Self-publishing, Free, and Flexibility

by +J. Lea Lopez 

Free is a hot topic in the publishing industry. Depending on who you ask, free is:

• an effective pricing strategy
• the only way to get people to take a chance on self-published books
• the reason publishing as we know it is dying
• devaluing writing and making readers reluctant to pay for good books
• pointless
• a way to gain exposure

And a whole host of other things. Everyone has an opinion, and if you know me even a tiny bit, you probably know that I'm going to tell you that none of those opinions are 100% right or wrong. There's often bits of truth behind each person's opinion. Quite often, authors will speak from personal experience, and in that case, I'm certainly not going to tell anyone that they're wrong about what they've experienced firsthand.

I can tell you from the experiences shared with me by several successful self-published authors that free certainly has a place in your arsenal of tools. Depending on the genre and type of book, it can be a very powerful tool. If all (or several) books in your romance series are out there and you're looking for a way to grab some more readers, putting your first book free (and yes, it is still possible to go perma-free on Amazon) could be a great tactic. Especially if each book has a strong hook or lead-in to the next.

If you're not writing a series, can free still work for you? Maybe. Maybe not. But a great thing about being self-published is your ability to analyze, react, and adapt. As a self-publisher, you have to be flexible and know when somebody else's tried-and-true isn't so true for you. Let me share my own experience with a free book as an example.

When I self-published last year, I knew I was going to publish my contemporary NA romance Sorry's Not Enough, but I was worried about readers taking a chance on me, an unknown author. Everybody was talking about the free strategy then like it was the holy grail of marketing tactics. But my book was a standalone. How could I still make the free strategy work for me? I got the brilliant (or so I thought) idea to pull together some of my short stories that had both romantic and erotic elements and package them in a collection. I figured it was a good introduction to my writing and a good lead-in to my novel because each of the short stories had elements you can find in my novel: character-driven and introspective narration, complicated relationships, steamy sexy.  It had to work, right?

I published my collection, Consenting Adults, and included an extended sample of my novel at the end of it so readers would be instantly compelled to go buy it after (hopefully) having enjoyed the short stories. Then I made it free. And then I spent many months trying to figure out if the free strategy was working like it should. I mean, I was getting a few sales a day of my novel usually, and the short stories were consistently ranked between 300 and 500 overall in the free Kindle store and in the top 10 of a couple different category lists. That must mean it was working, right? So I left it alone. Then something happened this year that made me rethink the free strategy for my books.

Sales of Sorry's Not Enough began to decline slightly early this year. I only worried a little bit, wondering if it was just a bit of a post-holidays slump. Sales continued to decline. And continued to decline. As of writing this, I've seen roughly a 60% decline in sales of my novel since the beginning of the year. Most of this year my worrying has centered on how to turn that around, how to increase visibility for the novel, how to entice more people to buy it. That included running price promotions, creating a new cover, tweaking the description and keywords, trying paid promotions on different web sites. Aside from publishing another book (which I'm working on doing), I felt I had done everything I could do and I had to stop driving myself nuts over it. And that's when my focus shifted from the novel to the free short story collection, and it dawned on me.

Free wasn't working for me. In all of my fussing with Sorry's Not Enough, I never paid attention to the fact that free downloads of Consenting Adults were still pretty steady. There's been a slight decline since the beginning of the year, maybe 15% or so, but nothing like what I've seen with my novel. My free book was not pushing readers to my paid book. And that's what it's supposed to do. That's the whole point of the free strategy. Obviously it was time to rethink that strategy.

I knew these things for sure:

• Consenting Adults has great innate visibility thanks to my keywords, description, and categories (and magic, because I swear sometimes it all just feels like magic)
• When you search for "erotica" in the Kindle store, Consenting Adults is the top result
• It had a consistent download rate of several hundred a day when it was free
• People who downloaded it for free were not going on to buy my novel

Because of that last point, I felt confident that having the short story collection out there for free was not doing me any good. That was the whole reason I'd put it out there for free to begin with. But could I make money with it? Would people pay for it? Or did they only want it for free? Based on those first three things I knew to be true, I decided that maybe some people would be willing to pay for it. I decided that even if no one bought it and the rank plummeted once it switched over to the paid lists, I'd wait to see if it negatively affected sales of my novel to further test my guess that it wasn't pushing people to the novel anyway. And if only two or three people bought it every day, that's still more money than I was making from 400 free downloads a day.

Consenting Adults switched over from free to paid this past weekend, and so far, people are still buying it. Not 400 people a day, but enough that I'm cautiously optimistic that this was the right decision. So what's the lesson for you self-publishers out there?  

Free is a tool. Use it wisely. Flexibility is also a tool. Use it to take calculated risks and to kick free to the curb if it doesn't work for you.

What are your experiences with free, either as a reader or an author?

Amazon is Like a Chowder Festival

by Pete Morin

Like most self-published novelists looking to crack the Amazon sales riddle, I’ve spent some time in the Kindle customer forums, and trawled the myriad of eBook sales websites that offer freebies, near freebies, advertising, interviews, etc. After nearly a year of it, I can confidently say that I have no better idea today how to sell successfully than I did the week before I uploaded Diary of a Small Fish.

And that’s okay, because the playing field is different today than it was then. Hell, it’s different than it was yesterday, and it’ll be different tomorrow.

But while I have been unable to extract any stone tablet Strategies for Novel Marketing that apply across the board to all fiction, I do occasionally come up with a nifty metaphor to keep my blogging active and current.

Amazon is a chowder festival.

For those unfamiliar with New England clam chowder (I shall not abide a diversion to that inferior stepson, the Manhattan clam chowder), it is a recipe with base ingredients of clams, potatoes, onions, and cream (or milk), and has been around in limitless varieties for hundreds of years. You can add dill, or rosemary, or coriander, or chocolate—anything—but the bottom line is, if you haven't used the magic 4 ingredients in roughly correct quantities, your chowder will fail.

In summer months, many seacoast communities have Chowder Festivals, where local restaurateurs compete for the prize of Best Chowder. I was, for a time, an avid participant in the Cape Cod Chowder Festival (now in its 32^nd year!). The winner of the contest is not chosen by culinary experts of the chowder genre, however.

The winner is chosen by customers.

This is where the Amazon-chowder metaphor works, I think.

Chowder eaters come in all varieties. Some understand the fundamentals of chowder (can’t have too many potatoes or too few clams, can’t use too much pork fat or bacon, and for god’s sake, forget about the corn starch!), and some haven’t a clue what good chowder is, they just like to taste. I overheard one “judge” express his adamant preference for chowder thick enough to stand a spoon upright. This is utter heresy, as chowder aficionados know, but as the old saying goes, the customer is always right.

Still, while clueless chowder judges may indeed outnumber the culinary experts (you can tell by the plaid shorts and sunburn), never do they elevate a pasty gruel to the top of the chowder heap. Why?

Just because. No product ignorant of cooking fundamentals tastes good. Crap chowder always tastes like crap, even if you salt the hell out of it. People will taste it, go “Ewww” and move on. They don’t have to determine that the potatoes were mushy, the onions were undercooked or the clams were spoiled (I’ve seen that train wreck before). They just “know.”

A novel is like chowder. It has clams (plot), potatoes (characters), cream (voice) and onions (structure). In a good novel, each ingredient is of good quality, and in proper proportion to the whole. Too little of one (or more) results in a reader’s diminished enthusiasm. Too little of all is a revolting experience.

There is a lot of bad chowder out there on Amazon. But Budweiser isn’t the #1 selling beer in the world because beer customers have discriminating palates. A Burger King Whopper isn’t made by a graduate of the American Culinary Institute. But damn, it tastes good.

You can’t worry about that, though. You can’t make a sublime paella and expect it to sell better than a Big Mac. The numbers just don’t work in your favor.

But you can always make a good chowder, if you just get the basics down. Then you can add whatever you want to make it your own.

Amazon is the ultimate test kitchen. There is always a multitude of tasters, looking for cheap eats. Give them more for their money than they expect, and you’ll do okay.

Just don't add corn starch.

Pete Morin is the author of Diary of a Small Fish and can occasionally be found swimming in his own pond.

You Asked: eBook Tagging

by J. Lea Lopez

A while back we asked you all what topics you'd like to see us cover here at FTWA. One reader asked about eBook tagging on Amazon, and unfortunately none of us really knew anything in-depth about it. At least not in terms of what it does for the author, and the logic behind tagging parties/lists. I've finally come across some information about this, so the question can be answered! I'm not sure the original asker really needs the info anymore, since it was Ruth Cardello, who is busy blazing her own trail on Amazon and seeing some good success with her marketing tactics. For the rest of us, here are some important things to know about tagging on Amazon.

• Any one person (author or customer) can add up to 15 tags (think of them as keywords or category labels) to a book on Amazon.
• If you click on a tag from a product page, you'll see other products with the same tag.
• You can browse the most popular tags.
• Amazon will suggest items to you based on your tags.

That seems fairly straightforward, and not exactly rocket science. It would seem that tagging is a way to make your book more visible to people looking for certain categories/subjects, right? Right. To an extent. However, you might be interested to know that clicking a product tag yields very different results than typing the tag into Amazon's search box.

It seems the more people who tag your book with a certain term, the higher your book will appear in the results when a customer clicks on the tag, either from another product page or the tag cloud. This is why you'll see groups of people starting "tag parties" (the erotica writer in me wants to assign a very different meaning to that phrase, ha!) where everyone agrees to tag each others books with the author's preferred tags. While this is good to know, ask yourself how often you browse for books (or anything) by clicking tags. For me, I might click on a tag occasionally, but not very often. More often than not, I'll use the search function and type in a topic, and use the drop-down box to search in "Books" or "Kindle Store." You can get drastically different product results this way.

Take a moment to do your own experiment on Amazon to see what I mean. I typed erotic romance into the search field and searched the Kindle store for that term. I looked at some of the titles, clicked on the first one, and scrolled down to the tags. From there, I clicked the erotic romance tag and was taken to another page of results that looked much different than when I had typed in the words and searched. I also tried enclosing the search term in quotes, and got yet another set of results. And just for good measure, I typed the tag into a separate search box labeled "search products tagged with" (which was at the bottom of the page, next to all the product tags).

Typing the tag into the special search box did yield the same list of results as clicking the tag itself, but not the same as typing the tag as a phrase in the main search box, which, let's face it, is the one that's most visible, and that most people will use. So I don't think rushing out to start or join numerous tag parties to make sure your book's target keywords are tagged hundreds of times is necessarily a guarantee that customers will find your book, but it won't hurt, either. (Something that might help a little more is thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) on your book's product page.)

Have you/would you participate in a tag party? If you have, do you think it's helped customers find your book?

“Going FREE” on Amazon: Insane, Inspired Marketing From The Frontier of Self-Publishing

by Lucy Marsden

Note from Lucy:

Hi, Folks—

Today, rather than geeking-out about some aspect of craft or genre, I thought I’d shamelessly capitalize on the recent success of friend and fellow writer, Ruth Cardello. Since the release of her second self-published romance FOR LOVE OR LEGACY two weeks ago, Ruthie’s sales have been phenomenal—a circumstance that she ascribes, in part, to her decision to give away her first novel, MAID FOR THE BILLIONAIRE, for free.

Lots of authors on Amazon are giving away short stories and prequels, but the decision to make a first book free is still considered radical. Here’s Ruth herself, to answer questions about what going free with the first book seems to have done for her and other self-published authors:

Free? Are those authors crazy?

Yes, crazy smart.

Giving your first book away is the most powerful promotional tool you have to get your book into the hands of hundreds of thousands of new readers. People like FREE. The new generation of readers has an almost limitless selection of books to choose from. Plenty of good books get lost in the shuffle. To be read, your book will have to be “found.”

But, Ruth, I’m going to use coupons and strategically give them to romance groups as an incentive for people to read my book.

Coupons are wonderful, but how many are you going to give out? Twenty? Two hundred? A thousand? In the four months that MAID FOR THE BILLIONAIRE has been free on Amazon, about 200,000 people have downloaded it. Let’s be conservative and say that one fourth of those people liked it and will purchase book 2—that’s 50,000 people.

FREE made MAID FOR THE BILLIONAIRE visible. Four months after publication, it remains in the top 10 in the Contemporary Romance Amazon ranking. It’s still in the top 10 on iTunes. How much would you pay for this kind of visibility? Eight-hundred to one thousand people download the first book in my series every day. Let me repeat that, because if you’re still wondering if putting your book up for free is worth it, then you need to consider how my reading base is expanding every day from this one single promotion strategy: Eight hundred to one thousand new readers every day.

Do they all love me? No. Will they all return to buy book two? Hell, no. But if only a fraction do, I’m still making $300—$500 a day on the sale of my second book. Every day.

How long are you going to leave MAID FOR THE BILLIONAIRE up for FREE?

It’s up for the foreseeable future. For now, there is no reason for me to charge for it, since it continues to bring new readers to my other book.

I hear you, Ruth, but won’t putting my book up for 99 cents deliver the same impact?

My numbers suggest otherwise.

Four months ago, before I put the book up for FREE, I was selling one hundred books a day at 35% ($35/day sales). I was pretty happy with those numbers, and was a little nervous when MAID finally did go FREE. Some of that reticence dissipated, however, when almost instantly, 35,000 people downloaded it. I just released my second book in the series, FOR LOVE OR LEGACY, and it’s shot up the ranks with high sales. In fact, it’s only been on sale for slightly over two weeks, and I’ve already made about $7,000.

But…but…but

You might be right; this approach might not be for you. It’s only one of many promotional strategies that self-pubbed authors are experimenting with, and the bottom line is that if you want to make it in what has become the Wild Wild West of publishing, you need to keep yourself informed. That doesn’t mean that you have to follow my formula (which isn’t even mine ... it was already being discussed by various authors on blogs), but it does mean that you need to aggressively seek out what people are doing, and compare their results. The market is changing at a remarkable speed. Today’s best advice might not be relevant next month. That’s why writers should network and share. We can all benefit from helping each other out. We need to stay informed.

So, what happens if that well dries up and Amazon doesn’t match Smashword’s free pricing anymore?

It’s already getting harder to go FREE on Amazon, and the option may not be there in the future. For now, the gamble is paying off for some new authors. It’s a strategy that is still worth considering.

What do you think the next big promotional trend might be?

I don’t know; but if you find out first, email me at Minouri@aol.com, and we’ll call it even.

Amazon: Publishing Friend or Foe?

by J. Lea Lopez

I'll be honest—I'm not a trendsetter. At least not when it comes to the publishing revolution. I'm cautious. I like to spend a lot of time gathering facts, weighing options, learning from those more opinionated and in-the-know than I. One thing I do know is that Amazon's name is on everyone's lips these days—a result of Kindle Direct Publishing, CreateSpace, and their newest publishing imprints. This is great! Isn't it?

I'm not totally sold, to be honest. Let me tell you why.

I used to be completely intimidated by the thought of publishing direct through Amazon KDP. I can do a fair amount with my computer, and I love learning new things, but formatting and creating an eBook seemed like a rather daunting task. When the crew at AgentQuery Connect posted their fabulous guide to publishing with Amazon, I thought Hey, I think I could do that! And I almost did, too. I came thisclose to self-publishing my first manuscript. But after some amazingly supportive beta readers encouraged me, I've decided to continue pursuing a traditional print deal a little longer. But that's beside the point. I was certainly enticed by the idea of 70% royalties, creative control over things like cover art and word count, and finally being able to say I have a published novel. If I was so gung-ho about it just a month or so ago, why does the thought of it make me feel a little dirty now?

One thing for sure irks me, and that's the issue with potential plagiarism on Amazon. To be fair, they seem to have favorably resolved every issue of plagiarism I've heard of, but the fact remains that it is simply too easy to do. When was the last time a check-box stopped anyone from doing the wrong thing? Oh, it says checking here means I have the authority to publish this material. I'd better stop,then, since I actually stole it from someone's blog/website/whatever. Sure. In what reality does that happen? Not mine.

If they valued intellectual property as much as they say in their Conditions of Use, I'd think they would incorporate some sort of detection controls in the KDP uploading process, and/or make it a little easier to report plagiarism/copyright infringement. As it stands, you have to scroll way way way down to the very bottom of the product page (which, depending on the length of product details, reviews, discussions, etc. can be immensely long) to find out how to report an infringement. But guess where the option to report a lower price is located? You probably guessed it. Much higher up, right after the product details.

Plagiarism potential aside, the recent announcement of Amazon's latest publishing imprint was the thing that really put this bitter taste in my mouth. On the surface, this is encouraging to writers. The largest online book retailer is getting into the publishing game! They've been a pioneer in the world of self-publishing, making it accessible to everyone and giving authors a chance to earn money and see their name in print. They must care about writers and the future of publishing, right? Well...

Amazon has several imprints. Their career listing has openings for acquisitions editors and more, implying expansion and growth for this aspect of their business. And yet there's no way to submit to the imprints for consideration. It appears Amazon hand-picks the titles to which they'll lend their marketing prowess and brand recognition. In other words, if you want a shot at being considered, you'd better get your book on Amazon. Instead of a slushpile where writers are hoping to get published and be presented to the buying public, we'll have a slushpile of self-published writers hoping to be vetted by Amazon. Just when the stigma surrounding self-publishing was beginning to let up, I fear this will create a backlash. But what does Amazon care? They make money either way.

Because that's what I fear this boils down to. Money. I don't think Amazon cares one whit about publishing as it relates to writers and writing. If I can channel Jessie J for a minute, this IS about the cha-ching cha-ching. The allure of KDP is that it has the potential to give voice to many excellent writers who have been overlooked by the traditional publishing industry. But now they want to get INTO traditional publishing? It just doesn't make sense on any level other than a monetary one, in my rather humble opinion. And let's be clear on that: they're much more interested in putting money in their own pockets than they are in yours.

Going back to the title of this post, do I think Amazon is a publishing friend or foe? Let's just say that they aren't looking so friendly on my radar right now. I don't think I'll be self-publishing anything on Amazon in the very near future. Does that mean I won't purchase anything from my friends and fellow writers on Amazon? Not necessarily. I rarely shop on Amazon to begin with, but I'll gladly support a friend if I can. Does that mean I'll refuse any part of a traditional deal that involves Amazon should I snag an agent? Hmm... I can't say for certain. There may be a day when you can call me a hypocrite, but for now, for me, it's a matter of principle. I'll be keeping my eye on you, Amazon.

What's your take on Amazon's place in the world of publishing?