Month: January 2021

What’s Possible

This month the husband and wife writing team Ilona Andrews self-published a title, Blood Heir, that ties back to one of their incredibly successful trade-published series about Kate Daniels and an Atlanta with waves of magic.

As I write this the ebook is ranked #167 in the Amazon U.S. store selling in ebook at a price of $6.99 and the paperback is ranked #4,403 selling at a price of $14.39. The book is available wide, meaning not just on Amazon, and is doing equally well on the other major retailers.

The book made #5 on the New York Times bestseller list which is almost unheard of for a self-published title. That’s also about as well as a title can perform. And the key is that it was self-published. Being able to hit that level of performance without using a publisher is HUGE.

I’ve been following the Ilona Andrews blog for a while now and it’s clear that they have an incredibly devoted fanbase. As I write this there are already 3,662 ratings on Amazon and the average rating is 4.8. Every time they post on their blog about publishing anything new, self-published or trade-published, a large number of people say, “Please!”, “Yes!”, “I’ll read anything by you.”

This was not the first title or series they’ve self-published. They’ve been hybrid for a while now. But I think this was a turning point and that they may very well focus on self-publishing for the time being. They’ve certainly indicated that’s the case for the next year.

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves. For me one of the benefits of trade-publishing is on the print side. For example, Ilona Andrews has a series they’re currently wrapping up that’s published by Avon in a mass market paperback size for $7.99. Self-publishing is currently not capable of matching that price point without a print run. (Same with YA print. The price points they can offer books at are well below what I can get from POD printing.)

I know on the trade side they’ve been talking about the demise of mass market paperbacks forever, but for me as a reader that’s how I find a lot of my authors. I’ll happily spend $8 on a first-in-series title. $16? That’s harder to justify. For now it looks like their readers have followed them to the higher price point in print but I wonder if long-term that may slow down.

For Blood Heir they’re doing print on demand through Ingram, but theoretically they could do their own print run on a mass market paperback because unlike most self-published authors they know they have the numbers to justify the up-front cost.

If they go down that road things could get very, very interesting. So something to keep an eye on if you weren’t aware of it already.

(And man do I love those Luisa Pressler covers. I saw her work on Twitter a couple years back and reached out about a possible cover but she was just a little out of my reach at the time and I’m sure is completely out of my reach now. But I love her style so much…)

So You Got a Bookbub Deal

First, congratulations. It’s scary to spend that kind of money on a promotion, but in my experience it’s been worth it every time even with the ones that didn’t perform as well. (My worst took four days to pay for itself with sales of that book and followthrough sales and I’ve only ever had 99 cent deals on standalones.)

Second, on the day of the Bookbub do not freak out if the sales aren’t there when you think they should be. I’m in the middle of the United States and inevitably think my deal is a big dud because the Australian sales for me don’t report until the next day on Amazon and that’s always a big chunk.

Now, the reason I am writing this post is because I’ve seen one too many questions about how to adjust pricing for a deal, especially how that works for authors who are wide.

So I decided I’d just run through it here once and then anyone who wanted to could find it on the internet and I could just link to this post if it ever comes up in a group again. This is for a non-free deal. Usually 99 cents but I’ve seen a few $1.99 etc deals.

We’ll start easy:

Nook: Change the price to your U.S. deal price. Done, because it’s just U.S. sales.

Amazon: Change the U.S. price and then click on Other Marketplaces to show all other markets. Make sure that the prices in India, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia match the price listed in the Bookbub acceptance email. (For 99 cent deals that’s 0.99 for all except India which is 65 INR.)

Apple: Change the base price and then go and confirm that all of your Bookbub markets are the price you want. There is no India option to worry about.

Google: Two options.

Simple option is to have one USD World listing and then one listing for each of the Bookbub countries (Canada, UK, Australia, India) using the deal price. So USD 99 cent WORLD and the rest are CAD 99 cent Canada, AUD 99 cent Australia, etc.

Make sure the tax-inclusive box is checked for each country so that you don’t end up with a 99 cent book priced at $1.06 which will mean that country doesn’t run as part of your Bookbub deal. (I do it for every country rather than try to figure out which ones have a VAT in place.)

The more complex option is to leave your usual listings in place and then for U.S. WORLD, Canada, UK, Australia, and India to list a second price for each country that includes your dates of your promotion and your sale price. This should mean that the deal shows as a discount off your full price on the book page.

I’ve been bit on this one before when it didn’t override my normal price because my normal price was not listed as tax-inclusive but my sale price was so I sometimes just go with the simple option instead.

Kobo: Two options here as well. Start on the set the price page for the book.

Your first option is to change the default list price to what you need and then make sure that the price listed for each country in your BB deal is what it should be.

Your second option is to leave that section alone and instead use the schedule a sale option. Works the same, basically price-wise, except you set dates for you promotion. (I tend not to use it because I end up cancelling the sale early because I always want it to end on the 14th but when you put in the 14th that means it will end on the 15th.)

Draft2Digital: They have a promotion option that lets you schedule a promotion but last I checked it was USD only, which I don’t trust because of currency conversion. So…

I go to the Publish page for the book, click on Manage Territorial Prices, and make sure that the USD price is set to what I need and then all the other prices are set to their requirement as well. To customize a country price you check the box next to that country and enter the price you want. Click Apply Territories when done and submit the change.

That’s it for the ones I use. I assume other stores would work the same. Basically, don’t rely on currency conversion to get the right prices for your deal.

Also, be sure to check your listings in each country before the day of your deal.

For Google you can add &gl= and then the two-letter country code at the end of the URL to see the price in each store. For Apple change the current two-letter country portion of the URL to the one you want to see. Same with Kobo.

(The UK two-letter code is GB.)

For Amazon you need to change the amazon portion of the address to match the amazon url for that country. So amazon.com becomes amazon.co.uk, for example.

You won’t have buy options in each store, but you should be able to see pricing to confirm that you got it right.

2021 Goal Setting

Today I uploaded most of my December 2020 numbers in my Access database.

(Audio and Kobo are still outstanding and so is IngramSpark Australia for some reason and I never upload D2D until the last moment to give them time to finalize the numbers they show, but what I had at this point was 95% of the year so close enough.)

As I expected, revenue was down, but profits were actually up, so yay. It seems less people were clicking on ads perhaps but more were willing to buy when they did since most of my revenue is ad-driven. Either that or I just didn’t keep my eye on the ball as much in 2020, because, well…2020. Either way.

Steady improvement, but still not where I’d like to be. And still not sure that the market is long-term sustainable as it exists today. But that’s a post for another day.

Part of looking at my numbers involved comparing them to some goals I’d set at the beginning of the year for revenue and profit by author, series, and title for 2020 as well as lifetime.

After laughing uproariously at my early 2020 optimism (I was hoping to have lifetime revenue by now of $75K more than I have) it was time to set 2021 goals.

I realized what I needed to do was stop setting goals based on lagging indicators like revenue and profit and instead set them on leading indicators.

What do I mean by that? I’ve probably discussed this before at some point, but it’s a good topic to cover again. A lagging indicator is a result, but it requires other actions to make it happen. A leading indicator is an action you take that actually drives those results.

For me, with publishing, leading indicators are published titles and ad spend. If I don’t publish titles and advertise them, I don’t make money.

For some it could also be word count or hours spent writing but those don’t work for me. I need a tangible finished product that I can sell. If I write 50,000 words on something I don’t publish, that doesn’t help pay my rent. Right?

And sitting in my office saying, “I will make $50,000 in profits this year” sounds great, but unless I have something out there selling that well already, it’s not going to happen.

Fortunately, I normally do set new year’s resolutions some of which are things like, “Publish 4 non-fiction titles” which cover the “produce new product” side of things.

Where I tend to forget this is when I look at ad spend, revenues, and profit and loss. Because I’ll often jot down revenue and profit goals for a title separate from my new year’s resolutions. “I would like Title X to make revenue of $20K with a profit of $15K.” But I almost never jot down title-level ad goals.

Saying I want a profit of $15k is nice and all, but it leaves out the steps that are required to get there. Which for a published title comes from promotion and advertising. If I think a profit of $20K requires an ad spend of $5K, then I need to actually spend that much on advertising. That needs to be my goal.

If I can actually make that work. There are diminishing returns on ad spend for some of my titles. The market for them is only so big, so I can’t just say “Spend $500K to make a million” because, haha, no, not with what I write.

But what I can do is go back to that revenue goal of $20K that expects an ad spend of $5K and then break that down either monthly or quarterly and set a goal to spend $400 per month or $1,200 per quarter on that title.

Now, I know some people who publish don’t have that money to spend on their titles. It comes up in the forums often. So let me say this: Start small and reinvest your profits.

Especially with something like AMS ads, you do not have to spend hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands when you’re getting started. You do need to bid enough for your ads to show, but if you can only spend $2 a day on an ad, fine. Start there. If that ad is making you $4 a day then next month you can spend more. And the month after that and the month after that.

(I think we all have a better grasp of exponential growth after last year, no?)

And if you spend $2 a day and don’t make anything over the course of a month, then something there isn’t working.

If you aren’t getting impressions, you’re likely not bidding enough. If you’re getting clicks but not sales, then something is off in that chain from first impression to purchase.

Are you targeting the right audience? Is there alignment between your target audience, your cover, your ad text, your sales page copy, your genre, and your look inside?

Does it all tell customers that they are getting the same product or does the initial impression look like a novel when what you really wrote was a philosophical treatise? Is the price you’ve set competitive for your genre? If it’s more do you justify that added cost with your presentation of the product?

And if you’re getting sales, but losing money, you may need more product to afford those ads. Often a first-in-series is a loss-leader and you make that up with the rest of the series. Or there’s something in that sales funnel that can be tightened up to get better conversion. But it’s good to start poking around and figuring that out so that when you’re finally ready to run you actually know what you’re doing and what works for your books.

Anyway. Some thoughts.

And now I have to go feed a “puppy” before she starts crying that I have cruelly neglected her by going 3 minutes past her lunchtime. (The real reason I write is so I can have the free time for her. Haha. Sad but true.)

Aer.io

I’m supposed to be setting up a Facebook ad for my new release but I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole with a site called aer.io.

Basically it’s a site associated with Ingram that lets you create a storefront to sell any print books that Ingram distributes.

You can create collections and offer your own discounts off of the list price. It’s a little clunky still (see the Stephen King book cover in the attached link which is not in English but fine when you click on the link) but definitely intriguing.

If you want to see one of my experiments, here’s what I did for a list of the books on my best writing advice books shelf. There were only two on that shelf I couldn’t find in their catalog:

https://shop.aer.io/WritingBooks

And here’s the link to the non-fiction store I’ve been working on for my books:

https://shop.aer.io/MLHumphrey

There are things I don’t love about it like the overlay on collection names. And it seems to like to overwrite the description for the page that you give when you go in to edit, but other than that…pretty cool.

Looks like anyone can set one up and you’re basically a little online bookstore.

New Year, New Releases

The Excel Essentials 2019 series is out! That consists of three titles, Excel 2019 Beginner, Excel 2019 Intermediate, and Excel 2019 Formulas & Functions.

I’m going to take a moment to talk about them and then I’ll dive in on some thoughts for the writer folks who follow this blog.

So, how do these differ from the Excel Essentials series? If you’ve already read Excel for Beginners, Intermediate Excel, 50 Useful Excel Functions, and 50 More Excel Functions do you need to buy these, too?

The answer is no. These books are written specifically for anyone using Excel 2019 but 97% of what I talk about in the two series remains unchanged so if you already read the first series you’re fine.

In the formulas & functions book I do cover a few new functions, IFS and TEXTJOIN being the two main ones. MINIFS and MAXIFS as well. But in the prior series I covered nested IF functions and CONCATENATE which were the old way to accomplish the same thing as IFS and TEXTJOIN. And the older functions are still better choices if backwards compatibility is an issue.

Which is why I continue to recommend the Excel Essentials books for anyone using an older version of Excel or who needs to worry about structuring things so they work for others using older versions of Excel.

I basically came out with these books because I just upgraded computers which meant upgrading my Office version to 2019 so I had access to it and also because I know there are users out there who want a book focused on their particular version of Excel so why not give it to them now that I could.

Which is the perfect segue (an interesting word because I want spell it very differently based on the way it’s pronounced) to talking about this from the writer perspective.

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction you always have to think about self-cannibalization at some point if you’re going to publish more than one title.

On the fiction side writers do this when they release bundles. If I have a bundle of books 1 through 3 and books 1 through 3 available on a standalone basis I should expect that some readers will buy the bundle instead of books 1 through 3 standalone. Which means that every sale of the bundle is a sale I don’t get of books 1, 2, and 3.

But it can make sense to do so anyway, because there are readers who are bundle readers who won’t buy a book standalone and it’s also often a way to reach readers who won’t pay as much without having to discount the standalone titles. So you broaden your potential audience in two ways.

The drawback is on a site like Amazon that is so rankings-driven it can decrease overall visibility. Maybe. Because sometimes getting a Bookbub promo is easier with a bundle which can then increase visibility. (Of course at that point you’re selling at high volume but low per-unit profit, but that trade off can make a lot of sense depending on when you do it. My general inclination is to price low only when I have somewhere more expensive for readers to go after that because it’s not easy to make a living on 35 cents a sale.)

In non-fiction there are any number of ways to do this as well.

One is an updated edition of a book. Most readers if there’s a 2010 and a 2020 edition of a book will buy the 2020 edition assuming it’s the “better” edition so publishing a new edition often means no longer getting sales of the editions.

If someone takes another pass at the material you assume they will find better ways to say what they were saying the first time around and update the book for any changes over time.

(Although I will say with cookbooks this isn’t always true. I have Better Homes & Gardens cookbooks spanning thirty years and some of the older recipes are the better-tasting ones because they weren’t trying to be heart-healthy. Although, let’s just take a moment to be glad that 1970’s entertaining suggestions stayed in the 70’s. Hanging bananas off of a centerpiece is an idea no one should have ever had, ever.)

Getting back to the point.

With non-fiction other ways I’ve cannibalized my own sales is through bundles. For example, I have the Excel Essentials title which is the four Excel books from the original series combined into one title.

(Even though it’s a discount over the four individual titles, the individual titles still sell much better, probably because the initial price point seems daunting to someone who hasn’t read my books yet.)

I also have the Easy Excel Essentials books which are extracted from the main series titles and focus on specific topics, like Pivot Tables.

They’re less economical for people to buy if they buy them all but people do still buy them either because they only care about one specific topic (Pivot Tables or Conditional Formatting) or because the price point seems more reasonable to them. They’d rather buy six books for $3 each than buy three books for $5-$6 each even if there’s less overall content in the six books.

Of course, another reason to release new titles has nothing to do with sales, but instead has to do with visibility.

For example, the newly-available-to-everyone AMS Sponsored Brand ads work best with three or more titles. So I went ahead and released Access Essentials so that I’d have three books on Access that I could advertise via one of those ads. I didn’t actually expect high sales on that title, but it gave me another advertising option so it was worth it.

And, as fiction authors who focus on Amazon sales know, there is value in being in the new release charts. (Although that’s only self-cannibalization when it’s an omnibus or bundle release, but that can make people realize they missed book three in that series and go buy it.)

Anyway. It’s something to think about if you’re a slower writer and trying to figure out what you can do. Think about new formats, bundles, etc.

But I don’t recommend new editions unless for this purpose. (These three books took me over a hundred hours to create and with novels or short stories I’ve redone it took as long as writing a new one and probably wasn’t such a vast improvement it was worth it.)

Also, I highly recommend having a release of some sort in January because it’s a nice, easy way to hit at least one New Year’s resolution. 🙂