Marketing – Page 3 – Teel McClanahan

Kickstarting creative projects

In response to a conversation on Facebook about ROI for Kickstarter Backers, where the responses were alternately about Kickstarter being a money-sink and about seeing lots of interesting products available there, I responded:

Kickstarter has to keep reminding people (and modifying the way things are worded & presented) that it is not, and should not be used as, a store. Backers aren’t Buyers. Rewards aren’t Products you’re purchasing.

At its core intention, Kickstarter is for this: A person has a creative project they’d like to execute, but not the funds to do so. Other people pledge money toward that person being able to create what they’ve envisioned; if enough people think the idea is something they want to exist (enough to put up cash), the creator gets funded.

As an aside, creators may offer rewards to backers who pledge significant funding toward their project. What a backer is paying for is always the execution of a creative idea, and any rewards delivered are equivalent to a tote bag or mug you’d get for pledging to PBS. The biggest problems I’ve seen in the discussions around Kickstarter come from creators & potential backers who deny what Kickstarter says it is, and try to treat it as a marketplace/store – and Kickstarter letting them.

I’ll admit that I have trouble with this last point/problem, myself – largely due to financial reasons; I’m not a wealthy patron of the arts, but a sort of ‘starving artist’. I don’t have a lot of room in my normal budget for making meaningful pledges. Roughly half of my pledges have been for the minimum amount: $1. None of my pledges have been over $15 and only one over $10. Where the problem of my budget meets the problem of seeing Kickstarter as a store selling products is this: I look at the rewards on a project I want to back, and if the “cheapest” reward is more than I can afford to spend, I typically just back $1 – it’s a way of showing that I believe the project is worth backing (though I can’t afford to do so properly). Projects I see near the beginning of the month are more likely to get my backing than those near the end of a month, because of how we do our budgeting; if we have $45 for [books + music + movies + games + apps] each month, it’s pretty easy to not have even $25 left (for a product we may not see for half a year) by the time even mid-month rolls around. Likewise, there are projects where I know the creator, I want to support their work, but I have no interest in the specific project they’re Kickstarting.

For example, there are two current Kickstarters by authors I know, The Way of the Gun and Dead of the Union, which I’ve been debating backing. On one hand, especially for Scott Roche‘s The Way of the Gun, I want to support the creators – Scott Roche and I have worked together on several projects over the years, helping Beta Read and/or edit one another’s stories/novels, discussing business, religion, and more, and in principle I’d like to see all his creative projects succeed. On the other hand, I have no interest in westerns. At all. I don’t know anything about Bushido. The core concept of his project is lost on me. I’ve never read/heard anything by the other authors whose stories are in the anthology, either. Likewise, I don’t currently crave historical fiction or zombie novels, though I have a couple more of my own to write, so while I would like to see Dead of the Union succeed, I don’t really want to read it.

Still, in accordance to what I wrote above, the point is the support, not the rewards. If I had the room in my budget, I could pledge more and tick the ‘no rewards’ box at Kickstarter, but I think the best way I can support these two projects is to: 1) ‘Sign my name’ by backing them, and 2) Spread the word. So I’m pledging a bit to each project, and I’m blogging about them here. I’m also sharing the projects on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. In a few years, when we’ve paid off our debts (we’re still on track to pay off our consumer debt (not student loans) by mid-2104) and have a little more financial freedom, I’ll almost certainly upgrade this sort of behavior to include more substantial pledges, but for now my best effort is to try to encourage you, dear readers, to consider making your own pledges to these projects. Continue reading Kickstarting creative projects

Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

I have Facebook Pages set up for myself and for Modern Evil Press, but I don’t really make good use of them. I also have subscriptions turned on, on my personal Facebook account, so fans can just subscribe to my updates there and … well, that’s probably the best option, if you actually want to see all my updates, and know what I’m doing, what I’m working on, et cetera. I do have a couple apps pulling the feeds from this blog, my podcast, and any updates to modernevil.com and wretchedcreature.com onto the official Facebook page for me (though not the Modern Evil Press page), so if you Like me there, you’ll know most of what I’m doing, but I rarely make direct updates/posts. Sometimes I try.

A little while ago I began trying to write an update for my page, from my iPhone, and … it got a bit out of hand. Here’s what I wrote (with a few tiny adjustments):

Trying to decide what to attempt this year for NaNoWriMo, and how to publish it (in print) in time for PHXCC’13 without going broke in the process. Possible ideas:

1) Rush to be ready to re-write Dragons’ Truth by November 1st
2) Write a ‘tentacle novel’ for NaNoWriMo (specifically to sell at PHXCC, partially via a tentacle-themed-crafts collective I’m tentatively a part of).

These two ideas each lead to spin-off ideas:

3) The Dragons’ Truth re-write is supposed to include designing it to allow for a sequel – actually I’m planning a trilogy. Due to timeline issues, I’d like to have all 3 written before the first goes to press. (At least for the paper version; eBooks are easy to change/correct/update.)
4) Should I write one long-ish tentacle novel (say, 75k+ words) or two or three short ones (under 40k words each), which can sell for pocket money (target: <$7.99)? Doesn’t “The Tentacle Trilogy” sound good? “Introducing: The Mystery of the Missing Manacles, Book 1 of The Tentacle Trilogy“

5) Printing trilogies is expensive. Triple the setup costs, trouble moving inventory for later books in the series… And while I really like the idea of doing the individual books (for either trilogy) as cheap paperbacks and adding a combined hardcover limited edition that would sell for a premium price, that makes for a very expensive spring, next year.
6) If I really put my mind to it (and didn’t spend the whole of the next 3.5 months on the tabletop game I’m also developing) I could theoretically write all six books (How did I go from one or two books in the next few months to six? Six!?) in time to have some or all of them at PHXCC.

How those books are presented/sold becomes the conundrum: Do I only release the first book (of each series), and give specific release dates for the others? Do I make the first books available as paperbacks, both series available in combined LE hardbacks, and conditionally print the other paperbacks if/when the cost of doing so would be covered? Do I break the bank & print up 6 new paperback and 2 new LE hardbacks, all at once, and hope enough of them sell?

It would be difficult to set deadlines appropriately without knowing my publishing plans, or to begin building marketing hype for those unknown future releases.

Then there’s always the thought of kickstarting: I could write the books, edit them, prepare them for publication, and release the first book as an eBook (or just link to the free interactive version I’m planning, for Dragons’ Truth), then kickstart to try to raise funds for printing paper versions, with stretch goals for the various mixes/release-schedules postulated above, and the main reward being the “best version” printed.

This is getting longer than I’d planned. Maybe I should go do a blog post.

So… here I am. Doing a blog post. Continue reading Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

Amazon Sales Rank

Sometimes I see other authors post about their Amazon Sales Rank, and their comments consistently frustrate me – because they do not, in any way, match my experience. I saw someone post on G+ recently about how they saw their sales rank “plateau” after a 1-star review, and go on to speculate that Amazon must have frozen their sales rank, because their sales seemed to be continuing at the same pace. I’ve seen other people talk about building spreadsheets or even screen-scraping apps to pull and correlate their sales rank as it changes over time, where by “over time” they mean hour-by-hour and day-by-day. Now, certainly there are those whose books make it into the various “Top 100” lists at Amazon, and I can see the value of paying close attention when it gets to (or near) that level – anything you can do to stay in the top 100 will have a major impact on sales; those are the books people find by browsing, everything else is found at random or by name.

In case you aren’t familiar with Amazon Sales Rank, I’ll give a brief description: It’s like those Top 100 lists, in that a Sales Rank of 1 means the title is the most popular, a Sales Rank of 2 means the title is slightly less popular, and so on. Amazon has close to (or possibly now over) ten million titles available, so a title’s Sales Rank can be anywhere from 1 to 10,000,000. The lower the Sales Rank, the better the title is selling – and once a title breaks into the Top 100, visibility (and thus sales) skyrockets.

Now, in addition to Sales Rank, there’s also a per-category ranking done by Amazon, but it only even appears on a title’s page when that title is in the top 100 for that category. The per-category rankings (once you reach the top 100) can have nearly as big an impact on sales as being in the general Top 100, especially if those categories are well-matched to the content of your book. None of my books has ever really been in the Top 100 of anything (barring my one KDP Select title, which, during its promotionally-free days was in the top 100 free books for its category – a fleeting thing, seeing as that “sales rank” was reset as soon as the promotion ended), or really even close. In fact, most of my books don’t make it to Sales Ranks of lower than the tens of thousands – and then only for a matter of hours. Here’s a chart of the Sales Rank, over time, for one of my latest releases, Sophia (Never Let the Right One Go):

What you’re seeing there is that when a copy sells, the Sales Rank jumps. In the case of its first sale, it jumped (down to) under 100,000. For less than a day. If a second sale had been made that day, or within a couple of days, it would have gone even closer to that elusive “#1” on the chart. (Peak Sales Rank for Sophia, so far: 83,547) Except it didn’t get another sale. For over a month. So its Sales Rank dropped: 300,000 places in the first week, and another ~250,000 places over subsequent weeks until… Another sale! Jump up 500,000 sales ranks! Passing, presumably, 500,000 books which didn’t make a sale that day, most not that week or that month. But again you can see the immediate drop-off. The same 300,000 places down in a week without sales.

One could speculate that books which stay in Sales Ranks between 100,000 and 400,000 are probably making about a sale a week, and those that stay above about 700,000 are probably making a sale a month. Conversely one could speculate that Amazon has over half a million (of its ~ten million) titles which sell at least one copy a month or more. That’s the long tail.

My work lives in the long tail… Just a little further out.

Here’s another chart, from my best-selling novel (across all formats) ever, Cheating, Death:

That’s a lot more time compressed into the same chart, but you can see the same thing at work. It makes a sale, the Sales Rank jumps up for a day, drops rapidly, then gradually settles. The highest peak there, the first one, is a Sales Rank of 37,490 – just 37,390 places away from reaching the Top 100, right? The other peaks under 100k are in the 75k-95k range, but you can see its unpopularity has driven even single-sale-bumps to the 150k-range, near Spring 2012. (The fact that, across all countries, Cheating, Death has sold 18 kindle copies… simply tells us they calculate Sales Rank on a per-region basis.)

This is all somewhat to say that, while the unbounded “shelf space” of the online marketplace allows the long tail of products to exist, and to make sales, it doesn’t seem to do anything to make the products in the long tail more discoverable. Discoverability still rests on the shoulders of marketing. Amazon (et al) are not interested in selling more copies of the roughly ten million titles which sell one copy a week or less – they’re only putting their efforts into selling those books which are already selling a lot. They feature “Bestsellers” and “Top Sellers” and by default sort a lot of search results by “Popularity” rather than relevance. i.e.: If you do a lot of your own marketing, enough to build a big audience of your own, Amazon’s algorithms will bolster your marketing, adding their strengths to yours, turning your success into a runaway success. If your marketing doesn’t work, Amazon doesn’t help. It’s like tax breaks for the rich.

A few of my titles are like the ones pictured here, spending most of their time drifting in Sales Rank from 400,000 to 1,000,000. Several of my titles actually linger in the mid-millions; things which sold once, but never again. Most of my titles actually have no Sales Rank; they have never sold a single copy via Amazon, and thus aren’t even branded a failure in the same way as those which have – on the product page for something which has never sold a single copy, Amazon doesn’t even include a line for Sales Rank in the product data.

I just can’t identify with authors who claim to get sales of 2-3 copies a day, right out of the gate, and who worry when it slows down to 1-2 copies a day. Or with authors whose Sales Rank plateaus. If my Sales Rank plateaued, it would mean I was having record sales. Sales like I’ve never seen before, on any title. It would mean sustained sales, rather than one sale here and one sale there. Right now selling 2-3 copies a month, across all my kindle titles, isn’t a terrible month.

No, my reviews aren’t fake. They’re real, and they’re meaningful.

Frequently when I see/read an article/post/rant which is in any way about indie/self publishing, one of the off-handed remarks that seems inevitably tossed into the mix is something about how since “everyone has twenty or thirty friends they can get to give them 5-star reviews”, consumer-based ratings can’t be trusted. A book’s Amazon rating, to their mind, is meaningless. (Many such people also add that traditionally-published authors get “a slew of 1-star reviews having nothing to do with content, but merely in response to the cost of their eBooks” (presuming, of course, that somehow all traditionally-published eBooks are priced too high). This anecdotal evidence is just more proof to them that no Amazon/consumer rating can be trusted.)

I just want to say that, at least for me, this isn’t true. I wish my books had “twenty or thirty” reviews – regardless of whether they were “all 5-stars”! My most-rated book, on Goodreads, has 26 ratings (only 10 with reviews, some of those only 2-3 sentences), only 4 of those from friends/family (3 if you don’t count my own rating!). On Amazon, none of my books has more than 4 reviews, total! Most of my titles have zero reviews on Amazon. (Over on Amazon, Cheating, Death (which had 26 ratings on Goodreads) has only 3 reviews – one of them from my wife, posted in response to the 1-star, 1-sentence “review” that was the only thing there at first.) I have no idea how to get people to post book reviews, let alone friends and family – I can barely get my friends to read my books. To the point where, by now, it’s a running joke among half a dozen of them that none of them have read, or expect to ever read, any of my books.

The reviews my books have, by and large, are hard-won. Thousands of people read and/or listen to each book (sometimes tens of thousands), but most never even go so far as to give a star-rating, let alone a text review. Of those who pay for my books (which is a small percentage of my total readership), an even smaller percentage ever post a review. I don’t know who these flippant bloggers/journalists/ranters are, or who their friends are, or where they get their ideas, but they don’t have the whole picture. Some of us, the authors who are actually introverts, don’t have armies of friends – at all. Certainly not armies of friends we can mobilize to SPAM 5-star reviews across the internet, every time we put out a new book. Some of us write books that aren’t easy to summarize, whose emotional experience is not simple to express, and whose reviews/ratings represent the thoughts of the best of our readers, rather than the result of a popularity contest.

Incidentally, I get more “fan mail” (between emails, text messages, and phone calls) than reviews. Hands down, no question, simply more. Easily double or triple the number of ratings I get (across all sites put together) per book. Readers are more likely to look up my home phone number and call me than they are to take 60 seconds and put a star rating on the book they loved enough to call me about. (Even when I ask them to do so on the call, and they say they will.)

Alternatively, it’s possible that the reason I haven’t been able to marshall an army of friends to review my books is that they’re all terrible books. In that case, my friends might feel it wouldn’t be appropriate to write a “bad” review of my book, since we’re friends, so they feel better not writing anything at all. I mean, it’s a possibility. It seems contradicted by the semi-regular fan mail (and calls), but … it’s a possibility.

Never Let the Right One Go – One Month Out [Updated]

It’s been just over a month since the official release/publication date of my new book/series, Never Let the Right One Go, so I thought I’d do a post to go over its progress so far, in terms of reviews, sales (both paper and digital), and free downloads. All numbers in this post are based on the best data I have available, covering the period from when the books became available (on the podcast as early as May 4th, the eBooks between midnight on 5/12 and several days later, and the hardcovers since 5/14) and midnight at the end of 6/13.

First I’d like to address free eBook downloads: As I’ve stated before, I’ve only made ePub and mobi versions of the eBooks available for free, so far. Since for 2012 nearly 75% of all my free eBook downloads are of a PDF version (over half a version which is only screen-readable, not printable, and none of which have reflowable text), this puts both Sophia and Emily at a disadvantage regarding eBook download volumes. In their first month of availability, the free Sophia eBook has been downloaded 62 times and the free Emily eBook has been downloaded 55 times. The ePub version is 30% more popular than the mobi version, for both titles. Considering that Unspecified, a poetry book, is still getting around 400 free downloads a month, every month, nine months after release, these are disheartening numbers. Of course, over 87% of Unspecified‘s downloads are of PDF versions, so I suppose that tells me what I need to do if I want to increase the number of people reading Never Let the Right One Go for free; based on these numbers, I could expect each title to see 400-1,000 downloads a month, if PDFs (et cetera) were available.

Then there were the versions of the eBook available for purchase. As I stated in my Phoenix Comicon wrap-up post, I sold two copies (of each of the two books) of the eBooks at Comicon, via Indie Aisle redemption cards, at roughly $8.99 per eBook. In addition to those, I sold 5 copies of Sophia (and no copies of Emily) – two each on Amazon and the iBookstore, and one copy via Barnes & Noble. (It’s possible some copies sold via Smashwords Premium Distribution that I won’t hear about for months; I don’t count those as sold until my balance due is updated.) After Comicon, because of great sales there, and because of my current pricing scheme, I adjusted the prices of the eBooks down to $2.99 (effective on most stores around 6/1) – only one of the 5 copies of the Sophia eBook were at the reduced price; the four other buyers (plus the two at Comicon) thought $8.99 or $9.99 was a reasonable price for an eBook. I’ll write another post after a while, on this subject: I think the eBook buyers clamoring for lower prices are a tiny (vocal) minority, and that most eBook buyers see low price as an indicator of dubious quality.

In addition, at Comicon I sold 33 copies of the Never Let the Right One Go limited edition hardcover, and I’ve sold another 5 copies online, for a total of 38 copies sold of the hardcover book containing both complete novels. (Four copies were exchanged with the photographers/models as compensation, so there are only 8 copies left, though one of those is also spoken for; I have a buyer who has asked me to hold one copy, to be delivered by hand (and paid for) next month.) Plus, I made up two copies of the audiobooks on MP3 CDs, and sold one of them at Comicon, for another copy of each book in a reader’s hands.

Speaking of the audiobook, I began podcasting both books on the Modern Evil Podcast at the beginning of May. Each is currently only up to about chapter 6 (with 21 chapters to go of each novel, over the next 21 weeks), so I can’t really count how many people have listened to the novels, quite yet – but I can see how many have downloaded at least the first chapter of either novel; 172 have downloaded the first chapter of the Sophia audiobook, and 129 have downloaded the first chapter of the Emily audiobook. (45-55 each have downloaded the latest chapter in the feed, so that’s probably how many are very-actively listening; around 50.) All told, here is the breakdown of distributed copies for the first month (or so) of availability:

Amazon: Sophia x2 ($13.22)
BN: Sophia x1 ($5.84)
iTunes: Sophia x2 ($8.39)
Indie Aisle: Sophia x2, Emily x2 (~$36)
Hardcover: x38 ($1320)
Audiobooks: x1 (~$18)
Free eBooks: Sophia x62, Emily x55 ($0)
Totals (full book): Sophia x108, Emily x96 (~$1402)
MEPod (started): Sophia x172, Emily x129 ($0)
Total started: Sophia x280, Emily x225 (~$1402)

When given the option to acquire the novels individually, about 30% more people get Sophia than Emily, though when paying readers are given the same option, 100% of them only get Sophia (so far). But what do they think of the books once they read them?

Well, so far 100% of the reviews the two books have received on sites like Goodreads and Amazon have been from people whose copies were not included in the stats above; they were people who were involved as First Readers or Beta Readers of the books. (The latest reviews are from someone who didn’t have time to make it through the written texts, but was easily able to listen to the audiobooks once I had them completed; she is still one of my First Readers, though.) I mention this not because I believe their reviews are biased toward me (give me a moment, I’ll show they’re all over the board – rather than the oft-derided all-five-star reviews of “the author’s friends and family”), but because … I really don’t yet know what random people coming across the books think about them. I don’t yet know what any of the people who paid nearly $40 (w/tax) at Comicon think of them (and likely never will). Several of my First Readers and Beta Readers for Never Let the Right One Go had never read a book by me before, so they weren’t (yet) fans, and others had less-than-favorable reactions to some of my other recent work – and yet so far, most of their reactions have been, while reasonable and honest, not what I would have expected from each of them. Here is what my books look like on Amazon, right now:

Four-star average is fine by me, and none of the reviews are the sort of 1-star or one-sentence reviews I’ve been frustrated by in the past. Instead, there is no consensus (so far) about whether the books are good (or mediocre), or as to which one is better than the other (with Sophia taking a very slight lead), and after a month, I’m not really sure either book will (possibly ever again) receive additional reviews or ratings on Amazon. Most of my titles don’t have any reviews, and those that do seem to get them within a very short period after release and then never again – despite new people reading them, sometimes thousands of new people reading them. Interestingly, the numbers on Goodreads look a little different (though the reviewers are about 75% the same; their reviews copied and pasted between the two sites), with Sophia looking like a significantly better book than Emily. Here’s what the books look like on Goodreads right now:

Here, Sophia comes in almost a full star-rating better, though if you look at the details at the bottom of Emily, you can see the chart is out-of-date (there should be two 3-star ratings, not one) because the latest review of Emily was posted just a couple of hours ago. Sophia has the look of a good book, with all those 5-star ratings, something which isn’t showing up on Amazon.

Now, I realize you may not look at a lot of book reviews, so I’ve grabbed screenshots of a couple of other titles to give you an idea of commonly-seen ratings distributions for generally-popular books. Either most people really like them (top right, 90% 4-star or better), or they are polarizing, (bottom right, 61% 4-star or better, plus almost 21% 1-star), but there isn’t an even spread across all five star-ratings. Usually there are disproportionate numbers of 5-star (and sometimes 1-star) reviews, but that (I believe) has a lot to do with the nature of amateur reviewing; people tend only to speak up about things they feel strongly about. We see the first pattern beginning to form for Sophia at Goodreads, but not for Emily, and for neither at Amazon, which is where sales are likely to result (or not) from those star-ratings. When writing these books I’d been dreaming of a pattern like the second and hoping for a pattern like the first (and really just hoping to get enough ratings/reviews that any pattern at all appeared, so at least in that I’m making some headway!), so it’s a bit disappointing to see such an even spread of opinions about both books, so far. They are neither loved nor divisive. I’m not sure they’re provoking any conversation, either:

If there’s one thing I’m learning in the wake of the recent Prometheus release, it’s that creating something which leaves people with things to wonder about, to talk about, to complain about, and to leave the theatre/book/whatever scratching their heads about, it’s probably better than … well, apparently better than what it is I’m doing, where I do my best to explain everything, tie up all loose ends, fill all plot holes, et cetera. Where the characters’ motivations and actions and resolutions are clear and make sense (at least internally, even if you wouldn’t have done that in their position), and the world is well-thought-out and thoroughly-explained… Luckily, I suppose, the next book I’m writing, in the DNGR Saga, starts in the middle, goes all sorts of crazy places along the way, and ends up with plenty of unanswered questions. Unfortunately, I fear that’ll put it in with so many of my other books as being unreviewable – people just won’t know what to say (or think) about them. Killing word-of-mouth sales/interest. Nullifying the possibility of building a reputation.

Bah.

Now I’m rambling.

Enough: Good night.

Update: After getting some sleep (well, mostly what I’m about to write was things I continued thinking, while lying awake in bed, trying to sleep as the sun came up beyond my curtains), I wanted to clarify/summarize a few key points: Within one month of availability, Never Let the Right One Go has been more profitable and sold more copies than any of my other books (excepting Cheating, Death) across their entire lifetime (some approaching a decade since first printing), and in terms of gross revenue it is far and away the most successful book (or series) I have ever published. In terms of revenue from book sales (not including cover art) the only other thing in my history which comes close is by comparing the entire Untrue Tales… series to the idea that Never Let the Right One Go is (technically) a series of two books; and even then Never Let the Right One Go already has 50% more revenue than all editions and releases of everything in the Untrue Tales… series combined. Depending on how the Sophia (and Emily) eBooks do in the coming months, and how quickly the 7 remaining copies of the hardback sell, Never Let the Right One Go should surpass Cheating, Death in both profitability and copies sold before the end of the year. Without the benefit of the revenue from selling the original cover art, Cheating, Death is already beaten on that front. Also, I believe each of the two books have received more Amazon reviews than any of my other titles. Despite my frustration with the star-distribution, more reviews is better, and something I’ve been striving toward lately, and Emily and Sophia have succeeded there, as well.

All in all, this is my most successful book to date, by many measures. I feel it very successfully accomplished what I set out to do when writing the books, which is my paramount goal. In addition, it has sold more copies, faster, for more money, than anything else I’ve ever published. In part this is because of all the marketing efforts I built into it from the start (cover design, hooking first sentences and first chapters, et cetera), and in part as a result of the gradual building of my reputation/brand/audience/fanbase, so that each book I write does a little better than the one before it. Now I just have to figure out what the right first sentence/paragraph/chapter for my new book will be, and what the heck to put on the cover, right?