It’s very difficult to do, isn’t it? That’s because this is a bad cover.
I personally really like this cover. It feels right for the book and, to me, it portrays one of the narrative elements that permeate the story. It’s clean, it’s very strongly branded to match the rest of the series, and it stands out from other books in the same genre and for the same age category.
But this cover does not sell books.
But why is it bad?
Those questions I just asked? A cover should be able to answer all of those immediately.
The cover of a book is essentially packaging. It’s something that is intended to catch the eye of a consumer when they are browsing for their next read and tell them immediately that this is the kind of book they will like.
Look at the books that are similar to yours and follow the same art style and patterns that those popular books are using for your cover. Are books like yours using hand-drawn covers? Shirtless men and calligraphy fonts? Typography with solid colour backgrounds? Take that look and feel and apply it to the cover for your book.
But my cover stands out! It’s unique!
It also doesn’t look like anything readers are expecting. People tend to be much more risk-averse than we give them credit for. If the packaging looks like something they already like, they are more comfortable taking a chance on it.
It should absolutely be branded uniquely to your style so that readers can tell that it is your work, but the cover should look like the other books in the genre and category that are already selling well.
Can it still work?
There are two ways that I’ve seen to make this work:
Don’t use the cover as part of the marketing strategy and sell the book entirely on the content of the narrative.
Have a cover that looks so beautiful that people will make the purchase based on the artwork regardless of the content.1
The important thing about the cover is that it is intended to entice an audience to stop and find out more. If your cover isn’t doing that, then you are not likely to get a lot of readers unless they are actively looking for your books in particular.
This appears to work primarily with printed books [↩]
After all this time, the end was finally in sight.
Alice long ago learned that life wasn’t fair. She had tried everything to defeat the Bandersnatch, but he remained deep in the forest of Lucena Academy. With only one semester left, she thought she could just enjoy herself as much as possible and wait until he finally took her away forever.
But when Adrianna suddenly falls into a coma, Alice knows there’s something strange happening. At the direction of the monster about to claim her, she must go back into Wonderland and through the depths of Neverland to find a way to wake her up. Alice knows time is running out for her, but she will stop at nothing to make sure Adrianna is okay.
Alice only has one year left to win her bet with the Bandersnatch, or be trapped as a prisoner in his garden forever. And Alice isn’t the only one losing heart. The Queen continues to steal peoples hearts, and the refugees from Neverland are the latest victims. For some reason, Alice can’t put them back and Adam refuses to leave Wonderland until they stop her.
The pressure is on for Alice to keep the magic books from falling into the wrong hands. The clock is ticking and failure means none of the stolen hearts will be returned, Adam will remain trapped behind the mirror, and Alice will be forgotten in the Bandersnatch’s garden. Forever.
While getting your book into the hands of readers is a great way to convince people to take a chance on your books, there is one more thing that you have to still do in order to increase your chance at getting a sale. And it is by far the most frustrating part of publishing. More than dealing with all the files and distribution outlets. More than trying to set up your ISBNs, taxes, and banking information. Probably more than even editing.
Reviews.
Why you need them
This probably doesn’t even need to be a section, but let me tell you as someone who has been at this for a while. Getting positive reviews on the sale page, whether that’s Amazon or Kobo or wherever, will boost your sales. People will still purchase your book without them, but it is much easier to convince someone to take a chance on your book if they see that other people like it already.
For the most part, reviews are there to convince people who have stumbled onto the page to give the book a shot. This is less for the folks to have already gotten the free copy, which is probably the majority of the people.
How high you need them
You should try to keep your reviews above 3.5 stars in order to continue selling, in my experience, though you will get more sales if you keep them at least at 4.1 People will still buy books with no star ratings, but if you do have a rating, it is best to have it high.
White Noise had a noticeable drop in sales when it dropped below a four star rating.2After Destiny, on the other hand, has dropped from a sale a week to zero sales total upon getting the one two star review on Amazon. The rather perplexing one-star-that’s-supposed-to-be-four-star review on Return to Wonderland hasn’t had as much of an impact on sales because it’s been balanced out by the higher rating and free copies.
How you get them
This is tricky, because you also want to keep a generally high level of reviews. If the only review you have is a low review, then your sales will plummet. Which means you have to be sure to solicit reviews from people who are more likely going to like your book.
Friends and family
I don’t do this. If any of my friends and family want a free book, they are free to one, but it’s nearly impossible to get them to read the thing and leave a review. Some of them have,3 but for the most part it’s more like throwing a fish in the air and expecting it to fly. They might buy the book to support me, but most of them probably won’t actually read it. And even fewer will review it.4
Goodreads
So this exists. And I have had less than pleasant experiences with it so far. So here’s the thing: Goodreads is its own book reviewing platform. Many people don’t cross-post their reviews to Amazon. Which turns out to be a good thing for me, because they are much more critical of books on Goodreads than they are just about anywhere else, I’ve found.
When you can get them to actually leave a review at all.
Seriously, hundreds of free books given out, six reviews back from those. It was really not worth the time sink. And on top of that, Amazon tends to purge reviews that came from free copies, so it ends up being kind of a useless venture if you’re looking for reviews to boost sales.
NetGalley helps get your books into the hands of professional reviewers and is considered by some to be a test for how good your book is. It’s also hella expensive, so I got mine in via Broad Universe in order to give it a shot. It was… less than fruitful in the end. At the end, you get a sheet telling you the revies and there were not as many reviews back as expected. Those that did come back did not all get posted to Amazon, instead posted on their individual blogs.5
And at least one of them posted a lower star rating on Goodreads than they did on the feedback sheet I got and I’m still salty about it.
So what do I do?
Nothing. I’ve stopped trying to pursue reviews at this point. There are services out there that will help you get reviews in the NetGalley sense, or that will just give you positive reviews for your page,6 but I’m unwilling to pay for these.
In the end, I’ve found I get more positive reviews from people who have just come across the book on their own and decided to leave a review than from people I have solicited reviews from. Unfortunately, this means I have far fewer reviews than I probably should, but actively pursuing reviews is a part of marketing that I’m just not all that keen on continuing with given the experiences so far.
So if I don’t like doing the social media thing, what do I do for marketing? What is the thing I’ve tried that actually ends up selling me enough books to buy a coffee or two a month?
Paid services
Don’t. Just save your money.
I have tried a whole bunch of paid services over the years. Twitter campaigns, getting in with a bunch of authors to cross promote, Facebook campaigns, good old ads for authors, all sorts of things. Spent a couple hundred bucks over the years trying them. And do you know how much I’ve gotten back as a direct result of them?
Email subscribers that don’t open the email or click on the links. Four sales. Total.
Smashwords
Smashwords is fantastic for giving authors promotional options for their fanbases. You can create coupons for individual books and give them out to whoever you want for whatever purposes you want, which is fantastic. If you just want readers and to get your book into as many hands as possible, this is probably the easiest way to do that.
On top of that, you can also set books to free on Smashwords. I think I’ve mentioned this in the Smashwords post, but I don’t set my books for free on Smashwords. I instead have a few books available where the reader can set the price, and that price can be free. In most cases, folks will just take them for free, but others will still offer you something that they can afford for them.
Contests
You know what? If you’re just looking for numbers of people to sign up for a mailing list, a contest is fantastic and you don’t have to arrange to sent too many books out to people. But from my experience, a contest is not how you build followers. The ones I’ve run and participated in have only earned me temporary followers with no sales boost, and a lot of unsubscribes and bounces as soon as I sent out the first newsletter. Getting people to your newsletter is great, but a lot of them don’t decide to stay.
I’ve only been doing Instafreebie1 for a short time, but this has actually resulted in a good number of sales since being part of the program. I have a mix of first books in series and previews of other books, and enroll in a bunch group giveaways. A lot of people download freebies and I see an increase in sales across all the channels I distribute to.
The thing to remember with Instafreebie is that they require an ePub and do not offer a conversion service. Because of this, and because of how I use it, I use the ePubs from Draft2Digital again, because those have links to other books presented to the reader when they finish reading. If it’s a preview, I have to open up Calibre and manually add a link to the download page for the book they are currently reading.
And, for the most part, that’s what’s worked. Except for that one last thing: Reviews.
Okay. So. Marketing. Let’s get one thing straight.
I am not someone to come to for marketing advice. I am awful at marketing, largely because it makes me very uncomfortable. There’s plenty of places that will tell you that these people want your book and you are just helping them find it.
See, I’ll walk into a store to look for pants, but I don’t want the sales associate to help me find them. Get me?
So yeah, marketing is not my strong suit. Still, I have to do some of it. You can come up with a much better plan than I have, though I can at least help to give you a starting point and tell you what’s worked for me without making me feel too terrible.
Okay? Okay. Let’s get into this.
The 10% Rule
Ten percent is not the firm number, mind you, but it’s a good general rule that I’ve found. One in ten people on average will take an action. One in ten people will click on a link to a book. One in ten of those people will check out the excerpt or summary. One in ten of those will actually purchase. One in ten of thosewill go to see a second book if a link is presented to them. And so on.
As someone who wants to sell books, this means you want to get as many people as possible to land on your book page so that eventually you will hit enough people to result in a purchase. In many cases, this means spam, and this is why I am not good with marketing.
Twitter, Facebook, and the rest
I have all of these things, but honestly do very little in the way of marketing through them. My Twitter sometimes has me talking about the projects I’m working on. Facebook is mostly an author page that has the blog cross-posted to it and the occasional book announcement. I have never been comfortable using these platforms for marketing, but I have them. Mostly because I did use them properly at some point.
And by properly, I mean I spammed the hell out of people. And it did get me sales, don’t get me wrong, but I also hated doing it. So now I use them like a normal person and occasionally tweet out something about a promo happening or post about an upcoming book. Most of anything that might be considered marketing happens on the blog.
Author Blog
This thing you’re reading! I read all the articles at one point about what to post and how often. You want to provide helpful-but-related materials to what you’re currently working on. Throw in a bonus scene! Do character interviews! Release a soundtrack! Do cover reveals and sneak peeks! That’s how you attract people who will read your work, by appealing to people who are already interested in your work.
This didn’t work for me. At all.
The posts that gained the most traction for me were the ones about writing and publishing. These were the ones that got interaction, shares, and feedback. And the reason for that is very obvious.
The Indie Author Problem
Look. I’m an indie author. I feel for them. I’ve read the same things they have, I’ve done some of the same things they’re doing, and I know that they are doing what’s been recommended. But I hate other indie authors on social media.
When you state you’re an indie author1 most of the people randomly following you are going to be other indie authors. And that sounds great, right? Nice support group? Nope.
About 90% of the folks who follow you are following you exclusively to get a follow back and so that they can then promote their books to you. Their feeds are all retweets of other people and advertisements of their books. The actual person is not there, it’s just an automated feed. Sometimes they will post something, but it will be something generic and non threatening, something that a bot could have come up with to try and make them seem like a real person. Something to maybe capitalize on a trend or hashtag.
The reason is simple enough. The theory is that enough eyes mean that eventually someone clicks. And if enough of those eventuallys happen, then someone will actually purchase their books. And honestly, it does work if you are persistent enough. But it makes your own social media unusable at a certain point.
If this is fine with you, go ahead. Just be warned. I opted to stop, though, and go back to being a person occasionally shouting into the void between drafts.
I do my mailing lists on Mailchimp and it’s been pretty painless, honestly. Once a month now, I send out a newsletter that includes whatever freebie giveaway I’m participating in at the moment, news about any book releases and upcoming events, and anything else that might be interesting.
I get a lot more traction and action out of the mailing lists than anything else because most of the people who sign up for it are actual readers who want to know what’s coming next. Every place I have a sign up for my mailing list is optional so I hope that the only people who join it are actually interested. Which helps me feel like I’m not actually spamming all these folks.
I’m also planning to give out some extras, so if you wanted to join the mailing list, there’s a box over to the left there…
Well, it was worth a shot.
Or put the keywords “novelist” or “writer” in the description [↩]
These guys are… new. They are super new. It seems to me that they were originally a service just for small press companies that has decided to now try to capitalize on the indie market. Which I have no problem with, given one of the more elusive locations that they distribute to.
File preparation
So here’s the thing about PublishDrive. They only accept ePub as a file format. If you want to give them a doc to convert, I’ve heard quotes at $180USD for it. It sounds like they are very manual about the whole thing1 so I’d suggest converting it yourself.
Now, I have two options here: Calibre or downloading a premade epub from one of the places I’ve already uploaded my book to. I try not to rely on Calibre too much2 so I opted for the latter. Nice and easy.
Except no. The problems:
The Smashwords epub has that Smashwords Edition page, so that was out.
The Draft2Digital epub that I made has links in it that will get stripped out because some stores don’t allow your books to have links to other stores in them.
The Kobo and Amazon epubs don’t have their required copyright page.
In the end, rather than creating a fourth and fifth file3 for the fifth outlet in Calibre, I just uploaded my Draft2Digital epubs and let them strip out the links.
Distribution
Ah, the only reason I decided to try them out in the first place. They distribute to a lot of little, non-English markets, which is less ideal for me, an English speaker that knows tourist French and less than tourist Thai. They have exactly one outlet I’m looking for: Google. Since Google shut its doors to indie publishers ages ago so we couldn’t go direct, you pretty much have to use a distributor to get into this location. And since Draft2Digital doesn’t have them, I’m giving PublishDrive a chance.
The rest
Because I’ve been with them for less than a month and I’m still waiting for some of these books to process, I can’t say much about payment or extras or anything else. I don’t even know how my sales are because, despite being the first things I uploaded, I still haven’t gotten Syndicate or Return to Wonderland4 distributed.
They are new, so I’ll give them a lot of slack, but it feels really obvious that they weren’t quite ready to make the leap to indie pub at this point. The UI hasn’t been refined and, given what they said when I mentioned it, I think they are using a manual process for just about everything.5 Which is… concerning long term.
But that’s the end of the getting stuff into stores. Next, onto the thing I’m terrible at: Marketing.
The next place I go to is Draft2Digital.1 This one just does distribution without a storefront, but it has some pretty fantastic extras. Which we will get into. But first, guess what I have to do again!
File preparation
Because of the way Draft2Digital does it’s thing, I opt to remove the front and back matter from my books. No title page, and no links at the back! It’s yet another file, but removing things is pretty quick, and then I save my doc.
Once that’s done, I get to upload the file and use the Draft2Digital uploader. And then their builder. See, Draft2Digital has probably the best of all the ebook conversion options of all of them, including the ability to pick front and back matter pages, and apply a few preset styles to your book so it looks a little nicer.
Among their front and back matter, they also give you the option to add previews for other books, and these Books2Read links to your books that I will get into a little later. Better, if you use their front and back matter options, they will update the links and content for you2 without you having to redo your documents all over again.
Distribution
Besides Amazon and Kobo, I distribute to all of their options because I like the ePubs that they generate. They don’t have that many options right now, but they have been adding, however slowly, more outlets. And they will let you present your opt ins and outs.
The UI
The UI is nothing special, which is pretty much exactly what you want with these things, honestly.
Their statistics are useless, however. They do give you the amount they owe you and that is always nice. On the other hand, you might as well download the spreadsheets because the graphs and charts that they show you on the site aren’t very flexible. I just want to know what book sold to what outlet when, guys. And give me a few more time ranges than Last Month.
Payment
Draft2Digital is nice in that it gives you both the Paypal option and the direct deposit one. They take 10% of the royalties, if I remember right, and you get the rest. Other than that, there’s not a heck of a lot to say. They pay regularly when they get paid from their outlets and… that’s it.
The Extras
So besides what I’ve already mentioned with the conversion, they also have this Books2Read thing. Which, the UI on it is not fantastic3 it provides this nice extra feature or giving any reader who clicks the link the option to choose their retailer and send you right to the book page. It doesn’t even limit it to just the ones you’ve used them for! It lists my Amazon and Kobo links on there as well as several options that Draft2Digital doesn’t even have.
They also have an option you can add in the back matter to allow readers to sign up for alerts about new books. Which is always a nice addition.
Sales
The sales aren’t fantastic through Draft2Digital, though it’s might be because of how I tend to use the epub files.4 I mostly get sales through Barnes & Noble and Tolino. Other than that, I haven’t seen much from the other outlets.
So, I go wide, and the first place you want to check out when you’re thinking of going wide is going to be Smashwords. It’s not only another sales channel on its own, but it will distribute your books to other retailers and give you a decent cut of the profits, though there are some hoops.
File preparation
Yeah, so with Smashwords, on top of all of that preparation you did with your file beforehand, also requires one extra little bit. I take my file and save a separate Smashwords version of it and add in the extra page they require, stating that this is a Smashwords edition.1 Which is annoying, and it means that shows up on every copy they distribute, but they have a lot of outlets I don’t want to distribute to directly.
Distribution
Once your book passes their checker2 you will have you book placed in their Premium Catalog and it will be available for wide distribution to a variety of stores. They will go out automatically and be available in those stores within a week.
However. I don’t want Smashwords to distribute everywhere. I’ve opted my books out of several retailers, including Smashwords and Amazon. Every time I upload a new book, I need to opt them out of the retailers individually, since you can’t just set your store to always opt out. And opting out is… annoying.
The UI
So for those who don’t know, on top of being a Canadian, I’m also a web developer as my day job, and I work mostly with doing UX3 and UI4 design these days. And I can definitively say that Smashwords has put minimal time into theirs. It has gotten better, but things are not where you’d expect them. There’s a whole separate page to manage your ISBNs for some reason, instead of editing them right with the rest of your book. And the opt out page involves a hell of a lot of side scrolling, just to even see what all the retailers are.
And you can’t even define presets for it! Every time!
Although, Smashwords, if you want someone to redo your UI, I will totally redo it. Hell, I may just redo it for a portfolio. It is seriously annoying.
Payment
There’s one more strange thing abut Smashwords. Since I reside outside of the States, they pay me monthly via Paypal instead of a deposit into my bank account. Which is… unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome for my particular situation.5
On the bright side, when you’re setting your pricing for your book, Smashwords will outright tell you what their cut is, both through their own storefront and what everyone is making on a book sold through one of their affiliates.
The Extras
Smashwords has my most favourite of all of the statistics. There are charts that will let you see sales by book, series, and outlet.6 It also gives you a running total of what they owe you, along with the all time books sold. Though the stats aren’t as good when you look at the numbers for the individual books, they do give you enough so you can see how many people downloaded even the sample of your book, as well as how many users added it to their library.
This is also the only outlet I have that lets me make coupons whenever I want. I can discount my books sold on Smashwords down to free if I want. I do have to make these individually per book, rather than for the entire store, but you can set things like an expiration date on them and use them as promotions. I know I’ve put a coupon in a newsletter before to try and drive people to get a book and they have.
Oh, and there’s the Pay What You Want option, which is strange. See, a common practice for people who write longer series is to set their books to free so people will give it a shot. Smashwords will let you do that, but they also have this other option. For the first book in a longer series, I’ll set it to Pay What You Want, and let the reader set the price for the book, whether that’s free or if they want to pay anything for it.
And lastly, they have site-wide promotions. They allow you to set what your discount is from a set of options and your book will be listed alongside the others on the site opted into the promotion. It’s a really easy and cool way to get your books out there, particularly since a lot of Smashwords authors also promote the hell out of it when they roll around.
Sales
I do actually get sales from Smashwords, and not just because I am using coupons to lure people to the store. Somehow I get people stumbling onto the books organically, though I still am not quite sure how. I’ve had people give extra on the Pay What You Want books, and I always get a lot of sales during the site wide promos.7 It’s been a generally positive experience using them. Even the sites they distribute to get sales, which is always a plus!
And honestly, despite the terribly UI, Smashwords has been pretty fantastic to me in terms of getting my books out there. The people coming to Smashwords are looking for indie books, so the general feel you get from everything on the site is a lot more appealing to an indie author, and you do kind of feel like they got your back, even though they are a company and they probably don’t.
But that’s the last of the ones with a storefront. Next up, straight distribution services.
This can sometimes take a while. I’ve found that Smashwords has the strictest formatting guidelines, though if you follow their guide you’re generally fine [↩]
All right now that we have Amazon out of the way, time to make this clear. I have been going wide on my distribution, meaning that I put my books out everywhere that I can get away with. Wide distribution is fantastic to reach audiences outside of Amazon’s US market1 and lets me do a lot of interesting things.
Financially, it makes the most fiscal sense to publish directly through the individual retailers. This way, you will make the most profit on each sale and you will not have anything skimmed off the top from other distributors.
One small problem.
I’m Canadian.
This means I can directly distribute through far fewer places. Many of them2 will only allow you to even register if you have a US or other local bank account, and some aren’t open to indie publishers directly at all.3
There’s also the small issue of me being kind of not willing to make and maintain hundreds of accounts for smaller sales channels, as well as market individually to each of them, so the only direct distribution channel I use outside of Amazon is Kobo. Let’s get into them.
Kobo Writing Life
Kobo will allow you to upload and convert the same file you used for Amazon and, upon completion, it usually takes no more than 24 hours for them to actually list them in the store. You also have the ability to add your book to Kobo Plus, which is like Kindle Unlimited for folks who want that. I have seen exactly zero traction from the service so far, but I’ll let you know if it ever bears fruit.
The nice thing about this one is that my readers are from not the US. Most of my readers are Canadian or the Netherlands, oddly enough, and it feels like they are reaching a much larger audience. Though, let me be clear, sales are not fantastic through this channel. Most of the audience I reach do not use Kobo, so it’s a little hit or miss as a channel.
The statistics are pure garbage, though. They have counters for “All time”4 and “This month” without giving you what you currently have earned and is sitting in your account waiting to be paid out. If you want to just see numbers for a specific book, you have to know the eISBN or hope you type in the title correctly. They are largely useless except to tell you how many books you sold that month and a rough royalty estimate for each individual month.
Also, payment. So Kobo pays either monthly5 if you reach a total sales threshold of $50USD. If you do not, then you have to wait to get that payout every 6 months. It was a bit of a hassle to get my account hooked up and I do not make that much from the channel, so it’s not… fantastic. On the other hand, they do offer 45% royalty on books priced under $2.99, so that is nice at least. Just… not ideal.
Overall, it’s got a decent process to get the books out there and an interesting market, but it’s not one of the better ones in terms of the usability or statistics, and the payments are a bit of a pain.
Next week: Smashwords!
Really, it’s mostly the US market buying books from there [↩]
