The Importance of Covers

I am absolutely learning as I go along. But, I was looking at my reports at 4 am (I don't wake up on purpose through night to check them, just if I wake up anyway) and it struck me that some books sell better than others.. For example

Three Celtic Ghost Stories

wasn't selling as well as:

Three More Ghost Stories

(I'm pretty imaginative with titles, don't you think?)

Even though in my estimation both volumes are equally good.. Then I realised that it was because the second one had a skull on the cover. I thought the first cover was stylish and moody (it was a standing stone) but it didn't point directly to the contents of the book being ghostly.

 It seems the lesson is don't be clever, be obvious. Maybe I'm wrong? I changed the first volume's cover to guess what - a skull. But a different one. We shall see. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Free giveaway books

It's amazing. You put any book up for free and it starts getting downloaded. For example my book about beating anxiety, the refreshingly titled:

How to Beat Anxiety

That downloaded very quickly in the hundreds and hundreds. Particularly in the USA. This was the first ebook I wrote. It was based on my solid professional experience and it is exactly what I would be telling my patients face to face. What I say in it works too. So it wasn't a useless infoproduct. When it went on money sale, sure it sold. It sold slowly but as we speak averages about 2 copies a day. This isn't bad as I'm only into the weeks stage of my ebook career.

Some of my books downloaded well and then are lucky to sell one, or in one or two cases zero copies.

Then I look at my behaviour with free ebooks. I download them. I only download the ones that are of some interest. So, I've downloaded smoothie recipes, books about bitcoin, how to drive a woman crazy in bed (I knew all this anyway of course), erotica (just to see how people wrote it).  I wouldn't have bought any of these books even for 99 cents, even though when I read them (apart from the erotica which with some well-written exceptions - was utter drivel. I've got nothing against rude words, but they just should be in the right order) - I thought they were useful, ok books that I was glad I'd read. But I wouldn't have paid money for them.

So take my ghost books. One of which is here:

Three Celtic Ghost Stories

It's 99 cents. It's about 12,000 words (iirc). That means each of the carefully crafted, and if I may say, pretty good, stories is 33 cents. That's about 20p in British. This is the kind of money that if you dropped the coin a large proportion of people wouldn't stoop to pick it up off the floor. But it's still a barrier that free isn't.

So, my thoughts about free are that some people download anything that's free, and they're not your real readers. They are never going to buy your books even if they are stupidly cheap. And if someone has no real interest in your books, they aren't even going to shell out 99 cents. I swear down (as they say) that I have never bought an erotic novelette, even for dirt cheap and I probably never will. I can't see myself buying a romance either.

So what's the value of giving away books? Now, +Sean Platt  and +Johnny B. Truant  (my new heroes - so their plan does work you see? Made me into a fan) say it's about funnels.

I'm so sick of these short post titles - back to the books

I had a lot of drunken teenage girls round at my place last night. They're still here in various states of undress and hangover. I wish they'd leave. So I went out shopping to get away from them. I bought four things: cheap tea; peach green tea (not for me though I may sneak some); a loaf of bread and six rolls of toilet paper. Teenage girls use so much toilet paper it's hard to imagine what they do with it.

I also nearly bought a second hand copy of Iain M Bank's Inversions as I haven't read it and I love him. I love his writing and it was only £2, but I still didn't buy it. That has lessons.

As far as I go, my book sales on Amazon continue to trickle out. I am not going to pay my rent this way for some time, but it's gratifying to see that people are buying my words. I even have a handful of good reviews. And I'm only 3 weeks in.

Some days when nothing sells, I feel pretty miserable, then a sale or two clicks in and I'm happy. I think crystal meth must be a bit like this.

I have bought various books since I started my ebook craze.

These were in order of purchase:

How I Sold a Million eBook in 5 Months by John Locke
Two main things jump out at me from this book: the fact he treats selling your stories like a business, and that you have to create your author platform. So here I am; creating my author platform by me and you having this conversation (technically it's a monologue, I know). I was shy of this. I didn't want to spam my friends on Facebook and Twitter with sales pitches. So I've set up a separate blog and twitter account.

Kindle Money Mastery: How I made Six Figures Through Amazon Kindle....This is a get rich quick book. Still I enjoyed reading it as it made me dream of wealth beyond imagination, probably in my hands within a matter of weeks. There was some useful stuff in it but I am wary of get-rich-quick schemes.

From Word to Kindle by Aaron Shepard
The reviews let you know it's a bit dated as Amazon no longer lets you use html in your product description, but it was a useful guide to the perils of formatting.

How to Sell Fiction on Kindle by Michael Alear
I thought this was a pretty useful book. It tells you how to utilise search terms in your book copy. In a sense it is "gaming" the system - still I managed to make my books more visible by changing the text in my description and some other tips he gives. I would say this was worth buying.

Then I got:

Write, Publish, Repeat by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant
I read it and thought my head was going to explode with excitement. Firstly it's not a get rich quick promise book. It tells you that success is going to take work and time and work. In fact I think you have to be a writing machine for it to work, but I can write pretty fast if I'm not distracted by video games. I wrote 2  short stories last night - about 6000 words, while I was drinking wine. At the time I thought my style was vibrant and powerful. I haven't looked at them this morning...

But anyway back to Write. Publish. Repeat. I think it makes excellent sense. But I'm shy! This email list thing. Who'd want to listen to me?

Let's see.

I saw a rainbow this morning. You know that the word for rainbow in Welsh is enfys; In Greek it's iris. Rainbow is pretty good, but I think those are better. I remember talking to a German who told me that he thinks German is ugly (I don't by the way. I like the sound of it.) He gave as an example schmetterling for butterfly. He said the English and the French words (papillon) are more beautiful than the German. I don't think butterfly  is beautiful. It's only a fly that eats butter. And we don't like flies with their scratchy legs and big multi headlamp eyes. Now flutterby is a whole different gig.

Laters homies

Tony

But...

The thing is I love writing. Always have. I'm writing now! (I mean on another screen on this PC). I wonder if this is what Joseph Campbell meant about finding your bliss. When I write, I feel this is what I'm meant to do. So it doesn't matter if no one reads it. If the path is long and hard and fruitless. I guess I'm always going to write.

But I would like someone to read what I write...

I always say that all art is a form of communication where people get to talk to each other at a level below words. That's why it feels so intimate when you're reading someone's work and you feel yes! this is exactly what I feel too. Someone clever said that before me. Was it How Green is My Valley? A scene from the movie when he's on a train... Vague recollections.

Anyway I am going to retreat from the stream of consciousness experience thing I'm doing here and go and write some more.

Languishing

So that was a year ago. I got an email, I think, letting me know about Kindle Direct. I had Word files of the novels and I had no expectation that they would sell at all. I mean at all. But I put them up there. Now you may ask if I didn't think they would sell, why did I post them up there?

I don't know. And then I forgot about them. I didn't check sales. I didn't look at them. To be honest I'm embarrassed about them now. They had formatting errors, the covers were abysmal. They were dreadful. Then towards November last year I got an email from KDP saying they would now pay me. I think it was just a few dollars, but when I checked back over the year, even these awfully formatted, appallingly presented, books - where the descriptions were a few lines I'd just knocked out in second and the covers were just an image without even a title - they had sold a few copies.

So, I started reading more about self publishing and by mid January I was obsessed.

So far

Well, I have always written. When I finished my first novel at the age of 21 (previously I'd considered myself a poet and essayist...) I thought, 'that's it - I will be recognised. The wonder of my work will shine all around.'  But it didn't happen like this. As I kept sending it off, and in those days it was a slow process, copying, mailing synopses, writing letters, the rejections kept coming back. I was in fact very surprised, and I suppose that turned into a sense of defeat. So I gave up with that novel - which was remarkably funny, I just rediscovered it in a box. I then took to writing my second novel. And after months and months of sweating and crying and typing, I sent it off to publishers. Rejections. Lots of them. This was quite perplexing. I couldn't work it out. It must have been a mistake. But lots of publishers and agents were making the same mistake - one after another.

So, then I thought I'd write another novel. This disappeared when I was burgled and my word processor was stolen. Probably just as well to avoid the heartbreak of further rejection.

Then I thought I'd write a novel for kids. In fact a publisher even wanted to see the full manuscript and I got very excited, but then they returned it with a short form letter saying it wasn't for them.

So I then thought I'd write some vampire books and I wrote 3 novels in the mid 1990s. A small publisher really liked one of them and was going to publish it, but then they got taken over and the bigger publisher didn't want it.

I then self published a ghostly guidebook (I was doing lots of ghost tours at that time) and that was a lot of work but fun - finding the printer, getting the barcode (this was 1998 and it wasn't so simple to do those things). On delivery I arranged national distributors but mainly went round local bookstores trying to get them to take it. They mostly did. It sold out of the print run of 2000 and got a lot of favourable reviews and press response. But I didn't manage to follow up.

Then I wrote another novel and I actually got a "master class" through the local arts board and submitted the first three chapters to a well respected published writer. He ripped it apart and kindly asked me why I didn't just stick to my day job.

So, I didn't write anything much for over 10 years. A couple of short stories. Nothing much.

And then I got involved with Kindle Direct...