OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
Amazon's list of Top 10 Bestselling books of 2011 was announced last week.
Here are my thoughts on these two books and what we can learn for our own book marketing.
(1)
That isn't meant to be a judgment. But these books are stories that people can clearly enjoy quickly without too much deep and meaningful thought. People want to be entertained, to escape from their lives for a moment in time. Culver's in particular is a strange case because the ebook has errors in it which have been pointed out by various reviewers. But he combines a violent crime novel with high body count and some paranormal aspects. Unusually, his protagonist is a Muslim detective which makes his book stand out in the crime genre.
This goes back to my thoughts on what the highest paid authors have in common. Write popular fiction, not literary genius, if you want large sales figures. It's also backed up by the sales figures of John Locke and Amanda Hocking, neither of whom claim to be prize-winning literary authors. They just want to entertain. You have to decide what you want as an author.
(2) They are both priced at 99c and they are both Kindle only.
I know price is a contentious issue and I personally swing from 99c to $2.99 and then up to $4.99 and back down again as the best price for an ebook. I pay all sorts of prices but certainly as a reader, if I hear of a book/ an author for the first time, it needs to be $2.99 or under. If I read an interesting sample and the book is 99c, I definitely buy it.
An article in the Wall Street Journal points to this strategic pricing as part of Darcie Chan's success.
(3) Book reviews
If you Google either of these books you will find a huge number of reviews on various blogs. Neither of these authors have a big “platform” in the way we usually talk about it, but it seems like the reviews they received boosted sales significantly.
I also saw a review on Goodreads for Mill River Recluse that pointed to Kindle bargain site Pixel of Ink where it had received some publicity. 99c books are very popular there and you can buy placement for a few hundred dollars.
In the Wall Street Journal article, Chan counts reviews, including Kirkus Indie, as a way to kickstart sales and paid for some as well as soliciting others.
(4) Paid advertising
According to the Wall Street Journal article, Darcie Chan also spent about $1,000 on marketing, buying banner ads on websites and blogs devoted to Kindle readers and a promotional spot on Goodreads.com, a book-recommendation site with more than six million members.
Robin Sullivan in her interview about 6 figure indie publishing also talked about Goodreads and it's a network I intend to be more active in during 2012.
Conclusion
I am personally convinced that book reviews and an accessible price point are the best sales tactics for selling bulk fiction ebooks, providing the book and cover are good enough in the first place.
These two novels seem to prove the point. The Abbey has 507 reviews on Amazon averaging 4.5 stars and Mill River Recluse has 667 reviews averaging 4 stars. I have seen with Pentecost how Amazon's sales algorithm kicks in when reviews start to pile up so this should be one of any authors main marketing tactics.
So what's the point in building an author platform?
Your platform helps you get reviews. It also starts the ball rolling with sales as you have an audience ready to buy the book when it's available. It's also support for the journey and a great way to network. I wouldn't do without my online platform and friends but I'll definitely be focusing on reviews for 2012. I'll share my research here as always!
What do you think? Are reviews the key to sales success? What sites have you found the best for getting reviews?
So if you enjoyed Pentecost and you would like to be considered for a review copy of Prophecy, please email me directly: joanna@TheCreativePenn.com
The review copy will only be available in Kindle or PDF format but I really like the stack of books image my cover designer Derek made for me!
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1 2 3 4 Next »I too waver on pricing. Of course I want to make money to compensate me for what I write. Pricing higher would seem to be the logical way to go, and some people I've spoken to like Nick Daws think that prices should go up. I'm not so sure that's true. I've sold many more of my books on writing at 99c than I ever did at 2.99. I look at it this way 99c is an impulse buy, and even if you spent a year writing a book you are not writing it for 99c, you are writing it for as many people as you can get to pay 99c. Twenty thousand times 99c is still a lot of money. I was reminded by all this that actually the reason books are expensive is not because the author gets a lot of the money, anyway. Authors, especially beginners, earn a small royalty but pray for quantity to make money.
When I was published back in the 80s-90s (non-fiction, polishes nails on collar) my royalty was about 2% which is pretty standard. This equated to about 2-3 quid on each book sold at about £25 and they only printed about 10,000 as a first run. I got an advance of £1000. All this is also pretty standard. The expectation was that they wouldn't sell all the books, but were hoping they would. So my advance was all the money they were expecting to pay me. Fortunately one of the books went into a second edition but stalled after that.
So by my calculations (probably wrong, but I do writing not maths so go with it) in total I got for that book was about say £5000 in royalties for selling about 10,000 books, which at the time I was very happy with by the way. Not a bad return on three months work. So if I wrote the same book as an ebook and sold it for 99c I'd probably have to sell half as many again to make roughly the same amount of money, even on Kindle with the 35% royalty, and hey it might take twice as long. So times really haven't changed that much in my view. If I did poorly I got £1000, if I did well I got £5000, if I did GREAT then the sky was the limit. Most people did poorly, and they still do. Poor subject choice and lack of marketing/getting the word out mean poor sales, for a paperback and a Kindle ebook. Even if you were published you still had to do marketing/getting the word out, and publishers were limited as to what they could do in that respect. I was lucky I wrote a book on a hot topic of the time, but others were not so lucky.
The only thing that has really changed a LOT is the price of entry into the book publishing game. Self publishers have lost the stigma of vanity publishing, which always had nasty overtones of Florence Foster Jenkins hiring the Carnegie Hall to torture and amuse people with her awful singing. Now as someone commented in another post, it's more like the Indie music scene. There's a lot of quality ebooks out there. Price of entry being so low means you have to give something to make up the difference between yours and mainstreams marketing budgets. You have to put a lot of time and effort into building your audience. (Joanna can tell you lots more about that, and does!)
Do that well, place adverts and get reviews and tart yourself around on the Internet (oh the humanity!) so people know all about your work and, as we've seen from the success stories, the price you charge for you book is suddenly not an issue.
Just my 2p.
Phil South
That's about 20p worth Phil :) I think it's worth having some books at 99c to hook people into your reading. The odd thing about these 2 is that Cullen has 1 other book and Chan has nothing else, so crazy stuff. But if you sell 430,000 books, then a 30c royalty per book looks pretty good :)
Haha yeah sorry once I start typing I can't stop.
And yeah you are right it doesn't matter how much you charge for something if you sell a lot of em.
and it was about £2, sorry about that :D
Pricing is going to be a difficult cookie to cut until ereaders and ebooks become more mainstream (they're getting there, but there's still a plethora of readers who love their physical books even more).
What stands out the most to me about this post is reviews! As someone who runs a small, independent publishing house, we often overlook integrating reviews onto our book pages, but after reading this article a solution hit me. So, thanks Joanna!
I'm so glad the penny dropped on reviews. It has for me as well lately and I am focusing hard on that in 2012.
Fantastic post, Joanna, an example of why I follow you.
At the risk of oversimplification, the new information this post gives me on the importance of book reviews: the greater the number of four- and five-star reviews, the better. And yes, we need to seek out reviews, but first we need to write a unique story well, one that resonates with a large group of readers.
Thanks again,
Susan
Thanks Susan. I'm glad you found it insightful. Yes, we have to write that great story - then we have to pack the reviews in. Maybe it is that simple?!!
you know what the more I read about that the more convinced I am. But then it's the same in music terms. I am in my own modest way a musician and I sell more records when I get a review than any amount of "social notworking". :) The example of Ms Chan and Amanda Hocking tells me that reviews are crucial to building your platform. I'm beginning to suspect it really is that simple.
An interesting post from Seth Godin today at the Domino Project on price points for ebooks.
http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/12/how-much-should-an-ebook-cost.html
Yes, I saw this post as well and it does make me think about future projects where I offer limited print editions to my fans as well as mass market ebooks priced cheaply. I would very rarely pay more than £10 for a book, I prefer to pay under 5. To take a chance on a new author, then 2 is a good bet, but then I'll pay more if I want their other books. It is a new world and we have to decide what we want. Bulk sales and a wider audience or fewer people paying less which will make us more money!
When I released Pentecost I had a day job so income wasn't the point - now it is a primary driver so I am reconsidering my pricing options!
I think reviews are chicken-and-egg. In my experience, the reviews follow good sales rather than lead to them. If you're unknown, you need some positive reviews to help readers make a buying decision, but you need an array of them. If you have nothing but 4 and 5 star reviews, that can lead to suspicion of sock puppetry. I think marketing within your subgenre is key so you can benefit from your book appearing on the "Customers who bought this book also bought..." on the pages of the popular books in your genre; so your book will be suggested on customer's Amazon pages; and so fans of the popular authors in your genre will receive Amazon emails suggesting your book.
The 99 cent price is a conundrum. I like it because it can help you get on a bestseller chart or two, but I wonder how many people follow through on reading it. I tend to put my cheap impulse buys on the back-burner in favor of books I paid a higher price for. I think the technique of using it occasionally to tweak sales is a good one.
aha - the price pulsing effect - I definitely use that one. I hate dropping off the charts though and when I move to $2.99 I drop out! aarghhh!
Reviews can definitely drive sales as Amazon recommends you more if you have more reviews - it is a circle that has to start somewhere though!
Joanna, I really appreciate your thoughtful posts. (I also love the way your accent shines through your writing! Sorry, I'm a silly American! :)
As for marketing, a friend suggested offering the first book for free then later books for .99 (with links to buy them at the end of your book of course!). After her books became more popular, subsequent prices were around 2.99 and sold very well. This only works if the books are well written (entertaining) and you have several out.
and there was I trying to use American spelling for you guys! I probably mix it up a bit so it's not entirely British or US!
That pricing is good but you can't do free easily at the moment - and only for 5 days on KDP Select (which is a whole other argument) I shall be keeping Pentecost at 99c and then the next books will be $2.99 so I agree with that for a series tactic. Well written is a given these days!
I've been seeing a lot of comments that the path of 'getting reviews', which worked so well for the early indie authors, has now plugged full like a publisher's slush pile - especially the high traffic reviewer sites that are the most useful targets.
That is true - they've also put up prices. I used Kindle Nation Daily earlier this year but when I went to look again for Prophecy, they are filled for months ahead and they are charging a lot of money. I'll pay under $200 for a worthwhile promotional opportunity but not $500! So you're right, but that will mean some other sites will start growing too - time to start a Kindle recommendations site anyone??!
And it used to be that a book review wasn't a book review unless it was free. Now, even Kirkus charges. Hmm, guess those days are gone.
Joanna,
Great synopsis and loved your conclusion. Book reviews, some well placed advertising and pricing do help to get the word out about your book. I'm a fan of having an author platform, such as a blog, and connecting with my readers as well.
Hi Joanna,
I think it's a combination of all the things you have mentioned that make an ebook sell really well. I know some authors find reviews useless: some have quite a few but struggle to sell a handful a month while others have hardly any or no reviews and sell loads of books. Some authors can't sell anything priced below $3.99 while others can't sell anything priced above 99c. As long as the book remains at 99c, they sell hundreds of copies.
It's a strange old world but I think in order to acheive success you have to experiment with absolutely everything before you decide.
Merry Christmas!
So, I write commercial fiction. Both my books so far are priced at 99 cents. I get almost uniformly positive reviews from the book blogging crowd. And I have paid advertising (with more to come).
And yet the word still isn't spreading. Some days I wonder what the deal is.
I think we both need more books John. If you check out the interview with Robin Sullivan on 6 figure self-publishing, she talks about 3 books being the minimum for a decent impact, and preferably more. Hocking had 9 before the big break, John Locke had 8, now lots more, Konrath has 40+. I'm getting on with writing my 3rd novel now. We can't all be the stand out like the 2 above, so we just have to put in the time! Luck is definitely part of it, but comes more to the prepared!