are a helpful bunch. Looking forward to posting my bad covers and terrible blurbs in the thread.
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# ? Aug 3, 2016 19:20 |
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Hijinks Ensue posted:I've been kind of light on the promotions this year, as I'm saving up for a big push in December/January. What venues are goons having success with these days? I'm not in KU, if that helps narrow it down. Book bub is king but there's also booksends and more genre-specific ones.
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# ? Aug 3, 2016 20:16 |
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Eyeneedle posted:Thanks, Popular Human and Bardeh. I've been going through old pages of the thread. You guys are a helpful bunch. Looking forward to posting my bad covers and terrible blurbs in the thread. It owns, most of us non professional artists have gone through the exact thing so we've all turned out some lovely first attempts. Looking back on that is part of the fun.
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# ? Aug 4, 2016 00:43 |
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A celebratory post: 108 ARC list sign-ups on a brand new, non-romance/erotica penname.
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# ? Aug 6, 2016 23:17 |
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RedTonic posted:A celebratory post: 108 ARC list sign-ups on a brand new, non-romance/erotica penname. Congrats! Does anyone have any experience publishing "literary" fiction through KDP? I'm trying to decide between self-pub/trad pub/kindle scout for something I'm working on, but I suppose I should finish the drat thing before I worry about publication.
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# ? Aug 7, 2016 01:20 |
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I'm back, this time with a blurb. (I'm still reworking the cover, thanks everyone). Okay, here it goes... Fireflies (A Katie Bell Mystery) Katie Bell is a survivor. Haunted by the demons of her past, she hopes she can finally have a fresh start at college. Fate however, has other ideas. At the first big party of the year, Katie witnesses a murder. The police dismiss the case as an act of jealousy, but Katie's investigative instincts tell her otherwise. With the help of an eccentric hacker and a mysterious journalist, Katie begins to unearth a dark conspiracy at the university. But even armed with sharp wit, red hair and pepper spray, does she have what it takes to catch the real murderer? Or is the amateur detective about to become the real killer's next target? With his daughter Katie in college, Arthur Bell can finally admit to himself horrors of his job have taken their toll. The FBI's most famous profiler doesn't believe he still has what it takes to catch any more psychopaths. Until the latest case lands on his desk. This time, he's hunting the disciple of the serial killer who murdered his wife. As the body count rises, Arthur realizes that the disciple isn't just planning on copying his teacher, but something far more insidious. Does Arthur still have what it takes to stop a madman? Or is he too broken to stop a monster, one last time?
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# ? Aug 7, 2016 02:42 |
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I feel like I have just read two blurbs for two different books.
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# ? Aug 7, 2016 09:22 |
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Cut the two paragraphs about her father, that's the sort of thing that can be revealed in a chapter in the book. It's a Katie Bell mystery, the blurb should focus on her and not draw attention to another secondary character.
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# ? Aug 8, 2016 19:07 |
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My cover for my latest book is done. Small version. I think this might be the first book I don't have a back cover. It's getting hard to justify considering I don't sell all that many paperbacks. Speaking of paperbacks, I've slowly started converting my books to 6x9 (from 5"x8") to drastically cut down on the cover price. My audiobook on my last novel hovered around top ten in science fiction for a few weeks before dropping like a stone. I was pretty excited as something like 7 of the 10 books around me had movie/tv deals. I still encourage people to think hard about audiobooks, as I believe they can be a potentially large source of revenue outside normal ebook sphere. I contacted ACX/Audible about what it would take to buy out my producer on my royalty share books so I would have full ownership. It would just make advertising easier and it probably wouldn't cost "too" much once the books start falling off in sales. But ACX responded by saying I would lose all my reviews/ratings--basically have to delete it and upload again as a new project. Which is pretty much a non-starter. For those people evaluating covers, I heartily recommend viewing them at thumbnail sizes. I saw a few here that I could immediately tell the main titles would vanish at small resolution. Sizes people will see in ads, or their phones, or even on amazon. I had a situation with my last book where I ordered a poster and t-shirt and when I got them, the monster was so dark, I went back and purpled it up so I could see it at worse resolutions. Also, if you're even remotely considering going audiobook, ACX requires covers be square and un-skewed. So your portrait-sized cover won't work on Audible unless you chop it considerably.
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# ? Aug 10, 2016 06:37 |
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LionArcher posted:I'm back, this time with a blurb. (I'm still reworking the cover, thanks everyone). If the story is ultimately about Katie, 'd rework this to give a little more oomph to her character in the first couple of sentences. I get the vague notion that she's a survivor with investigative instincts, but that's not enough to grab me. The part about being armed with red hair and pepper spray is okay, but I didn't get that far the first couple of times I tried to read your blurb. Lines like "demons of the past", "dark conspiracy", "mysterious journalist", and "stop a madman" have a whiff of cliche to them, so I'd say they hurt your blurb more than they help them. This needs to be less vague. If you don't want to give too much away about the set-up to your mystery, focus more on making me care about your protagonist. I agree that you should probably nix the second part about her father. Maybe you can work in something about Katie's FBI profiler father, and whether she's comfortable following his trade, trying to get away from it, or whatnot.
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# ? Aug 10, 2016 11:50 |
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DukeRustfield posted:My cover for my latest book is done. Small version. Looking good! quote:Speaking of paperbacks, I've slowly started converting my books to 6x9 (from 5"x8") to drastically cut down on the cover price. Do you have any insight as to why these dimensions are cheaper? It's strange that Createspace's default size doesn't actually match standard paperback sizing... quote:I contacted ACX/Audible about what it would take to buy out my producer on my royalty share books so I would have full ownership. It would just make advertising easier and it probably wouldn't cost "too" much once the books start falling off in sales. But ACX responded by saying I would lose all my reviews/ratings--basically have to delete it and upload again as a new project. Which is pretty much a non-starter. Do their terms say they own your reviews? Is there no way to ask Amazon support to merge the product pages instead of dumping them entirely? This seems unnecessarily punitive.
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# ? Aug 10, 2016 17:20 |
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You pay the vast majority of Createspace books based on the # of pages. So the larger the dimensions, the smaller the font, the tighter the margins, the less the mandatory cover price. I think making no changes except the dimensions, I shaved off $2.50 from the cover price of one book. And that wasn't $2.50 going into anyone's pocket, it was just the required cost of printing. I wrote ACX back about the royalty split. I'm pretty sure we don't own reviews because Amazon will pull reviews for whatever reasons they choose.
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# ? Aug 11, 2016 04:03 |
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Curious: Do you think it's worth going through Project Wonderful to get web banners? I know a lot of people use ad blockers, but some people still trust certain sites to show them ads. I'm specifically thinking of LP Archive since I already get about 400 youtube/etc. views a month just having my LPs up there, and the stats look like about 70k views a day. I did some quick math based on the current min bid, and it seems making an extra 50 sells or so a month will justify it. Thoughts?
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# ? Aug 13, 2016 03:50 |
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Chokes McGee posted:Curious: Do you think it's worth going through Project Wonderful to get web banners? I know a lot of people use ad blockers, but some people still trust certain sites to show them ads. If you're reasonably confident you'll do better than break even, and you won't get higher returns by spending more on whatever marketing tools you already use, you've got every reason to give it a shot. I've also been thinking about trying out Project Wonderful eventually, so if you go through with an ad spot, it'd be cool to know how it goes.
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# ? Aug 13, 2016 04:15 |
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RedTonic posted:If you're reasonably confident you'll do better than break even, and you won't get higher returns by spending more on whatever marketing tools you already use, you've got every reason to give it a shot. I've also been thinking about trying out Project Wonderful eventually, so if you go through with an ad spot, it'd be cool to know how it goes. Considering I'm still in the planning stages and don't really have any ideas yet except for PW and trolling the internet for quality reviews, yup, it's better than any tools I'm already using
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# ? Aug 13, 2016 06:20 |
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Chokes McGee posted:Considering I'm still in the planning stages and don't really have any ideas yet except for PW and trolling the internet for quality reviews, yup, it's better than any tools I'm already using Do it! Dunno if anyone else has been experiencing this since I've been hunkering down and not chatting, buuuut - Amazon subcats under book details have been appearing/disappearing for my latest release for no reason that I can tell. I wrote into KDP support and they "fixed" it, but the disappearing/reappearing act's still going on. Support said the subcats would return when my book started charting on them, but hey, my book's at #2 and #3 on the subcats that keep coming and going. I love you, Amazon.
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# ? Aug 14, 2016 19:48 |
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Book hit Amazon today. Thanks everyone for your input. Let's all brace for hilarious failure!
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# ? Aug 14, 2016 23:19 |
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Chokes McGee posted:Book hit Amazon today. Thanks everyone for your input. Let's all brace for hilarious failure! Where's the link? I'm sure plenty of us will borrow it to give you a little boost.
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 04:52 |
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Bardeh posted:Where's the link? I'm sure plenty of us will borrow it to give you a little boost. here come dat Astin I don't know how the borrow program works, i.e. whether it's baked in or something else you have to do. I didn't take Kindle Select since I wasn't sure about the terms and wanted to publish on Apple and B&N. If you're willing to wait two weeks I'll probably have a seven day sale for $0.99 a copy though! e: durp as soon as I hit Post I see "lending enabled" at the bottom. Welp!
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 05:20 |
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Chokes McGee posted:I don't know how the borrow program works, i.e. whether it's baked in or something else you have to do. I didn't take Kindle Select since I wasn't sure about the terms and wanted to publish on Apple and B&N. If you're willing to wait two weeks I'll probably have a seven day sale for $0.99 a copy though! Not the same thing. "Lending Enabled" refers to a feature that basically nobody uses ever, and most people don't even remember exists. You can ignore it. The "borrow" people are talking about is Kindle Unlimited, which is only available to people in Kindle Select.
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 06:15 |
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Chokes McGee posted:
Yeah I was referring to Kindle Unlimited. I'd suggest enrolling for the first term (90 days) People are far more likely to give the book a chance if they can borrow it with their KU subscription. Nothing stopping you from taking it out after those 90 days are up and publishing it elsewhere.
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 06:28 |
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Bardeh posted:Yeah I was referring to Kindle Unlimited. I'd suggest enrolling for the first term (90 days) People are far more likely to give the book a chance if they can borrow it with their KU subscription. Nothing stopping you from taking it out after those 90 days are up and publishing it elsewhere. Alright, I'm in. Thanks for the advice.
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 14:51 |
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Chokes McGee posted:Alright, I'm in. Thanks for the advice. I borrowed it. I can't promise that I'll read it, but I may take a look. One thing I did note from flicking through is that you don't have a mailing list signup anywhere. It's definitely a good idea to create one ASAP and put the signup link at the beginning and end of the story. Most people use Mailchimp. E: oh, and make sure you've unticked the automatic re-enrollment in Select. It pisses me off that you have to do it, but if you don't uncheck the box it's very easy to forget about it and get locked into another 90 day term. Bardeh fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Aug 15, 2016 |
# ? Aug 15, 2016 16:12 |
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Yeah. One of the things Draft2Digital offered was a nifty little "Insert a mailing list signup page at end of book!" checkbox. I hadn't realized it's that a big deal, I'll throw it on the list.
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 19:26 |
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What do you guys think about this for a website ad banner?
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 21:11 |
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I'll be honest, my first thought was a Thursday Night Football Buffalo Wild Wings promo (though coffee doesn't really fit ).
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 21:38 |
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a shameful boehner posted:I'll be honest, my first thought was a Thursday Night Football Buffalo Wild Wings promo (though coffee doesn't really fit ). Did it make you want to buy my book because I'll slather the goddamn thing in Blazin' if I need to Anyway I hadn't even thought about that lmbo. How about if I change the Mayhem to Nightmares? Still summarizes the book well.
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 21:51 |
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I feel like that banner summarizes the book to you or others who have already read the book, but to a random observer it's basically a list of random things that have no actual connection to each other. Horns and wings have a tenuous connection, coffee is like...it's out of left field--but not in a way that actually hooks me or makes me wonder what is has to do with horns or wings. Mayhem and nightmares, or whatever other word you choose to throw it at the end, is still not connecting these things together enough to hook me or pique my interest. Here are two thoughts I'm getting that I see as two separate probelms: 1) imagine a banner ad for a game that uses the same "List out words" approach, there might be some kind of image on the side, or in the first frame, that lets me know what the context for all this is. Maybe I see an isometric pixel-art character that looks like they are from Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre; now I have the context to know what the random words are going to relate to. 2) Reading your blurb, "coffee" relates to the protag being a barista. Why is "coffee" in your banner ad? I understand that making the protag a barista grounds this supernatural stuff into a reality, and that making him a barista has a very certain and specific connotation toward your target audience (underemployed, young, millennial, struggling, etc.) but "coffee" doesn't hit any of that. When I saw "coffee" I was thinking of drinking coffee, not being a barista. So you have a lack of context for any of these words, combined with "coffee" being a really poor choice to get across the feeling you want. You could circumvent the context problem by just picking out a really good list of words. We don't have to know this is a book for the list of words to hook us. It might be good to put that little eye drawing into the side of the banner while the words show across though, because that eye will at least give us the "tone" of the book before we know it's a book.
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# ? Aug 15, 2016 22:19 |
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Maybe something less single word? Something like Astin has horns. Astin has wings. Astin has nightmares (in bloody scratch text) It doesn't really work for me tbh, I'm more just kicking over rocks to see what I find.
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# ? Aug 16, 2016 00:36 |
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People don't intend to stick around to read the ad, so I'd say either get to the book title/Amazon frames sooner, or keep those logos up at all times. 5/7 frames of that gif are not about your book or books in general, and in fact I thought it was a restaurant/coffee shop. If you reduce it all to that one frame with "Horns etc" or whatever you end up going with, add an Amazon Kindle logo to the bottom right, and keep the final two frames as is, it'd be way better and you have 3/3 frames that are about books.
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# ? Aug 16, 2016 13:42 |
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Szmitten posted:People don't intend to stick around to read the ad, so I'd say either get to the book title/Amazon frames sooner, or keep those logos up at all times. 5/7 frames of that gif are not about your book or books in general, and in fact I thought it was a restaurant/coffee shop. If you reduce it all to that one frame with "Horns etc" or whatever you end up going with, add an Amazon Kindle logo to the bottom right, and keep the final two frames as is, it'd be way better and you have 3/3 frames that are about books. Eff it, I have a tendency to overthink things. I'll swap between the title/author and "now available on Amazon" and call it a day.
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# ? Aug 16, 2016 13:58 |
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DukeRustfield posted:You pay the vast majority of Createspace books based on the # of pages. So the larger the dimensions, the smaller the font, the tighter the margins, the less the mandatory cover price. I think making no changes except the dimensions, I shaved off $2.50 from the cover price of one book. And that wasn't $2.50 going into anyone's pocket, it was just the required cost of printing. I missed your response and you probably won't check back in for a while, sorry! Now that I've finished assembling my first createspace monstrosity, I now understand why my question was really stupid. Though I really wish Amazon would ease back on its review mangling policy, given that they can choose to be quite anti-competitive with it (why not rip some reviews off a title not going through Kindle Scout or being promoted by the Amazon machine?).
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# ? Aug 16, 2016 16:17 |
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e: Okay just threw everything out but the title/author and "Now Available". Think this is the one I'm gonna go with. Chokes McGee fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Aug 17, 2016 |
# ? Aug 16, 2016 17:44 |
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angel opportunity posted:making the protag a barista grounds this supernatural stuff into a reality
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# ? Aug 17, 2016 14:05 |
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See, using puns like this in my book would make me a has-bean
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# ? Aug 17, 2016 14:10 |
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One last request: Can anyone who's read the book (*crickets*) leave reviews for it? I'm reaching out to various sites, but I'm getting put in queues, and it's gonna take a bit before they get to me. If at all. I'm trying to at least get a bunch of reader reviews so it doesn't look like I just shat something out there and hoped for the best.
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# ? Aug 18, 2016 15:15 |
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Chokes McGee posted:One last request: Can anyone who's read the book (*crickets*) leave reviews for it? I'm reaching out to various sites, but I'm getting put in queues, and it's gonna take a bit before they get to me. If at all. Gimme like a day or two to read it and sure. Just got paid
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# ? Aug 18, 2016 16:27 |
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Chokes McGee posted:One last request: Can anyone who's read the book (*crickets*) leave reviews for it? I'm reaching out to various sites, but I'm getting put in queues, and it's gonna take a bit before they get to me. If at all. I'm going to try to give you some advice without making the post too long (edit: I failed to not make it too long). I do this poo poo for a living now, but I do romance, so everything about this is easier for me to make money with. With that said, I think the genre you are doing can be profitable. A lot of the stuff I do/did to make a book succeed when I had little to no traction may not work as well for you since you are in a very different genre. Take the specifics of what I say with a grain of salt and not as gospel. 1) Your book is pretty short--like 40,000 words?--so you ideally want to get one of these released per month...minimum. Your book is not doing well right now, and likely it will not do well, but if you keep producing these and slowly gain some traction, this first book can end up making money in the long term. 2) $2.99 on launch for a new author is probably not what you want to do. Your rank right now is around 50,000. That means you are probably selling around 1-2 copies per day (and getting 1-2 borrows per day). Here are your sub-category rankings: quote:#509 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Horror > Dark Fantasy You are invisible at this rank. Look at the best sellers in the Dark Fantasy category and see the difference: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/157062011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_kstore_1_5_last They all have more complex and illustrated covers. I doubt you can afford to do that right now, but you need to so something to fight for visibility on Amazon. As it is now, there's no way for someone who would like your book to actually know your book exists. Even if you got something like 20-30 sales per day, which would land you around 1,000 rank...which would be TOP TEN in the dark fantasy category...suddenly you would be very visible. 20-30 sales per day is much easier to get if your book is $0.99, the tradeoff is that sales at $0.99 give you almost no money. If you pass a certain threshold in rank (I don't know where that is for your genre, for mine it's around 1k rank, yours is likely not so high rank--3k is probably decent for you) the income from Kindle Unlimited will make up the difference in lost revenue from $0.99. You want to remember that 1 sale at $0.99 has the exact same effect on your rank as 1 sale at $2.99. You're fighting a super uphill battle rank wise trying to sell as an unknown at $2.99. A lot of the books in your genre sell for $2.99-$4.99, but you don't want to go for that price until you are able to become visible. For now, it's smarter to gain an edge with a lower price point. 3) Consider trying going free on or near release of your book. You want to try to find some promo sites that aren't TOO expensive, and buy ads for your book while it's free. You can do a strategically timed free period for something like a Friday and Saturday, and run your ads on the Friday. This can fairly easily put your book onto top ten of its categories on the free store. You may want to consider trying this for book two. If book one MUST be read for book two to make any sense, then you'd probably instead want to save the free period on book one and make it free when book two comes out to try to make book two visible. If you are making this a series that must be read in order...it will be really hard to sell book 2 if no one read book 1. You may even need to make book 1 permafree if it doesn't sell at all. The other option if this book doesn't sell, is simply to remove the book completely and jam it into the next book. Sell book two as both of these stories together under a new cover. This way you don't face the issue of trying to pour resources into a "book 2" that no one will buy because no one bought book 1. 4) For your next book, message people on Goodreads who read books similar to yours and ask them if they'd like to receive a free advance review copy. Get them all written down and email them after the book is released reminding them to leave a review. Usually less than 20% of the people who take an ARC will actually finish the book and review it, so you'd need close to 100 people taking your ARC to have a decent amount of reviews on release. The main thing to understand with ebooks and Amazon is that visibility is everything, and right now you have no visibility. Even if you get a bunch of reviews right now, you still won't be visible. If you manage to hit like 3,000 rank or so you might make a few hundred dollars on a book. If you manage to hit rank 1,000 or so you could make a thousand or two. If you can stick around rank 1,000 and jack the price to $2.99 you could make quite a lot more than that. If somehow you hit rank 500 or so you can make a living. If your book sits at 50,000 rank you'll probably make like less than $50. That might put in perspective how "greedy" $2.99 is right now. Whatever small amount you are making per day right now will be the cost you pay to try to hit a higher rank. I don't think a switch to $0.99 alone would push your rank up though--you'd need to do some other stuff to get it going. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Aug 18, 2016 |
# ? Aug 18, 2016 18:21 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:23 |
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Galick posted:Gimme like a day or two to read it and sure. Just got paid Neato! Thanks. Yeah, this is all sound advice. Keep in mind I just dropped on Sunday and am already in the process of setting up GoodReads and Bookbub, and BB just now approved my author account. On a tangential note, I don't think I'm going to be able to crank out a novel a month, nor do I want to—as slow as I write and meticulous as I am, a month will end up with something badly rushed and really lovely. I'll just have to eat that hit. Besides, I don't need to make hundreds of thousands of dollars off this, I just want a successful book that people will buy and like. By book two or three, if it turns out I've got something, I can really start leaning in. That being said I've been considering dropping the price point to $0.99 for a while now and will most likely do so. I am promoting heavily from banners since there's some really good cheap ones to be grabbed out there on sites I've actually visited regularly and get traffic (Questionable Content, Bad Machinery, etc.). I realize most people run ad blockers these days and they're not going to move the needle too much, but throwing a couple of dollars a day out there to get about 40 more click throughs can't be all bad.
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# ? Aug 18, 2016 19:05 |