A Very Small Fish Jumping Into a Very Big Pond

I think there's a reader psychology issue to consider, too. I remember when I first got an ereader (this was 2011 or so, maybe?) and I went to Kobo because it was a Kobo ereader. In the lower price range there were tons and tons of books without covers and books that were public domain books republished at 99 cents. At the time, I don't know if it's still the case, Kobo allowed you to filter on price. I immediately filtered the results to hide all of the cheap books. This was me as a reader seeing what was available at cheap prices and deciding I just didn't have time to sift through all that crap to find what was good.

As a writer, having experimented with pricing, I think there are different markets of readers at different price points. When you price at $3.99 in KU, which is a pretty standard approach for fantasy in KU, you attract one group of readers. But when I priced at $7.99 I was attracting a different group of readers. And the fact is a book may appeal to one group and not the other. An author will never know which group they appeal to if they don't try different pricing strategies. (Sure, if you're selling enough to make $10,000 a month, don't mess with a good thing, but how many of us are in that position?) Self-censoring because you're self-published doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Most readers don't pay attention to that. They look at the writing and the presentation and if those are of an acceptable standard they don't go digging in to find who published the book.

And that book that was selling at $7.99 only has about a dozen reviews on Amazon and the other two books in the series have 3 and 4 respectively right now on Amazon US. (It sells better in the UK but I'm sure there aren't that many more there.)

To each their own, but when you don't have much to lose, why not try different things?

For the record, I took that series back out of KU almost immediately because it just wasn't a good fit. (I emailed and they let me.) I was seeing weird results in KU this time around that made me wonder if something was wrong on their end. My mysteries are still in KU and behaving normally, but the fantasy series was most definitely not. I'm leaving the books at $4.99 for now because I'm going to be in a promo next week, but I may well take them back up in a month or two.

A little bit of exciting news that I hinted at in my last post. My YA fantasy first-in-series title, Rider's Revenge by Alessandra Clarke, is in a StoryBundle from now until April 11th. You can check it out here if you want: https://storybundle.com/fantasy

The non-fiction StoryBundle I was in in 2017 was a very nice boost for me, so we'll see how a fiction one compares. I have a friend who has been in a few and I think was pleasantly surprised but that was a couple years back. If nothing else, it's some great company to be in. In that first tier along with my book are books by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and James A. Owen. And the second tier includes a title by Alan Dean Foster as well as a number of up and comers.

As someone who is fairly prawny in terms of social media reach I'm always nervous about opportunities like this one because I want to be able to pull my own weight but it's hard when you just don't have a captive audience set up waiting to hear from you, but hopefully some of my good friends who are better at that sort of thing will come through for me. I've sent out the pretty pleases and they're usually pretty good for it. (In return I tend to have more time to keep a finger on the pulse of what's going on and can give them a quick download when they need it, so it's a fair trade.)

Depending on how well this goes it'll also result in my passing the professionally published threshold for Writers of the Future, so I went ahead and wrote and submitted one last short story to them last week. I tend towards novels these days but I had one story idea I'd been playing around with for a couple years that I finally tackled. I suspect it's too dark for that market, but since it was likely my last chance to submit there I went ahead. (It's not graphic but the themes are more adult and that market is PG-13.)

In other news, I'm still on track to hit six figures gross in June, just in time for my birthday. I was honestly hoping to get there earlier than that, but that's how I always am. No matter what I accomplish I always want to have done better than I have. It's what drives me forward but it does make it challenging to appreciate what I already have.

The cozies are getting great reviews and selling well but I need more of them out to make up for the high ad costs in that genre to really make it work, so that's where I'm focused right now. But if the sellthrough from the bundle is really promising then after this next cozy I'll have to step back to write a new fantasy novel. It's time, too. It's been two years since I released a title under that name. Problem is the fantasies take about twice as long as the cozies to write and sell about half as well. But they do sell at a better price point.

That's the real challenge of self-publishing: Knowing where to actually focus your efforts to get the best result. (It's something I'm afraid is not my strong suit.)

Figured I'd give a quick update since I was editing my forum signature to remove the link to the old Easy AMS Ads title. I released a 2019 edition earlier this month. AMS had changed so much in the past two years that it ended up being almost a complete re-write and was 10K words longer than the original. The ads still work for me, but it's definitely a more challenging environment now than it was two years ago.

Didn't hit the pro-out level for WOTF for Rider's Revenge after the Storybundle, but it was a great experience and I'd happily do another one anytime the opportunity arises. But I did finally get a U.S. fantasy Bookbub on that title for early June, so if the averages hold true I'll hit the 5K sold level at least. Actually if it only does half as well as expected I will. Only question then is if I hit the pay-per-word level, too.

I've also been doing more price experiments. I put my first romance novel at $6.99 because I took it wide and all of the non-KU books in my also boughts were at that price and I wanted to see if it sold at that price. It has. I'm using AMS ads to get those sales, so it's not a huge profit, but I just wanted to see if it was even an option. I'm not advertising the second book so sales on that one are pure profit and there are some. That's another pen name I need to feed at some point. And one I should probably focus on more than I have since sellthrough between those two books looks to be about 88%. (Hard to actually tell because there were some free giveaways and some people read book 2 and not 1 because of the subject matter and I was advertising both titles separately.)

Still on track to hit six figures in revenue next month. I suspect my profile is very different from most since I also write a lot of non-fiction. Right now I'm about 50/50 print to ebook sales.

Because of that I finally bit the bullet and bought my own set of ISBNs and have spent most of the last month putting my paperbacks out with IngramSpark. Only the cozies and non-fiction so far. I'd have to go back to the cover designer if I wanted to do the fantasy series and if I do the romances that associates them with everything else which I haven't chosen to do yet. I don't care so much about the novels as the billionaire romance but that continues to sell four years after it was published and with no promo, so I can't exactly pull it.

I submitted a note about my writing for my MBA program class notes this month because one of my classmates asked me to. It was right next to another classmate of mine who'd just sold his $10 billion company...

Even though that's not the path I would've wanted to take it's still hard to be struggling to succeed at this and see what could have been. Not a $10 billion company, but something far more lucrative than writing. In another forum there was a discussion about opportunity cost. As in, what you could be earning if you weren't doing this. They were talking in terms of putting a value on the time you spend on writing and publishing, but it's something I think about often.

Having come from a high income career I frequently think I'm a fool for pursuing this instead of doing that work. But each year I see improvement and think, "maybe this'll be the year when things finally pop for me" because when things do hit in this business it's often an exponential change. I took forever to reach $1,000 a month in income and then once I did I stayed well above that level from that point onward. (Knock wood it continues.) And my year-to-year numbers last writing year were an 8-fold increase in profit and 4-fold in revenue from the year before and this year I'm past last year's numbers with five more months to go. But I'm still so far from what I could earn in my old career it's not even funny.

I like what I'm doing a lot more than that other career, though, and I'm generally happier doing it. And that matters to me more than the money. I just need the money to hit a sustainable level. For me.

Someone in that other forum also made some comment about how authors shouldn't expect to make a lot of money from their writing. Like somehow writers should expect to live in abject poverty. I call bullshit on that. You don't aim high, you don't get anywhere, IMO. And why shouldn't writers expect to make money from what they do? I don't get it.

Anyway. Still going for now. May throw my hands up when I hit six figures and say, "Well, I can't say I failed" although I'll feel like it anyway if I quit at that point.

Or I may double down and set a bigger bolder goal. I would like to get at least one more cozy out before I make that call.

Thanks!

Thanks guys. Today is the Bookbub on the fantasy series so I suspect I'll be spending a lot of time refreshing my dashboard and watching for sellthrough to the other two books in the series. I have an international-only one for the cozy series later this month, so here's hoping that turns June into a nice month for me since April/May/June is when sales tend to slide for me and I start to think the world is ending.

CathleenT said:

Yeah, I saw your book in my Bookbub email, and I'm insanely jealous. I'd love to hear how you did. : )

Click to expand...

It actually bombed by Bookbub standards. They said the average number of downloads to expect was 2,200 and I'll be lucky to hit about 1,000 when all the numbers are in. Could be a Saturday in June, could be the book which I've always struggled to sell compared to other titles, could be a shift in the Bookbub demographic, could be that it had an international deal six months ago, I don't know. But it was not pretty.

Of course, it was still 1,000 sales, I did make it on to the top 100 authors in Teen Fantasy and at least as high as #81 which put me above Orson Scott Card for a moment, and I'll probably breakeven over the next day or so with sellthrough to the other books in the series. So as sad and pathetic as it was compared to what I was hoping for, it was still a successful promo for me and still a thousand sales which is a darned fine number.

And other good news is I feel no pressing need to go write another fantasy novel right now and divert from the cozies which sell much better and get a much better reaction from readers and are cheaper and easier to produce. But fantasy was my first love so it makes me sad to see this book just never quite do as well as I want it to. I suspect if/when I do go back to fantasy I'll be levels of magnitude better because I will (a) ignore what people think my stories should do, something which messed with how I wrote the romantic subplot in that book and (b) I'll just have that much more writing/storytelling experience to bring to the table. I'm still not quite at the point though where I can keep all the SFF opinions out of my writing, so non-fiction and cozies and the occasional romance it is for now.

Circling back here to provide the numbers for the Bookbub two weeks out. This was a 99 cent Fantasy promo of a completed trilogy with decent reviews but not amazing reviews where books 2 and 3 are priced at $7.99 and the collection is priced at $14.99. The collection is not available on Amazon. The only other promo I ran was a Many Books promo about a week out and some low-level AMS ads.

Final result (for now, there will likely be more follow through sales over time): 1,155 sales of the first book, 62 of the second, 47 of the third, and 12 of the collection.

So it cost me about $725 all told and I'm at about $1100 made at two weeks out.

If it had hit Bookbub's averages, I'd be at double that. So instead of a $375 profit, I'd have $1,475. But I think this is a good example of how big a role expectations play in all of this. I was bummed to hit only half the numbers they show for their average and yet, I still made a profit and had over a thousand sales. It's so easy with self-publishing to let all the expectations bring you down. And to let how others have done make you doubt your own path.

For example, I can't count the number of conversations I've seen where someone implies that if you have to advertise your books to sell them then something must be wrong with the books because they don't have to advertise so why should you. Or where someone will say that if you only make $2 for every $1 in advertising you spend that you're clearly not doing it right because large brands don't accept those levels of advertising costs. But so often it's about where each of us are on our writing journey. Yeah, sure, if you have 50 related books in your catalog and all you're returning is $2 for every $1 spent on ads, that's likely a problem. And if you're not getting organic sales in a hot genre where readers are devouring anything remotely close, then that's an issue, too. But if we're talking just a few books that aren't written to a hungry market? That's a different story entirely.

This industry is not one size fits all, but so many people speak from where they're sitting and don't see that what worked for them at the time they did what they did and in the area where they did it will not necessarily work for others. It might not even work for them if they were to start over today. I did extremely well with my Excel books but I know I could not publish those same books today and do near as well with them. And that was less than two years ago that I published the first one but the "for Dummies" people are now using AMS. That's a huge shift in that market.

Anyway. I know what I need to do. I need to put on the blinders and follow my own path and just focus on making steady upward progress. But those expectations, man, they'll kill ya. I have two more Bookbubs in the next two weeks (mystery and romance), so here's hoping I can keep them in check.

playground said:

Really interested to see how your next Bookbubs do.

Click to expand...

They both earned out, so I consider that successful. The cozy was breakeven on day 2, the contemporary romance on day 4 but there was a glitch on the day that one was supposed to go out that delayed the email by a substantial amount. I spent most of the day the contemporary romance was supposed to run looking at only 3 sales and having a minor panic attack, but by the end of the second day it was in range of what I would've expected. Neither one hit the posted average sales from the BB site so I've decided I will just no longer pay attention to that since I think it's skewed by trade pub books that have name recognition so get secondary shares when the ads run. They were both probably at 80%.

I had less immediate sellthrough on the cozy compared to the fantasy trilogy, I think because it's a series of related standalones as opposed to a complete trilogy, but at this point I think the cozy has more sellthrough than the fantasy trilogy. Just took a few days as people read book 1. And I'm still getting sales there now that it's back to full price. Lowest sellthrough was the contemporary romance because those are both different couples and book 2 is at $5.99. Cozies are at $3.99.

Overall happy to have had the Bookbubs but needed to learn not to judge myself by their posted averages and to wait until the end of day 2 to make any judgements.

I'm also pretty sure this is the last update I'm going to post on here. It's a good stopping point for me. I'm still writing, just done with doing progress reports.

K Robert Donovan said:

I have found it interesting reading about your journey into self publishing. I am at least a year away from considering direction on my book. I am going the traditional route, but I keep reading up on self publishing as a back up if I fail to find any takers of my work.

Click to expand...

Ages too late on the response on this, but I'd honestly suggest just writing the next book and the next if the trade route is what you really want. If you have that one book of the heart and it's the only book that matters to you or if you crave control or can't stand the timelines on the trade side then self-pub can make sense. But with self-publishing you really have to get about ten times as many things right to do well. You not only have to write a good book but you have to be able to package and promote it well, too. And it's all on you expense-wise. Some people have crossed over to trade after self-pub success, but I'd say far more have self-pubbed to crickets and that can be really hard to handle.

You can learn a lot if you self-publish and it may help. I know of more than one author who tried trade, couldn't break in, tried self-pub, didn't do very well, went back to trade with a new series and finally got a deal. (One just signed a significant six-figure deal as a matter of fact.) But just writing that next book and that next book and that next one while keeping an eye on what sells is probably just as effective a path.

Whichever path you end up taking, good luck with it.

Anyway.

I actually logged on here to share my end of the decade lessons I've learned post for anyone interested: https://mlhumphrey.com/2019/12/14/almost-2020-ten-lessons-i-learned/

Patty said:

Thanks MHLee--

I've appreciated reading your updates. I hope to see more in the future. Off to your blog post now.

ETA: That is a great post. Thank you for the food for thought.

I'm curious if you ever tried free booksy in addition to bookbub. A friend of mine swears by free booksy.

Click to expand...

Thanks!

I have tried Freebooksy a number of times. I actually used them for my first cozy in November and between them and FB/BB/AMS click ads was able to give away 8,000 copies and make it to #1 free for cozies for the day. But free is weird. And I actually have been debating writing a blog post about this because I asked a number of successful authors who were wide what the best strategy was and their reply was pretty universally have a first in series permanently free and then promote the hell out of it.

But I have to say that my experience with free is that it's really hard, unless you're in KU, to see much of an immediate result. I gave away those 8K copies and had about 55 sales of the next book in the series for that month. Which can feel horrible. But people hoard freebies more so than I think they do 99 cent titles. So it's possible that even though it feels like it had no real impact that by the time I release the next cozy in January there will be 30 new readers waiting to buy that book and that boost in rank may be just enough for that series to start bringing in new readers. And I'll keep having some of those 8K people buy the rest of the series for the next year or two probably.

I know more than one author who had a Bookbub free run, gave away 25-30K books, felt like it really didn't have any lasting effect, and then found themselves having their first five-figure month on their next release.

The other weird part of it was that I decided not to leave that title permafree and I saw more paid sales on book 1 than I did on book 2, so the free promo actually sold book 1 more than it did the rest of the series which I hadn't really expected or seen before.

If you read back through this thread you'll see (I think) that at one point I did a Freebooksy promo for a standalone romance that was in KU and made back my money on page reads. But I think that happens less now than it did a few years ago. Readers have started just downloading the freebie instead of reading in KU would be my guess.

Honestly, if I had one book and were trying to figure out how to promote it, I might pay for a Netgalley listing. I did one of those for my first in series cozy through Xpresso Book Tours and it attracted some good reviews and also I think some sales due to those reviews because they're often people with blogs or followings. And, of course, I'm partial to AMS ads which let you sell steadily long-term at full price.

The one thing I found with my fantasy trilogy was that I lost readers between book releases, but once the whole trilogy was out people were much more likely to read through all three books. So I'm good enough that they'll read the books if they're there to read, but not so good they'll eagerly wait for the next book to come out. So for a writer like me, the best bet is to get that next book out ASAP so you lose less readers.