Category: Promotion

Post Release Numbers

KenMcConnell1 Comment

Thought I’d show you the numbers for the week after Corvette’s release. I do this not to brag or to belabor how little money I make on writing, but to help others understand what to expect. So far this book is turning out to be more interesting than any other release I’ve done. I’ve had an out of nowhere hit before and the sales numbers for that were in the hundreds per day. Most of my books start with maybe twenty or so sales and then putter out to about one a day for a while and then a couple per month. Corvette started reasonably well and has showed some staying power over the week.

Here are the numbers just before the weekend.

You can see the spike on release day, in this case I picked a Tuesday (21st March) which is when the Big 5 publishers typically release books. After that the sales take a hit but are still not too shabby. Then they finish the week above 10 books per day. This is where I started to realize this book was sticky. The fall off at the end is just when I took the snapshot early Saturday morning. The red line is all ebook sales and the black line on the same chart is all paperback sales. The blue line represents pages read by the KDP Select program which I enrolled this book into for the first 90 days to generate interest.

Here’s the breakdown of sales to date for March. Again, this was taken early Saturday morning. Corvette is doing very well with 60 ebook sales. Devon’s Blade is still selling well despite falling to the mid 500,000 ranking. Everything else is just curiosity. What’s interesting is that Books 1, 2, and 3 in my Star Saga series each have at least one sale. This means at least one person is taking a chance on reading the series. I hope that after reading Corvette, I start to see their numbers going up. The whole point of Corvette is to have it be a gateway book to the series.

 

This is a screenshot of the rankings on the book’s Amazon page taken early Saturday. The book has been as low as 10,000 and as high as 16,000 for the week. It’s never gone below 100 on any list but likes to hover just under 200 on a few of them. This puts the book out of sight for even the most bored list readers. So clearly you have to sell more than twenty books a day to get under a hundred on a list. Being in Select is helping get it some visibility for sure.

What about paperbacks, you ask? I’ve sold two Corvette paperbacks. Which is exactly why I’ve never done them before. But enough people who know me have said they would like to purchase them so I can sign them to make it worth going the KDP Paperback route on the whole series. So by the end of April I’ll probably have all of them in paperback. If nothing else it will be fun to have a vanity shelf.

Below you see the numbers come Sunday morning.

Late Saturday before turning in I took this screenshot of the rankings. I think that may have been the best day yet.

Again, more early Sunday results.

The sales numbers for Corvette and hence the Star Saga series are still pretty much small potatoes but they are better than normal and I’ll take them. I’m curious if anyone will feel the need to review the book as time goes on. I’ll do another post on the numbers some time next month to determine how well the book has done. I expect to launch another novella from the series later in summer. In the meantime, thanks for buying Corvette and I hope you carry on with the Star Saga.

 

 

Under the Radar

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Internet storms again this week about publishing methods.

Yes, I self-publish. No, I don’t think everyone should. Yes, I’m traditionally published too. Yes, I send out novel submitions to agents. No, I have yet to impress an agent with my novels. No, that doesn’t bother me. No, I’m not a huge self-published success. No, that doesn’t bother me either.

Here’s my approach. It’s simple and only works for me.

I like to write. I have tons of ideas for books and short stories. In fact, I have more ideas than I have the time to write them. I also have a day job and a family. My family – raising two boys, my home life and my job take about 95% of my time. That last 5% of my time is reserved for writing. It’s not much time to do anything.

So I have to prioritize my time. Do I spend that time advertising myself and my books or do I spend that time looking for agents or do I spend that time writing? For now, I have chosen to just write. To learn my craft and to build a resume of books. I have now written 4 books. Are they totally awesome? No. Well, maybe one of them is. But mostly, they are stepping stones to honing my craft.

Each book has been critiqued by fellow writers, professionally edited and professionally compiled into ebooks. It takes me a full year to get a book from outline to Amazon. About five months on average are spent on writing, the rest is rewriting, editing and formatting. I can’t afford to pay top dollar for the best editors, but I can afford a decent editor. I can’t afford a great cover artist, but I can afford a decent artist. I don’t publish crap. My books may not be Nobel Peace Prize materiel, but they are most definitely not crap.

I don’t have much free time. So I must make the best use of that free time that I can. For now, I chose to just write and get better at writing. I read books on writing, I go to writing conferences and I read. But mostly, I write. Every year I publish one novel and spend a bit of that precious time doing interviews or otherwise pimping it online. But then it’s back to the keyboard and on to the next novel.

My online presence is growing but so slowly that my grass grows at a faster rate. But I don’t fret about it. I do tend to post about my writing more than anything else that interests me. That’s mostly because I like to present a different side of the Self-publishing story. I’m not a big success and I don’t dedicate huge amounts of time to becoming a success. I simply cruise along under the radar, doing my thing and hopefully getting better at it.

 

 

 

First Thursday in September

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I’ll be doing a book signing at Rediscovered Books on 8th Street, in Boise next month. I’m the featured author for First Thursday. Looking forward to meeting and talking with the people of my home city. I’ll be selling and signing copies of my mystery novel, Null Pointer that I have written under my pen name – Johnny Batch.

So tell all your friends to come out and see me and get the latest paperback version of Null Pointer.

 

Double the Fun

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Today I finalized the look of my short story covers and then published four short stories in epub format to Amazon Kindle. They should show up for sale in the next few days. I used Sigil to create my ebooks. Sigil is open source and available cross platform. I used Gimp to build my covers and that program is open source and cross platform too. The code validation system I used is a web site called Threepress.org and is open for anyone to use.

If you know XHTM and CSS, rolling your own e-books is not that difficult. If you don’t have those skills, it becomes much more challenging. But if you use the tools mentioned above and you have some basic web design knowledge, you should be able to crank out a decent e-book.

I placed a greater effort on the covers with these short stories. The design is simple and ties in well with the Starstrikers novel. Because the only thing that changes from story to story is the title, I can also crank out lots of covers with minimum effort. I will be releasing more stories over the holiday weeks. Each will be set in the same Starstrikers Universe and will have similar covers. When a reader comes across these story covers on Amazon, it will soon be obvious that they are short stories and that they are related. It’s a great way to sample my writing if you are new to my work and a great way to collect my stories if you are a fan.

Eventually, some of these stories will be released that are not available for e-books anywhere else. That is the end goal here, get all my canon out there and available for those who own Kindles or use Amazon software on their devices. I may eventually do the same on Smashwords, but for now, I am focusing on just the Kindle audience.

Amazon Rush Results

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One of my favorite Christmas movies is It’s A Wonderful Life. Clarence’s final message to George, “No man is a failure who has friends.” has resonated with me on a personal basis over the years. I’ve always surrounded myself with friends and tried very hard not to annoy or piss anyone off enough to make enemies in this life.

Since first entering this writing gig, I’ve been an active participant in the writing community in my home town and to some extent to the online community. I serve on boards, attend meetings and go to the signings of my fellow writers. I dutifully buy my friend’s books and I tout their books on this and other web sites that I participate in, like Twitter and Facebook. I do this without any expectation that anyone would do it in turn for me. I mean, that would be too much to ask, right? Apparently it was, too much to ask.

But in this holiday season, I decided to try and cash in on some of that goodwill that I had been showing others to see if I could get at least ten friends to buy my $2.99 e-book as a show of support for me. I know that my internet following is weak at best. I’m an unknown writer, doing his own publishing in a genre that prefers authors to be traditionally published. I get that and was not expecting much in sales from the “Internet”. But I figured I knew at least ten friends who would give three bucks to see if they could help me out. After all, I was not asking them to leave their home and buy a much more expensive paper book.

Two friends bought my book on Friday. Two. I know who those two friends are and I love ’em. I will continue buying my writer friends’ books in genres I don’t regularly read and supporting their efforts to become established writers while my own efforts languish in obscurity. Because that’s who I am. I do this because I know that I have at least two true friends, so I’m not actually a complete failure. But I won’t be relying on friends to bail me out of a financial failure anytime soon. LOL

It was the kindness of strangers, not friends who first bought ten copies of Starstrikers back in March. Those ten strangers helped propel that book onto the best seller lists for four months. Maybe the idealized myth of friendship in that old movie, is as out dated as an old black and white movie, in this on-demand, streaming HD movie world of today. Call me old fashioned, but I still support my friends, and I won’t be expecting that support in return.

Buy TYRMIA Day Today!

KenMcConnell2 Comments

Today is the day to buy TYRMIA on the Kindle! Even if you don’t own an actual Kindle e-reader, you can still purchase and read Kindle e-books on any computer or smart phone. The reading software is free and available from Amazon. You can also gift TYRMIA to anyone with an e-mail address.


The goal is to sell as many copies of the TYRMIA e-book on Amazon as we can today only, to boost the e-book up onto the best seller lists before the holidays. TYRMIA is a Science Fiction novel about a woman who finds herself stranded on a jungle planet and forced to live with a native tribe of aliens in order to survive.

Please be sure to come back to the Amazon page after you have read TYRMIA and leave a review. As of this morning, there are not reviews on the Amazon page and the ranking is sitting at 207,675. The goal is to get the ranking into the hundreds just for today. So please take a moment during your day today to either gift this e-book or buy it yourself.

Thanks to all my readers and fans and may all your holidays be happy and healthy!

This Friday is Buy Tyrmia Day

admin2 Comments

Going to be reminding folks all this week to wait until this Friday to by Tyrmia on their Kindles. The reason is so that we can boost the sales ranking enough to get the book on some best seller lists. Once your book gets on these lists, more people see it and it therefore sells more.

Starstrikers is doing quite well this month and I’d love to see that one up on the lists too, but the focus this Friday is on Tyrmia. Remember that you can gift an Amazon Kindle books and you can read them on a variety of devices without even owning a Kindle.

Tyrmia on Kindle.

Buy TYRMIA Day

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December 17 is the first Rush Amazon Kindle Day for my latest SF novel – TYRMIA.

Go and buy the e-book on Amazon and tell your friends to do the same!

My goal is to get as many people as possible to buy the e-book on Friday, December, 17 2010. This will boost it up the charts and give the book a jump-start before Christmas. Don’t like SF novels, but know someone who does? Gift it! Click on the link and look for the Gift It button on the right. The Sci-Fi lover in your life, will thank you. And so will I!

Stranded on a jungle world where the native aliens are being hunted to extinction by descendants of her ancestors, Szeredy must protect the tribe that befriends her or suffer their fate. Leading her adopted tribe against the technologically advanced Votains is an impossible task that she refuses to accept until they leave her no choice.
Matching wits and military prowess with a powerful Votain Commander, Szeredy sets off to a distant land to try and end the violence against her new found Tyrmian friends. What she finds in the sophisticated and cruel society of the Votains pushes her to her breaking point. If she doesn’t survive to return to the jungle, her hopes for saving the Tyrmian natives perish with her.

Want to track the sales on Buy TYRMIA Day? Insert this code on your blog or web page.

Code to insert sales ranking tracker for Tyrmia on your blog or web page.

<!-- Start NovelRank Sales Rank Widget -->
<script src="http://www.novelrank.com/embed.php?asin=B004DNWI8W"
type="text/javascript" ></script>
<noscript>
<a href='http://www.novelrank.com/'>Amazon Sales Rank</a>
by NovelRank</noscript>