The 39 Clicks

Sold another two copies of the first book. Spent fifty bucks in advertising to do so. (1,500 ad impressions, 39 click-throughs, two e-book purchases and a couple of page reads).

This is yet another case of the modern world moving too quickly. There is still lots of advice and books and training videos out there about publishing on Kindle, but the gold rush was in 2010. The market is tougher now. Readership is now in the two billion mark but the number of new books is growing even faster.

I feel more and more that some of the advice is dated. Such as "pay for professional editing, pay for a cover artist; it will pay for itself." Sure it would -- in 2010, when the difference between a well-prepared manuscript and a shoddy manuscript was in the hundreds of copies sold every month, and an eye-catching and timely book could do sales in the thousands per month.

Now even the leaders are moving tens of copies per month and only surviving because their back catalog is in the double digits. According to a recent Writing Excuses episode, "many" independents are reporting three or four figures in marketing costs, and half their writing income is going towards that. What's more, it is starting to look like diminishing returns even at those levels.

(Another bit of dated advice; book blogs, Facebook, and some other new media marketing. They have become saturated past usefulness as well. Having a Twitter presence is still helpful, but it has to be in the hundred-thousand follower range!)

In real world gold rushes, most of the success stories are of people who opened a store. Or a bank. Editors and cover artists are probably taking a lower risk. And, as always, a book that is sure to sell is a book on how to sell...or in this market, a book on how to write.

But that market, too, is more open than it perhaps should be. It is more difficult than ever to figure out if an editor or cover artist actually knows what they are doing, or if a training video is actually worth it. So another reason not to blindly follow the "just pay an editor, okay?" advice.

And it's a pity, because I would like to, at some point, hire both.

***

So the plan is to try a big push and see if I can get over threshold. There's two problems, though; one is getting in front of the wave. The other is staying in front. Amazon Kindle is currently optimized towards a fast turnover. The author who is going to do well is the one who is putting out a new book every month.

Which is really ridiculous. But audiences are fickle and reader are forgetful and six months between books is a stretch these days. The one thing that can save you is a deep back catalog, especially in an ongoing series; enough books, and you can write one or two more of them in the time it takes the reader to finish their archive binge.

So that push is going to happen after I have A Fox's Wedding in the store. And I'm also really, really hoping to be able to follow up with Sometimes a Fox within 4-6 months! (As a reminder, Fox and Hounds came out October 16 of 2020. So that's five months and counting, as of today, and based on the current revision plan I'm looking at up to another four months to finish.)

When you have a series, advertising for one is advertising for them all. Additionally, when you get over three you can start advertising series and yourself as a brand on Amazon Kindle -- at least this month, as they are constantly tweaking their system. Three books and a belief in the readership that a fourth will be coming puts me just barely in the window where the numbers might start working for me.

Amazon is, after all, a real-world game of Civilization. Visibility in the system depends on popularity, popularity depends on sales, sales come when you have visibility. When you are in the low numbers you are spending money just to try to keep from sinking completely out of sight.

I'm not committed to this series. I think it might be too niche to find its audience. The short campaign I'm running now is on the blurb "Romancing the Stone meets Tomb Raider." Not to say there aren't plenty of stories I'd like to tell within it. Biblical archaeology and archaeological tourism (Go Ye and Tell That Fox). Warbirds and the conservation question. NAGPRA and the southwest. Archaeo-gaming.

But I'd be happy re-visiting the idea of Weird War; the supernatural meets WWII, but (the latest spin that just occurred to me) focusing largely on the misfits and the less-told stories and other than professional soldiers; the Coast Watchers, the Bletchley Park "Computers," failed kamikaze pilots, French plantation owners, Union organizers...

That's why there are two things I really want right now. One is to figure out how to damned write faster! The other is to find ways to offload as much as possible all the editing, preparation, marketing, and other non-writing chores.

Oh, yes. Related to all of this, I'm contemplating re-staging the series to try to find that readership. Below is the first successful mockup I've had of the "girl on cover" scheme. That model has the wrong coloring, but besides having a big enough portfolio at Shutterstock to permit branding the entire series with her, she's also the first model I've seen that has a committed physicality instead of the usual "look, I'm posing for the cover art" look. (Well, maybe not so much in this pic. Oh well.)

Anyhow, having both the girl and more of the scenery might grab more eyeballs than the artifact cover. I just need to find a Fiver artist or something who can do all that magic cover stuff that I don't have the patience to learn (and probably don't have the talent, either.)