September, 2011
Liking, Sharing, Tagging, and Reviewing Your Favorite Books on Amazon – A Video Tutorial
I’m not Steven Spielberg or anything, but I put this little tutorial video together to show you how easy it is to not only write a quick review for a book on Amazon, but also to like, share, and tag it to make it easier for other readers to find. This is a HUGE help to your favorite authors, and only takes you a minute or so to do!
Print Books or Ebooks: Where Do You Stand?
I did a post recently giving my cracked crystal ball look at the publishing industry, and after some spirited discussions on Twitter about what the future of print books might be, I decided to follow up on that post by taking a microscopic look at the issue from the perspective of my own sales and how it’s been affecting my business decisions.
So, let’s set the stage by taking a look at my sales for July, which has been the peak month so far this year. Here’s how it looks:
| Sales Channel | Copies Sold | Price Range | Royalties Earned |
| Lightning Source (print) | 40 | $9.95-$16.95 | $102.62 |
| CreateSpace (print) | 50 | $9.95 | $83.50 |
| Kindle Store (ebooks) | 21,186 | $0.00-$5.99 | $32,877.00 |
| Other eBooks | 360 | $0.00-$5.99 | $700.00* |
* Note that the sales reporting for the other ebook channels I have via Smashwords aren’t as timely or accurate as the Kindle store, so these figures are approximate.
Now, you don’t have to be a statistical genius to see what’s going on in this table. Forgetting the copies sold for the ebooks, which in this month included a ton of free versions of IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, and just looking at the bottom line dollar figures, the “other” ebook sales channels did at least three times better than my total print sales, while Kindle sales were almost 170 times more.
“Well, hey, you just focused on the ebook market and left the print book lovers in the cold, you swine!”
I’ll certainly confess to slanting things more at the Kindle market, in particular, as it’s the biggest ebook market, but I wasn’t ignoring everything else. Oddly enough, looking back at my sales before they started taking off in February, the ratio of earnings between my ebook and print sales was still drastically tilted in the favor of ebook sales on what I estimate to be a 25:1 ratio, if not higher. So, it’s not like I ever put my print books under a black cloth and hid them. In fact, I even dropped the prices on them after my ebook sales started taking off (note: I’ll also confess here that I can’t add: my royalties for the print books are higher than $1.00 a piece, but maybe as much as $1.70 – I can’t do math!). Yes, I sold more after that, but not exactly enough to retire on.
This brings us to the ongoing discussion “out there” about the future of print books.
Let me make it clear that I don’t believe print books (and by that, I really mean novels more than anything else) are going to just disappear overnight, or even in the next fifty years. There is going to be a continued market for print books for the foreseeable future. There are lots of people who love physical books and have no intention of giving them up. I think that’s great and I love you guys & gals!
However, the inescapable reality is that the print market is rapidly diminishing. Again, you don’t have to be an industry expert to see that. B. Dalton – gone. Borders – gone. Books-a-Million has suffered losses every quarter so far this year. Barnes & Noble isn’t doing great, but hopefully will hang on. If it survives, it’ll largely be due to the success of the Nook, and because there won’t be much other “big store” competition, especially if Books-a-Million eventually goes down the tubes. And on Amazon, Kindle book sales continue to outstrip print sales by a growing margin, and the Kindle is penetrating more markets outside the U.S.
With their retail outlets dying, how are the legacy print publishers are going to survive? Answer: they won’t, unless they can adapt to the new paradigm.
As for me, I’ve really been questioning whether I should keep making print editions of my books. If you look at the numbers I had for July (other months are roughly the same proportionally), it’s sort of hard to get past how much the ebook segment is bringing in compared to print sales. From the business point of view, is it really worth the bother?
After a great deal of thought I’ve come to the conclusion that it is. But not because of some of the silly arguments people have been making in support of print books (for some examples, see this article on Big Think). It’s because even if the print editions are only bringing in $200 a month or whatever, that’s still $2400 a year, which in our area is good for a mortgage payment with a bit left over. To me, that’s an argument that actually makes sense.
Did You Know?
I think this is something that everyone should see, particularly those with children. I blog periodically about what it means – and takes – to be successful as an author, but those same principles extend to just about any endeavor, including life in general.
But this is simply fascinating, and is even more motivation for my wife and I to prepare ourselves and our children to be successful.
Stop Worrying About Book Sales Stats
Book sales. For those of us trying to make a living as authors, that’s sort of an important thing, isn’t it? If our books sell, we make money we can use to buy peanut butter for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If they don’t, we’d actually have to go back to working for a living. It’s hard for me to imagine anything worse, except maybe getting a courtesy water-boarding treatment.
The technology available today lets us know in near-real time (in some cases) how many books we’ve sold in a day, or an hour. Or in the last thirty seconds since we checked.
And therein lies the danger. Stats addiction. The irresistible impulse to constantly see how many books you’re selling. RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!
This leads to three things: 1) euphoric highs when your sales are climbing; 2) depressing lows when your sales are moving down, with a proportional increase in your stress levels; and 3) the effective loss of a boatload of time that you could have been writing new stuff.
It really can be an addiction, and the tragedy of it is that knowing those numbers is, by and large, absolutely useless to you on anything more than a daily basis. And even that’s probably unnecessary.
Yes, you read that right: absolutely useless. Poof.
Why would I say such an outrageous thing? Simply put, the sales, good or bad, are gonna be what they’re gonna be. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to directly control those numbers.
Now, there are things you have control over that may help influence your sales, and that’s where you should be focusing your attention. For example, you could reach out to more folks on Twitter and engage them, or talk to X-number of new folks on Facebook, or run an ad, or whatever else that you have direct control over.
Sales, alas, isn’t one of them.
“But I’m running a targeted ad campaign on Facebook and need to know if my sales are going up!”
Well, maybe. But the real metric of the success of an ad campaign is the click through rate to your target page, right? And chances are your target page isn’t a direct sales page, it’s information to get the reader in the mood to buy. Information. A juicy sample of your novel. Whatever.
From there, they might buy right away. Or they might wait a while. Again, though, I have yet to see a direct impact on sales right away. Over the course of a few days maybe. Or not.
Another one is promotions and giveaways. While I personally have found them useful for helping to build fan loyalty, none of the ones I’ve tried thus far have had any immediate impact on sales. My checking sales stats every five minutes while those promotions were running was nothing but wasted time.
I’ve resolved to not check my sales stats and book ranks more often than once a day, and I only do that because I put together a spreadsheet calculator that gives me a pretty accurate projection of my royalties and sales figures for the month. So I plug in those numbers once a day and forget about it. I can use the time I gain to work on my next book.
If you’ve got a different experience, I’d love to hear it!
Using Twitter Effectively (Part 4): Basic Tweet Adder Queries
In this installment, we’re going to zoom in a bit more on the TweetAdder app I told you about in Part 3, focusing on query strategies and syntax (oooOOOooo!) for reaching out to tweeps who hopefully will want to reach back.
The search function you’ll probably use most is the Tweet Search. As the name implies, this will take the query terms you enter (more on that shortly) and search the Twitter stream for them on a continuous basis if you have automation on (which you should!). When it finds results that match the terms, it adds those users into the “To Follow” list, and TweetAdder will automatically follow those folks (again, as long as you have the automation turned on for that function). Following back, of course, will be up to them.
Now, before we get into more of the nitty gritty of these searches, let me say right up front that I’m not going to tell you exactly what I put into my searches.
Before you start calling me dirty names, let me say why: my intent here is to try and teach you how to sculpt a block of marble into something more than just a bunch of rock chips. I’ll show you how to smack the chisel with the hammer, but I want it to be your creative energy that shapes the marble. If I tell you exactly what I’m doing and a whole bunch of people do that exact same thing, then we’ll wind up annoying a lot of potential readers (or would-have-been potential readers!).
So: in your Twitter kit you’ll soon have a hammer, a chisel, some band-aids for when you smack your thumb, and the basic knowledge of how to use those tools. Then you can go out and practice making your very own Winged Victory of Samothrace. Or Spongebob Squarepants. Whatever turns you on.
Let’s take a quick look at the Tweet Search screen (click on the image for an enlarged view where you can actually see something). The first thing we need to do is set a parameter or two. The first is Language. In most (but not all) cases, you’re probably going to want to focus on whatever your native language is, which I sort of/kinda assume is drawn from whatever people put in their Twitter profiles, but I’m not sure. I usually just keep mine on English, because that’s supposedly my native language, no matter what my mom says, and that’s the only language in which my books are currently available.
The next is Recency. This helps you limit the search to tweets that occurred in certain number of days, as determined by the dropdown menu. To be honest, I only limit the recency when I’m experimenting with a query and before I load it into the Automated Searches list, just to help it run faster. Once I’ve pinned down what I want, though, I change the recency to “Any” (searches Twitter for however long) and add it to the Automated Searches list. It may take the query a while to run the first time, but after that it generally runs pretty fast, because it will automatically dedupe the tweeps you’re already following.
I normally don’t use the location option, but you could. The only one that I know of that works is zip codes. Again, however, I’ll have to claim ignorance on this one because I haven’t found it very useful for myself personally. And, as you know, it’s all about me, right?
Now to the good stuff: QUERY SYNTAX! That’s a fancy term for words you use to help find tweeps you’d like to follow, and who hopefully will want to follow you back.
The first thing to understand is that there are two general types of query terms: ones that you want, and ones that you don’t want (which I’ll call “defeats”). You can search on just about anything in the content of a tweet, including a single word or part of a word, a set of words, a hashtag (one of those terms preceded by a # sign, like “#kindle”), etc.
Let’s say you run a search for kindle. That will bring back any tweet that has the string of letters “kindle” in it. Most of them, of course, are about Amazon’s Kindle, but you could get anything. If you searched for “man,” you’d get “man,” “woman,” “human,” “humane,” etc.
So, go ahead and stick in “kindle” as a term and hit the Search Now button to see what results you get.
Note: When I originally started with Tweet Adder, you could get up to 1500 hits returned for your search, but Twitter has since put a limit on such searches by adder-like apps and cut this down to 20. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means that your automated searches, which we’ll get into later, will run more frequently.
Now, looking at the results, there are clearly some promising tweets by people talking about loving to read on their Kindles, Kindle vs. Nook, etc., along with a lot of junk. Most of the “junk” are tweets that contain URLs. Why are those junk? Because most of them are going to be posted by authors like you! While linking up with other authors is fine, they’re not you’re primary audience. So we use a defeat, typing our query in like so: kindle -http (note that there’s a space between the two).
The results for this search look much better! Most of those obnoxious author types have been zapped, MWUAHAHAHA! But scrolling through the results, this actually looks like a pretty good search in and of itself.
One thing that I like to do to check the results is to click on the “Tweet” column, which will sort the tweets in order. Then I scroll down and look for any that have a bunch of duplicates: sometimes those are broadcasters, sometimes not. But if it’s something that looks like I don’t want it, like tweets from that dorky @kreelanwarrior guy (er, me!), I find a term in the tweet and add it to the query as a defeat, like this: kindle -http -kreelanwarrior (remember that defeating “kreelanwarrior” will also filter out “@kreelanwarrior”).
Okay, I told you I wasn’t going to give you any specific queries, but that’s one that you can fiddle with that – assuming you’re published on the Kindle (and you’d better be!) – you can use. Just don’t be obnoxious about it or I’ll send Cousin Vinnie to bust your kneecaps, ‘kay?
You can also search for terms like season of the harvest, but that you need to put in quotes: “season of the harvest”. If you don’t, it’ll just look for tweets that have all the individual words in them, which in some cases can yield rather entertaining results.
If you want it to find terms in an either/or fashion, you can do something like this using the OR operator: “michael r. hicks” OR “in her name”. That will pick up any tweet that has either michael r. hicks or in her name in it. Then you could put in one or more defeats: “michael r. hicks” OR “in her name” -”rv living is awesome”.
Once you’ve tweaked your search to how you like it, make sure to click on the Add Automated Search button, which will put it into the queue that will run continuously when you have the Automation On button clicked. You can add as many searches as you like, and I encourage you to continuously experiment.
And on a side note, if you click on the “Followers” tab on the left of the main interface (which will bring up a list of the people – surprise! – who are your followers) and look at the Source column, you can see how many followers you have from your searches. This gives you a good indication of how much of a return on investment you’re getting from each one in terms of the number of followers you’re getting.
Again, I want to emphasize that TweetAdder is one of the very few things that I decided to spend money on for promotional purposes, and it was an investment that’s paid for itself many times over. But like all powerful tools, you have to take the time to learn to use it effectively. Hopefully this post will help.
My Books
Led by Commander Owen McClaren, the TNS Aurora is embarked on an extended survey mission, searching for new worlds that could support human life. Drawn to an uncharted star system that appears to have not just one, but two potentially habitable planets, the crew of the Aurora discovers something even more unexpected: the planets are already inhabited, but not by humans. Approached by gigantic alien starships, the human crew prepares for humanity’s very first contact with another sentient race. Read More >>