KDP Select – An Analysis

When I published Antigone’s Fall, I basically blasted an email to everyone I didn’t consider a mortal enemy, published the same thing on Facebook and Twitter, and then sat back, waiting for fame and fortune to come knocking.

Incidentally, Fame and Fortune, you two are soooo late.

Sales were…modest, Barnes and Noble’s numbers even more so. Basically, my friends and family supported my efforts, but that was about the extent of the book’s reach.

For Stormcaller, I made a more deliberate attempt to spread the word. I didn’t push much while the paperback was the only version—it was intended for those who like paper and/or hate Kindle-formatted books—but with the ebook came the opportunity to try out KDP Select.

For those not familiar, KDP Select is Amazon’s way of saying “Publish your book only with us and our search algorithm will like your book better.” It also includes five days in which you can give your book away.

“But wait—isn’t the point of selling books to make money?” Why, yes, it can be, but giving the book away does two things for you. First, it broadens your exposure. If your first book sold 200ish copies over two years, you don’t have a large audience. Giveaways can help boost that. Second, everyone who downloads the book, for free or not, becomes one of those “People who bought Men Who Inappropriately Love Goats also bought…” ads. This gives you a much better chance to get your book in front of new eyes.

I documented the giveaway’s results in earlier blog posts, so I won’t reiterate those now. Stormcaller reached #1 on the Paranormal Fantasy list, and disappeared from that (and other lists) as soon as the giveaway was over. However, the sales rank stayed around 5,000 for the first week, 10,000 the second week, 15-20,000 the third week, and has fluctuated between 20-30,000 since. Ish.

Antigone’s Fall enjoyed a brief bump in sales, but since it’s not related to Stormcaller, there’s no real reason to expect a jump on that title. However, when Stormcaller #2 comes out, I suspect it will do better than Stormcaller, which will also see a bit of a resurgence as new readers discover it.

Was the giveaway worth it? Absolutely. From a purely financial standpoint, Stormcaller earned much more money—and continues to do so. Instead of a readership of hundreds, I’ve reached thousands, and received more reviews and exposure. If you’re an indie author, I’d say you could do a lot worse than enroll in KPD select. Use the giveaway days…and use them in a block. Let your title climb through the ranks.

Then do it all over again for the next title. Remember, indie publishing is a long game, not a quick fix.

Shifting Plans

I must say, 2013 is off to an amazing start. Stormcaller’s successful giveaway program netted a great deal of exposure. It’s too early to count chickens, but I wouldn’t be shocked or dismayed to see that the book enjoyed modest, steady sales throughout the month of February. Expect a more detailed analysis on KDP’s impact in March.

I’m working another short-term contract at the moment, back at En Masse Entertainment, where I’m helping with the launch of TERA: Rising. It’s great to see everyone, and I’m doing some different work, which makes for a nice change of pace. Plus, I frequently find myself treated to spectacular views of sunsets. Still, it is a short-term gig, and I’ve lined up another job for after.

In Japan.

I accepted an offer to teach in Japan, which means a lot of things, most of which are really good. I’m excited about the opportunity to travel again. I’ve been back in the states for seven years now, and wanderlust is making my feet itch something terrible. It gave me a great excuse to brush up on my Japanese skills, so there’s that. Stormcaller #3 takes place in Japan, so hooray for research opportunities!

There are, however, two impacts on the lower end of the joy scale.

First, I must leave the beloved sailboat that’s been my home for the past two years. That’s a tough one, more so because I must do it before the end of February. That’s not a lot of time, so if anyone in the Puget Sound region is interested in a killer deal on a sailboat, send me an email.

Second, I don’t know that I’ll get to write two novels this year. That was certainly my goal, but until I leave for Japan, my free time will be booked with moving or studying. I don’t anticipate a lot of writing time until June. I do get the month of August off, but either way, I think I only get to finish one of the two novels on my list. I’m still torn as to which one to finish. Both are about in the same level of completion, both need the same amount of work…

Something to think about. In any event, this year is shaping up in ways I never expected. New choices, new chances, new challenges….

Stormcaller Giveaway Results

Well, after 96 hours, the Stormcaller giveaway came to an end. A lot of people picked up my signal and gave it a boost. So many kind people retweeted, reshared, liked, and otherwise put up with my posts. Many thanks to the McKenna clan (Marti, Jessie, and Bridget—seriously, check out their books), Erin Evans, Kat Richardson, the Masquerade crew, J. Elizabeth Hill, and everyone else who helped make this a success.

Good news! I promise not to tweet about my book for a week at least.

Day 4 Results:
Stormcaller peaked at the following ranks:

• #106 in the Kindle Store
• #68 in Genre Fiction
• #8 in Fantasy
• #1 in Paranormal

Readers downloaded 2,245 copies on day 4, bringing the total downloads to 5,070. Bear in mind, my original pie-in-the-sky goal was to break 1,000 downloads, so consider me gobsmacked.

Clearly Amazon’s marketing machine rewards position. The higher ranking meant more exposure, with an increasing number of downloads. I confess that I didn’t think the giveaway would work as well as it did. Amazon is such a huge market, with so many good books to choose from, that even free books face an uphill battle.

The whole point of the giveaway was to expand my audience. Antigone’s Fall didn’t reach many people because no one knew who I was. Family, friends, and friends of friends bought it, but after those benefactors, any sales were little more than luck. My hope is that giving away Stormcaller will not only spread the word about the new witch in town, but also get my name out there a bit. With The Praetorian Agenda and Assassins coming out this year, I’d like for them to have somewhere to go.

So, job well done. Thanks to everyone who took a chance on a little book with the big blue eye.

Giveaway Results – Day 3

I made the conscious decision today to not promote Stormcaller on social media. The book had a good head of steam, so I wanted to see how much Amazon’s mechanics would help. I assumed that today would be a slowdown day, that it would drop out of the top 10, possibly off the Fantasy chart altogether.

Holy. Crap. How the hell did I end up here?!

I have no future as a prognosticator if this is any indicator. When I checked in at 1710, Stormcaller was #6, with a total of 2224 copides downloaded. At 1750, I was at #3 with 2316 copies downloaded.

Wasn’t this supposed to be the slow day? Amazon’s day of rest, as it were?

I’d like to thank the Academy, all my friends, my social media links, and the amazing Evil Eye Cover o’ Doom. And Voltron.

ANYWAY…

So, I checked back around 2000. And then my jaw dropped off my face.

Holy Shih Tzu!

Copies downloaded were:

• Day 1: 615
• Day 2: 828
• Day 3: 1,382

So there it is. Stormcaller climbed to the top of the Paranormal Fantasy chart. It reached #11 in Fantasy, and #183 overall in the Kindle Store. Over 2,800 copies downloaded in total. By pure coincidence, I’m listening to Bill Conti’s Yeager’s Triumph. I reattached my jaw, but it’s still working weird. Can’t stop grinning. Even with one day left, I declare Operation GIVEAWAY a huge success. More than I dared to dream.

Giveaway Results – Day 2

I did a lot less posting about the giveaway today, mostly because so many people put up with me yesterday. I didn’t want to wear out my digital welcome, especially since I don’t like it when other people do it. A few updates, on a couple of channels, rather than covering them all with the same content.

Imagine my surprise at the results.

Stormcaller peaked at #8 on the Paranormal Fantasy list, #19 on the Fantasy list (Wow!), and #283 in the Kindle Store. As for breaking the 1,000 copies mark…yeah. Did that. As of 2335, readers have downloaded 828 copies of Stormcaller, surpassing yesterday’s tally and bringing the total to 1,443!

I also noticed one very nice lady left me a review (w00t!) and a bunch of people clicked the Like button. Thank you so much.

I hope everyone enjoys the novel.

Finally!

The ebook conversion for Stormcaller is finally finished. Long live Stormcaller. My apologies for the delays. Life has thrown me a few curveballs lately, but I appreciate everyone who prodded me about this or The Praetorian Agenda. Means a lot to me.

Oooh, up in the top left! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the long-promised ebook for Stormcaller!

The ebook isn’t quite available on Amazon just yet. I asked a couple of Kindle-owning peeps to take a look at it on their devices to make sure the formatting holds up (looks fabulous on my iPad Mini).

Whew.

Now I need to go cheer myself up.

2013 – The Road Ahead

The past year brought good things and bad. I’m not yet sure about the equal measure part. It feels like the bad outweighed the good. Family deaths, injuries, unemployment, Mass Effect 3, and Kate Winslet got married again. Honestly, it’s like she doesn’t even know I exist. Sheesh.

On the plus side of the column, I helped launch TERA, which was the end of a long road for me. Sadly, then I got launched, but what can you do? I published Stormcaller in paperback, which turned out to be very educational. Interestingly enough, it took almost as long to get that done as it took to publish Antigone’s Fall in ebook. I learned a lot about that process, but now I need to get Stormcaller‘s ebooks out the door and make my formal “Buy this now!” announcements.

But that’s the past and present–what about the future? The way I see it, 2013 is about me dealing with three problem areas: employment, collaboration, and publication. Employment is simple: I’d like to get on in a full-time gig again. Freelancing is tough on me, or I need someone to mentor me through it. Collaboration is also simple, though more problematic: Going through life alone sucks. ’nuff said.

As for publication, I’ve got 50,000 words written on The Praetorian Agenda and 45,500 on Stormcaller #2. That’s where I need to focus my energies.

I’m stuck on TPA because I need to brainstorm with smart people to finish outlining the end. In truth, I need to brainstorm the middle. I know how it ends, though I’m not certain how I want to wrap it up. Whether tales continue for August will depend on how I go with that, but I want to publish by the end of June.

Stormcaller #2 has the opposite problem. I know how it all works, but I burned through the entire outline in 45K, which means I didn’t do enough to flesh out the story. Definitely a smaller problem, and I’ve got three more books in my head on this series. Poor Isaura’s trials and tribulations are far from over. I want Stormcaller #2 out the door by Halloween.

I wonder how many of these I’ll make happen…

NaNo NoMo

You’re probably wondering why I called you all here today. I don’t know why you think I have the answers. My brain’s mush, but after 28 days of flying by the seat of my pants, I finished NaNoWriMo.

50,000 words, at least twice that many tears. Mmm…tears.

I’ve taken the purple. It’s like taking the black, but less ice, warfare, and dateless nights. Actually, I’m pleased with how things turned out on The Praetorian Agenda, though I need to get an outline down on paper before I go back to it. It’s not done, of course. Fifty-thousand words is a good start to a novel, but not really a finished product. As I left my intrepid heroes, they’d just uncovered the first twist to the first conflict.

It’s cool, though, because I left them at a really nice golf course in Abu Dhabi. Swanky.

One of the things I encountered on Google+ was a writer including a fact about her main character each time she updated. I thought that sounded great, so I decided to do the same. Now, this being a sequel to Antigone’s Fall, I knew a fair amount about August already, but this gave me a chance to flesh out some of those tiny details that help a character climb out of the words and into the mind. Anyway, here they are, presented in no particular order.

Main Character Facts – August Christopher

• August has both Navy Marksmanship Medals.
• August speaks Russian and Arabic.
• Part of August’s work required him to read the Qu’ran twice, as well as several collections of hadiths.
• August struggles to stick with vegetarianism (mostly because of his girlfriend). He’s known to conduct steak procurement raids.
• August is entitled to no warfare qualification badges.
• August was raised by his older brother, Cyrus, when their parents were killed in airliner crash.
• August’s older brother, Cyrus, was a Navy SEAL killed in the first Gulf War.
• Emancipated at age 17, August joined the Navy after completing the NROTC program at the University of Florida.
• Though seconded to CIA, August remains a naval officer.
• August’s girlfriend, Miranda, is senior to him at CIA despite being seven years his junior.
• August has traveled to every continent and sailed each of the five oceans.
• August is terrified of insects and arachnids. High-pitched squeally terrified.
• Like many sailors, August can’t resist picking arguments/fights with Marines.
• August has an old Ms. Pac Man/Galaga arcade machine in storage with the rest of his household goods.
• August suffered from PTSD after he returned from Iraq and the events in Antigone’s Fall.
• August finds religion fascinating, though his life experiences shattered what faith he once had.
• August’s tendency to look before leaping has earned him much success, but more than a few failures as well.
• Shame keeps August from wearing a Bronze Star for Valor that his record indicates he’s entitled to.
• August has three dog tags, but the extra one belonged to his brother.
• When August can’t get Coke Zero, he wants ginger ale.
• August abhors baba ghanoush.

There weren’t thirty facts because I came to hate myself over the course of this month and didn’t always post updates on time.

So that’s it. No more NaNoWriMo for another year. Now it’s time to get a proper outline constructed, finish The Praetorian Agenda’s first draft, get Stormcaller’s ebook done, then finish the first draft of Stormcaller #2.

How to Publish a Print Book

I try to learn something from each book I write, each job I work at. I learned a great deal from Antigone’s Fall, which served me well when I proposed the TERA tie-in ebooks. Working on those taught me even more, but I’ve never done a print book before. As someone living on a boat, paperback books aren’t my first choice because space is a premium, but I had a lot of people ask me about getting a print copy of Antigone’s Fall. Well, that might not ever happen, but I decided to put Stormcaller out in paperback, then work on the ebook.

I thought I’d share some of what I discovered.

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover? Yeah, right. If people didn’t do that, there’d be a lot fewer artists working today. We do judge covers. They should entice us, tell us just enough about the story to be useful, and conform more or less to the norms of the genre.

I looked a long time for a great cover image, as I discussed in an earlier post. Once I had one though, getting that to work on paper wasn’t easy.

From left to right, start to finish. I didn’t like the feel of the 6×9″ format, but I loved the 5.25×8″ print size–although that dramatically increased the cost of the books.

If someone were to write a one sentence synopsis of publishing, it would probably say “Again and again and again!” Forgive the image quality. Holding an iPad to take snapshots isn’t as easy as I had hoped. You can see the transition as I reviewed the size, the layout of the cover, tweaking font size, image size, colors, and spacing.

From bottom to top, start to finish. The first two prints had cover layout issues, resulting in those nasty white bands. The next version fixed that, but revealed other issues. The final cover pleased me.

Of course, there were a few bumps along the way. Some were entirely my fault. Others were simply the result of seeing a printed version versus a digital one. If there’s anything I can stress to indie authors, it’s this: LOOK AT THE PHYSICAL COPY. Don’t accept the digital proof as gospel.

The left book is the second to last proof. You can see how ill-fitting the back copy is for this size book. I laid it out again, taking into account the binding process Createspace uses.

Don’t be afraid to revise things. Expect to purchase multiple proofs. I’ve got ten laying around the boat. These are just four with the most noticeable differences.

The left book is the second to last one. Unfortunately, I switched the cover image and lost much of the blue in her eye. As dark as this looks on-screen, it’s much worse in your hand. I ended up burning the center band a fair amount in Photoshop so it’d translate well to the print version.

The goal, aside from education, is to put out a book that I can feel proud about. I’ve seen indie books that look like…well, you can Google not nice words for yourself. No book is perfect and once it goes out, you can’t just make changes, so bring your best eyes, and then bring sets of fresh eyes to the process.

Don’t steal the eyes, of course. Eww. Get volunteers to look at your books.

NaNoWriMo and Tribulations

We’re nearly halfway through November, which means we’re also halfway through NaNoWriMo. Between enforced wordcounts and my work getting Stormcaller out the door, I may not survive the month.

My sole goal for NaNoWriMo was to hit the 1667 word count each day. No skipping days. So far, I’ve hit that mark, which makes me happy. On the other hand, The Praetorian Agenda is still taking shape in my mind, so I’m not sure how much of the first 20,000 words will survive first contact with the enemy, er…editorial process. In fact, just last night, when I was supposed to be asleep, I identified a major theme that I didn’t even know I was dropping into the story.

Who’da thunk it?

Stormcaller, on the other hand, is becoming an exercise in frustration. CreateSpace turns out a decent paperback, but I’m on my 3rd proof printing because they keep screwing up the files. Even after I called them up to tell them they used the wrong cover file, to use X, not Y, they did it again. When I called them up, they helpfully explained, “Yes, it looks like we used the wrong file. Somehow.”

No shit, Sherlock. I told you that.

I am, however, thrilled that I switched to the 5.25×8″ format. I held up the fooked up proof next to my trade paperback of Gorky Park and it looked spot on. So, now I know what size my paperbacks will be until such time as someone makes mass market-sized paperbacks available on demand.

All things considered, I’m pleased with November’s progress. What about you? Are you NaNoing? Are you making a list of books you want to give/get for the holidays? I can recommend a couple if you’re having trouble….