 There is a subtle prejudice against Indie authors that isn’t present in other forms of creativity. I’m not talking about the big prejudices, like those involving race, religion, gender, sexuality etc. I wouldn’t want to lump this in with those as it doesn’t have the same sort of impact on those who suffer. No, I’m just using the word in its original meaning, which is to ‘pre-judge’. In other words, to make assumptions that aren’t based on any real evidence. That happens with the big prejudices in a big way and is more far reaching. Pre-judging an Indie author probably won’t affect their ability to earn a living, get housing or fair treatment by the police, so it isn’t in the same league. But it matters to the Indie authors, all the same. Indie authors are prejudged in a way that no other art form appears to be.  Imagine you are walking along the street and see a sign outside a pub. It says “Appearing here tonight, Fred Bloggs, musician. Entry £5.” Would you consider parting with a fiver to see him perform? There might be some questions you would want to ask, such as what sort of music Fred plays and what price the beer is at the bar, but I think a great many people would take a chance and part with their fiver. Or maybe if it said “Comedian Fred Bloggs.” Again, you might have a few questions, but you might well decide to go along. You would give Fred Bloggs a chance.  What you probably wouldn’t say is “Fred Bloggs has never had a hit record, so I’m not going.” Or “Fred Bloggs has never appeared on Live At The Apollo (a TV comedy showcase in the UK) so he can’t be very funny.” In other words, you wouldn’t pre-judge Fred Bloggs. If his music or comedy style was to your taste, you might well take a chance and buy a ticket, even though you had never heard of him. But when presented with a book by an Indie author, how many people say “He (or she) hasn’t had a best seller, so they can’t be very good, so I’m not going to part with my money.” Because that seems to be what happens to Indie authors with monotonous regularity. People will pay £5 to hear an unknown singer in a pub, but they won’t pay the same amount to read an unknown author.  Being judged by different standards For some reason, authors are judged by different standards to other creative artists. So, what is the difference? It is something of a mystery to us here at Selfishgenie Publishing, as I’m sure it is to all those Indie authors who are reading this right now. Is there an answer to this? Only in the form of a Catch-22 type scenario. You will sell more books when you become famous, but to become famous you first have to sell more books.  Celebrity Author It is sickening to see many famous people with limited writing talent getting ‘their’ books published just because of their name. The publishers know that the book will sell because of the name on the cover, so they’ll hire a ghost writer to make the book readable. That’s not to say all celebrity authors are bad. I’ve read a few that were pretty good (Richard Osman, to name but one). But we know that a footballer or reality TV ‘star’ who can barely string 3 words together to form a meaningful sentence, isn’t going to be capable of writing War And Peace. But there is one thing all the Indie authors can do to support each other – and I don’t mean doing all those annoying #writerslift thingies.  #WritingCommunity - support Indie Authors! Just pick one Indie author a month and buy their book, then post reviews on all the relevant sites. You don’t have to go on Twitter to ask for recommendations - most of those are just people trying to boost their follower numbers anyway.
No, all you have to do is quietly browse through the profiles of your own followers who are authors and see what sorts of books they write. If they are in the genre you read, buy a copy. If not, move on to someone else. There’s no need to make a big deal of it; no need to Tweet them to say ‘I bought your book’ - that looks like you are looking for thanks and sounds needy. It may even be interpreted as a suggestion that they buy your book in return, which isn't what is intended. But if you post a review, you could Tweet the link to that so other people know how good the book is and may be encouraged to buy it. We often use the hashtag #WritingCommunity, so let’s act like a community and support each other, not through words alone, but also through deeds. And the best present you can give an Indie author is to buy one of their books. And if you are looking for a place to start, then you are already on a suitable website. Just click the Books tab at the top of the page. If you have enjoyed this blog and don't want to miss the next edition, be sure to sign up for our newsletter. We'll be so grateful, we'll even send you a free ebook. Just click the button below.
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 Picking a title for a book isn’t always easy. Sometimes the title picks itself, based on the plot or the leading character. But sometimes it isn’t quite so obvious. “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit” by Janet Winterson, for example, isn’t a title that you might associate with a book about “religious excess and human obsession”, to quote from the book’s blurb. But it’s a best seller, so its readers obviously weren’t the type to be put off by an opaque title. However, is there more to it than just a having snappy title? What if you are publishing a collection of work that has been previously published. This happened to one of our authors, Robert Cubitt.  He had published a series of nine sci-fi novels under nine different titles, but the series collection was called, simply, “The Magi”. If anyone has read the book then that title makes sense, because the series is all about the search for the Magi, who are the rulers of the galaxy and they’ve gone missing. So far, so good. Each book in the series has its own title, but the first book gives the series its collective name. But what do you call the collection when you put all 9 books out under a single cover? Robert chose to call it “The Magi Omnibus”. It made sense to him, because an omnibus, as well as being a mode of transport, is a collection of stories either with a common theme or by the same author. So, tick the box on both counts. For the same reason the title also made sense to us. "sales started to tick upwards at once" But it turns out that not everyone seems to know that the word omnibus means a collection of work. The word has become old-fashioned, out of date. It also doesn’t resonate with non-UK readers. Robert’s generation grew up on the omnibus edition of “The Archers” broadcast on the radio every Sunday morning, which is all 5 daily episodes, each of 15 minutes duration, broadcast as a single 75 minute edition. There are also omnibus editions of some TV soap operas, such as Eastenders and Coronation Street. So, you would think that the term omnibus would be well known.  It appears we were wrong about that. While we weren’t looking, the omnibus has been replaced by the “box set”. And that was reflected in our sales for the collection. We were getting plenty of clicks on links to the book’s sales pages, but no buyers. We can only assume that potential purchasers were confused by the title, thinking it referred to the aforementioned mode of transport. So, we retitled it as “The Magi Box Set” to see what would happen. And sales started to tick upwards at once. It seems that the readers of sci-fi are happy to buy a box set, but they aren’t interested in buying an omnibus.  OK, lesson learnt. A title change can make all the difference in the world for some books. So, if your book isn’t selling, you might want to ask yourself what the title is saying to your potential readers. Ours was obviously saying “Radio 4” when we wanted it to say SYFY Channel or Netflix. This isn’t a phenomenon that is unique to the publishing industry. Plenty of films have been retitled because the original title didn’t go down well with test audiences, either at home or abroad. I’ll give you an example. The film “The Madness George III” was retitled “The Madness of King George” for the American market, because the producers thought that with so many films being released in series (eg Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III etc), audiences might not go to see the film because they might think they’d missed The Madness of George I and II. Mad Max is a well-known film name these days, but very few people in the USA had seen the first film in the series, so when the second film was released in the USA it had a name change to “The Road Warrior” without any reference to Mad Max – and it worked  Will Smith in "Hancock" You may be familiar with “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” and if you are, you didn’t see it when it was originally released – or your memory is playing tricks on you.
When it was released in 1981, it was just “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and was retitled later by George Lucas in order to fit in with the titling of the sequels, which did use the style “Indian Jones and ….” The Will Smith superhero movie “Hancock” (2008) didn’t start out with that name. It had the very generic title of “Tonight He Comes”. Would you have gone to see it with that title? It might have worked in the 1930s, but not in the modern market. So, if your book isn’t setting the reading world on fire, you might consider a change of title. But do include a note inside giving the original title, so people will know if they have already read it. No point in upsetting people by letting them buy the same book twice. Amazon gets a bit touchy about that too. Would you like a full-length eBook for free?* Of course you would. All you have to do is sign up for our newsletter to qualify. Just click the button. *Excludes "The Magi Box Set".  We started a free book giveaway yesterday, which prompted one of our team on the Zoom call (we don’t have an office – it helps keep costs down) to ask if free giveaways actually work. Which is a very good question. By the way, if you didn’t know about the free book, it just shows the value of signing up for our newsletter – but that’s another issue. We know that people like to get something for nothing, but that isn’t why we give away free books. No, we give books away in the hope that the enjoyment the readers get from it will encourage them to buy more books by the same author. But you knew that already. What you really want to know is if it works or not. Which is a very … sorry, we’ve said that once.  One of our authors The answer is that there is no short answer. We can’t point our finger at the work of one of our authors and say “Because we gave away one of his books for free, we then sold more by him” (or her as the case may be). There are some people who do free book giveaways in order to generate lists of email addresses they can use for marketing - you have to email a certain address to get your free copy. We don't do that. We think it's a little bit underhand. When we do a free book giveaway it is always done through one of the etailing sites so that we don't know the email address of the beneficiary. Or we allow a direct download from this website, for which you don't have to provide an email address. (see our "Freestuff" tab to find out what's on offer) But to get back to the point, let’s take this from first principles. If you are trying to get people to buy more books by the same author, then it follows that they must have more than one book available. So, for first time authors, this isn’t going to do them much good. You may think that is stating the obvious, but it is amazing how many first-time authors do free giveaways in the hope of stimulating sales. Just goes to show how hope can delude people sometimes.  “But it will get my name noticed.” Some authors will reply. No, it won’t. Your name will only be noticed by people who take a free copy of your book. OK, they may come back for your next book, but you haven’t even published that yet, so by the time you do, your name will probably have been forgotten again. For authors who have multiple, but disparate, titles it is hard to see a connection between the sales of titles that have no connection to the one given away for free, ie books that are about different groups of characters, even if they are in the same genre. If you track your sales and there is a sudden surge of interest in some titles, then it does suggest that the free giveaway had some influence. But if the change in sales is less dramatic it could just mean that some new readers have discovered your books and it has nothing to do with the free giveaway. Indeed, the new readers may not even have read the free book and might buy it later if they like the ones they have bought.  It is in sales of books that are written as a series that we see the greatest effect of free giveaways. If it is Book 1 of the series that is given away (which is the sensible way of doing things) then we know that Books 2, 3 etc are probably going to increase their sales if the readers of Book 1 enjoyed it. So, if you are an author that writes a series, then this is something worthy of your consideration. What about books written as ‘tasters’ – stories that are less than full length books which are given away as an introduction to the series. These are usually a prequel, but they don’t have to be.  I have to say we have seen very little evidence that those justify the amount of work that is invested in them. If you know differently, then do get in touch and tell us. There are a couple of issues with tasters. The first is the amount of time they take to write. Every author has some idea of how long it takes them to write a full-length novel, but does writing a half-length ‘taster’ story take half the time? Does it take less, or does it take more? And we all know that Benjamin Franklyn said that “Time is money.” Are you going to generate enough sales of your taster to make it worth the investment of time that you have made in the writing of it? You hope you will, of course, but I’ve already mentioned how hope can delude us.  The other issue is quality. I have read some taster novels which are nowhere near as good as the books they seek to promote. Perhaps it’s a psychological thing and the author subconsciously doesn’t try so hard to write a good story for a work they know is going to be given away for free. And if the taster isn’t good enough, it isn’t going to encourage sales of the full price book. That doesn’t apply to all tasters, of course. I have also read some that are brilliant and a good advertisement for their product. It just isn’t a universal truth. But is it enough just to give the book away for free? Should you do more? Yes, you should.  As with all books, readers aren’t going to stumble across your free book by accident. OK, most book etailing sites maintain lists of their free books, so your offering will appear there. But it isn’t the marketing channel you need to appear in. The sorts of readers who haunt the listings of free books are the sort who want to read, but don’t want to buy books. Yes, they’ll download your book because it is free, but there is a good chance they won’t come back and buy the ones they would have to pay for. They’ll be back browsing the lists of free books, looking for their next read No, you need to entice the book buying public, not the freebie lovers. And that means promoting the fact that you have a freebie on offer which they might consider looking at. Those are the readers who will buy Book2, 3 etc of the series. You may also get some reviews, which always help sales. So wherever and however you promote your books, that is where you also have to promote your free offer. You may even have to invest in advertising.  I know it sounds insane to spend money in order to give something away for free, but it does work. Thousands of businesses pay to advertise free and ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ offers and they wouldn’t spend the money if it didn’t work. You need to think of this as a long-term strategy. Yes, it may cost you £50 to run a Facebook advert for your free book, but if you get enough sales of the rest of the books in the series, the cost of that advert could be repaid many times over. So, for those of you who are considering doing a free giveaway, the key points to take away from this blog:
 And if you are reading this before midnight on 31st October, you can still get “Operation Absolom” by Robert Cubitt for free. Just click the cover image to find out more.
If you have enjoyed this blog or found it informative, why not sign up for our newsletter. At least, that way, you won't miss out on our next free offer. Just click on the button below.  Many an “Indie” author will tell you that the hard part of being an author isn’t the writing of the book, no matter how hard that seemed at the time. No, the hard part is actually selling the book to readers. Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter how good the book is, if no one knows it exists then they can’t buy it. Readers rarely, if ever, just stumble across a new author’s work. It may occasionally appear on Amazon under the heading of ‘People who bought …. Also bought …..” but that is the equivalent of hoping to hit a fish by throwing a stone into the sea. OK, theoretically you could, but it’s unlikely you will.  Do not confuse marketing with advertising, because advertising is just a small part of the marketing mix which we will discuss later in this blog. It is covered under the P for promotion part of the mix, but even then it is quite a minor part. Back at the beginning of this year we published a series of blogs that discussed marketing in depth. If you want to read the whole series then look under February in the archive and scroll down to the bottom of the page to start at the beginning. Don’t be confused by the fact that the first blog is Week 5 – the first 4 weeks were looking at the dark arts of publishing. The series continues into March and April But before you go and look at the archive, we’re going to reprise some of the highlights of those blogs to give you a few things to think about. Call them the ‘key messages’.  We’ll start with the marketing mix – the 6 Ps. Some marketing blogs talk about the 4Ps, but we’re a bit like Spinal Tap, our Ps go all the way up to 6 (Younger readers may not get that reference). These are:
 The most important P is people You might think that ’promotion’ is the most important part of the marketing mix, but it isn’t. It’s people. You can 'promote' your ‘product’ as much as you like, but if you aren’t reaching the right people, then you are wasting your time and, probably, your money. Your ‘people’ are the people who read books similar to the ones you write. They are the ones you need to identify and engage with on social media. I say ‘engage’, because if you just ‘promote’ you will lose their interest very quickly. Yes, you can promote, but only as a small part of engagement. You need people to want to follow you, which means having something interesting to say. And if you doubt that, consider this – you’re reading this blog, aren’t you? That is part of our ‘engagement’ with you. Maybe, as a consequence of our engagement, you might take a look at the ‘Books’ page of our website to see what we have to offer – or maybe you won’t. The choice is yours, but the important thing is that you are here, which makes the choice easier.  Paying companies to blast out Tweets about your book won’t get you sales -despite their promises of having a gazillion followers. Because only the Tweets (or other social media posts) that reach the sort of people that read your sort of books are of any use and only you can identify and engage with those people. Just as an aside – doing a #writerslift on Twitter isn’t engagement, it is just becoming increasingly annoying because so many people are doing those. And everyone in the list replying to it and filling up notification boxes is even more annoying. We’ve started blocking all the people who do it. We’ll assume from the start that your book is well written, has a good plot, interesting characters, has been properly edited, proofread and corrected. It is therefore fit for purpose. Only you and your Beta Readers can judge that. So that part of the next P, ‘product’, is OK.  After that the most important part of the product is the cover. Despite the warning in the old proverb, people do judge books by their covers. So, yours must be right for your genre. The cover image is what is going to attract people’s attention, so it has to be eye catching and genre appropriate. A picture of a woman in a big bonnet walking through a field of daisies isn’t going to sell many sci-fi books. The second thing about the cover is that it should tell the reader a little bit about what is happening in between the covers. Call it a visual representation of the plot. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say, so make sure that the picture on your cover is using those thousand words to best effect. Here’s one of ours which, we think, tells you a lot about the plot.  What about price? How much should you charge for your book? If you are a big-name author, you (or, more likely, your publisher) can get away with charging £12.99 ($14.99) for your book. If you are an unknown or Indie author, don’t even think about it. There is some interesting psychology related to pricing. On the one hand, people expect to pay more for a quality product. On the other hand, everyone loves a bargain, even readers. Where you pitch the price of your book is therefore important. Price it an 99p (99c) and readers may think ‘It can’t be very good if they’re practically giving it away’. On the other hand, price it at £12.99 and readers may say ‘I’m not going to pay that much to read a book by an author I’ve never heard of’. We price our ebooks at £4.99 ($5.99) and that seems to be about right for us. But the key messages are (a) don’t undersell yourself and (b) don’t price yourself out of the market.  When we talk about ‘place’ we mean the places where you promote your books rather than the places you sell them. We’re going to assume that your book is listed on all the relevant ebook etailing sites and, for those of you that don’t want to give money to Geoff Bezos, all we can say is that if you aren’t on Amazon, you aren’t anywhere. Internet searches always place Amazon at the top of the results, so if someone is actually trying to find your book, that is where it will appear first – and perhaps the only place on the first page of results. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing offshoot also allows you to publish in paperback without paying expensive set-up charges or buying a minimum number of copies. But in our terms, place means your choice of social media site(s) on which to engage with readers and promote your work and your choice is important.  If you want to reach young people, then Facebook isn’t the place and Twitter is iffy at best, because young people are always on the newest, trendiest platforms. Only 51% of social media users between ages 12 and 18 use Facebook – the second smallest group. So you need to do some basic research to make sure the platform(s) you are using are the right ones to reach your target audience. But don’t rely on social media alone. Local newspapers and radio stations are always looking for content, so a short item (written by you) will fill some column inches for them or an interview will fill five minutes of radio time. But, again, don’t expect them to find you. You have to reach out to them. Also, check your local community resources (libraries, schools, colleges churches, clubs, societies, etc) for events where you can go along and talk about your work (and maybe sell a few copies).  Promotion can be anything from a Tweet or Facebook post to a video, podcast, a free extract or paid for advertising. I don’t aim to cover all of those. Instead I’ll focus on the one that you have to pay for – advertising. Social media has given us all the ability to run relatively cheap advertising campaigns – but which ones work and which don’t? Ask us a question that we can answer. Because, again, it depends on the advertising channel you use. There is no point in paying for and advert on Facebook if hardly any of your target audience ever uses Facebook. We can tell you where we get the best return on our advertising budget – but that would be more confusing because we use different platforms for different books, because different audiences use different social media platforms. What we can tell you is that spending money on Amazon doesn’t seem to work for us. We don’t know why that is, but we have had very little success there. Other publishers and authors tell us that they have had significant success using Amazon, so we can’t explain it. But one important detail about advertising. Makes sure your advert includes the following:
 You’re now wondering what I’m going to say about ‘process’. Actually, not a lot. I’ve tried to get the messages in this blog in the order you need to address them. That’s about all the ‘process’ you need to worry about. But if you want to be successful your ‘process’ must also include research:
 Without that research, you may as well be standing on a street corner shouting ‘buy my book’. And you will be no more successful.
And, if doing research sounds like too much hassle, then good luck getting people to stumble across your book by chance. If you have found this blog informative or entertaining (or both) then make sure not to miss future editions by signing up for our newsletter. Just click on the button below. |
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