I’ve already told you about the research I do when writing. Today I thought I’d write about my research concerning publishing and marketing.
Publishing
All the advice I read says that you can’t find a publisher without going through a literary agent. I think that applies to the major publishing houses. My editor recommended a book, Indie Press Guide, by Francoise Harvey and Debbie Taylor. I found small publishers in there which I’m sure would have taken me on. So why didn’t I approach one of them? Because she also said that some of her other writers have done very well on KDP. At roughly the same time I was thumbing through Writers and Artist Yearbook. I read an article by a writer who had landed his dream publishing deal with a major publisher, yet a year or so later decided to go indie on KDP. Well, Amazon is the largest bookstore on the planet, and you’re in control. So that’s the way I decided to go. The downside is that you incur all the costs that the publisher would. If you decide to go about it properly, and why wouldn’t you, they are significant. I’m keeping a careful record of my expenses and revenue. The latter is so far about 10% of the former. My view is that the biggest expenses are one-off. I’m thinking of editing, cover design, audiobook narration, editorial reviews, and launch publicity. The books are out there and if readers like them, hopefully they will keep earning money. I see it as an investment.
I think that you probably can get a major publisher without an agent, but only if you’re a celebrity already. I did try submitting to agents. I selected eight from the yearbook and crafted my submission as per the guidance I had read. No takers. Not even acknowledgements from some. KDP for me then.
Marketing
I suppose I could have looked for a book publicist like Brian from the outset. But I didn’t. The engineer / scientist in my was curious, and wanted to experiment, to research. I wanted to discover for myself what worked, and what didn’t. Of course I did as much research into how to go about marketing as I could as well. I watched the videos and read the blogs of Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur. They’re very good. I bought Publisher Rocket and it’s been useful in several ways. It tells you how to adjust the categories you market your book in to have the best chance of gaining the #1 bestseller tag on Amazon. It also helps when you want to find keywords, authors, and books to target in an Amazon ads campaign.
What I found is that you can achieve the #1 bestseller tag, but it may not generate the sales to keep you there for more than a day. I have enrolled all my books in the Kindle Select program. That gives you higher royalties for your ebooks and access to Amazon’s promotional tools of free book promotions amongst others. The downside I perceived at the time, was that your books are available free to read to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. I’ll come back to that. When I first tried free book promotions, I “sold” books in the low dozens, over several days. Enough to win that #1 badge, but it didn’t last. I tried it several times with similar results. When I had three books in my series, I tried making them all free at the same time. I “sold” about 360 books in an hour, and ended the promotion immediately. I feared everyone on the planet was going to get all my books for free.
Promotions
I have tried two promotions with the big editorial book reviewers. I paid for the Kirkus Discovery package for Fire and Earth, which they had given a great review. It got me 216,000 impressions, that is when someone looks at the ad. The scientist in me did nothing else to market my books while this campaign ran. I wanted to research how this campaign alone worked. So how many books did 216,000 impressions sell? It sounds like it should be a lot, right? Wrong! Zero, not one book sold during the campaign.
The other campaign I tried was also for Fire and Earth. I took up the offer of Book of the Day, with Online Book Club. I ran their free ebook campaign. They ran a huge social media campaign which generated a lot of likes, retweets etc. It sold a lot of free books, several hundred.
My next marketing effort has been Amazon Ads. But I fear I may be exceeding the ideal length for a post. So I’ll cover that in part 2.