Publishing Year One: The Dimming Spark

Now it’s time to get to the deep, painful truth about publishing. You’re not special. I’m not special. So if you think that you can get thousands of sales on Day One with your first published work, you have an overactive imagination. Or you forced your church group/college dorm-mates/professional organization to buy copies. Then maybe you can attain that goal. 

I didn’t expect more than ten or fifteen sales on the launch day of Unfolding Life. Heck, I wasn’t even expecting much more than that in the first week. I did, however, expect to see a steady one or two sales a week throughout the year. Didn’t quite work out that way. I did have a one-year sales goal and I’m so far off from it that I’m simply too embarrassed to give you the number. But we can totally talk in percentages to help me save face. 

The truth is that 22% of my yearly sales happened in the first five days after the book launch. And of the 22%, I bought 6% of the books sold (promotional giveaways). Unfortunately, after the first week of sales, they slacked off. Oh… who are we kidding? They stopped altogether. I kept up my promotional efforts, but I just couldn’t close the deal. 

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Give it Away

So I decided to utilize the tools provided to me by Kindle Select. About a month after publishing, I created a free day to get some book sales, even if they didn’t make any money. For most authors, this tactic is used to boost after-promotion sales. This is the day where I sold the bulk of my yearly sales. The upside of this is that for at least a few hours, my book was listed as the #1 selling book in the haiku category. Three days later, the book slid back into ranking obscurity. 

The downside, aside from the lack of money coming in, was that I used this promotion to boost the number of ever-important book reviews. When I give books away for free, whether through a promotion like this or individually to reviewers, I don’t expect to get 100% of the reviews. I really only aim for a 20% review rate. At this point in the process, I still only have about an 8% review rate—and I’m really lucky to have that. 

Tsk, Tsk Amazon

Although I would rather forget about it, we have to talk about Amazon’s horrible return policy when it comes to ebooks. Amazon has the nerve to let someone return an ebook for a full refund up to seven days after purchase. Um, what? No, Amazon! My book is only 60 pages long cover to cover and the fact that anyone can buy it, consume it, then say they didn’t like and get their money back is just plain stupid. Restaurants may have to do that when you hate your food, but something like a book shouldn’t be given that much time to say, “Oh, nevermind.” Anyone heard of buyer’s remorse? You bought a book you didn’t like. Just suck it up and move on! I have a closet full of terrible books that I purchased. I don’t whine to get my money back. 

This whole thing may make me a little angry, but in reality self-published authors deal with this all the time. My only post-promotion sale ended up being a return. Not only that, it was a return from the person who decided to leave the less-than-stellar review. Now, I think you should be kind enough to choose one or the other. You didn’t like the book? Fine. Either take the $2.99 hit and leave a bad review, or return the book and keep your mouth shut. It’s just plain mean to do both, especially since your review is one of the factors contributing to lack of sales from then on. (*Note: I was a good little author and didn’t engage in a spat over a negative review, especially since it was well written and made valid points. But I did do my research on the reviewer. This person was both a chronic returner AND hated everything they ever read. So there.)

Summer Slump

Then summer came and went. I distracted myself with other projects and didn’t promote Unfolding Life very much. After the free day and the return, I didn’t sell another book all summer. I was a little disappointed because I knew it meant I would never meet my yearly sales goal, even if a miracle occurred. And let’s not waste a good miracle on book sales when I’m still single. ;-)

The only thing I could do was to keep getting the word out. Around Christmas, the opportunity to include the book (as a $0.99 countdown deal) in the Read Tuesday catalog seemed like the perfect way to get holiday sales. I did the countdown deal for the maximum time allowed.  

Not. One. Sale. 

At this point, I was not surprised. Not one bit. Unfolding Life had unfolded, and it lived a very short life.

Absent Stacks of Paperbacks

The one aspect of this process I still haven’t mentioned is the paperback version of the book. I was first confused about KDP Select’s exclusivity rules and thought I couldn’t publish another version for 90 days (turns out it only pertains to ebook versions with other retailers). So I did create a paperback version and put it up for sale on Createspace and through Amazon. I didn’t promote it as hard as the ebook version, and because I didn’t want to have a bunch of copies coming to my door where my family would find out I published something, I didn’t buy any copies to give out or create a Goodreads giveaway with. Yes, they know I’m a writer—but there’s no need for them to read anything I write! I have issues, I know. I still haven’t sold a single paperback copy. Not even to myself.

(*Note: Since originally writing this post at the beginning of March, I have made paperback sales--a nice surprise!)

This was certainly an eye-opener. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about those pesky things I should have done, but didn’t.

Publishing Year One: Marketing Mayhem

Once you write a book, you have to take off your writer hat and put on your business hat. This is true of any creative profession. It’s not enough to just write, revise and edit. It’s not enough to put the paint to canvas. You must go and sell yourself to get anything that resembles success.

Like I’ve said before, I wanted to create this project without spending money—at least not a lot of it. There are so many free options for advertising out there that I knew I could find success without having a marketing budget. I was confident in that. But what I didn’t expect was for free advertising options to have a little bit of class and some standards for what they advertise.

Advertising Options

The main options I looked at were the free/bargain priced ebook newsletters I subscribed to. Most of them had the option to submit your book for free and they would choose whether they wanted to promote it or not. Fair enough. The problem with these newsletters is that they wanted to make sure they were providing quality products to their subscribers (nothing wrong with that). Most of these advertising outlets have a review minimum that you have to meet before they will consider your book. Usually it is 5-10 reviews with a four- or five-star rating on Amazon, or a combination of Amazon and Goodreads. To this day I still don’t have 5 reviews on Amazon and Goodreads combined (considering some reviews are cross posted). And you have to throw out the one less-than-stellar review the book received because it didn’t reach the 4-star minimum.

So this advertising option was out. I then decided to check out my own newsletter option. But there is a big problem with starting your own newsletter. If you go through a service like MailChimp, you are required to provide a physical address that appears on each newsletter. I didn’t want to give out where I lived and I didn’t want to rent a P.O. box where I lived (because, as we all well know, I still don’t want to live here). So I had to toss that option too. 

Social media is free, it’s great and you can utilize it in a hundred different ways. So that ended up being one of my main ways of advertising Unfolding Life. Conversion numbers are really hard to get from this, so I’m not sure how well it actually worked, but I did get new followers who happen to enjoy haiku. Whether they bought the book or not is another story…

Goodreads: Offerings to the Book Gods

The last advertising avenue I put effort into was Goodreads. After all, that’s where I first discovered some of the better self-published authors, and they were doing great on the site. I already had a large number of friends/connections on Goodreads, so I took a personal approach and sent site messages out about my launch day ebook giveaway. Surprisingly, a number of people wrote back telling me good luck… but they were also telling me that they don’t read ebooks, so they didn’t enter the giveaway. 

That’s when I put into place Goodreads Advertising Phase Two: hitting up the groups. I belong to at least a dozen groups, many of which allow shameless self-promotion, providing you post the message in the right category. I went through all of these, posting messages and trying to connect with others. I got a few bites, some people telling me it wasn’t the worst they had ever read after checking out Amazon’s preview (uh, thanks?) and others telling me they would definitely put it on their reading list. I offered a number of free review copies, and some readers surprised me by saying they preferred to buy it so they could support indie authors. But let’s be honest—if their reading lists are half as long as mine, I’ll be waiting a few more years for those reviews to come in. 

Without spending any money (other than on the copy for the giveaway), I managed to get a few people interested in what I had to offer. Would money have changed that? With a niche like haiku, I’m not so sure anything would have changed. Except I would be slightly poorer than I am right now. 

Tomorrow, we’ll take on the hard numbers.

It's Still Just a Marathon

Life, writing, careers... all are marathons, not sprints. Some days, you just have to be reminded of it. 

I've grabbed NaNoWriMo by the horns this year, and I'm not letting go. I'm on my game. I'm still in the running to win by the end of the month. As of right now, this is what my stats look like:

Don't worry: I plan to meet my daily goal by the end of the night. I don't know what this strange feeling I have is, but I think it my be a little bit of pride. I'm actually going to do it. Let's be honest though--the novel is total crap, but it is nothing that can't be fixed with months of toiling over every word choice.

And about my Vine project... yeah, that stopped. I really wanted to get a post for every day of the month, but it was becoming much more of a distraction then I meant it to be. Instead of working on my novel, I found myself banging my head against my desk trying to come up with a more compelling 6-second video. Next year if I chronicle my progress, it will need to be a full-on video blog so that I can just ramble, upload it and be done.

The real roller coaster in the last week has been on the job scene. A little over a week ago I was invited to join a writing team that could actually put me back in the category of earning a normal wage. So I did everything I was asked: I attended a webinar, I requested to be added to the team and I waited patiently to get started. Turns out, through whatever reason I have yet to understand, I was actually denied from working with this specific team/client two years ago--without writing a single word for them. Through this particular company, sometimes you'll get a client who doesn't like your writing voice or some other (usually arbitrary) reason, they'll keep you from writing for them again.

I normally take this all in stride, but this situation is ridiculous. They promised me work that would let me, you know, actually pay my bills. But they didn't realize they made me lose an hour of my time to attend a webinar for work I would never have access to. Yes, it could be just a simple mistake, but I'm not going to beg for work. I have a little bit of dignity left.

The good, the bad--it all means nothing. I just have to keep going, keep trying. There's a lot that's trying to stop me, and I'm not going to put up with it anymore. My time is now. I'll get to the place I need to be. Very soon the opportunity I need will come. Until then I'll be here, writing away.

Week 1 Wrapup and On to Week 2

Here's the compilation video, as promised. It sucks. I had a music track for it, but after a computer update yesterday, Movie Maker went bizzaro and started making an awful screeching, popping noise instead of the track. The program has changed since I last used it a few years ago and is more frustrating than I remembered, so next week I think I'll be using Adobe Premiere Elements. 

Week 1 of NaNoWriMo has gone surprisingly well. In past years, I've usually fallen behind at this point. By the 15th, I'm out of the game completely. This was always due to a lot of things--lack of money, lack of work (we're smack in the middle of the freelance holiday dead zone), and the guilt that comes along with spending so much time and effort on something that may never make a dime for me. While the guilt has subsided this year, every other little problem that had held me back in the past is actually ten times worse. Either I'm getting too old to care about things or I'm being really, really stupid. I haven't decided yet.

As of right now, I'm still on track with my work count. The novel went from focusing on the narrator to focusing on the narrator's boss. I don't know how that happened, but it's making it easier to meet the word count. Eventually, I'll get back to the narrator's seemingly petty problems.

Reconnected... and It Feels So Good

Well, as of 7PM last night, I have Internet access again. It wasn't easy, and I didn't think it would happen. A call was finally placed, and the cable experts on the phone were adamant this this equipment would no longer work because of the speeds being paid for. Yet four hours after that call was placed, the Internet was running again, and might I add, faster than ever. Huh. But this equipment is inferior? Okay...

Anyway, I've been trying to catch up on all my emails and getting back to work. The three-day hit I'm taking in the wallet doesn't help, but luckily there is work to be had now that I'm back online. Will I still have to go out and find seasonal retail work? Looks like it. And New York is getting put off indefinitely. Money is the main issue since we are now officially in lets-hike-up-the-prices-for-the-holidays season, but the hatchet attacks on the streets and deadly diseases infiltrating the city are making me feel not so bad about not getting there right now.

So I'm going to focus on what is good around here. NaNoWriMo starting next week? Check. Tons of samples/campaigns/VoxBoxes/free stuff coming in the mail? Check. Still having a three-year backlog of books to read? Check. So it's not so bad.

July Roundup

What happened in July? Quite a lot. I'm proud about the things I have achieved and I'm still striving to tackle more next month. Here's a roundup of what I've been up to:

Camp NaNoWriMo:
I participated in another round of camp this month. Starting from scratch on an outline I couldn't stop writing during last November's competition, I aimed for 25,000 words. I managed to get 11,534 words, which isn't a bad start, though one of these days I would love to win this competition. I've been competing way too long to not have a win yet.

I'm looking forward to meeting the NaNo challenge again in November. 

The Novel in Question:
This novel that I still can't quite categorize and still spend moments agonizing over the name of the fictional island--it's still totally alive, which is more than I can say about some of my previous NaNo novel projects. I don't think [#] is even a third of what the novel could be, so there is plenty of more first-draft writing in my future. 

My Next Challenge:
That whole pesky "real job" talk? Yeah, I think it's time to get one. I know what I want to do, I'm just not surrounded by opportunities I can take advantage of. I'm currently writing cover letters for editorial assistant positions. However, the stress of the massive amount of planning is getting me down. I'll be the first one to say my cover letters are probably not the best I can do (yet), but I know that I am perfectly qualified for this position.

All of these jobs are in New York. That's the hard part. I'm still debating on whether I should just suck it up, take a chance and go first, then submit the letters; submit the letters with a specific date of arrival; or simply leave it open and throw together a quick travel plan if I'm lucky enough to get a call back. I know which option will give me the best chance, so taking a huge risk on a relocation may be just what the doctor ordered.

Ultimate Dream:
Ooh... that's easy. Getting the editorial assistant job and living it up in the city. Living it up may mean free days at museums and spending time people watching in a park, but it still works.  Achieving this within the next month would be AWESOME, but I probably need to think in smaller steps. Although, this surge of positive energy does make me feel like I can do just about anything right now.

Other Goodies:
Money is an evil necessity.

That's not technically one of the goodies I was talking about, but it relates. I still have plenty of books to sell on half.com. I've reduced the prices a bit to make them even more appealing. I need them out of the way, and it doesn't hurt to get a little pocket change in the process.

Of course, you could always take a chance on buying my haiku book, too.

Okay, that's about it. Let's see what August brings!

The Rules of Freelancing #3: Save, Save, Save!

I'm talking about money here. Freelancers and the IRS have a complicated relationship. Every year, my tax forms keep growing in size, whether I've had a good year or not. Saving money not only for those estimated tax payments but also for an emergency fund is key to maintaining your sanity.

This rule I follow as much as I can, but when I have a lot of money, I usually decide to go and do a grownup thing, like buy a car. I bought my little yellow bug a year ago (with a hefty down payment that dwindled the savings account), and by November 2011 I had lost a great gig. I didn't find steady work again until March, and during that little hiatus, I was sick twice, which added to the bills and now the savings account is just above empty. I'm now in financial convalescence in the guest room at my parents' home instead of my two-bedroom apartment. Or New York. Or any other place I could imagine myself living it up without my parents asking me when I'm coming home.

Take from me, although I find a few certain television financial TV experts annoying, when they say have an emergency fund, DO IT.






Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
 

**Bonus Tip: Don't Count on It
This may seem harsh, but until that money is in your bank account, don't count on ever seeing it. A lot of freelancers have to deal with delayed or nonpayment of services. Make sure you aren't paying your bills with the idea of getting paid on time.

If you need my example of the crazier things that can happen with money in this business, two weeks ago I finished a job, but because of circumstances out of my control, I found out I may have to wait up to 60 days OR MORE to get my money for completing the project. Unfortunately, I was counting on that money to pay bills because the project was through a site where payment is guaranteed, but at the discretion of the client's timetable—and the website gives the client a pretty big timetable. Instead, I had to work 12-15 days in the last week with companies I already knew would pay me on time to make up for what I thought was going to be a nice paycheck. Guess I'll get a surprise two months from now.