New Post: Promotion 101

c2011 Shalako

During E-Book week, we observed that page hits on our Smashwords e-books went up to eighty, a hundred, or even a hundred twenty-five per day. During a couple of short bursts of Twitter-feed promotion, again page hits went up, maybe in the twenty-five to fifty per day range.

The lesson is a simple one. When you promote the book, people look at it. When you don't, they stop! On our Smashwords statistics page, we can see that paid customers are in fact downloading books that they 'paid' for by signing in and typing in the promo code.

Now that the free book promotion is over, virtually no one is buying books even when the page hits are up due to links going out on Twitter and Facebook, etc. I still have one product for free on Smashwords. That is the short story, 'The Handbag's Tale.' People are taking this product, and I can see downloads on the stats page from time to time.

With the price marked at, 'zero,' rather than using a promo code, this does nothing to boost that all-important statistic, books that were 'sold' one way or another.

Right now my Smashwords total is only 135, so anything that sells or even just moves books is important. At some point, I have to put a price back on 'Handbag' just to make the counter move!

As far as pricing, any edge helps to move books. The funny thing is, people are buying my books from Amazon, and that number has bumped up since the promotion. In some crazy way, price doesn't even really matter.

Somehow promotion rubbed off...or something.

No one who isn't into self-publishing or writing really knows what Smashwords is. They don't want to sign up if they don't know anything about it, or its advantages, or how the system works. At that point price is meaningless.

Why I am selling more books in the U.K. as opposed to the U.S. is still a bit of a mystery. The ratio is 2.3/1 in favour of the Brits.

So for March, 'Heaven Is Too Far Away' is back in front, followed by 'Handbag's Tale,' with a surprising third-place resurgence of 'The Paranoid Cat,' and in fourth place is a steady 'Case of the Curious Killers.' Once again, 'Core Values' lingers in a distant trailing position, and maybe we should count ourselves lucky to have sold or given away seven copies of that book.

Promotion gives feedback, which means you have data you can attempt to interpret.

If I do something right, the numbers will climb...if I do something dumb, or just stop promoting...the numbers will fall.

Notes:

First, I posted this at about noon on a Friday. There were virtually no page hits within an hour or so, yet when I made a post at about eight or eight-thirty last Thursday night, there were about forty page-hits. So time of day, i.e. 'prime-time' makes a big difference to a blog entry which cross-posts on Facebook or Twitter. In terms of technique, it's just dumb. However, I can 'share' it later or copy and paste the URL into posts on other platforms such as LinkedIn or Stumbleupon. It's all written up and everything. It's not a total waste, is what I'm saying.

By having a number of products and platforms, which is a lot of work to set up, it gives me the chance to experiment. By treating one book differently, or promoting one platform against another, I can compare results and try to figure out why one performs differently; or why it might be perceived differently.

***

While not exactly an expert, my mother is asking me to set up a free website for her.

That is so easy for me now, that it's really more a matter of her finding the time! If she had some short texts written up, and a few images, all I would really need is a little fuel and a couple of hours.

I started blogging in February 2010 and created my first website in August/2010.

I published my first two e-books last fall and I have seven or eight products in all, (some of which are experimental or promotional,) with a few more on the back burner.

***

If I treat it like a game, and enjoy it as a learning experience, I think we'll do all right, ladies and gentlemen.

Learning the Ropes: Criticism and Feedback.

Morguefile, effects by Louis.



When I first began submitting short stories, I made one hundred eighty-five submissions before I got a hit, and that story still hasn’t come out yet.

Since May of 2009, I have made five hundred and ninety-seven submissions. Maybe half a dozen of those were book subs. Previously, I had made an estimated seventy-five book submissions, and a few others. Those were all by post. They also take a very, very long time. I used to submit to contests, which also takes a very long time, but you often do get the jury’s criticisms.

There is a difference in terms of feedback, and it is a vital one. The difference is time. A book rejection rarely if ever has any feedback or criticism attached to it. I know of one exception, and the gentleman edits two pages of your submission and sends them back to you along with your rejection slip. Mine had more red ink of his than the black ink I put there! It hurt like hell. A few hours later, I was re-writing happily enough, because, ‘now I knew what I had to do. ‘

Asimov’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s, or Ellery Queen’s will not send you criticism or a reason for your story rejection. They get tens of thousands of subs a year. To give even one person criticism is an unfair advantage in a competitive business. They don’t have time to do everyone, and how could you choose? Hard-luck stories? It is favouritism, especially at the lowest levels. How they treat top-profile authors is a whole ‘nuther story. (They ask for revisions.)

So the difference is time, and early in the career, criticism is absolutely vital. I never would have figured that out without actually trying different things. People who are further along the learning curve tend to forget what they struggled with twenty or thirty years ago. Maybe they made six submissions and started making money! Their experience is simply different. Mine is not exactly unique.

Some editors do give feedback, and criticism, and reasons for rejection. Rejection hurts? These guys are your best friends. ‘Learning the ropes,’ sounds like a nautical term. But it’s really a boxing term. In the early part of any career, you spend a fair amount of time on the ropes…it’s inevitable, and a part of the learning curve. You will see scars in the mirror, and you will have earned them.

The reason for rejection may be a simple one. Recently I subbed a story unthinkingly, and it was simply too long. The story itself may be fine. By checking the guidelines, I might have saved us both a little time.

My first submissions were combed out of a printed media guide at the local library, but getting on the internet has really freed me. This may seem nuts, but I did everything wrong—and I still got published. I sent original stories to foreign reprint markets, who mostly publish ‘known’ authors previously published in English, or writers in their own language.

Some of the inappropriate submissions I made were too long, or too short, reading period closed, improper format, failure to put my own name on things, no word count, or wrong genre. Every mistake in the book, and I still managed to get in. So far, the rate of acceptance is still running at about four percent, and most of those aren’t even professionally-paying markets. That is still twenty-five in a year and a half, with a few subs still out there. It proves ‘even a dummy like me can do it,’ and who hasn’t heard that one before?

There is plenty to learn. That’s for sure. But it’s just a matter of blood, tears, toil and sweat.

It is a matter of time. A short story has structure, and so does a novel. The criticisms come back to you a lot faster, sometimes three days as opposed to eight months or longer. And so you learn faster.

As far as writing novels goes, the more I do, the better I will get at it, and it is not that hard to see a big difference from the first to the fourth, fifth and sixth, which is where I began to get pretty comfortable with straightforward narrative fiction writing.

I can go back and look at stuff I submitted a year and a half ago, and sometimes I just shudder!

You can’t be afraid to take it on the chin once in a while, or you ain’t going anywhere.

Note: as of this re-post, (May 6/12, I'm up to 693 submissions.)