Stephen King has a publisher. I'm not convinced he's a great example. You certainly don't need to go through your own website and make direct sales. A lot of very successful self-publishers just focus on Amazon, and there's definitely every chance I'll get a couple of months in and decide that is the best way to go. But right now, I want to keep my options open. More meaningful than the hot air we've been throwing around this far. What I'm providing - or hope to be, eventually - is a list of hard figures, because it's what a lot of people on this forum have said they want. Money in, methods used, money out. I don't know how useful it'll actually end up being, but since lots of people want it I'm going to try my best to provide it. They can make their own decisions about how applicable it is to their own situation afterwards. I'm no trailblazer. This thread is here to keep me honest, because I've always found doing things in public tends to make sure you actually do them. I'm offering the figures that come from this as a way of saying thanks for letting me take up forum-space, and I actually don't know anyone who's offered that. Do you? (Serious question, by the way - if you do know of any shared figures like this I'd love to see them, and I think everyone reading this thread would too) Given I'm expecting to spend a chunk of money not get anywhere near making it back, I'm not sure 'encouraging' is the right word. If your main issue is that you don't think I'm good enough, then you're more than entitled to that opinion. But I've already had a load of people I've never met tell me they really enjoy the flash, so it's clearly not an opinion shared by everyone.
@JayG - you said: That's not fair. You yourself created a thread where you were giving out your own self-pubbed sales data, as I remember. People on the forum thanked you, myself included. You are ALSO "a writer of unproven writing skills" who has chosen to self-publish. You thought your data would be meaningful. What makes Nigel's any different? And why do you seem intent on bashing and bashing? Why can't you take a nice gesture, say "thank you" (or leave your differing opinion and walk away) rather than try to invalidate another writer? Maybe you won't find his figures meaningful. That doesn't mean no one else would. Your figures are as meaningful as Nigel's and, like I've said already, it seems enough people on this forum at least found your figures meaningful. I don't see harm in having more data. Besides, how do you think data is collected normally? How do you think we calculate the average of anything? One person by one person. One by one. Avalanches are caused by one snowflake building upon another. To invalidate Nigel's data because "he's just one person and one set of data" is to say data in general is useless in the first place. Which is of course why you created a thread with your own sales data? Besides, MOST of us here on the forum are "a writer of unproven writing skills" and a lot of us would probably self-publish - that makes Nigel's stats VERY relevant because it would be from exactly the right tier for us to compare ourselves to. You also said: I'm sorry, but I've got to ask - did you even read the thread title!? It says, "Fancy watching me SCREW UP..." Screw up. How is Nigel encouraging anyone to take his path? He's simply said, this is what I've chosen and I'm gonna reveal all my data, end of story. Whether you think he's a good writer is your opinion, but he's made his decision, and you've had your say. If you have nothing to add other than sneer at Nigel and say "You're rubbish and everything you do will be a big fat FAIL", then go away. Nigel asked you for real data, you've come back with a sarky remark of "You think your data would be useful, do you?" You think Nigel will fail, you say you don't care if he fails. Well, one who doesn't care usually doesn't reply because it'd be a waste of their energy. So I don't know what you're trying to do, but please, STOP. @NigeTheHat - actually, you should take the same advice. Just stop replying to Jay. That's what I'm gonna do from now on, on this thread.
@JayG, were you to mitigate the magniloquence, I hazard it may serve you better. To every and all: I encouraged the OP to give us information on this and if it becomes yet another self-pub screamfest I'm going to be poorly disposed to being generous with the participants.
@Wreybies - apologies, I shouldn't have let myself be drawn in. We'll get this back on track. @Mckk - good advice. I'll take it.
Let's talk numbers. Over the last couple of days I tried a bit of prelaunch promotion. Nothing big or clever - a Google ad for keywords based around flash fiction, short story etc that directed straight to my website, where I'm offering a free book when they're released: http://neilmurton.co.uk I let it run for 2 days. I got 27 clicks, 2 opt-ins, and spent £19.91, which is about $32. I'm well aware, by the way, that this doesn't even begin to approach a statistically significant sample, but getting that would take more funds that could be better spent on a decent cover design. This was hardly a rigorous campaign - I didn't test different ad copy or landing pages, and I'm sure I could get cheaper leads if I did so, but that would take time, effort and money, and if my starting point is $16/lead and my total potential customer value about $5 that seems like too much of a gap to be worth pursuing. Conclusion: this would be worth exploring more if I was promoting a series. If I can reasonably the expect the reader to buy lots of books from me, I can afford to spend more on leads, and I can afford to spend more on testing to get the lead cost lower. With my current project, it's not really viable. Next: - try similar things with Facebook ads - I'm not expecting it to be profitable, but getting some idea of click cost / market responsiveness seems like a good investment. - plan another Google ad campaign when the books are live: getting the free book immediately rather than 'soon' feels like a more compelling offer Anyone who wants to see the full keyword list or ad copy, PM me.
I didn't read everything on this thread so I don't know if this issue was debated already. I'm not sure how things in London go, but in Canada we actually have local authors that can have book signings and sell their copies in Chapters. I'm not sure how they do this but usually there's a Local Author sticker on the book and the publishers don't look to be anything special - a few looked self published. Have you tried talking to any local bookstores?
Talking to local bookstores is on my list, but it's not something I've done yet. I have started looking up writer's groups in the area - I've never been much of a one for them in the past, but I really ought to start being more sociable, and not just as part of a 'get noticed' thing. I want to get back into writing things that aren't flash this year, and a bit of accountability should help me do that.
So, been away from here for a while - real life caught up with me a bit. On the plus side, somewhere on the internet there is now a video of me talking about Shreddies to a large crowd of people. I'm not even kidding. Anyhow, back to important stuff: 3 Kindle volumes will be going live on Amazon on Monday. Initially, I'm pricing each one at $2.99 - which is the lowest it can be to get the 70% royalty. I intend to play with prices later but this seems a sensible place to start. In the interim, the following has happened: I hired a designer to make covers. I didn't like the covers and, not wanting to spend more cash, ended up doing my own. I like the result but it took too long - but I do now have a far better idea of the kind of brief I should be giving a designer next time. The one I gave the guy this time was stupidly vague. Full post on lessons learned from this later. I collected together the stories I want in each of the three collections and did the formatting for Kindle conversion myself. Once I'd worked out a style I liked this was actually pretty easy - I'll put a link up to the template I made if anyone wants it. I've started a short prelaunch campaign. Nothing fancy: I've posted on my various social media accounts that I'm launching on Monday, and if they sign up to my e-mail list before then they'll get Book 1 for free. I'm running a couple of FB ads to groups that might be interested that say the same thing. E-mail is by far the easiest way to get in touch with people, so I'm hoping to attract a few people this way that I can then tell about anything else I publish. The ads (and social media posts) are going to my website, so if you click the link in my signature you'll be able to see what they see.
It's my understanding $2.99 is good for an unknown writer. If you go lower people think the book has no value, or some psychological thing like that.
I'm told so. I'm pretty certain I get significantly more sales at $0.99 - the theory is there's a bit of a psychological barrier when the price goes above $1, so it's less of an impulse buy - but with the way the royalties work, I need 6 times as many sales to make the same amount of cash. I think there's an argument for pricing volume 1 aggressively low, so it acts like a gateway drug, but I'll start out with them all at $2.99 and see how it goes. There will be experiments and SCIENCE.
So, it's been a while. But I have not been idle! Well, I have a bit. Definitely not as far forward with this as I planned on being by now, some of that through circumstances beyond my control, some of it due to circumstances very much under my control but basically my being a bit rubbish. That doesn't mean there's been no progress, though. The 3 small Kindle collections went live at the very end of March. In the build-up, I ran a set of ads on Facebook targeting people interested in Flash Fiction and people who had liked my 100 Word Stories page, offering a free copy of Collection 1 as long as they signed up by the publishing date. The idea was to get them onto the e-mail list, so I can get in touch again easily, and also hopefully sell copies of Collections 2 and 3 off the back. This half-worked. I spent about $10 on Facebook ads in total, and got an extra 31 people signed up to the list. $0.30/lead is pretty damn good, and if you're writing for a genre with a bit more market reach - say erotica, or sci-fi, or YA, or anything that isn't flash fiction - then I think you could get quite a lot of people on your contact list that way. It was definitely true that a higher proportion of people signed up if they'd already liked the page, but there wasn't much in it. I can look up precise figures if anyone's interested. The half that didn't work was getting them to buy Collections 2 and 3 afterward. I mailed about the books a couple of times, and only made 1 sale of each. Some of this will be down to format - if you've just been sent a collection of flash, you likely don't want another right away. This was always going to be a risk, though I'd hoped there'd be a couple more takers. C'est la vie. It's also down to a small sample size - there's only 81 people on the list so I was never going to sell many. On the plus side, most people who signed up are still opening and reading the stories I send, so I've got engagement - just no cash. I also ran a Facebook ad for $5 to people who had liked the Facebook page once the books were live, pushing them to the Amazon page. Between that and posting/tweeting to my family and friends, I shifted 15 copies, which was enough to push me to the giddy heights of #23,641 in the Kindle store. and equates to enough royalties for a semi-decent bottle of wine. Semi-decent bottle of wine was purchased. I don't know how many of those purchases came from family and friends and how many were from the ad, unfortunately. I admit, I kinda left it in April and May. I was still working on putting the paperback version together and still writing stories for my readers, but when it came to promotion and networking, I sucked a whole lot of suck. There were 4 organic sales in the meantime - by which I mean they just appeared, presumably through people browsing Amazon. Frankly, that's more than I expected. Time will tell if that keeps up. I got better in June. I've tried running some ads on the Project Wonderful network, at the moment just trying to get website readers. So far I've spent $6.50 and have seen a significant increase in traffic, though no more sign-ups to the e-mail list. I'll be continuing with this with a new sign-up offer - now anyone who signs up will get collection 1 for free, rather than just the promise of new stories. One thing that's definitely come up: This has taken a TON more time than I expected. I've been doing the bits I capable of (like formatting) myself, and outsourcing the things I can't (anything involving illustration or design). I should have outsourced a lot more. I run my own business and have been doing this in my spare time, and since I run my own business I have precious little of that. Trying to get all this stuff sorted myself AND find time to keep writing has been one of the reasons this has gone far slower than I was expecting. That's not to say I couldn't have run a few more experiments in this time - I could and should have done. The paperback book is close to done. It's got all the Kindle books and an extra 25 stories in there. The formatting's done, the cover's made (separate post on that coming shortly), the illustrations are in. I'm just waiting on the final proof from CreateSpace before I put it live. Other things: I decided to take @JayG's advice and use a free CreateSpace ISBN. I might want my own one in future, but that feels like something to deal with if it ever turns out to be required. It'll be easy enough to set up a new edition with a fresh ISBN once this version's complete. So, game plan for next week: Run ads on webcomic sites and book-related sites on the Project Wonderful network to get more readers on the website Join some of the Facebook book promotion groups and see if there's anything actually useful in there. If there's not, just spam some ads like everyone else to see if it makes sales Spend $10 on FB ads sending people with interests in short stories and flash fiction to the Kindle collections to see how many clicks ads like that get, and if any of them translate into sales I'll update on Sunday week. If I don't, feel free to shout at me via PM for being a failure.
I read the original post and I am sorry you took it down because I was quite curious what you meant by liking every wordpress post. I don't know that I'd ever want to do anything gross but I am wondering if there was some way I could use the concept without being a jerk. But I don't even know what the concept is, so ... But I sure would like to figure some ways of doing something with the stuff I have written. It's published but the big world doesn't seem to be bothered, much.
Hi, I got carried away with myself - laughing into my own palm...in the dark study. ...Wordpress is - they always tell us - is 'a community' of writers, and everything else in between a and z, although people don't simply come to your website because it is brilliant, they need to know you are there. You have to visit all the other blogs and put a tick alongside their writing that they have (maybe) agonised over and place a tick. This gives everyone a nice feeling inside, but is disingenuous if you haven't really read these other people's stories. This self-publicity aspect is not natural to all of us, or is 'bullshit,' I suppose. Even with my own glittering advance - my career - being selected as "New Writing South" blog of the week generated about 15 hits - I imagine from fellow jealous pygmy scribes on the fish for material, no doubt. Indeed, some Spanish guy said to me that you only really get any credit for short stories, the memoir type stuff, after you have died, and I shall work with diligence toward his new guidelines.. ...if you do write, read on Wordpress, eventually you discover the mirror image versions of yourself. Guys who pen the 'hilarious' memoirs - for example, the 'how I had sex with the ugly woman' stories and such. Often the boys are fairly loathsome but there is room for parody. Still these 200 page misadventure tomes can be good sellers - for people on the underground trains, urban market - as was the case with the guy I referred to: - his main, initial marketing tool was to physically press 'like' 20 000 times each day, making a million people aware of his presence...he created an audience. Then I heard him interviewed as a guest on the big radio station - that's when I liked him. I hadn't enjoyed his writing, but to hear a young guy dry up on the air, with nothing to say - the poor little fella, I wanted to wrap him up like cod, once I saw-heard the vulnerability. I am like that, having saintly qualities x ....UPDATE... (Actually reading what you said, tch...[admonish self - me, a word slug - the slimy trail all around an house]...STOP.) AClem - have you tried the smaller magazines? They don't pay...and sometimes I sense they get as many views as the blogs. But that was very satisfying - getting published in somebody's mag, kind of reduced the itch pain. Also - the hard part - get involved with the local literary scene. You have to turn up one day, bite bullet, and read a story or a chapter at an event. There were probably only 2 people there, but somebody types it up in review, it's a feather in your bow,backside - then your story gets printed in the quarterly. It's real small steps - but gets you out of the 'attic bound writer' typing for the wallpaper... ... ... thing ...
Thanks, Matwoolf. Your writing here impresses me, seriously. Trying to market is definitely a pain and I am struggling with it. I have done the Facebook bit with perhaps a few sales but nothing compared to the effort I put in pimping in all those book groups. I don't really see readers in those groups, but rather writers trying to get noticed. And if it's other writers who notice your post, chances are they aren't going to buy anything since that's not why they are there. But it's a case of being something I know how to do and I don't know how to do much else so far. Reddit hasn't done anything for me, nor has twitter or Pinterest, though I have a nice place to put photos and promo material. I'm going to keep nosing around and hope to come up with a few things that may help. I can't do anything locally really because I am not even in an English speaking country. There are probably some retirees writing cookbooks or whatnot but I don't think what I'm doing would go over with them, even if I were willing to spend 3 hours on a bus to meet with them. But thanks for the reply and you've given me food for thought. Muchas gracias!
[Fireside post response @ 10pm, Werthers Original Lozenge embedded in cheek, piss'd too egc] Well my friend, you impress me too, and I was concerned - because it is horribly frustrating, the search for audience and whilst we deal in the day to day...writing is so slow. Is there not a 'Writing Costa Rica' where you pay them ten dollars a year - and get to go to workshops, readings, a website? And I say slow - Michael Morpuergo (sp) wrote Warhorse 30 years ago - for example. Imagine - traipsing between studios to flog, promote your poem - you wrote it in college: almost like being an old rock band, s'pose, it is kind of naff...[very wise] Anyways, where can I read your stuff, please.
@NigeTheHat : A sincere thank you for taking the time share your trials, errors, and successes with us concerning self publishing. This was a great thread with a lot of useful information. ~Chad
As promised, an update. I said I would: Run ads on webcomic sites and book-related sites on the Project Wonderful network to get more readers on the website Join some of the Facebook book promotion groups and see if there's anything actually useful in there. If there's not, just spam some ads like everyone else to see if it makes sales Spend $10 on FB ads sending people with interests in short stories and flash fiction to the Kindle collections to see how many clicks ads like that get, and if any of them translate into sales Most of this I've actually done. Webcomic site ads: I've targeted a few different sites of varying size and posting frequency. I went for a small one (School Bites), a medium-sized one (Gunnerkrigg Court) and a huge one (SMBC). My conclusion is that it seems worth paying for the bigger ones with more traffic. I've had vastly more clicks from SMBC than anything else, and the cost-per-click is pretty competitive. The click-through rate is low, but there's just so many more people reading the comic that it doesn't matter. I've also had some success posting on more story-focused sites like Lunaescence Archives and Super Powereds - these all sent a reasonable amount of clicks but there's just not very many of them on the network, so there's not really any opportunity to scale. Numbers for everything I've run so far: http://neilmurton.co.uk/stuffs/ (The screenshot is quite big, so I didn't want to drop it into the post) ETA: Forgot to mention the important bit - that spend's led to 5 new subscribers on the e-mail list (where I'm now offering a copy of the first collection as an incentive). Nowhere near as effective as the Facebook book-launch campaign, but on the other hand there's no special event here, so if I'm happy to spend the cash I can just keep running ads. Facebook book promo groups: This is the one I haven't done much on. I've had a look at a few of the groups, and they do seem to be largely just people posting up ads saying 'HEY LOOK BUY MY STUFF'. I'm a bit dubious about the value of that, but I don't see that I've got much to lose from making a couple of ad posts and seeing what happens. I'll probably wait until the paperback is live, though. That feels like a more impressive thing to shout about. Spend $10 on FB ads: This has been started, but I only set it running on Friday, so I don't have much meaningful data yet. The ad was set up to target people who have said they have an interest in flash fiction and were from the UK. I've tried an ad that's very simple and to-the-point - it looks like this: Current results: not great. 1 click for about $1.80. I'll let it run a bit longer, but it'd have to pick up a LOT to become profitable. In other news, I had the paperback proof from Createspace, I've fixed a couple of errors I didn't pick up on the digital version, and now I'm waiting on the new version. It looks amazing, though. Next week: Find Flash Fiction sites around the web. Somewhere out there are people who read this stuff, it'd make sense to know where they are Post in a couple of the Facebook book promo groups to see if they do anything (Hopefully) get the paperback book live
don't you just hate those little errors that are more apparent in the paperback than the ebook version? Well done and thanks for the update.
I know, right? I went through the digital proof several times but there were still a load of errors. Nothing big - extra spaces, some quotes that'd been formatted wrong for some reason - but I want this to be perfect when it goes out.
With me, it's also wrong words, as instead of at, through instead of though. I've now found the narrator programme so as I write and edit, I get the narrator to read my MS back to me in small chunks. You'd be surprised how many errors I pick up this way and it helps massively with the flow of the writing.
Sorry for being so tardy to reply, I don't have a good excuse. I write under 2 different names, one for "G" rated audiences and the other for more "adult" content. If you like I will email you a copy of either my Sci-Fi satire novel or my latest not-G book, "Magdalena - A Prostitute's Life in Costa Rica" if you promise to write me an Amazon review. If you or anyone else is interested in swapping reviews, I'm game. I can't read romance novels though. If anybody wants to PAY for any of my books, they are available on Amazon, ebook or paper. The Sci-Fi thing is called "Lost in the Multiverse." If I can sell enough copies (not all that many really) I will finish the sequel.
