What can I do, right now, today, to increase my sales?

I was sitting there the other day, having finished writing for the evening, and I found myself staring at my rather static reports on Amazon, hoping against hope that if I refreshed them one of the numbers would click over to a slightly higher number, meaning I'd made an elusive sale.

I tried it.

The numbers stayed the same.

So I went to Amazon and browsed a few of my book pages, reading a few reviews telling me how awesome I am, and then I went back to my sales reports and saw that nothing had changed.

Of course it hadn't. Because all I had been doing was wasting time. It would have been as much use for my books to go and browse Yahoo for half an hour. I was procrastinating, and no amount of staring forlornly at my books would make them sell.

I needed to do something to make my books sell, but after two failed blog promotions over the Xmas period I was out of cash, and I was saving up my one chance at the big daddy, Bookbub, for when the final Tube Riders book got released.

So what could I do, without spending any money, to improve my sales?

Lots of things, actually.

First of all, let's redefine that sentence.

Let's change it to what can I do to improve my reach?

No matter how hard you try, without a gun pointed at someone's head you can't really force them to buy your books. But what you can do is start to persuade them, and part of persuading them is to let them know that your books are there in the first place. And part of letting them know that your books are there, is letting them know that YOU are there in the first place.

There are lots of ways to do this without being an annoying spammer, something I really hate.

Obviously, the zero, the most important thing, would be to write more. But you're tired. I understand. There are days when I'm tired from WIP in the morning followed by a full day at work, followed by cleaning the house, followed by more work on the WIP. I just want to do something mindless for a while.

So here, are a few options.

1. Write a blog. Exactly what I'm doing now. Write something that will be out in the public domain. You can write something to help people (as I'm hoping this will do), you can write a diary, or you can write a book or a movie review. Anything. What did you do today? Me, I wrote in the morning, then I taught a class for a couple of hours, then I went to the supermarket, then I came home. Yeah, sorry, not very interesting, but I took a couple of pictures of my cat today, so I could post them if I wanted. Better than nothing, and she's pretty cute.

Of course, if you don't have a blog, start one. Get a blogger like this, or a Wordpress. They're free. Set up your blog like mine, with all your links down the side so that anyone stumbling across it gets a look at your books. They might not buy any, in fact they probably won't - I know exactly how many people buy mine through the links, and its not many, haha). But, whereas you have perhaps a 5% chance of someone buying a book from a blog post, you have zero chance of them buying it if they can't see it at all. 5% is a lot more than 0.

2. You can post your book on Facebook. See that Facebook link under your book on Amazon? Click it and post it. Who cares if most people ignore it. You're not spamming because it's YOUR Facebook page and on your Facebook page you can post whatever the hell you damn well like. A link to your book is going to be way more interesting that some idiot writing something like "OMG me bestie just dyed her hair blue. Sick, innit?" and enough people do that. What's the worst that can happen? They block you. Oh, what a shame.

DO NOT post your link on other people's pages. THAT is spamming, and that sucks.

And while you're at it, I assume you have a Facebook page set up for your book? No? Here's how.  Do it. Then share your page on your main page, and start collecting followers.

3. Is your book on Goodreads? If not, then get yourself set up there. Goodreads is a site for readers, so the usual spam rules apply - in short, don't be a douche. Once you're on there, join a few groups and start some conversations. You don't have to talk about your book - in fact, in many cases its best not to - but if you're interesting people might want to find out more about you.

4. Write some stuff on Twitter. If you don't have one, go and set one up. You're allowed to follow up to 2000 people straight off the bat, and there is absolutely no reason why you should have less than this, unless you're waiting for your follower count to rise. Here's a few tips on the best ways to utilize Twitter from my friend and fellow author Kristie Haigwood. Follow those rules and you're well on your way. Again, if you just post endless links to your books people will likely ignore you, but if you write normal things from time to time people might take an interest and start a conversation. And who knows where that might lead ...

5. Next thing. Do you have freebies, either permafrees or books currently free through KDP Select? Get to Author Marketing Club and start advertising them. Fill out all the free book submission tools that your book meets the requirements for. Sure, they might not post it, but they definitely WON'T post it unless you ask. Just the way things work, that ...

6. Okay, so those sites are asking for a certain number of reviews? Start trying to get some then. Email book bloggers (a good list is here), or post your book on the Making Connections page on Goodreads. Again, no one might want it, but you don't know unless you try.

7. Are all your books in KDP Select? If not, then there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be available through other vendors, such as Apple or Barnes & Noble. If you're in the US you can go direct, but if not, go to Smashwords or Draft to Digital and start uploading. You're missing out on potential sales.

So, there are a few ideas to get you started. As a disclaimer, there is no guarantee that any of the above will get sales for you, but if you don't try, you never know. The biggest thing to remember is that if you want a career you have to treat it like a career. Careers last a long time, usually until retirement or death (although you might be able to publish to Amazon from the afterlife, they're pretty good at anything else!). So think long-term. If you set up your Facebook author's page today (I have three, for each of my pen-names), you could set yourself a goal of say 200 likes by the end of the year. Or if you have Twitter, try using the tips above to get yourself 5000 followers.

The key is to be proactive. As a friend of mine often says, it doesn't matter how many books you have, they won't sell themselves.

Best of luck!

Chris Ward
January 11th 2013

Don't cut corners

Most people are quite happy to throw their spare cash wantonly on whatever whim they feel like, be it clothes, beers, cigarettes, eating out, entertainment ... yet for some reason, when it comes to self-publishing, suddenly people "can't afford" editing, proofreading, decent cover design, formatting ... can't afford to pay to advertise, can't afford to do pretty much anything, in other words.

From reading many writers forums you'd be forgiven for believing that all self-published writers are poverty-stricken, bridge dwellers who have to make daily decisions between which they need most, coffee or cigarettes.

Of course some might be one step away from the dole queue, but most aren't. Most have exactly the same amount of disposable income as anyone else, but when it comes to putting money into their books there seems to be an unnatural aversion to it.

Why?

Perhaps because it is possible to self-publish for free, many writers think that spending money on it is money wasted. Perhaps they don't feel their work is deserving of it. Or perhaps, like I did when I started out, they feel that they don't need to. They think they're good enough to carry it all by themselves.

A few days ago I got this review -

Not a bad story, shame about lack of a definitive ending to allow the sequals.

Does need a bit of proofing with a few words missing (but you can tell what is implied) and a few plurals missing their S.

Don't get me started on the comment - there's no more a cliffhanger in that book than there is in Star Wars, and I've never seen anyone complain about that. Nor that the review was posted by an indie author who managed to spell the world "sequel" wrong, but whatever. What's important is that if you cut corners in the beginning it will come back to haunt you.

I'm an English teacher by profession. I'm halfway through a MSc in Linguistics. I felt I could catch anything, felt I didn't need anyone to help me.

Wrong.

Tube Riders, the book in question, has since had a paid professional edit and I'm quite confident there are none of the errors the reviewer talks about. However, since I was stupid enough to go the Amazon KDP Select free promos route for a while (against my better judgement and something that, for novels at least, I now regret) there are some 8000 copies of Tube Riders out there in various states of repair.

Freebie hunters are notorious for not reading the books they horde, but at any point such a review could jump up and bite me. And while genuine readers rarely mention actually textual errors, indie author "reviewers", the bane of new writers everywhere, take an almost sadistic pride in pointing out the errors of their fellow writers.

It doesn't matter that Tube Riders is now in good shape. That review is up there and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm not about to start adding "newly corrected version" at the top of my book listings page because there's nothing that screams "amateur!" louder.

However, if I'd been wise enough not to trust myself in the first place and got a paid edit of Tube Riders done before I first published it, I wouldn't be in this position.

So, think about it before you put your masterpiece out into the world for public criticism. You don't have to pay a fortune - the edit for Tube Riders cost me about $200 - but getting a professional pair of eyes to look over it can make all the difference. I might never know how many readers have been turned off by reading such reviews about Tube Riders, but I do know is that it would have been easy to avoid getting those reviews in the first place.

Don't cut corners.

Chris Ward
July 5th 2013

Nifty little tool for self-published writers

I found this interesting little website mentioned on a forum I frequent the other day. Basically, if you put the ASIN of your book into the search box it will give you a kind of floating spider web diagram showing which books are linked from your book's Also Bought list on Amazon and which books link to you.

If you put your cursor over your book it'll give you a bunch of orange lines. These go to the books from where your book can be found. There's also a box on the left in which you can rank the books in the spidergraph(?) related to your book in terms of things such as ranking and price.

For interest's sake, I put in my book Tube Riders. Just for clarification, I'm writing this on May 18th, and so far this month I've sold just two copies.

There are 84 connected books. Tube Riders ranks lowest in both ranking and popularity. It's second from the top in terms of diversity, whatever that means, and there are no orange arrows pointing inwards, which means a few books are visible from my book, but my book has no visibility from elsewhere.

However, when I put in my current bestseller, Five Tales of Horror, which is selling 2-3 copies a day and has sold nearly 200 since I released it in March, there are a lot of orange arrows pointing in as well as out, meaning it is being seen on a lot of Also Bought lists. From looking at Amazon I can see that many of those books are ranking pretty well, inside the top 5000 or so. Basically, my book is hanging on the coattails of these books, whereas my book Tube Riders isn't hanging anywhere, and the books its connected to are all other unknowns that aren't selling well either.

What does this tell me? In short, that I don't have much visibility. The obvious answer is to sell more books, something that's of course easier said than done. However the right kind of visibility is important. For example, getting on the Also Bought lists of a bunch of unknown books is pretty much a waste of time. This is what happens when you do free promos, because people download at random and free promos are increasingly becoming the playground of the desperate or not very good writer. Bargain books are the way forward, don't you know! Although if you look carefully, you'll often find a lot of my short stories on promo as I don't have a lot else to do with them...

Another thing I noticed from playing around with this site, is that none of my books are linking to each other. When I put in Dan Brown's new book, the biggest group of Also Boughts linking to and from his new book were all his other books. It's become kind of a sport among unknown writers to dump on Dan Brown's writing skills (for what it's worth I've read Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons and thought they were both pretty good, although the films were hit and miss), but he clearly has fans. People who bought his other books are all over his new book regardless of what the snobish non-selling indie community thinks of it. Looking at my own graphs proves that I don't really have fans, just people who see my books and pick them up because they're cheap or free or whatever. Hopefully when I put out the next book in the Tube Riders series I'll start to see a few more backwards and forwards arrows.

And talking of which, I'd better get back to editing it. So if you've got some books out, have a little play around with this tool. It's kind of interesting.

Chris Ward
18th May 2013