Working hard to hardly work

Posted on August 31, 2018 (Subscribe to Blog)

The dream is to work hard now so that I can goof off for the rest of my life. Easier said than done!

I've spent the past two months delving deep into the world of marketing. After 9+ years of avoiding getting my hands dirty, I thought it was probably time to step up my game. For a long time, I've been one of those authors who just wants to write, with the hope that my books will sell themselves. Sadly, that's even more of a fantasy than the genre I write for.

Arrival of first books

I started out with Island of Fog in paperback format only, as you can see in this ancient picture of me opening my very first shipment of books. This was back in 2009. I did book signings and talks at libraries and schools, and I was "quite well known" locally in that respect. That kick-started my writing career (okay, hobby). Eventually I was dragged kicking and screaming into the ebook world. "Oh, go on then," I said, "I'll make a Kindle version if you really, really prefer that..." (all spoken with a distasteful curl to my lip).

If you're interested, you can read more about my very first proof copy and my first delivery of books in these old blog posts.

How things have changed. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of my sales today are ebooks, but I still sell paperbacks. I still have that "local connection" where parents want me to sign a print copy for their child. The libraries want print copies. Print copies are essential for book signing events and sci-fi/fantasy conventions. And of course they look really nice on my shelf.

As for marketing... (yawn)

I've done a lot of free and paid promos over the years. The basic plan is to offer Book 1 for free in the hope that the reader will take a chance and read it, then fall hopelessly in love with the story and buy every other book in the series. So, giving away the first book for free is a great idea.

Usually, a bunch of free promos might equate to one paid promo, and a paid promo might yield a few hundred downloads. Then there's BookBub, the titan of all promo services. Nothing can touch them in terms of sheer volume of readers. The first promo I did with BookBub cost maybe $60, and Island of Fog was downloaded 11,600 times. I've had several similar promos since, each with 5000-6000 downloads. The last one I did, about a year ago, resulted in a staggering 43,000 downloads... for $88. Money well spent.

So why don't I just use BookBub all the time? Because a) you can't promote the same book more than twice a year, and b) that's assuming your book is accepted at all. Island of Fog has been rejected as many times as it's been accepted. Many, many authors still have not had their first BookBub promo. It's fair to say that a BookBub promo is like the Midas touch, launching your book to the top of Amazon's Kindle lists and turning it to gold for a while. It can put your book on the map, and usually it stays there.

(Yes, yes, I know the legendary King Midas was around long before Amazon, or indeed Kindle, but you know what I mean.)

If authors could use BookBub all the time, readers would be so jaded by the same books showing up that the system wouldn't be anywhere near as effective. So, we authors have to hope for an occasional BookBub while making ends meet in other ways.

Besides, free downloads aren't the complete answer to everything.

Overall, Island of Fog has been downloaded roughly 175,000 times. But does that translate to 175,000 sales of Book 2 and Book 3 and so on? Nope. If so, I would have made... hmm, let's see... yes, 5.4 million dollars. I haven't quite made that much because, in reality, only about 2% of free-book downloaders "convert" to sales of other books in the series, either because they never found time to read the first one or they just didn't like it. 2% is about 3,500 people, and that's probably close to accurate -- in fact, I've sold 4,680 copies of Labyrinth of Fire in total, plus all the other books. Pretty stark difference, right? Yep, 2% is pretty miserable.

(It's worth noting that the 43,000 downloads last year made almost no impact on sales whatsoever. Strange but true.)

Hence why I've been delving deeper into marketing the past two months.

I bought a training course for one proven method that many people swear by. I found that I knew much of it already, either because I'd learned these methods elsewhere or they just seemed logical -- but it still helped to see these methods validated by experts and expanded on.

In my old office job decades ago, I used to train staff about repetitive strain injury (RSI) using computers, and I'd have to show people how to avoid WRULDs in the office. (Go on, guess; the answer is coming up.) The point is, when I developed severe backache one time, I suffered for six months before finally seeing a doctor and a specialist, and I discovered the solution was to practice exactly what I'd been preaching -- raising my screen so I was forced to sit more upright, raising my chair a little, doing some basic stretches, etc. Within days, my back was better. All it took was believing in what I already knew, and actually doing it myself. So, so stupid.

Seeing these marketing experts demonstrate what they were doing to make tons of money made me think, "Oh, I kinda knew that already... but all right, I'll try it." I learned quite a few neat tricks, and learned a few things I was doing wrong, and I think I can move forward now with a better understanding of what works and what doesn't. But mostly I learned there's no "magic button" that will skyrocket my sales and earn me a fortune. I either work harder at promoting my books in endless social networks, or I get smarter at marketing with paid ads.

Meanwhile, the one thing experts agree on is this: Build your reader list. Nurture your readers. Don't be "salesy" with them. Don't try to sell your books all the time. Give them stuff. Make it about what you can do for them. Build a relationship, make them eager to see your emails arriving from time to time, offer them an interesting five-minute read or something else of value. Give, give, give, then maybe ask for a sale, then give, give, give...

As a reader myself, and someone who subscribes to various mailing lists, this advice is good. But man, it makes me wonder how I'm doing with my own emails. Only you can tell me that. Not many readers leave comments, but hardly anyone unsubscribes either. What about indifference, though?

Lately I've been dabbling with ads on Amazon, Facebook, and BookBub.

A BookBub ad is not the same as a BookBub featured promo that I was talking about earlier. Ads on all three platforms function roughly the same way -- you create an ad, throw some money at it, and wait to see if anything converts to sales, and if so, do those sales outweigh the spend?

I've decided Facebook is the easiest to get results with and by far the most powerful. You may have seen this one going around:

I have different versions of this -- same image, and mostly the same copy, with just the first part changed. This one is for dystopian fiction in general. In the other versions, the first quote is from readers who compared Island of Fog to Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Percy Jackson. Each ad targets that particular niche.

The book is free, so obviously I'm not trying to make profit here. Instead, I'm trying to gain subscribers. Some of you reading this post arrived here in this exact way, and I hope you agree it was worth it!

I've had a tiny bit of success with Amazon, and even where there's no sale or the book is free, it has to be good to have my ads constantly showing up on Amazon book search results, right? Awareness campaigns, that sort of thing:

Amazon Ad

But even better would be to make actual profit from ads. Books are so dang cheap, though. How do you compete in a saturated market, with high costs per click, when the sale of even a $4.99 book yields no more than $3.50 royalty? For me, the answer is to advertise box sets, which naturally have a higher price tag. Here's a box set on Amazon:

Amazon Ad

Still no dice, though. Amazon ads just aren't working very well for me. Many authors swear by them, but they say you need literally thousands of keywords, hundreds of ads, and dozens of hours to make it work well.

The BookBub ad system is the nicest to work with, but I'm still trying to make them profitable. It's good to target a certain niche of readers and tailor the ad copy accordingly:

BookBub Ad

Still, getting conversions and making profit is hard.

So here's another idea:

BookBub Ad

The first targets an audience by genre, but the second targets those who recently bought Sleep Writer through a BookBub featured promo a few months ago (resulting in thousands of downloads and a lot of recommendations). Not only is this bundle set a great deal for readers, but one sale pays for a LOT of clicks. The ad goes to my Gumroad landing page where readers can buy the series directly and very easily with credit card or PayPal, no fuss. It's a really sweet system.

Of course, the obvious problem is convincing readers to turn over $30 of their hard-money. Fans of the series will know it's a great deal, but try telling that to newcomers! So it's still a number-crunching game. How many clicks will it take to make a sale? Time will tell.

So that's it for now. I'll keep plugging away while writing my books and doing my home-based website design day job. I'm happy to say I'm no longer filling in with carpentry/construction work; I'm now back at home full time and earning what I need to earn to pay the bills and be comfortable -- but not as much as I'd like to earn.

Maybe I should return Steven Spielberg's call and take him up on that movie deal...?

(By the way, for those dying to know the answer, WRULDs is work-related upper limb disorder: sitting at a computer for a long time, the screen so low you're hunched over, your chair so low your forearms are angled upward, that sort of thing.)

Comment by BRIAN CLOPPER on Friday, August 31, 2018...

Absolutely one of the best blog posts I've read recently. You come across as so approachable and the type of person I'd want to spend time with even if it was just doing a menial, arduous task together while shooting the breeze. It makes me want to go buy your books or help you chop wood. Since I've already read your many projects and loved them, I guess I'll just have to grab an axe and show up at your doorstep.

Plus, Keith has just the coolest British accent. You feel elevated in intelligence and wit just being part of a conversation with the bloke.

Comment by ROGER ESCHBACHER on Friday, August 31, 2018...

Great post, Keith. I have my little forays into marketing and promotion, but, in general, I'm pretty bad at it. I tried a few Facebook ads back when I was doing my Ghost Star Kindle Scout campaign, but I'd say my results were mixed at best — probably due to unconvincing ads. I like the ones you shared in this post, much more focused than my own.

I'd say tweets, FB author page posts, and, oddly enough, LinkedIn shares of my blog posts seem to generate the most interest and "results" (again, we're talking Ghost Star here — my other books, especially the Dragonfriend series, are in need of an overhaul). I try to keep marketing posts on my personal FB page to a minimum and I think/hope my friends appreciate that. Those little rectangular "timeline ads" I recently created seem to help too. I think they draw the eye better than a plain text tweet.

Anyway, good job! I share your dream of "working hard to hardly work" and will follow your marketing quest with interest.

Comment by KEITH ROBINSON on Friday, August 31, 2018...

Why, thank you Brian!! Yes, please do show up at my door with an axe... er... but maybe let us know you're coming so it's not such a massive shock where we call the police and everything.

Roger, I've never considered LinkedIn posts. Like ever, at all. I would have thought LinkedIn was too serious and professional for book readers... which is silly, of course. I'll have to pick your brains about that. And little rectangular timeline ads? I'll have to delve deeper. And I agree, I have a Facebook page for books, and I have my personal page for everything else.

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