Mark Coker, Founder Of Smashwords: Six Ways To Increase Book Sales

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, in his recent article, Six Tips to Bring Your Book Back from the Doldrums, shared 6 ways to increase book sales.

If you feel your book is under-preforming, Mark's article is a must read. What follows is a summary.

1. Does your book evoke passion in your readers?

One way you can tell if your book evokes passion is through its reviews.

For instance, are the reviews mediocre? If the book receives mostly 5 star reviews that's fabulous! People love your book and they're passionate about it. Also, if you get mostly one star reviews, at least your work has evoked passion in readers--perhaps not the kind you'd like, but still!

Three star reviews can be the worst. Readers didn't feel strongly either way.

That said, beware of clumping the reviews together and focusing on the average score. Look at the distribution. If your reviews are split between 5's and 1's then chances are you've written a great, controversial, book. There's a lot of passion there, don't change a thing!

Mark writes:

You need to WOW your reader.  It doesn’t matter if you write romance, mystery or non-fiction, if your book doesn’t move the reader to an emotional extreme, your job isn’t done.  

Bottom line: If folks aren't passionate about your book think about doing a major rewrite. Or, perhaps, take what you've learned, and write a new book.

No reviews

If your book has no reviews Mark suggests offering the book for free. Perhaps not permanently, just to get folks reading what you've written and hopefully get some reviews.

Why are reviews important? There's no way around it: reviews help sell books. Mark writes:

For the first two years (2008-2009), Boob Tube sold maybe 20 copies.  It had only one or two reviews.  My wife and I decided to set the price to free for six months.  We got 40,000 downloads, a lot of reviews, and even our first fan mail (yay!).  Then we set the price to $2.99 and it started selling.  Without reviews at the retailers, Goodreads, LibraryThing and elsewhere, few readers will take a chance on you.  FREE helps readers take that chance.

2. Does your cover image give the correct impression of your book?

If your reviews are 4 stars or over, congratulations, people feel passionate about your book and they like it. If it isn't selling well think about redoing the cover.

Here's Mark Coker's test for whether you need a new cover image:

1. Take all text off the title so it's just the artwork.
2. Ask yourself:

Does this image/artwork tell the reader: This is the book you're looking for to experience X?

If your book is a romance book then X="the feeling of first love."
If your book is horror then X="horror."
If your book is a thriller then X="edge of your seat suspense."
If your book is non-fiction or how-to then X="knowledge."
If your book is a memoir then X="an inspiring story of personal journey."

I think that's a great test!

Here's another one:

A test to see if your book cover is professional enough

Compare your book cover to "the top-10 sellers in your category or genre."

Does your cover look as good as these? You want your cover to look just as good, preferably better.

3. Is your book priced too high?

The more you charge the less likely it is that a reader is going to take a chance on it, especially if you're an unknown author. Mark writes:

For readers who could afford it, the high price can make the book less desirable when there are alternative books of equal quality at less cost.  Last year, when we conducted a comprehensive study of the impact of price on unit downloads and gross sales .... We found books priced at $2.99 earned slightly more than books priced over $10.00, yet enjoyed six times as many unit sales.

Another advantage of pricing your book a bit lower is that "if the reader feels they received a great read for the price, they may be more likely to give you a positive review, and positive reviews will lead to more readers."

4. Look at how many sample downloads led to sales.

The Smashwords store has a little-known feature I think is entirely unique in the ebook retailing world:  We tell you how many partial samples were downloaded.  If you click to your Dashboard, you’ll see a column for book sales and a column for downloads.  The download count is a crude metric, but if you understand how it works, you’ll be able to use it as a relatively good tool.  This data is only for sales and downloads in the Smashwords store.

The download data includes both sample downloads and full book downloads for purchased books.  If a customer or sampler downloads in multiple formats (such as epub and mobi), or downloads multiple times, each time will tick the download count higher.  To make the data cleaner, subtract your paid sales from the download count.  Divide your sales at Smashwords.com by the number of downloads.  This will tell you, roughly, what percentage of downloaders actually purchase your book.

When I do the numbers on my priced book, The 10-Minute PR Checklist, I find that approximately 13% of sample downloads lead to sale.  That’s pretty good.

 The higher the percentage the better.  50% would be fabulous.

5. Are you targeting the right audience?

No one can make everyone happy. Don't even try. If you give your paranormal romance to a person who only reads sci-fi then chances are they'll hate it, no matter how great of a paranormal romance it is.

When you know who your target audience is make sure your "title, book cover, book description, categorization and marketing are all aligned to target that audience with fine-tuned precision.  If you send the wrong messages, you’ll fail to attract the right readers.  Instead, you’ll attract the wrong reader, and the wrong reader will give you poor reviews."

In short, "Avoid the temptation to target a broader-than-necessary market."

6. Grow a thick skin and never give up!

As Mark Coker writes, it takes bravery to publish. Chances are your book will get brutalized at least once and the reader who did it may not stop at your book, they may start in on you!

We can't improve as writers if we don't know our weaknesses. Learn from the reaction your story gets and do whatever it takes to make it better. As Mark Coker writes:

If you want to be a successful writer, you have to be willing to listen to the judgment of readers.  Your readers, through their word of mouth, will determine how many other readers you reach.

Mark Coker's article Six Tips to Bring Your Book Back from the Doldrums is filled with practical, easy to follow, advice. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to increase the sales of a book.

Other articles you might like:

- Embrace Rejection: Write More, Write Better, Share Often
- 8 Ways To Channel The Power Of Your Unconscious Into Your Writing
- 4 Ways To Enchant Others

Photo credit: "The art of silence..." by VinothChandar under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

How To Sell Books Without Using Amazon KDP Select

This is a continuation of yesterdays post, Edward Robinson And How To Sell Books Using Amazon KDP Select, but today we're going to talk about how to sell books either without using Select or by using a hybrid approach.

2. Selling Books Without Select

a. The power of permafree

There are many ways to use the permafree strategy (see: Writers: How To Use Permanently Free Books To Increase Sales).

- Make the first book of a series permanently free

- Write a book intending to make it permanently free

For instance, if you have a few blog posts you're especially proud of, compile them into a book and make it permanently free. I think you'd be guaranteed to get more traffic to your blog.

- Make one of your short stories or novellas permanently free

This should be one that you feel showcases your ability. Yes you'll lose some potential revenue but you could also think of it as passive marketing. After you publish the book you can and then completely ignore it and it does it's work without you having to tweet or blog or do absolutely anything! That's attractive to all writers who feel their most valuable asset is their time.

b. How to make a book permafree

This part is easy. Publish it through any and all online bookstores you can but make sure that at least one of them will allow you to sell the book for free. (I know Smashwords will let you do this.) The other bookstores will price-match and, eventually, make your book free as well.

I want to mention that I don't know how Amazon, or any other online retailer, feels about this.

3. Going Hybrid

a. Grow an audience for your series using select then pull it out of the program and publish it as widely as you can

Ed suggests starting your first couple of books in Select then transition out once you have 3 or more books in the series.

After you've written 3 books take them out of Select and, as a group, place them in all the online bookstores. Readers often want to know an author isn't going to promise the next book in the series then get busy with another writing project and never deliver.

Also, bookstores such as Barnes and Noble often promote new books. Ed writes:

... if you've got a squad of books, they help each other out. They pull each other up when one of them stumbles. BN, for instance, has a new releases list that goes back 90 days. You have a much better chance of climbing high up this list if you fire three titles at it all at once--giving browsers three chances to find your series--rather than hitting it with a single book at a time. There are cases in which books enter a state of positive reinforcement where they haul each other faster and faster down the track.

Great advice.

4. Experiment: Find What's Right For You

In the beginning I said we'd look at Ed's ways to sell your books without you doing a lot of promotion. This way involves trying a bit of everything, including promotion. He writes:

... when you move your books out of Amazon [Select], advertise or promote your books in some way. If you know a site that advertises to Nook users, book an ad for soon after your books go live on BN .... Do something. Anything at all to get some initial sales and, with any luck, provoke your books into continuing to sell.

Ed writes that in October he was dissatisfied with the sales of Breakers and its sequel Meltdown (both terrific books by the way). Here's what he did:

- A guest post on his friend's popular blog.
- Took out an ad.
-  Reduced the price of both books to 99 cents.

Ed kept the books at 99 cents for 5 days and, in that time, sold hundreds of copies. After the 5 days he raised the price of Breakers to $2.99 and Meltdown to $3.99. That was 6 weeks ago. They continue to sell at a rate of about 3 per day which works out to around $200 a month. Not bad at all!

All Things In Moderation

Perhaps the best strategy is to move your older books, books that have begun to build an audience, out of Select and distribute them  to as many online bookstores as possible. Put a new book, or one that is under-preforming, in Select to see if that will help.

As Ed says, Select is a tool that a writer can use. It's up to you.

Summing Up

Experiment and find out what's best for you. As Ed says, other folks can say whatever they like, but their experiences aren't your experiences. This is still the wild west of writing and publishing so all anyone can do is pass along what has worked for them.

No one knows what will work for you. You don't even know what will work for you, not unless you experiment.

As Dean Wesley Smith says, there's only one way to kill a career: Stop writing.

I know it's scary. I've been setting my writing and publishing goals for 2013 and I've felt an iron weight in my stomach, my heart starts to beat quicker when I think about putting my work out there. What if no one likes it?

These days I don't need a horror story to keep me up at night!

But that's all part of being a writer, and as I've mentioned to others, you don't have to publish under your own name. If you're nervous, create a pen name, put your work in a program like Select and see if it sells. If so, great! If not ... well, that's good to know. That's great feedback.

No matter how your work is received, if you follow Heinlein's rules then you're a professional writer and that's a pretty terrific thing to be.

#   #   #

What is your strategy for selling your books? Where do you tend to sell the most books (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, etc)?

Other articles you might like:

- How To Earn A Living As A Self-Published Writer
- Writers: How To Use Permanently Free Books To Increase Sales
- Amazon's KDP Select: The Best Long-Term Strategy?

Photo credit: "Winterlight" by Pink Sherbet Photography under Creative Commons Attribute 2.0.

Fifty Shades of Alice In Wonderland: Sales Peak At $1,000 Per Day

Ever wondered what other authors are making on their self-published titles?  Melinda DuChamp, author of the indie bestseller Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland, shares how much her book has earned. (All quotations are from Joe Konrath's blog post Independence.

Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland: Marketing
On July 23, 2012 Melinda DuChamp self-published Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland. Over the next two days her novel sold one copy. (Melinda also bought a copy to check the formatting, but that doesn't count!) Then, on the third day after it was released, Melinda set Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland to free for the next five days.

Other than enroll Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland into Amazon's KDP Select program and take advantage of the free days, Melinda did two other promotions:

The only promotion I did was the interview on Joe's blog. NYT bestseller Ruth Cardello was also kind enough to include Alice in a contest for her fans. Joe also was sweet enough to mention it on the Facebook page "What to Read After Fifty Shades of Grey" because I'm not on Facebook yet (I know! I know! I need to get on Facebook. I'm trying to become more like Joe and Ruth and get into social media, but I'm a Luddite and I was on a deadline for another book.)

Other than that, I didn't do anything to promote Alice. I figured it would sink or swim on its own merit.

Downloads of Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland
Melinda writes:

During the free period, I gave away 22,740 copies in the US and 10,255 in the UK and hit the Top 10 free list in each. That surprised me, because I'd done free promotions before but had never given away that many.

Sales of Fifty Shades
Downloads when a book is free is one thing, how did those downloads translate into sales? 

Assuming the loans are $2 each, Alice has made close to $15,000 in the last 20 days. That's more than many of my advances. [....] Alice peaked at #194 in the US, and #56 in the UK. It is currently #643 and #208. At its peak, it was earning over $1,000 a day. Things have slowed down, but it is still outselling all of my other novels on Amazon.

Melinda's Plan
Where does Melinda go from here? How is she planning to capitalize on the incredible success of Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland?

Melinda has done what any smart author would do in her place: write a sequel. Fifty Shades of Alice: Through The Looking Glass is now available on Amazon. Melinda writes:

At the height of Alice's sales, I was fantasizing about money. What if I had twenty ebooks doing well instead of just one? Making $20,000 a day is almost impossible to comprehend. But is it really impossible?

I'm working on the third book in the Alice trilogy. When finished, I'll release it as a stand alone, and also package the trilogy as a set. So I'll have four ebooks (each individual title, and the combined collection.)  If I did this four more times with four more trilogies, I'd have twenty ebooks for sale. With twenty for sale, I could have one ebook always free on KDP Select. Twenty ebooks at five days per free promo is one hundred days of free promo. KDP Select resets every three months, and then you can use the free promo again.

Writing twenty ebooks might seem like a daunting task. But remember, five of those are box sets, and each ebook is only around 30,000 words.

So in order to have 20 erotica ebooks, and one title always free, I only need to write 450,000 words. That's less than five full length-novels. Writing 2500 words per day, that's only six months of writing.

Half a year to write twenty ebooks? It sounds crazy, but it is entirely possible, even though I really believe $20k a day is a fantasy that can never happen. It's just too big a number. And who knows when the mommy porn bubble will burst?

I'd never thought of it quite like that, but Melinda's got a point.

If an ebook were only 30,000 words long and every three books written was a trilogy, each trilogy could be bundled to make a fourth book. In that case an author could write 20 books after writing ([3 x 30,000] x 5) 450,000 words. At 2,500 words a day that would take about 6 months to do.

Amazon Select allows an author to offer her book for zero dollars for a maximum of five days every 90 days. With 20 books on Amazon's virtual shelves an author would have 100 days of free promo time which means that she could always run a free promotion on one of her books.

Here's Joe's comment on Melinda's plan:

If she [Melinda DuChamp] wrote 20 ebooks (15 titles and 5 collections) and each one earns only $150 a day, that's a million dollars a year. That's just 75 ebook sales and loans a day per title, and I've hit that number many times and for extended periods.

2,500 words a day, huh? Where'd I put my pen ...

UPDATE (February 25, 2013): Joe writes:

I ... asked my buddy Melinda DuChamp for a sales update, and she emailed me.

Melinda: "Happy to share, dearie. The two ebooks have made me over $65k in seven months. I'm working on a third, then I'm going to follow your lead and make a trilogy boxed set and a paper version via Createspace. Considering how quickly I wrote these books, this is the highest paid I've ever been as a writer per hour, even with traditional paper sales in the millions under my other names." (Ann Voss Peterson's Big Regret)

Other articles you might like:

- Kristen Lamb: 5 Steps To Writing Success
- What To Write About: Fiction That Sells
- Update On Amazon's KDP Select Program
- Indie Authors: Bad Sales? Redo Your Cover!

How To Increase Your Sales: 6 Tips From A Successful Indie Author

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Elizabeth S. Craig, a Penguin/Berkley author who has recently taken the plunge and self-published, writes about what has worked for her. These are her tips, paraphrased:

1. Use a loss leader
This is what grocery stores do all the time, they price one thing low, the loss leader--for some reason it's often bananas--to try and get customers in the door then they sell everything else at a normal price confident that the average customer will buy much more than the loss leader.

2. Release your self-published title about the same time as a traditionally published one
Many folks aren't going to be able to take advantage of the publicity push arranged by a traditional publisher, but if you have one then take advantage of it!

3. Use your real name for your self-published books
It's easier for fans of your traditionally published work to find your self-published work that way. Elizabeth writes:

I’ve made more money following a traditionally published release in my own name (i.e., the recent Quilt or Innocence release) than following a release with a pen name (the November 2011 release of Hickory Smoked Homicide as Riley Adams.) This tells me that readers are looking for other books under my real name.

4. Make sure everyone is on the same schedule
This point isn't so much about increasing sales as making sure there will be a book to sell! Elizabeth advises keeping in contact with everyone on your team (if you have one)--your editor, formatter, and so on--to make sure that they have time to devote to your book.  Elizabeth writes:

From a production standpoint, I’ve learned that I have to think ahead in terms of reserving editors, artists, and formatters. Last year I was ready to put my first self-published book through the production process and everyone I contacted was busy. This time I will contact everyone on my team before I complete my final draft.

5. Release a print version as well as an ebook
This will help keep your fans happy.  Sometimes folks are used to reading paper books and they don't want to change. Setting up an account at CreateSpace is simple and cost-effective so there's no reason not to. (I haven't done this yet because I don't want the bother, but I know I should.)

6. Write the book your readers want to read
If, for example, niche books are popular in your genre, then think about writing one, especially if you're at the beginning of your writing career and few readers know your name. For instance, if you're a mystery writer, cozy mysteries are popular and might be a good way to build an audience. Elizabeth writes:

I'm thinking that niche books with built-in, dedicated audiences (like cozy mysteries) tend to do well with self-publishing. It certainly doesn't hurt, in my observations, to have traditionally published books releasing regularly, either.

To read Elizabeth's entire article, go here: A Few Self-Publishing Thoughts and Discoveries

I hope you've found something useful in amongst these six points. If anyone has anything to add, please do!

Elizabeth's self-published books:
- Progressive Dinner Deadly (A Myrtle Clover Mystery)
- A Dyeing Shame (A Myrtle Clover Mystery) -- [July 26, 2012: Only $0.99!]

Elizabeth's traditionally published books:
-  They're all listed over on Elizabeth's book page.

Related reading:
- Self Publishing: 3 Steps To Success
- 10 Reasons Why Stories Get Rejected
- How To Find The Right Freelance Editor For You

David Gaughran Shares His Sale Figures: Print Pays

Last year David Gaughran used to list how much he was making from the sales of his books, what he was doing in terms of promotion, where he was selling his books, and so on, but he hasn't done it in awhile and I missed it.

Perhaps it's voyeuristic, but when David had a great month I felt inspired and when he had a slow month it made me feel better about the slow months I've had, so for me it was a win-win.

In any case, I was very happy to see David is once again reporting his numbers. In his latest post he concentrates on paperback sales of his book, Let's Get Digital (love that title!). He writes:

I was really slow to see the potential in print, and it was probably the biggest mistake I made over the last year. ...

I had felt that the market for Let’s Get Digital would be largely, um, digital, and that whatever was left would be cannibalized by the PDF version being available as a free download from my blog.
I was wrong.

Paperback Growth

Here are my paperback sales for the last five months:

February: 6
March: 24
April: 20
May: 49
June: 67

Note: A Storm Hits Valparaiso was released in Feb, Let’s Get Digital in May

I’m pretty happy with that growth – especially because I’m averaging $5 in royalties per copy sold. Last month, paperbacks brought in $330 (profit) – which is about 25% of my current income, helping me break new ground. I cleared $1000 in May and easily topped that in June – largely on the back of stronger print numbers.

Most of those paperback sales came from Amazon US, and, following that, direct sales to indie bookstores (mostly in the UK).
- Making Money From Paperbacks

Let's think about that. In one month David's paperback sales from just one of his books earned him 25% of his current monthly income from writing. That's what I call significant!

CreateSpace
This is the second time in the last few days I've come across an author singing the praises of Amazon's CreateSpace. (What Jen Talty of Cool Gus Publishing thinks of Amazon's CreateSpace.)

David makes another excellent point and one I hadn't considered. Let's say you're selling your ebook for $2.99 on Amazon and are offering a print version through CreateSpace for $13.99. When a reader views the ebook version they'll see the $13.99 price crossed out, the Kindle Price of $2.99 highlighted, and the customer will be informed that, in buying your ebook, they will save $11.

Now that's good advertising!

I've just concentrated on a couple of the things David talks about in his article; it's well worth the read: Making Money From Paperbacks

Related reading:
- Jen Talty: Amazon's CreateSpace Vs LIghtning Source
- Kobo's Self-Publishing Portal: Report From A Beta Tester
- Mystery Writer Elizabeth S. Craig's Reasons For Self Publishing

Photo credit: The Guardian

Audiobook Sales Up 33% From Last Year

Net Sales Revenue From Book Publishing Is Up

According to a recent article in gallycat, revenue from downloaded audiobooks has increased by a whopping 32.7% from last year (25 million vs 18.8 million). That's amazing, and excellent news for folks, such as myself, who love listening to stories.

Lately, I've been putting together a list of book bloggers who review self-published books, or who do author interviews with self published authors, and I've noticed a startling trend: increasing numbers of reviewers prefer submissions in audiobook format. Good news for authors who have made an audiobook version of their story and something that could give self published authors an edge.

But that isn't the only interesting statistic. Net sales revenue from ebook sales (283 M)  has surpassed that from adult hardcover sales (230 M)--although not from adult paperback sales (300 M), although adult paperback sales have gone down by 10.5 percent. But the largest decrease of all was in the category of sales revenue from mass market paperbacks; sales in this category have decreased by an amazing 20.8 percent.

For your viewing convenience, I've included the table from the original article, above.

To read the original article, head over to galleycat.com and read eBook Revenues Top Hardcover.

Thanks to Passive Guy for writing about this (eBook Reviews Top Hardcover).

Publishers are under-reporting electronic book sales

This is what well-known and respected agent Kristin Nelson wrote yesterday on her popular blog, Pub Rants:

Publishers are under-reporting electronic book sales in any given period on the royalty statements we are seeing.

That's a fact.

Wow! This is big. 

(By the way, Kristin's post wasn't primarily about publishers under-reporting ebook sales, it was about one of her authors, Courtney Milan, deciding to turn down a deal from Harlequin to self-publish. For more on Courtney's decision see her blog post on the subject as well as her interview over on the site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.)


A few weeks ago I read Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog post, The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements Update, where she wrote that publishers are under-reporting their ebook sales. (I also blogged about it.) I talked to a few of my friends after I wrote that post, they weren't writers, and they flat out did not believe that any reputable publishing company would under-report sales.

Well, it looks like publishers are indeed under-reporting ebooks sales.  I respect Kristine Rusch but she was just one person saying it.  Now it's two.  Two very respected people in the book industry.  I have no doubt that neither of these women would make this claim publicly if they weren't sure and if they didn't have proof.

It will be interesting to see this subject develop.