So, another week has passed with mixed fortunes. Not the greatest month for me, but I had a trip away, doddled some book notes and while I’m not yet throwing myself into the next work, I actually had some small sucess in promoting tEXt me. The freeby dates for the kindle version ended up with a number of downloads, which is gratifying, and even better, five people bought one of other of the books at the same time! Why do free downloads?
Well, one of the biggest challenges for an indie author is actually getting the word out about your book, and as I’ve mentioned before, there is a huge amount of competition for reviews. This way, extra people will hopefully read what they’ve downloaded, in the ideal World the book itself will do it’s job and some might leave a positive review, and that’s where the action is. No reviews means no coverage, and no recommendations, so as good as a novel might be, it will get nowhere if people aren’t persuaded to try it in the first place.
I’m (perhaps foolishly) very honest about my experiences, and two things that are apparent to me are that it’s difficult for me to build a following as each of my books tends to be in a different genre, so needs marketing differently (not my biggest strength), and while I love tEXt me, the use of the old style emoticons (as I know from my beta readers) puts a lot of people off. In this case, that’s particularly unfortunate as it’s the basis for the entire bleeding book, but, you live and learn. Also, fellow wannabe authors, a lesson I’ve learned is about price and format. The first two were what I’d call ‘normal’ paperback prices (£5.99 or £6.99) but I’ve learned from feedback that the price of the one (£8.99 hard copy) has put some people off. It wasn’t me being greedy, but rather the fact it is longer, more pages, so it’s actually the cheapest I can make it and still make a small profit (I earn just 71p per book, so I’m really not getting rich anytime soon, and need to sell several hundred just to cover costs!) I wanted the same size and margins as previous books so they go together nicely, but for the next I may consider a larger format and less generous margins, as a way to keep the retail price down. This wasn’t something I’d thought about to be honest, but the practicalities of the trade are always worth learning.
For the future, alongside trying (and failing) to effectively promote this tome, I’m going to throw myself back into the fifth draft of the next novel, and simultaneously work on the non fiction memoir. So we’ll see how that pans out.
Oh the photo? Well, it’s because I’m a ‘fun guy’ 🙂
Stay safe,
Kit