Timing for Series & Pricing

Your books are romance, correct? What's the word count?

What are your writing/publishing plans after this two-book series?

For pricing:
*For <$2.99, Amazon only gives you 35% royalties, so I'd stick above $2.99+ for regular price for a novel to get 70% royalties
*I wouldn't go over $4.99, just based on the prices I'm used to seeing. Over $4.99 I think would discourage too many readers. Hard sell for an unknown writer.
*So I'd stick with $2.99-$4.99, probably closer to the lower end of that range. Personally, I sell my novels (about 60k) for $3.99, and I think that would be reasonable. You could also possibly price the first book lower at $2.99, then $3.99 for the second.
*Also: pricing is easy to change! You can run a 99 cents sale on Book 1 (best to put the first book on sale vs the second) whenever you like, for example. Or just change the price and see what happens.

For scheduling:
I asked about your future writing plans because this would affect what I recommend here. People talk about rapid releasing to take advantage of Amazon algorithms...IDK how well this works. My books are 2-3 months apart because I put out 4-5 books (short novels/novellas) a year. My instinct is somewhere in the 3-6 month rage for you. I think <6 months is better or people might forget about you. Now, one thing to consider is that KDP (Amazon) allows pre-orders of up to 90 days, so you might try to have the pre-order for Book 2 up by the time Book 1 comes out so people who enjoy Book 1 can immediately pre-order Book 2. In that case, it'll need to be 2.5-3 months between books.

It's only "bad" depending on what your goals here are. If you want to make a full-time income as an indie author in the near future, then yes, having nothing else in the works might not be great... It depends what you're looking for.

One other question: are your two books separate couples or the sample couple?

Sarah M said:

Do you know if Amazon is the only ebook retailer that allows pre-orders?

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I have my books up for pre-order everywhere: Kobo, B&N, and iTunes. The latter two I do through Draft2Digital. I am not sure what the time frames allowed for pre-order are for the other retailers are, though, just that it's 90 days on KDP.

When I was originally writing the series and for a time after I finished, it was my full intention to be a full-time author, especially since I was planning on writing the spinoff. However, now I just want to put my stories out there and see what happens.

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To make a decent money as an indie author in romance you generally have to publish quite frequently. Even 3 books a year would be seen as a pretty light year to many... It's sort of nuts.

Both books in the series are centered around the same couple.

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If both books are about the same couple I would release them closer together than if they weren't. I'd probably lean toward 2-3 months. How does the first book end? HFN? Cliffhanger?

If you don't have a following yet, (and I'm not being mean here--just direct), it doesn't matter. The point of a certain release schedule (one week apart or one month apart are typical) is that your book would rank because your mailing list bought it and it will stay visible for some optimal time as a result. A new book by an unknown author is going to, short of a miracle, sink to # 3 million faster than you'd like, and that sort of ranking will never let you be seen by people browsing for books. Of course, AMS ads have bolixed up the possibility of being visible through ranking alone. Sadly, you used to be able to win visibility on merit, but Amazon, wanting to line its pockets more than it wants to please customers, has the vendor's spend on AMS determining visibility more often than not. Visibility used to = more sales, and you could hang out for a while in the top 1000, assuming you had a purchasing mailing list. Even 300 people buying would start that process working. (I used to release at .99 to start the ball rolling and reward my mailing list for their loyalty.) The ultimate goal was to hit the top 20 in your subgenre, and that would help book browsers see your book easily. The top 3 in a subgenre was golden. I've been there, and it takes a good long while for the sales to tail off after that.

So these awful new days, with a new author, it'll be tough to sell any books beyond friends and family. First, have a great cover and great product description. What I'd do is put them in Select, so you're in KU/Amazon only. Release the first ASAP, and then release the second in 83 days more or so, at which point, you'll put the first one to a five-day FREE sale. (that's under promotions). Then re-up for a second 90 days in KU and run another 5 free days as soon as they'll let you. So your first book is up there for 10 nearly consecutive days for free. For two days of that first five-day period, run promos at sites like Freebooksie and EReaderNewsToday if you can (they may require a minimum number of reviews). They'll run you about $60 each but get you a lot of downloads of the free book. If the second book is priced at $3.99, and if you spent $120, you'll need 45 sales of book 2 to make that work financially. Then hope that word of mouth takes over and keeps selling the book for a few months. If that does happen, and once you've paid for cover and editing, then look into AMS ads, keeping a low spend every day ($5-$10) for about two weeks. Then shut AMS ads off. Then six months later, do that all again.

If you can't afford those two ads, or if you don't have the reviews to get those good ads (it's competitive), then look through this list for free listings of free books: https://kindlepreneur.com/list-sites-promote-free-amazon-books/ I'm not sure each still exits, so you'll have to work that out for yourself. Each one might not get you more than 5 free downloads of book 1, but if you get some reviews out of that, then next time around, you can get into the more effective sites like freebooksie.

Never put the second book to free--or even to .99. People who tell you "July is a bad month to release" or "X is a great month to release" don't know what they're talking about. Any month is a fine month and gives you an equal shot as any other month.

Good luck on learning the ropes of placing ads, and good luck on getting back to writing more. I wish you success.

If you're not in the US, you can't upload directly to B&N, so a lot of writers use D2D for that. Kobo doesn't have that limitation, so it's not a problem to go direct with them.

Sarah M said:

Okay. And you know, until a couple months ago I'd never heard of Kobo. lol Why do you upload your books directly to that site instead of using D2D?

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Partly because there is a promotions tab in Kobo Writing Life that you don't have access to through D2D, allowing you to apply for various promotionss.

I live in Canada and have a Kobo. Kobo is very popular here. In fact, I sell more copies in Canada through Kobo than Amazon, and since I'm a Canadian author writing books set in Canada, I do have quite a number of Canadian sales. Close to 50% of my Kobo sales are in Canada. Many months I make more on Kobo than I do on D2D, which I use for iTunes, B&N, Overdrive, and others, so not losing 10% in revenue to D2D makes some difference.

So for me it makes sense, but I don't think it would for everyone.

Marissa D said:

If you're not in the US, you can't upload directly to B&N, so a lot of writers use D2D for that. Kobo doesn't have that limitation, so it's not a problem to go direct with them.

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This definitely used to be true, but I thought I had heard that it no longer was? (sometime in the last year?) Anyway, I don't make a ton on B&N, so I'm happy using D2D.

And yeah, it is hard to break into indie romance these days. I started self-publishing a year ago, and have had modest success (more than I ever had with small presses, under a different name) which I think I owe to 1) Twitter presence, 2) very catchy title for my first book, and 3) luck. There are a bunch of different ways to approach it, and I never considered KU (because selling in Canada is important to me, and Kobo seems more popular here), but some people do well on it.

I have four series. Three are romantic suspense and one is contemporary romance. I publish on all retailers. I do permafree for the first books in all the series and price 2.99 for the rest. I try to get Bookbubs for the first books as much as possible because that helps get the ball running for sales for the rest of the series. With my series one consists of 5 books, the other 7 books, the other 4 books, and the other 3 books.

Some people price 99 cents for the first book but I've found permafrees work so much better. If readers like your first book they will read the rest of the series and even unrelated books in your back list. Permafrees usually work (that is if the reader liked the book) because some readers (especially those outside Amazon) won't buy from a new-to-them author so a loss leader can work wonders in gaining readers. I've gotten a lot of loyal fans from my permafrees.

Permafrees sell in the background for you without you always actively promoting. But, again, you gotta have a first book that people enjoyed enough to go on to the rest of the series. If your first book is lacking then permafree won't get you followup sales.

There is no general price. It depends on your genre, what the market is willing to spend, and how well you cell at a certain price. The 2.99 price has been my sweet spot so I stick to it except when I run discounts I price 99 cents. I was raising prices for my older books but that just made sales stop so I went back to 2.99 for those too.

If it wasn't for pricematching we could have more freedom with pricing but some retailers don't allow you to price lower on others, etc.

Sarah M said:

Thanks so much.

Yeah, I noticed a lot of ebooks on Amazon were $3.99 and that does seem reasonable. I just didn't want to go to high or too low, at least at first.



Do you know if Amazon is the only ebook retailer that allows pre-orders?



When I was originally writing the series and for a time after I finished, it was my full intention to be a full-time author, especially since I was planning on writing the spinoff. However, now I just want to put my stories out there and see what happens.



Both books in the series are centered around the same couple.

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[FONT=&quot]Were those 3.99 books in KU? In KU authors rely on free borrows so pricing doesn't have as much of an affect as it does if you are not in the program. It's much easier to move a high-priced KU book than it is one readers pay for. If you plan to sell on other retailers I'd ignore books in KU and concentrate on the pricing of wide authors so you get a better idea. Both methods have different rules, etc.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Also, some books are from small presses but you can't tell. Small presses tend to price extremely high even for novellas. [/FONT]

Sarah M said:

So what month(s) would you suggest to release for the possible best result?

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There is no right or wrong answer, but I no longer release anything in the summer. For many it's a dead zone known as the summer slump. That's because people are busy doing other things. I find that the fall and spring are the best months for me.

I have a ten book series. The first two kind of suck so I price them at $2.99. The rest I price at $3.99. That seems to work out well for me. Regarding timing, certainly there are seasonal patterns on sales, but the time of release doesn't seem to affect sales one way or the other as far as I can tell.