Louis Shalako
Editor’s
Note: the following may be heretical. The odds of Louis
recanting would appear to be rather slim.
It was in April of last year when Shalako Publishing
and Long Cool One Books underwent a massive system overhaul and quality control
audit.
During that revamp, we found missing titles on a few platforms, and a
badly formatted story or two. During the course of that month (as well as since
then) we have upgraded many of our marketing images. We rewrote a few blurbs
and checked all meta-data, some of which turned out to be not particularly well
done.
One of our goals here is to build a powerful,
personal publishing system that’s effective, easy to use and as profitable as
we can make it.
We call it our virtual publishing machine. The only
moving parts are the keyboard and the mouse on this desk...and, one must
assume, the writer.
This machine takes no account whatsoever of anything
that has ever gone before. It totally gnores traditional assumptions.
About last April, we noted that OmniLit
has an iTunes distribution channel. Various writers on the industry have
recommended being on every platform. Smashwords also has a distribution channel
to iTunes. That’s the one we were using, basically because SW was here first
and we started off with SW and Amazon four or five years ago.
When I looked into publishing directly through Apple’s
iTunes, the first thing I noted was that they wanted me to download the app,
which didn’t fit my needs. The PC I was using at the time was choked with
stuff.
There wasn’t enough space on the hard drive. The second thing I noticed
was that they wanted a credit card number. That was enough to stop me at the
time. However, now I have a new computer and presumably downloading the app
won’t be a problem. My credit card is maxed so I’m not too worried about being
robbed.
We’ll worry about publishing directly to iTunes
later.
However, on Smashwords’ distribution channel
manager, we un-clicked a few titles, and removed them from iTunes distribution.*
We made ourselves some 1400 x 2100 marketing images and used OmniLit to
distribute to iTunes. It takes some time, as Apple has an internal review, and
OmniLit’s uploading process is more labourious. But those books made it into
the Apple store just as well as through Smashwords. Those books will pop out
into the new books stream for the second time. We can even un-click them from
OmniLit and pop them out through Smashwords again.** Basically, we have built a
new wrinkle into our machine, our system, or whatever you want to call it. It’s
a little bit like price-pulsing, only we’re using the product itself.
You have to understand the market: it is a great,
gaping maw, it’s hungry and it wants to be fed.
It likes nice, shiny, new little tidbits to gnaw on.
Around the same time we opened an author account on
Kobo through Kobo Writing Life.
Using one pen-name, we uploaded three or four
titles. Without any real promo effort, he had sold about three books over the
course of a year, which was more than he had sold using the Smashwords to Kobo
distribution channel (and no promo there either.)
It was only recently that we read the post on price
pulsing. Honestly, I hate to brag, but I learned that one
from WalMart. Their mushrooms were $1.27 one week so I went back the next week.
The price was $1.49, or the same as anywhere else. The next week they were
$1.86 and that’s when I started doing some thinking...
I also bought
the mushrooms at $1.86—I didn’t feel like driving across town, only to find
that the other store might have them on for $1.99. That was my great revelation
in marketing. You have to drop that price and then raise it in a way that seems
completely arbitrary. This is especially easy with ebooks because no one seems
to know what the price should be anyway.
(What does the average consumer know about mushrooms
except what they paid for them last time...?)
Writers
are like mushrooms, aren’t we?
Keep
us in the dark and feed us nothing but shit, right, ladies and gentlemen?
We will see about that, ladies and gentlemen.
Like any other tool in the inventory, no single
thing is responsible for selling a book. It’s a whole combination of factors,
but pulsing does seem to work to a certain extent. To change the price puts it
into another category, where presumably a different class of shopper may see
it. Quite frankly, I was shocked to stick a new cover on a $0.99 book, jack the
price to $7.99 and sell one copy in fairly short order. I only wish it had sold
two copies! But who knows what will happen if I dropped the price to $0.99
again.
The basic theory behind price-pulsing is that you
try to move as many units as you possibly can at a lower price. The stated
theory is that the algorithms don’t care about price, only ranking. Those
algorithms create the ranking based on total sales. Once you have a higher
ranking, jack the price, sell a few units, and then lower it again.
Giving away free books carries less weight
algorithmically per unit, and getting Amazon to price-match a free book on
another platform is always uncertain. They reserve discretion to set pricing
policy and as it’s their store we can only push so hard.
So what we are doing now is to unclick titles from
the Kobo distribution channel on Smashwords. We’re uploading directly to Kobo
now, and if we make a sale, then we simply get paid by Kobo as opposed to
Smashwords.
When we uploaded our first few titles to Kobo a year
or so ago, the lowest price that you could set for a book was $1.99.
Now you can set it anywhere from free, $0.99, and
up. This makes the platform much more amenable to the hot-shoe driving of it.
You can set books for free, and watch them go out
the door. Publishing from Smashwords, either Kobo didn’t report free books
‘sold’ or maybe we simply didn’t get any. But we uploaded old titles to Kobo and
saw at least one sale almost immediately. That was in the Philippines, another
first for us. We’re giving away free books in a number of countries and that’s
a first for the Kobo site as far as we can determine.
There is more to what we are doing here than just
price-pulsing. We are adding in dashboards and control points, and diversifying
our revenue streams.
When you publish a book, it pops out on a website’s
front page shortly thereafter. If it does not sell at least one copy, it may
never have a ranking.
One wonders how passive discoverability would ever
have a chance to work in such a case.
Those books were already on iTunes and Kobo. They
just weren’t doing anything, and in fact this is a good reason to go back and
sign up for publishing directly through iTunes, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook
Press if they ever make provision for Canadian authors and ITINs and no 30 %
tax withholding.
This is why it’s important to sell a book—it
improves the odds of selling another one greatly. We have titles on Amazon for
example, that have never sold a single copy. Those books have no ranking at
all.
Giving away free books means that the customer has
indicated a preference, and they will likely be presented with more of your
titles, especially if you keep writing them and the customer is not so
displeased that they give the book a bad review.
We’re not doing any practical harm to Smashwords
when we do this, because those titles weren’t selling through the channel
anyway. Now they stand a much better chance, and it’s because we can fine-tune
the machine. We can price-pulse (or toggle back and forth from zero to $0.99)
using an individual platform, essentially giving us more control, and a greater
likelihood of selling a book on any given day. We’re going to learn Kobo’s
strengths and weaknesses in a way that was just not possible by going through
Smashwords.
With something like a hundred titles and a few other
products, including PODs, you can only spend so much time on it. I can’t toggle
a hundred prices a day on eight or nine different platforms, it simply isn’t
possible. In that sense it is still limited by the number of hours in the day
and the need to write new material. If I could get a bunch of trained monkeys
or build a bot to do just that, I would switch prices every day. Every damned
day, because that’s what WalMart does, ladies and gentlemen.
I just don’t have the time.
We all have to eat, to sleep, perchance to dream.
***
The other day I read a blog post where the author
felt it was ‘dishonest’ to use giveaways to achieve a high ranking and then
claim a bestseller.
I do not claim to be a bestselling author. There is
nothing like that in any of my blogs, it does not say that on the cover of any
of my books, or anywhere at all.
Number eight or twenty-seven on a free list is just
that: number eight or twenty-seven on the free list.
But what really struck me is that I was being judged
by someone else’s standards, and obviously we will always fail such tests,
because they are based on a set of someone else’s assumptions. And having
failed their test, they now have the right to condemn us as ‘dishonest.’
Obviously the person sincerely believes that
traditional publishing is the only real way to go.
This is certainly true in their case. I cannot
recommend anything else for them—this advice is offered without prejudice and
without further comment.
As for me, I am building a machine that simply
ignores traditional publishing in this one particular author’s life.
I
never have to submit a book or story again if I don’t want to.
You are comparing apples in a basket to a man in
boots and coveralls who just picked out a fine parcel of land and he’s sticking
apple seeds in the ground. You have a basket of nice shiny apples and he’s
building something that will be totally awesome at some point in the future.
It’s a difference not so much of opinion—we both
consider each other’s opinion irrelevant,
but in our basic set of assumptions.
And the whole world is built on assumptions, isn’t
it?
END
*Smashwords tells you not to un-publish your books.
If you do, you will lose any ranking those books have on any given platform,
for example iTunes or Kobo. If you’re not selling any books on those platforms,
you have no ranking to lose. You can still keep the rankings in the SW store
and in any other platform where you have sold books.
**iTunes’ internal review and time-lags at the
aggregator end sort of stymies this to a certain extent. This actually helps to
make the case for publishing directly via iTunes—once the titles are up, you
should be able to price-toggle, (or instantaneously change covers with some confidence that
changes will actually go through), to your little heart’s content.
I can’t really state that with any certainty, as I
haven’t actually done it yet.
