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BookBub lives up to the hype

For Indie authors trying to promote their books, the name BookBub looms very large. Once I finished blindly flailing about, I discovered that BookBub is the leading name in promotion of e-books by e-mail. I also learned that they’re hard to get in with. But eventually, they accepted Death of Secrets.

Bookbub has certain requirements: The price you give them has to be the lowest for which the book has been advertised anywhere else. It has to be a limited time special. Unfortunately, I had put Death of Secrets at $0.99 as a regular price starting in March, which made it hard to get listed in bookbub for that price.

I put the novel on free promotion, and paid BookBub $220 to list it. I also sent the free promotion to a few smaller e-mail lists that promote free e-books. As usual, I scheduled like a bazillion tweets over the course of the free promotion.

What happened?

Over the course of the free promotion (April 29-30) the book was downloaded 40,000 times. Let me repeat that: Forty Thousand. My previous free promotion had 5,700 downloads. So yeah, BookBub can move e-books.

But of course, those are all free. Your humble narrator makes zero. Obviously, it’s a great audience builder for the sequel, which is the main point at this stage of my writing “career.” But still, one yearns for entrepreneurial success as well.

Good news!

Amazon. of course, lists books based on their sales. So by spiking the downloads so hard, Death of Secrets was all of a sudden much more visible on Amazon to people who are looking for thrillers. What that means is, after a free promotion, there’s always a spike in paid sales. In this case, that spike was pretty impressive.

I set the price back to $2.99 after the free promo, rather than $0.99. (more on the pluses and minuses of the two price points in a later post). And at that price, the day after the huge free promo, 220 people bought Death of Secrets. In the intervening days, the number has grown to 320.

Since $2.99 qualifies for the 70% royalty rate on Amazon, I get roughly $2.05 per sale. That means, of course, that I’ve made $656 in royalties so far in May. Given that the BookBub promo cost $220, that qualifies as a smashing success!

Now, the trick is to keep the success going. I have a couple other promotions scheduled today and later this month. I’ll post again about how things develop.

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Life of Secrets is being edited

The rough draft of my next novel is done. My editor is working on it right now. I’m incorporating her changes as they come in. Very soon, the sequel to Death of Secrets will be ready for readers.

These are my plans: Very soon, I hope to begin recruiting ambassadors for the book. Ambassadors will get a free copy with a unique commemorative cover in exchange for committing to post a review on Amazon the day it comes out there, and sharing about the book on their social media account.

After the ambassadors, it’ll be time to sell advance copies. Everyone who buys in advance will get a signed copy with a unique cover.

And then, Life of Secrets goes live on Amazon! The day is not far ahead of us!

In the mean time, if you haven’t read Death of Secrets yet, get your copy on Amazon today!

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Death of Secrets now includes a sample from Life of Secrets

The e-book version of Death of Secrets has been updated with a sample chapter from the forthcoming sequel, Life of Secrets. To celebrate, it’s free for download today.

Life of Secrets is a thriller about a professional thief framed for an assassination. It’s also a character driven novel exploring why a person comes to do bad things. Most important of all, it’s a story of redemption.

Return to the world of Mike Vincent, Kathy Kelver, and D. W. Tilman. Meet Alyssa Chambers. Go deeper into a political world where secrets and betrayal can be the difference between life and death.

You can start reading early by downloading the Kindle version of Death of Secrets today!

 

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Death of Secrets hits BookBub

As I’ve learned the art of marketing an indie novel, I’ve been trying to inform readers about what works and what doesn’t. But in all those posts, there has been one name that loomed over everything I wrote about analyzing sales. As I wrote “E-Reader News Today is good” or “Facebook advertising stinks,” there was always a caveat. The huge, most effective marketing channel that everyone talks about is BookBub.com. And I couldn’t report on it because they would not accept Death of Secrets for promotion.

Until now!

Yes, DoS finally qualified for the (reputedly) most effective marketing channel out there for e-books. So after April 29th and 30th, I hope to be able to report on just how well BookBub works.

So I want to say a thank you to everyone who responded when I asked for reviews. Your actions directly helped make this happen. More and more five star reviews make it possible for an e-book to qualify for some marketing channels. Thanks to you, I guess I finally made it over BookBub’s threshold.

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Sample Chapter Coming April 28!

Life of Secrets is now to the point where I’m ready to release a sample chapter! Starting a week from tomorrow, I’ll make it available on www.bowengreenwood.com. At the same time, the Amazon.com listing for Death of Secrets will also change to include a sample chapter from Life of Secrets.

As for the full novel, although I’m a bit behind the schedule I set for myself, it will still be published on June 1. The timeline was built to allow for a few delays.

Currently, the manuscript is in what I call the “rough rough draft” format. The story is finished, and I’m cleaning up some of the errors that result from the way in which I work on books (several different files, writing the beginning, middle, and end in different documents, constant revision of what’s already written to accommodate new ideas — etc.).

My first choice for editor doesn’t have the time right now, so hopefully this week I’ll learn about my second prospect.

The book will be substantially shorter than Death of Secrets. Currently it’s 53,000 words, and I doubt it will grow much beyond 55,000. Death of Secrets was closer to 90,000. Hey, that’ll cut the cost of editing almost in half!

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Sequel-izing

For people who enjoyed Death of Secrets, it might raise questions that Life of Secrets is a sequel, but features a completely new main character.

Don’t worry!

Congressman Mike Vincent is back in a pivotal role, and Kathy returns as well. D.W. Tilman will pass across the scene in flashbacks to his younger days.

Vincent finds himself a key player on the Presidential campaign of a man who might finally give Americans a leader who’s humble and sincere. Since it’s part of the marketing blurb for the novel, it’s not giving anything away to say that candidate dies early on. The whole story hinges on choices Mike makes.

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Life of Secrets is 99% finished

Today I expect to write the climactic fight scene and the epilogue. After that, it will become a simple matter of polishing, submitting the manuscript to an editor (I have her picked out – hope she agrees!) incorporating edits, polishing again, and beginning the marketing process leading up to the June 1 launch.

I expect Life of Secrets to come in shorter than Death of Secrets. Probably about a third shorter.

I wrote the start of the novel, then started a second file to write the end of the novel. Since then I’ve been writing forward in one and backward in the other. Tonight, the two files caught up to each other and I merged them.

Life of Secrets is on the cusp of being finished.

I can’t wait to show it to you.

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Kindle Nation Daily

As I evaluate the various electronic places where I have marketed my book, Kindle Nation Daily stands out as one of the more effective ads I placed. Although I would rank it slightly below e-reader news today, it was still very good.

My “Thriller of the Week” sponsorship there yielded over 100 sales, which is more than any other single form of advertising except among my personal friends. I studied the statistics they publish about sponsor sales figures, and saw that DoS had a bigger bounce from their advertising than any other sponsorship for which the book wasn’t free. It worked quite well for me.

It has to be said that my total sales were far from earning back the cost of the sponsorship. So from an entrepreneurial perspective, it was not a success. However, I view the writing project on an 18-month long timeline. The question isn’t what I’m making right now. The question is, what will writing earn for me in June of 2015. My hope is that, assuming my current job ends then, I will be able to write full time. So all the marketing efforts for Death of Secrets, Life of Secrets, etc are aimed at building an audience who will buy future books.

From that perspective, KND definitely succeeded. I assume that essentially every one of the 100+ sales was a new reader. Will they buy future books? Time will tell. But I hope so.

I have promotions upcoming with ereadernewstoday.com and thefussylibrarian.com. I will evaluate their effectiveness as they happen. I am also planning at least 2 more free promotions, and I hope to study on whether any one day works better than another. Posts on all those subjects will be published as the data comes in.

The big one is bookbub. They are supposed to be the giant of indie author promotion right now. so far, I have not had success in getting listed there, but if I have the opportunity to work with them, I will certainly post about the effectiveness.

Perhaps, once I’ve run through the marketing plan for Death of Secrets and life of Secrets, I’ll be able to write a book about successful marketing of e-books. How very meta…

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Life of Secrets: Cover Art Revealed!

cover-facebookComing June 1, 2014: Life of Secrets!

A double life. A secret from her past. Betrayal from every side.

Alyssa Chambers is rich and privileged by birth, but a criminal by choice. She steals secrets from the powerful and influential, and sells them to whoever pays — and they pay very well. But when someone assassinates a Presidential candidate in an office Alyssa just robbed, she’s framed for the murder and her whole life goes up in smoke. Now she’s running for her life, hunted and alone. The last man she can trust is the one she can’t stop betraying. To survive, clear her name, and uncover the assassin, she must face the truth about her past, her family, and her life of secrets.