Moving right along…
So I’ve had a short story for sale for a week so far, as described in this post. (The book itself can be found on Amazon.com; that’s the Amazon US link, although it’s also available at the company’s UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, [etc.] sites.) At 99 cents apiece (less Amazon’s cut), I’ve sold about a dozen copies of that story to date (one was “refunded,” for reasons unknown — probably a double download).
As I mentioned at the time, I haven’t really done anything to promote it, other than to announce its availability on Facebook and Twitter. I did a follow-up on Facebook, a day or two later, and — for what it’s worth — sold more copies via the follow-up than from the original announcement. I made a point of not urging anyone to spread the word, buy copies for friends and family, and so on; I just announced the story’s availability, to see what happened next.
From this small chunk of data, so far at least, I (not very earth-shakingly) conclude:
- People who see the announcement are more likely to respond to it. Thus, the timing of the announcement is critical: almost no one can read every single posting in his or her Facebook and/or Twitter feeds. Follow-up can greatly announcements improve the odds of likely purchasers even knowing about the sale in the first place.
- Since Facebook and Twitter (and RAMH itself, for that matter) are self-selected population samples — only people who “know” me in one way or another — presumably all of those dozen sales so far came not via word-of-mouth, but in direct response to the announcement.
I don’t know how to encourage word-of-mouth sales without constantly nudging the people who’ve bought it so far — remember, people I “know” — and risking wearing out my welcome, so to speak. Especially now, at this time of year, people (even generous friends) simply don’t want, let alone need, to be badgered repeatedly to buy something.
So, let’s move on to phase 2, applying some of these lessons (and leaving some of the mysteries unresolved for now).
You can find my next 99-cent offering here, at Amazon’s US site: “How It Was: Christmas.” If you’ve been reading RAMH for a while, you’ve seen this (both the overall series, and this specific volume) referenced before. One of my very first posts here described the series’ genesis, and what to expect from the individual booklets.
Of all four books, this one is most likely to “sell,” I think — especially at this time of year. I’ve done a couple of things to open it up a little further:
- I’ve enrolled the title in Amazon’s
“Kindle Select”“KDP Select” program. This will provide me some promotional opportunities downstream. Chief among these: I will be able to RAISE the sale price, with the intention of immediately offering it for sale at a deep discount back to the 99-cents level. - The book will also be available for free “library” lending to Amazon Prime customers. I won’t get a direct royalty from these so-called borrowings, but I will get a small bit from some kind of Amazon’s global library promotions.
- I’ll do more than one follow-up announcement on Facebook, and also make a point of following up a couple of times on Twitter. (As ever, I don’t want to wear out my welcome. If anyone sees me approaching that limit, I hope you’ll let me know!)
- A bigger risk, maybe: I’m offering the book free of all digital-rights-management constraints. This means that someone who BUYS a copy can simply turn around and give the book file to anyone else. Of everything I’ve written, maybe, this Christmas booklet is “most likely to succeed,” at some point (perhaps years in the future). To the extent that more and more people read (and of course like) it, future sales of both other How It Was books and everything else I might e-publish might get a boost.
Again, let’s just see how things play out. And I’ll report back on this phase, too, at some point.
Thanks as always for reading anything at all which I’ve written… and of course, thanks extra if you’ve paid for it, and/or encouraged someone else to do so. ;)
Froog says
Good luck with these e-publishing experiments! I’ve particularly enjoyed your childhood reminiscences in the How It Was series and would like to see them reach a wider audience.
I think there will come a tipping-point where someone else starts promoting for you. I had an odd little blip in my blog traffic a few years ago where a journo mega-blogger with a million-plus followers picked up one of my posts. He’d ‘recommend’ dozens of posts a week, or a day – so, only a few hundreds of his alleged hordes of readers wandered over to Froogville. But if they’d all been paying me a buck, I’d have been very happy!
I hope something like this happens for you, sooner rather than later.
But you know how perverse – perversely admirable – the determined non-self-promotion is.
By the by, I have a new blog. It is primarily for my students (none of whom have yet commented), so necessarily rather… restrained. But you might find a few things on there diverting (lots of video posts recently).
http://eatthetapirs.blogspot.com/
I hope that doesn’t count as ‘shameless self-promotion’. I really don’t want to ‘promote’ this blog. Just thought you might interested in it.
ReCaptcha is giving me phone numbers again. Whatever happened to Katrina Grinsley and Wallis Hemphin?
John says
Well hey there. Thanks for the good wishes!
You’re right, of course. And I’m under no illusions at all about the odds of success. Still, you never know… A brother-in-law thoughtfully thought to promote the Christmas book in a forum (which I don’t belong to) peopled by about a thousand denizens (former/still) of our hometown. Maybe a couple of them will pick it up, and maybe like it well enough to recommend/give to a couple of others… It’s a Ponzi scheme — kind of like the mathematical analyses of why a world of unrestrained vampires/zombies is not possible (eventually you just run out of blood/meat). Who knows?
Mostly I think I just got tired of writing for no one. Trying to use these initial experiments just to (a) grok the how-to’s and (b) maybe provide a “loss leader” boost for later projects.
Unsurprisingly, your new blog is entitled like no other. (Referring to the URL, not the title as actually displayed there.) I hunted around but couldn’t find any obvious source (although I did find a rather disturbing YouTube video of an anaconda eating a tapir). So: ???
You should consider yourself honored to be getting numeric reCaptchas. They’ve changed the algorithm: if the system* “knows” you’re human, it offers you what is supposedly a more legible (albeit less imaginative) all-numbers prompt. You’ve obviously established your bona fides.
__________________
* “System” here refers to the reCaptcha software, which is actually managed elsewhere (Google, maybe?) — not to Running After My Hat‘s apathetic underpinnings.
John says
Ah — I just found the “eat the tapirs” reference explained on the blog itself! Thanks for that; I’d never heard that story (re: Kubrick/2001) before.
Froog says
And sorry about the zombie outbreak of italicization there – I must have forgotten to close a tag somewhere. D’oh!!!!
John says
Yep — fixed it for you!
Froog says
I didn’t know that the numerical ReCaptchas were supposed to be a ‘treat’. I am finding them infuriating. Not only are they far less interesting than the random word combinations we have grown to love, but they are often far less decipherable. One of the two groups of numbers usually takes the form of a photograph – out of focus, shot in bad light, at a skewed angle, etc. It’s most often of a house number on a wall, but sometimes there are two numbers close together, one of them partially cropped out, and you can’t work out which numbers are meant to be included in the challenge. You have numbers dangling semi-inverted or scrawled over with graffiti too. These are HARD: I’ve ‘failed’ them a number of times, and that almost never happened with the word combinations.
Froog says
Then again, they obviously don’t take them that seriously, because I just forgot to key in the second number group (and of course, keying in numbers is itself way more awkward than typing a word or even just a random sequence of letters on the primary keyboard area) and my comment was accepted anyway.
I was just reminded of another of my little story ideas that I never got around to doing anything with. It was the notion of you as a man who defiantly seeks to convince online filtering systems that he is a machine in order to experience more interesting captcha challenges – a sort of Turing Test in reverse.
I once pictured a world of the near future where the pioneers of AI think that they’re getting very near to cracking it, and the Turing Test has become big business. Some tech gazillionaire has put up an enormous bounty for the first machine intelligence to convince a human panel that it is human through typed conversation, and a rolling circus of attempts – somewhat akin to the world chess championships – has been going for a few years, with none of the contenders yet fooling everyone, though many have come close.
The thing is, there’s a coterie of professionals – or regular participants, at any rate – involved in these events on the testing panel. And also as the human dummy candidates against whom the competing computers are compared. And some of those dummies have to deliberately act less human, to pretend to be a really plausible machine, in order to sow doubts in the testers’ minds.
So…. I pictured an awkward romance where one of the regular testers starts becoming attracted to one of his unseen interlocutors, who seems to have a feminine personality – but he’s not quite sure if it’s human or not.