Hey kid, the first hit is free!
My second book is with my editor. When I get the manuscript back, it’ll look like a murder scene, covered in red pen. No, not really. She uses “track changes” in Word; there’s no pen. But while she’s editing, I just get to kick back in the Florida heat with a cold locally brewed Summer Pale Mango Shandy Sour Gluten Free Ale.
Wrong.
I’m in the eye of the storm. That false calm before the wind shifts direction and the real devastation begins. Writing is easy. Editing is hard. Selling books? Hell, even the big publishers are lousy at selling books. I mean, sure, they have their big names, but let’s not give the publishers too much credit for that. It was the pros who kept telling J.K. Rowling not to quit her day job (she’s a billionaire now).
It’s time to put on your marketing hat and get ready to sell. This is the really hard part and I’m not going to pretend I’ve mastered it. But there isn’t some “secret” to all of this. In fact, it’s pretty formulaic. Like cooking a soufflé, you follow the recipe. Of course, even then, you aren’t guaranteed it’ll be a success. It may come as a surprise that the first key to success in selling books is to give books away.
For free.
As many as you can.
Yes, my plan for my second book is kind of like selling drugs. The first hit is free. With two books to market, I now have something I can use to get readers hooked. A free ebook costs me nothing. The fact is, a certain percentage of readers will finish The Grandfather Clock and pay for the sequel, kind of like that first free ecstasy pill Tommy gave you in college. It’s called a “sales funnel” and it applies to drugs and books. A typical conversion rate might be one sequel sold for every 20 free downloads. That’s one sequel for maybe $4 (putting about $3 in your pocket). And if your book is strong, that 1 in 20 is going to become 1 in 15.
Let me use real numbers so it makes sense. Back in 2015 I gave away 18,000 free downloads in three days. Amazon limits the number of days you can offer your book free in KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select, so I had to stop (there’s an easy trick to getting your book to be free forever once you’ve got the sequel ready). If I had a 1 in 20 conversion rate to the sequel, that would translate into 900 sales of book two — $2700, based on three days of downloads. Keep giving that first book away for free and suddenly you’ve given away 80,000 ebooks, converting to 4,000 sequels sold. That’s $12,000 in your pocket. But this doesn’t stop. I know an author who has given away 200,000 free books over three years. And that first book isn’t just the gateway drug for book two, but also book three if you should write it. A book you wrote in 2014 will pay you for many, many years. Keep writing, get a dozen titles out there and suddenly you’re making yourself a damn nice living doing something you love.
A dozen titles? Are you crazy? Friends, Steven King didn't stop writing after Carrie. And if John Grisham quit after writing A Time To Kill he’d still be a lawyer because nobody read that book until after The Firm became a bestseller. In fact, Grisham was turned down by 28 publishers and began writing The Firm the day after he finished A Time to Kill. This is work.
Yes, I hope we all write 50 Shades of Being A Martian and find ourselves attending the Golden Globes next year, but even if you don’t, you might spend a decade writing and publishing and finding, “Hey, this is way better than selling timeshares” (Or whatever soul-sucking day job you go to).
Here is a basic, but not comprehensive, list of key elements to promoting your books:
Amazon and Createspace: If it’s your first book or two, don’t worry about iBooks, Nook or any of the others. First, they total less than 20% of the ebook market, so it’s not the best use of time. Second, going exclusive with Amazon increases your royalty significantly. Createspace is simply the print-on-demand arm of Amazon, so you have hard copies for your friends and ebook holdouts (because they accept cell phones, electric cars and email, but not ebooks.)
Promotion: Do you have an email list? A blog audience? Ways to reach people who read what you write? I’ll admit, my email list of “readers” isn’t going to be my main source at first. Having only one book out, I’m still in the building phase. But I do have several social media avenues that have produced in the past. Mainly, over 20,000 readers got my last book for free or bought it , so I’m hoping that Amazon’s algorithm lets a fraction of those people know that the sequel is out. I’ve got a good network of other writers who I’ll count on (hat in hand) to put out the good word. Everyone who heard about The Grandfather Clock will know about book two.
Paid advertising. This is the soufflé of promotion. Timing is key. Too much and you’ll never make a return on your investment. Too little and you’ll get no results. I’ll be consulting other authors and the bible of Amazon promotion by David Gaughran, Let’s Get Digital. Marketing in this way is an art. There is definitely trial and error to paid advertising. I will talk more about this in future posts.
More promotion: Guest blog posts, interviews, traditional media coverage, book clubs, friends with big circles of influence, and a lot of old fashioned hustling. You need to pay attention to what works and keep pulling those levers.
Be patient.
The payoff starts to show up when you have two or three books and you’ve developed a bit of an audience. When you only have one book to sell, even your most fanatical reader has nowhere to go after they’ve read your book. You don’t have inventory for them to buy.
Today, you don’t need to get rejected 28 times like Grisham to get started. There’s a publisher waiting for you. Amazon is their name. Amazon loves you and if you do well, they’ll promote you. Why would Amazon want to do that? Because Amazon spent exactly 0 minutes writing, editing, revising, designing cover art, and publishing a book that they will make at least 30% on. Amazon loves you, but they love themselves more.
It’s work. But fun work that allows you to honestly say, “I’m a writer.”
For more about these strategies, check out the Rocking Self Publishing Podcast’s interview with local Self Publishing guru Nathan Van Coops, where he talks about how these strategies turned him into the Heisenberg of Time Travel Adventure novels. Nathan’s series is the blue meth we all want to create.
Want to see what a free eBook looks and feels like? My novel is fresh off the presses on Smashwords for all eBook formats FREE. Check it out.
This article appears in Sep 1-8, 2016.