Sales

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February 22, 2013

FIXER available for pre-order

Posted by genedoucette under Apple, Fixer, iBooks, Sales, TWCS | Tags: , , , , |
1 Comment 

Fixer_Hi-Res_CoverDirect from the publisher

We are four weeks away from Fixer‘s official debut, which means you’re four weeks away from having the book you can pre-order right now sent to you!

Okay, that’s probably the worst pitch I’ve ever written, but it’s the middle of the day, on a Friday, and I’m hitting an afternoon food coma.

Forgive me.

And after you’ve forgiven me, follow this link right here to pre-order your own hard copy of the best book you’ll read this year.

…okay, that was a little better.

Also

If you pre-order a copy I will mail you a signed book plate for it.

Is that cool?  I think that’s pretty cool.

Pre-ordering ebooks

If you happen to be a fan of the electronic book format, you will also find that it is possible to pre-order a copy of the ebook right now from iTunes.

 

July 30, 2012

Amazon watching

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Good Day NY, Hellenic Immortal, Immortal, Promotion, Sales, Television
[7] Comments 

Tracking sales ranking

I’ve been confusing my friends and family a lot lately due to my addiction to Amazon.  I don’t mean shopping, I mean watching other people buy my books.  It’s unhealthy, and I understand that it’s unhealthy, and I can’t seem to stop.  Or make any sense.

“Okay but what does that mean?”

What happens is, I’ll look up one of my books on Amazon– this is a lie, it’ll already be open, I’m just hitting refresh– and say something like, “It’s below thirty-thousand!” and whoever I’m speaking to will either A: ignore me (recommended) or B: ask, “what does that number mean?”

It doesn’t mean I’ve sold thirty-thousand copies.  That would mean larger numbers are better, but this is a sales rank, meaning it’s the overall rank of the book in comparison to a much larger pool of books for sale.

As for what the rank means in terms of sales, I really didn’t know and couldn’t find out easily.  And that was how I went through most of June, looking at the rank for Immortal and Hellenic Immortal and wondering what their sales rank meant in terms of real sales.

July

Then July happened.  Something weird transpired in July that the publicist termed (and she might have invented this) a “media hangover”.  We had a big media push in May when Hellenic debuted, and that push involved a blog tour, some print media, and my appearing on television, twice.  The result was a modest bump in sales in May that essentially vanished in June.  I knew there was more print media coverage coming (it’s still pending, because print media is for-fucking-ever) but basically I was a wreck for most of June.

In July, I gave a nice long interview for a podcast, and a new review popped up, but there wasn’t really anything else of note.  Despite this, sales exploded.  Suddenly those sales rankings I was babbling about weren’t in the thirty-thousands, they were in the three thousands.

But what does it MEAN?

I didn’t know what these numbers meant in terms of real live sales, but I found a website called NovelRank that I thought would help.  It tracked every time a book’s rank moved up and calculated each bump as a sale.  So I plugged in both books and started using that to figure out how many books I was selling.  (Note: obviously, I get a real report from the publisher on a month-to-month basis.  I was doing this because I can’t wait for that report, because I’m insane.)

Now.  There is an obvious weakness in NovelRank’s scheme, and it’s one that the site itself admits openly to: it isn’t very good at tracking sales for books that have sold over 100 copies in a month.  (It is very good at tracking sales for books that are in the lower range, and it’s really meant as a tool to see how well a promotion might be going and that sort of thing.)  At a certain level a sales rank improvement– or a sales rank that only improves slightly or worsens slightly– is an indication of X number of books sold since the last time the rank was updated, with X being “a number greater than one”.

Another problem with NovelRank’s scheme is Amazon really only updates the ranks about eight times a day, so the best I was ever going to see was eight books sold per day.  And this turns out to be… a little low.

That media hangover

It occurs to me, well after the fact, that most people don’t buy books as soon as they hear about them.  They add them to wish-lists and buy them later.  The delay between May and July appears to be exactly that.  With allowances made for the possibility that folks who heard my radio interview made immediate impulse buys after hearing me talk about myself for an hour or so, that May push (and specifically the television appearances) worked much better than it appeared to have at the time.

And now Immortal is regularly holding its own ranked below 4000 overall and Hellenic is humming along at below 9000 overall.

What do these ranks mean in real sales?

Um…

I can’t tell you

OK, I only have a rough idea, but it’s a lot better than 8 books a day.  It’s also better than all of the other months combined, going back to when Immortal first debuted in 2010.

So as you can imagine, I’m happy with where we’re going.  And I see no reason to stop addictively hitting refresh any time soon.  Or, not until I have a best-seller.

Then maybe.

 

June 6, 2012

Anticipation

Posted by genedoucette under Hellenic Immortal, Immortal, Reviews, Sales, Writing | Tags: , , |
1 Comment 

That sound you hear is me holding my breath

I am slowly going insane.  This insanity is due to the following facts:

  1. Immortal and Hellenic Immortal are both doing very well, both in terms of sales and reviews, however…
  2. …there is more press coverage coming.
  3. Eventually.

The press in question is of the sort I can’t talk about right now.  Because talking about it before it happens will look pretty terrible if it doesn’t happen.  Just know that there are some big things to come, and I am excited enough about it that I can’t do much of anything but hold my breath and wait.

And this is absolutely killing me.

Book Three

A dirty little secret that isn’t all that dirty or secret is that I haven’t begun writing the next book in the Immortal series yet, which is causing some of you a degree of anguish which I am both impressed and surprised by.  It will get written, but… oh okay, here’s another list.

  1. Adam’s “voice” is a reflection of mine, and his moods are as well.  My first draft of Hellenic Immortal was started around 2006 or so when I was still pissed off that Immortal hadn’t been sold yet, and that frustration became a part of his voice, which in turn became him being grouchy about Clara.  Imagine, if you will, what his voice might sound like right now, if I start writing new material while also holding my breath.
  2. I have actually not written a fresh and new piece for a little while, and I have less time than I used to.  The fundamental change is that my office moved and I am now commuting to that office by bike, which means I’m spending 3 hours a day in the saddle instead of getting fat in front of my computer.  The good news is, I’m in fantastic shape, but I’m going to have to figure out a solution that gives me more wide-awake free time.
  3. I don’t quite have enough yet to start writing.  I have pieces, but the big picture isn’t there yet.  I don’t need a lot– I don’t outline and do very, very little planning when writing, and usually start well before someone else would– but I need more than I have.

Still: nobody panic.  The work will get done.

 

December 14, 2011

Immortal updates

Posted by genedoucette under Distribution, E-Book, Hellenic Immortal, Immortal, Indie Book Event, Sales, TWCS | Tags: , , |
[2] Comments 

New publisher

As I explained here, Immortal is changing publishing houses, and Hellenic Immortal is on board with the same publisher.  That publisher?  The Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House, henceforth known as TWCS because that’s a mouthful of a name.

I met some folks from TWCS at the Indie Book Event over the summer, and honestly I think the only reason it took this long to inquire about working with them was that I thought they only handled romance.

You will find that TWCS has a website!  And marketing!  And promotions!  And you will likely find that the least expensive place to buy their books is directly from their website, so keep that link on-hand.

Publishing dates

The new edition of Immortal will be available February 9, 2012.  This edition will have a new cover design (about which you will hear more about just as soon as we figure out what the hell the new cover should look like) and it will be marketed as having a bonus chapter/teaser for Hellenic Immortal.  I would LOVE it if you, a fan who has already read Immortal, picked up a new copy of the book.  But I’m going to be honest with you: the bonus chapter is the same thing I shared with you at the beginning of the summer.  You can read it for free right now here.

The publishing date for Hellenic Immortal is April 5, 2012.

Keep in mind these dates are written in very dark pencil, not ink.  Ahead still is: editing; cover design for both books; navigating the mayhem likely to ensue when attempting to issue a new edition of a book from a different publisher than the one who published the old edition, which is going to wreak havoc with online retailers.

Now then: anyone want to pitch a cover idea to me? I’m open to anything.

 

May 18, 2011

What to get the author who doesn’t have everything

Posted by genedoucette under Birthday, Facebook, GoodReads, Hellenic Immortal, Immortal, Promotion, Sales, Twitter | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
[5] Comments 

Birthday wishes

“I don’t want everything.  Where would I put it?”

–Stephen Wright

As today is my birthday, I have decided to be obnoxious, which I admit is not a large step for me but here it goes.

Read Immortal

That’s what I want from you, on this, the occasion of my forty-third birthday.  I would like for you to go out and find my novel Immortal through whatever means you have at your disposal, and read it, and enjoy it, and then tell people about it.

“My god,” you’re thinking, “He wasn’t kidding.  That’s obnoxious!”  I agree!  But I get to be obnoxious on my birthday.

But really?

Yes, really!  Look, it’s a great book.  It’s been out for nearly eight months now and has collected exactly zero negative reviews.  Look here, at the blog tour page, and read for yourself.  See?  And it’s not like these are all coming from friends and family, because my family isn’t that large and I don’t have that many friends.

If that doesn’t work for you, look at the Goodreads page.  That’s thirty-five ratings for a 4.43 average out of a possible 5.  Or look at the seven five-star Amazon reviews.

Still not enough?  Read the sample chapter first.  Or if you want, read the teaser for the second book.

Dude, really, this is annoying

I don’t care!  And I’m still going!

The book costs $14.95 in print (at Amazon) or $9.99 as an e-book (everywhere e-books are sold) and it’s absolutely worth it.

Ask anyone who’s already read it!  In fact, if you are one of those people who has already read it, go ahead and say so in the comments.

As of this moment I have 1,187 followers on Twitter and 672 friends on Facebook.  If half of those numbers bought Immortal today it would jump to the top 100 in best sellers on every online retailer, and by this time next month I might be negotiating a wider distribution deal, which is what I really want for my birthday.

You don’t really think this will work, do you?

Shut up, imaginary inquisitor!  It’s my birthday!

Also?  I want a pony.

 

February 25, 2011

Challenge Accepted!

Posted by genedoucette under Agents, Blog Tour, Distribution, Hellenic Immortal, Immortal, Promotion, Sales | Tags: , , , , , |
[2] Comments 

Blog tour!

I kind of buried the lede, but: I’m hosting my first official blog tour for Immortal!  And I need your help!  See the bottom for details. But first…

Planning the future

I had the opportunity on Saturday to sit down with a couple of New York-based editors.  I was at a convention called Boskone at the time, and the reason I was able to sit down with these editors was partly that nobody else was.  They had these things called “Kaffeklatch” at which one could sit down for a scheduled hour with a professional… something.  Mostly writers.  And since most of the people at the convention were there to meet writers, those were the Kaffeklatches that filled up.

I was there to meet writers too, but since I am a writer, my highest priority was to find readers and to network with people and maybe to see what a convention is actually like. (This was my first.)

So anyway. I sat down at a table with two editors, and they asked me what I wanted to talk about.  And the long and sordid tale of the life of Immortal came out, ending with the triumphant publication of said product.  None of which was a question: more like a speech.  The question, at the end of all that, was: “now what?”

Now what

The answer was: put together the positive reviews and blurbs– I have quite a lot– and show them to an agent or seventeen.  And then the agent–we’re assuming here that one signs me, which is a specious assumption but it’s where we are– can go out and hopefully sell the mass market edition.

I thought this was a stunning idea, largely because it never even occurred to me that the rights to the mass market edition of Immortal was something I could market.

I gave them my rough sales numbers, with a number of caveats (no distributor other than Amazon for the print edition, no ebooks before mid-December) and found that these weren’t actually bad numbers at all.

Then again…

Earlier this week, I traded some emails with an agent I knew before this mad scheme was cooked up, gave him the same information I gave to the kind editors at Boskone and heard something slightly different: the sales numbers need to be much higher, “and soon” for an agent (well, for him) to seriously consider it.  A figure was provided, and that figure was the same as the rough number I’d already sold, times ten.

Challenge Accepted!

If I keep promoting as I have been so far, and if nothing else changes, I’ll probably end up needing at least another 1,000 sales to get in the neighborhood of the right number.  Now, there are other factors that could play into this.  For instance: a distribution deal would make an enormous difference, but I don’t have any control over that; the e-book sales numbers from every resource other than the Kindle have not been reported yet; there are P.R. avenues that have not yet been explored by the publisher.

Still, 1,000 extra seems about right.  So how do I get those sales?

I HAVE NO IDEA.

However, since that doesn’t do me any good, I’m going to declare “challenge accepted!” anyway.

Oh; and throw together a blog tour.

BLOG TOUR!

I need 20-30 bloggers who are interested in hosting one or all of the following:

  • a summary of Immortal
  • an interview with me
  • an interview with my narrator, Adam
  • an interview of me interviewing Adam
  • an interview of Adam interviewing me
  • a book review
  • excerpts from other reviews
  • blurbs
  • excerpts from the novel

(Interviews would either involve questions from the blogger or a set of Q&A’s provided by me.  It’s up to the blogger.)

I’m planning for a 30 day tour.  If it goes well, I may be convinced to release a little treat: a chapter from Hellenic Immortal.

If you are interested

The best place to contact me if you are interested in participating is on Twitter, @genedoucette.  I’m also known to respond to emails, at GeneDoucette (at) me.com.

 

December 29, 2010

Ringing in the New Year

Posted by genedoucette under Distribution, E-Book, Facebook, Genres, GoodReads, Immortal, Networking, Publishing, Reviews, Sales, Social Media, Twitter | Tags: , , , , , , |
[5] Comments 

It has been quite a year

I have a bad habit of focusing on things that haven’t happened yet rather than stepping back and looking behind me at what has been accomplished.  This tunnel vision quality is sometimes very useful, such as when I’m writing a novel, but maybe less useful in other settings, such as networking events.

So rather than concentrate on what still needs to be done– and since Immortal isn’t in brick-and-mortar bookstores yet or on any electronic device other than the Kindle, there’s a pile of screenplay work needing doing and two other novels to edit, this is a long list– I’d like to take a minute to look back on where we started.

A year ago at this time

This time last year, I had a publisher who did not yet officially exist.  I had barely succeeded in wriggling out of another contract to publish Immortal with a klepto-publisher that is thankfully no longer an entity.

I was not on Twitter.  I was not on GoodReads.  This blog did not exist.  (I was on Facebook, but that’s legally mandated nowadays.)

I had no idea how to get reviews for Immortal much less who to talk to for blurbs.  I didn’t even know what genre it was.

In other words

So it’s been a pretty good year, really.  And my impatience with the fact that I am not yet a world-famous author with a movie deal and a yacht (okay, not a yacht) shouldn’t overshadow the fact that the person I was a year ago would be kicking the 2010 version of my ass for worrying about current sales and distribution outlets whether there is such a thing as too much promoting.

So HAPPY NEW YEAR

And may next year be as fruitful as this one was.

And hopefully more profitable.

(Okay, let me have THAT complaint at least.)

 

December 14, 2010

Immortal on Amazon Kindle

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Distribution, E-Book, Editing, Immortal, Sales | Tags: , , , , , , |
1 Comment 

Ebook challenges part two

Yesterday I dove back into the Ebook fray for two reasons: Immortal was still not set up on the Kindle; and we’d gotten back feedback from Smashwords on the ebook version we’d uploaded that required addressing.

As you know, I had issues reformatting Immortal to accommodate the Smashwords Style Guide, but the outcome was supposed to produce something that could be uploaded to both Amazon and Smashwords as-was.  It nearly turned out that way.

Kindle folderol

The problem with the Kindle availability was that each time the file I sent to the publisher was uploaded to Amazon, the resulting file still looked like hell.  After fiddling with this for a while, the publisher sent me the link and suggested I try it.  When I did, it looked considerably better.  Possible explanation: my file, which was emailed and then opened in another version of Word before being uploaded, had been altered by the program, which thought it was helping.

One of the first things one has to do before reformatting a document for epublishing is turn off all of the things in MS Word that are there to “help” you.  Auto-formatting, for instance.

But it still looked kind of crappy.  So I spent a good hour making adjustments to my Word file, uploading it to see what it looked like on Amazon, then making additional adjustments, and so on.  When I was happy, I finished the publishing process.

And: it is available now, directly from Amazon.

Shmashing

The Smashwords problem was much, much dumber.  In the style guide, it is “recommended” that specific language be included in the copyright information.  This “recommended” text is not “required” but “MIGHT” make it more difficult for the manuscript to be approved for their premium catalog.  

I didn’t include it.  And the premium catalog is what releases the book to all of the third party retailers, like Apple and Barnes & Noble.

So I had to fix that and send it back through their conversion meatgrinder, and wait for all of the War & Peace sized novels ahead of it in line to get done.  It’s available– again? Still?– from Smashwords.  And hopefully by the end of the month in a whole lot of other places.

The lesson. Don’t fuck with the Smashwords Style Guide or their abuse of the word “recommended.”

 

December 7, 2010

Promoting in a social media world

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, E-Book, Facebook, Fiction, Immortal, Internet, Promotion, Publishing, Sales, Social Media, Twitter, Writing | Tags: , , , , |
[12] Comments 

Leading horses to water

Promoting a novel can be extremely challenging, and in ways that are different from promoting a website or a toy or a machine that goes *ping* at regular intervals.  Novels are subjectively enjoyable, frequently disappointing, and an unavoidable commitment. Nobody wants to get stuck reading a bad one, or worse, having to tell the person who wrote it that they thought it was bad.

Despite that, if I know you, I will continue to expect you to buy my novel and read it.  Why?

  • From my perspective: it’s very good; you will be sharing something that came from me and is important to me; you will tell other people.
  • From your perspective: the odds that you know a novelist that is actually very good at novel-writing are small, while the odds that the person you know is overstating the quality because of an unavoidable bias are rather high; in buying it you’re being nice, but you’re not expecting much.

Here, then, is the Catch-22: I know what your perspective is because it’s my perspective with most of the people I know who are also writers, yet I have to continue to promote the book to you and to everyone else I know, because it’s all I have. Yet the more I promote it, the more I confirm your concerns, even if unconsciously: he’s selling it to his friends because nobody else is buying it. Because it isn’t good.

Creative ways to keep it in front of you

Since Immortal debuted I have spent a lot of time posting links to: my blog; the Amazon sales page; the Smashwords sales page; and various press releases and reviews, and I have been doing this on what I would call a highly regular basis.  These links go up on Twitter and are cross-posted to Facebook (when I don’t post them directly to Facebook) and are not without their detractors.  ”Stop spamming me, your links are taking up my whole page,” I have heard.  And that was from my wife.

At first, I just posted straightforward tweets, like “Read Immortal” which is dull, but essentially informative.  The problem is you post enough of those and you may as well be a spambot offering a thicker penis.  (Incidentally, if you read Immortal you will have a thicker penis.)  So I write creative tweets, or funny tweets, or odd tweets.  I have touted the book as a potential murder weapon; I have declared that not buying it means the terrorists win; I have implored buyers to get it because it simply doesn’t suck.  I wrote a hostage letter tweet once announcing that you had to buy it “or the kitten dies.”

You get the idea.  I am mindful that the people following my twitter feed and my facebook page are not just there to hear me repeatedly beg them to spend money on me all day, every day.  But I have to continue to promote the book, so I try to keep the promotional tweets as entertaining as I can.

Sometimes, I ask other people to help me promote, and their approach is much the same.  Which is how I ended up fielding an interesting complaint this morning about the scurrilous nature of some of the promotional tweets.  Because to catch someone’s eye and get a sales tweet re-tweeted, you have to write something interesting and retweet-able.  (Read comment and replies here.)

But why keep doing it?

You may argue that yes, you are aware of the book, and yes, you intend to buy it at some time but no, you really don’t want to keep hearing about it.  I understand.  But appreciate that to sell something effectively, the name of that something has to be introduced to someone more than once.  Especially with novels, where the “I’ve heard of that book; how was it?” factor is incredibly significant.

The buzz has to start somewhere.  I have to convince people I know to read something so that they can convince people I don’t know to read it.  And the only way I have to make sure the people I know get themselves a copy is to put it in front of their eyes on a semi-regular basis.  Both Twitter and Facebook have scrolling status/update screens, so sometimes making sure Immortal is in front of everyone means a new tweet/post a few times a day.

Is it annoying?  It can be.  That’s why the tweets are usually different, and usually tongue-in-cheek.

 

November 3, 2010

International and electronic Immortal

Posted by genedoucette under Amazon, Distribution, E-Book, GoodReads, Immortal, International, Internet, Poll, Publishing, Reading, Sales, Twitter | Tags: , , , , , |
[4] Comments 

Death of the “local” customer

As I have discussed before, the e-book revolution sort of took me by surprise.  I still like paper books, but I’m coming to realize that every day I cling to them is another day for me to look like a guy on horseback on a freeway.

And I’m still trying to get a grip on who the demographic is for Immortal. So far I’ve settled on: people who read sci-fi, fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fiction, or any combination thereof; people who like vampires; dudes.  I am now adding “People who do all of their reading on the Kindle” to the list.

Then there are the international buyers.  Since I’ve done nearly all of my promoting online– on Twitter and Facebook and Goodreads, mainly– it’s only reasonable to expect that some of the people I interest in the novel are going to be people outside of the United States.

So it would have been awesome if I had expected it.

Poll

What would be great is if I could go to the Powers That Be with numbers, rather than anecdotes.  I would also be deeply curious to see how embedded the Kindle has become to the reading world, and whether I really am a horseman on a highway.  Plus, I found this really cool poll option in my WordPress toolbar, and I couldn’t resist trying it out.

[Note: I know not everyone will be buying the book, and I'm okay with that.  Should you be struck with the urge to vote "Other" and fill in the box with some variant of "You Suck"... I understand.  I was young once too.]

 

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