2012 May | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

May

no two days are alike, except the first and fifteenth pretty much

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I fight the temptation to turn this into one of those writer blogs that’s about nothing but the numbers. But this is an interesting enough development that it bears recording.

So: on April 30th, I made Too Close to Miss available on Amazon for free. It had been moving fewer than a dozen copies per month over the last couple months (B&N, still killing it), so I wouldn’t be losing much money by giving up sales. The shift from $2.99 to $0.00 wouldn’t take effect for a few days^*, since I was taking advantage of Amazon’s price-match guarantee rather than their KDP Select program. So I lowered the price, checked in a few days later to see if it had taken effect (it hadn’t), and promptly forgot about it.

On May 7th, I saw that Too Close to Miss was finally at $0.00 on Amazon – the price-matching algorithms had caught up. I also saw that, through no work on my part, it had moved ten thousand free copies.

Fast forward a week. As of last night, Too Close to Miss has moved 60,000 free copies. It’s the #1 free ebook in the “Women Sleuths” category and, as of Sunday, was the #2 free ebook on Amazon overall.

When you get 60,000 of anything, you need to address it somehow. So let’s talk about the meaning of “free.”

I’ve been blogging for over ten years and I’ve never written something that 60,000 people have read. Even the occasional Overthinking It article of mine that found its way to the IMDb front page (and was fraught with errors) couldn’t match those numbers. And that’s free content too! So it takes more than just a $0.00 price tag – it takes a presence in front of an interested audience.

If I showed up in Times Square with 60,000 paperbacks, I couldn’t give them away in a week. And even if I did, almost all of them would end up in the garbage. The 60K copies of TCTM that have been downloaded in the last week all went to people who wanted something to read. A significant portion of them may have deleted it after the first page. But I guarantee I had a better success rate at connecting to readers with Amazon than I would have via any other means.

This is with practically no publicity effort on my part. I let my friends and the Overthinking It twitter feed know. But I do not have 60,000 friends, and OTI does not have 60,000 regular readers.

Then how did 60,000 people know this book was free all of a sudden? Amazon has created an audience expectation that plenty of Kindle books will be available for free at any one time. Sites and subcultures, like Kindle Nation Daily and Pixel of Ink, have sprung up around this notion: automatically and frequently updating subscribers on which ebooks are available for free that day. So there are people who will scoop every free ebook onto their Kindle like the lightning round of Supermarket Sweep. Given that, I’m not opening any champagne bottles yet.

And yet, presuming 1% of those 60,000 read the book and like it enough that they want to read more, that’s 600 new fans. All at a cost of the $20 to $30 that I lost in Amazon sales for May.

Final note: I would have been happy to end the experiment at 25K free copies. But, since this is a roundabout process (change the price at Smashwords, wait for it to get pushed to retailers, wait for the retailers to notice, wait for Amazon to notice the other retailers), it’s not fully under my control. Thankfully I’m not relying on this for significant income. And it’s not costing me or anyone else anything, so I’m left with this odd, inexplicable embarrassment as free copies keep pouring out the door.

Of course, the real test will be how many copies it moves once I start charging money for it again – or how many copies the next book in the series sells. Which should be any day now …

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* Briefly: Amazon will not be undersold on an ebook if they can help it. If Amazon finds the same ebook at a lower price via another retailer, they will lower their price to match – all the way to zero if need be.

May

when the words don’t come

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I will never again rag on a professional writer for putting out a bad book. Not after this week.

While the second book in the Mara Cunningham series undergoes its third round of edits, I decided to tackle another project. To challenge myself, I ran with an idea that had just come to me, rather than an idea I’d been brewing for a while. I was writing without an outline, sure, but I’d done a few novels that way and it hadn’t killed me yet. And I was aiming for 5000 words a day, just to keep it moving.

Seven days into the new project and I want to claw out my own brain.

What separates this project from my other (successful) ones? I have no idea where I’m going. In those other drafts, I had a strong sense of either character or plot, two of the essential ingredients for a novel. Here, I had a compelling vision for one character – and I was trying to write three. And I was making up the plot as I went. That led to my frontal lobes seizing up and grinding to a halt at about the 25K mark.

I’m pushing forward, anyway. I’ve decided to set aside the characters I can’t figure out (for now) and plunge on with the one person I can. This may result in a markedly shorter first draft. So be it! But it’s crucial that you finish the projects you start. A completed project can be remodeled, or salvaged, or at the very least harvested for parts. But an incomplete project will rust on your front lawn and scare the neighbors.

What valuable lesson have I taken from this ordeal? Will I reduce my daily page count to a more reasonable level? Will I go back to outlining projects before I launch myself at them, skull first? Will I study my characters with greater focus? Yeah, sure, probably. But most importantly, I’ve learned to forgive traditional authors their bad novels.

As a self-published author, I get to determine the arc that my work takes. The Mara Cunningham series could be two books long, or it could be twenty-two. It’s up to me. I don’t owe Random House their advance back if I can’t manage a fourth book in the series (TOO DRUNK TO SLEEP, coming September 2016).

Traditionally published authors don’t have that option.

I have enough faith in Lee Child as a craftsman to bet that he looked at the final draft of 61 Hours and thought, “This could have been better.” But he owed Delacorte a manuscript, so what choice did he have? He got that one out of his system, then turned it around with Worth Dying For and The Affair, his next two. So I forgive him 61 Hours.

And George R.R. Martin? Never again a complaint. I may not like A Dance with Dragons as much as the other books in the series. It genuinely isn’t as good. But you’ll never hear me rag on the man for taking so long to produce something sub-par.

Why not? Because through this creative battle, as I’ve let my daily deadlines wither by the roadside, as I’ve decided to shift focus away from the literary novel I’d hoped for to a more traditional thriller, as I stood in the shower this morning and thought, “Hell, maybe there’s a short story buried in there,” only one thought has kept me sane: it’s a good thing no one’s waiting for this one.

Enjoy the freedom to suck if you have it. And pour one out for those who don’t.

May

and I stay on target and refuse to miss, and I still make hits

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Talking a little about reviews today.

Too Close to Miss has 12 reviews on Amazon, out of 257 ebooks sold (it’s also available in paperback, but it’s sold maybe 10 copies there, and Amazon aggregates the reviews anyway). It has 9 reviews on Barnes & Noble, out of 929 ebooks sold – 7 of which are anonymous. The Goodreads page indicates TCTM has been added to 55 shelves (“read”, “to-read”, etc.), out of which 27 people have rated it and 10 people have written reviews.

Some observations:

Goodreads has the highest reviewed/acquired ratio, which is especially impressive given that Goodreads isn’t a marketplace in itself. In fact, several people reviewed TCTM on Goodreads and Amazon. Is “hero” too strong a word for these people? Yes. But “champion” isn’t.
Amazon has a higher reviewed/purchased ratio than B&N, despite B&N allowing anonymous reviews. So having to sign your name to something isn’t a barrier to participation. In fact, that may be part of the appeal.
Not counting the Anons on B&N, Goodreads has the highest percentage of reviews by people I don’t know. This may speak more to the purpose of the site. Goodreads exists only to share information about what you’ve read with friends, whereas Amazon also serves that purpose, in addition to funneling goods to you at scandalously low prices. So a Goodreads user is, all things being equal, more likely to review a book that they added to Goodreads than an Amazon user is to review a book they acquired through Amazon. That’s the type of user the site attracts.

A little more on that last bullet: I suspect people review books on Goodreads to share information with friends (real or Internet), while people review on Amazon to share information with strangers (potential future buyers). The former encourages people to write more reviews. Or maybe reviewing is just a rare behavior – how many products do you review, out of everything you buy? 10% of them? 1%? – and Goodreads aggregates a lot of reviewers into a convenient clump.

A user who reviews my book is of value to me, almost regardless of how well they review it. A review tells future buyers what to expect. One of the biggest obstacles to purchasing a book is uncertainty: is this going to entertain or enlighten me? Yeah, the marketing copy looks good, but does it live up to the hype? Even a 2-star review that goes into detail (too much sex and violence) could lure a reader off the fence.

My conclusion: Goodreads is a worthwhile place to focus on to build buzz; Amazon is important to attract buyers; and Barnes & Noble can just keep selling in massive quantities for whatever reason they choose.

If you read Too Close to Miss and thought something about it, whether good or bad, please let your friends know via a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Goodreads.

If you want to see why readers call Too Close to Miss a “compelling, incisively smart, and witty thriller”, then pick up your own copy!