Basic Steps outlining how to publish an ebook!
Salve!
Here’s a quick and dirty set of directions explaining how to Publish an ebook! Had to write this up for a fellow author interested in self-publishing, so here goes for you, hope you enjoy. Let me know if I left anything out!
Google Adwords, Facebook, Goodreads, Oh my! The choices and effectiveness of Advertising your ebook.
Happy Holidays everyone! Only about three weeks left till Christmas, and let me tell you, things are only getting busier from here on out!
Today’s post is all about Advertising. More specifically, the types available to authors (on a relatively cheap basis) and whether or not it’s worth it. I’m going to give each type of advertisement a ranking. $ for affordability and stars for effectiveness. Ideally, you want a type that is low cost and high effectiveness, that is, purchases per click!
Opttion 1: Google Adwords: $ (Three Stars)
What you need: Google Account and a CC
How it works: Essentially, you are creating a text or picture advertisement to run alongside Google’s search results or on any google page. So for my Brass Legionnaire, if you typed in the word “Steampunk” you might see my advertisement pop up. The caveat is that you tend to pay by the click. You also need to pick good target words and hope that your book is a match for people doing that search The more you are willing to pay by the click, the more likely you are to get yours seen. But then the more expensive your advertisement campaign becomes.
I tend to run my ‘offers’ for clicks between $1.00 and $1.50 per day. That way, I can pop in fifty dollars and then let it run for a while. Have I seen a huge jump in sales? Not necessarily, but I have seen rather consistent clicking the advertisement, as well as rather consistent sales since I’ve started. Now I cannot individually target this as the factor in all honesty, but I am considering letting it stop at the end of this cycle and seeing what happens to my numbers.
Option 2: Goodreads (Or other book website/blog) $ (Three and a half stars)
Goodreads and other web blogs are great places to run your book ad. After all, you’re specifically targeting the group of ‘readers’ that you want. I’m not going to run an ad on a Women’s artwork website, I’m going to run it on one that likes to focus on Sci-Fi, fantasy, or history! Thus it is a tiny bit more effective, and if you are on Goodreads, you can see how some information on people clicking on your link. You can make the link go outside the site (and on other blogs) but for goodreads they encourage you to link to your own site on the page. I’m not sure which is better, as I have very limited experience with this site (only 4 days worth of ads.)
Option 3: Facebook $ Two Stars
So you’ve got a facebook account? Do you have a facebook page? Great, then you can run ads! Similar to the way that Google Adwords works, you create an ad then provide a link. Similar to Goodreads, you can link to an external site or to your own facebook group page. I was town between making a Steam Empire Chronicles page and an Author Page. In the end I went for an Author page, figuring that it would be all encompassing should I ever write more books (Which I plan to). Pop in some money, assign a target demographic, and off you go. Was this effective in getting me sales? Probably only a bare few. But it DID get me a much wider target base. Before the ad, I had roughly 20 ‘likes’ on my page. My ad has been running since Thanksgiving, and I’m up to about 55 or so. That seems pretty good to me. And they are people I don’t know! Even better! You have to go into this realizing that you aren’t out to make sales now, more so to build community involvement and interest.
Other advertising service: $-$$$ (three-four stars)
Bookbub and several other advertising services for self-published authors have sprung up like weeds around the proverbial well of writing. In many cases, the services can be overpriced or poorly targeted. Some specific ones are useful, but require that you discount your book in order to purchase an ad slot, and even then they can deny you. So if you’re looking for a specific time to do an advertisement, you’d be out of luck, as I was when I wanted to run Black Friday ads. However, in retrospect I’m sort of glad I didn’t spend $200 on the advertisement. I’m not sure I would have made it back.
Some other information: When I published with Wix, I got $30 free at Google Adwords and $50 free on Facebook for advertisements. Thus, I’ve only paid about $75 (out of my pocket) in advertisement costs total since my book was published. 2/3 of that was to Google. So as you can see, lots of choices, but be careful where you put your money!
Where do you guys advertise that makes the greatest bang for your buck? Or do you eschew advertisements altogether?
Brass Legionnaire has been nominated for an eBook Award from the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition. Read the post to find out more!
Happy Thanksgiving! I have a lot to be thankful for! First and foremost, I just learned that my debut novel, Brass Legionnaire, is a finalist in the Action & Adventure Category for the 2013 eBook Awards. The eBook Awards are done by the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition, and is one of the very first awards for e-publishing. You can learn more about them here.
It’s a great honor to even be considered for the award. Honestly, when I submitted my novel, I truly never even thought it was going to make it. And at first, I wondered if it was going to be one of those ‘you applied and paid a small entrance fee, and guess what? Everyone’s a winner!’
But it isn’t. I’m one of the top three in an entire category, going up against two other more veteran authors with many books and novels out, including last year’s winner of the same category. Oof!
But like I said, I’m so overwhelmingly excited just to be mentioned. And I’ve decided I’ll be going to EPICon (The annual conference/awards gala) this year just to see what it’s like to be a published author at an event where everyone is involved with publishing in one way or another. The even is in March, so I’ll be able to update you then on what happened!
Plus, I can still hold out hope for an award! And I already know I’ll be submitting Copper Centurion this upcoming year. As always, it never hurts to have a second string in your bow.
Happy Thanksgiving! Be sure to eat well and help the cook clean up!
A brief look at how to effectively price your ebook, in both the short and long term.
Hi all,
In Today’s posting, I wanted to talk about pricing your ebook. I know that many self-published authors are engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’ of sorts in an effort to eek out as much money from a book as possible. Someone once told me that I should always price my first book at 99 cents because “why would anyone spend more on a more expensive book when there are 99 cent ones out there?”
Good question. But I would like to say that there are not many other books out there just like my book. To be sure, there are a lot of quality 99 cent books out there. There are even many quality free books out there too. But for me, I know what my own book is worth, which is my first point.
1.) Price your book for what you think people will really pay for it. Everyone wants to get the most bang for their buck, and people are always looking for deals. But at the same time, don’t forget that you get what you pay for. If you purchase a 99 cent book, you’re expecting to read a 99 cent book. I don’t expect it to be great, just average. But if I see someone charging a bit more for their book – and it has good reviews with a good amount of traffic (I like to check the ranking numbers) then I’ll check it out.
2.) You will make more money by selling fewer higher cost books than you will selling more lower price books. Amazon, in particular, gives authors 70% of the profits if their book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99. So I make roughly $2.74 off each book I sell at the 70% rate. Contrast this to the paltry 30% offered to those who sell their book at 99 cents – a meager 30 cents (roughly) per book. So a person with a 99 cent book would have to sell nine books to make almost what I make in one book. One sell is a lot easier than nine.
3.) The flip side is also true. Nine cheap sells are a lot easier than one tough(er) sell. But this is where being smart ties in. Right now I have just one book. So I’ve priced it a bit high, with the idea that eventually I can lower the price. But how can you have your book, your work of blood-sweat-tears that took you a year to write actually have a helpful price while also keeping excited readers? Create a loss leader! Make a short story or two (ten thousand words or so) and price them at 99 cents or free. You don’t need an incredible amount of editing, just some basic formatting work and cover art. People will buy the cheap one, and be drawn into your story, then purchase your more expensive novel. By the way, Lindsey Buroker is an expert on this, check out her multiple 99 cent short stories that helped her get started in the world of self-publishing.
4.) Using a loss leader – This can be especially easy if you have a series. A loss leader is simply when you offer something at free or reduced prices to get someone interested in a product. You see this all the time when credit card companies give you a baseball hat or t-shirt when you sign up for a card. They lose a (small) amount of money on the shirt, but expect to gain more when you rack up big debts on your account.
So you set up your first novel as a cheaper or free introduction to your story, and hope the reader enjoys the story enough to purchase the next installments. Bingo, the ‘free’ book leads to two or three other purchases perhaps? Maybe more if you have multiple series.
What do you guys think about price setting? Is it better to start high then go low or simply stay low? Thoughts?
Ciao!
I return to take a closer look at Amazon’s KDP Select service and discuss whether or not you think it’s right for you.
Hi all,
Sorry for the long absence, but my life has been absolutely crazy the last couple of weeks. Moving houses, preparing for school, doing grad school work, setting up new house, first week of school, etc. Anyways, I back with my hopefully-weekly-blog-posting. 
This week I’d like to talk about Amazon Select. For those of you who don’t know, Amazon Select is a service run through Amazon’s KDP Digital publishing platform. Essentially, the gist is that if you sign up for this service, you have the ability to offer your novel(s) at no cost for five days. It also places your book in a ‘lending library’ where people can borrow your novel and read it. The more people who borrow your novels, the more money you get. Amazon has established a fund this month of $600,000 to pay KDP Select members.
Sounds pretty good, right? I mean people pay to borrow your book. There’s some math involved (See below) but the gist is that the more borrows your book gets, the more money you make.
For example, if the monthly fund amount is $500,000, the total qualified borrows of all participating KDP titles is 100,000, and your book was borrowed 1,500 times, you will earn 1.5% (1,500/100,000 = 1.5%), or $7,500 for that month.
So what’s the catch? Several in fact. First, your novel must be exclusive on Amazon KDP for 90 days. Three months of not being able to sell it digitally on any other site. Now you’re still free to sell it physically – i.e. paperback wise – through other sites, but lets be real here. If you write eBooks and you are not a multi-thousand copy seller, you probably aren’t selling more than perhaps a dozen hardcovers a month, give or take. You’re limited by the five free days, and with Amazon adjusting their rankings to eliminate free ‘purchases’ so that they won’t count towards the sales ranking, I’m not sure how effective this is. Sure, your book is free, but it isn’t boosting your ratings and isn’t really getting you much. If you’re using it as a loss-leader for a series, it would make more sense, but perhaps not so for a person like myself with just one book.
Of course, I’m not exactly selling tons of novels through Barnes and Noble or Smashwords and sell the majority if my books through Amazon. So I could try it out, and may be tempted to if I ever write a short story companion to Brass Legionnaire. That could be a great way to bring in new readers with the style of short fiction that is so popular right now.
So to sum up, Select is something that I’m not considering using now. I may consider doing it down the road with a companion novel to drive up interest in my Steam Empire Chronicles, but until then, I’ll stick to the sidelines. I’d be interested to see if B&N rolls out something similar to compete, perhaps offering a more impressive rate amount or additional free days.
That’s all folks, time to get back to writing Copper Centurion. I leave you with a lovely quote by your favorite rabble-rousing assassin, spy, and rebel, Corbus.
“Have it your way, Brittenburgian,” Julius’ eyebrows rose. “Ah yes, see I placed your accent. I have a special place in my heart for that corrupt, disgusting, pestilent city.” Corbus sneered wickedly. He socked the legionnaire again, and the man collapsed back to the ground.
“Send a message to the Duke, we’ve got a prisoner.”
Ciao!
Modern Papyrus 