icey502's Publishing Thread

[icey502]

Ok, I decided to do a science experiment. I will pick a day next week and start a promotion on facebook in several countries that I know have large software dev populations. Then I will monitor the traffic and the sales and see what happens. Why not, right?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[icey502]

Latest sales dashboard attached. Pretty humble, proof that one needs to market ebooks :-0

 

[ChickenHawk]

Latest sales dashboard attached. Pretty humble, proof that one needs to market ebooks :-0

At the risk of sounding anti-marketing (yet again), I don't think that's generally the issue.

It might be that your niche isn't wide enough. Or maybe there's something about your description, cover, or excerpt that isn't making people hit "buy." Or maybe there are too many similar books competing for too few buyers. Or maybe it's just a factor of having only one book out there. These days, I think it would be fairly hard to make a splash with a single book, unless you were in a really hot-selling niche or had a big platform already.

Rather than spending money on marketing, you could look at putting your book in Kindle Select. Since you're a new name in publishing, it might be easier to get people to borrow your book, rather than buy your book. (Under Kindle Unlimited, you get paid a "royalty" of approximately $1.35, give or take, per borrow.) But if you do this, you'd need to make your book exclusive to Amazon for 90 days.

If you do try marketing, though, I hope you keep us posted, especially if you find success with it. Good luck either way!

 

[icey502]

Anti-marketing, that's funny

Thanks for the comment. I tend to think it is a combination of many of your points. Certainly the niche is small, relative to something like novels for example. I considered the Kindle Select avenue, and still might do that, but the same problem appears to exist there: for example, how many software folks are in that program? And would anyone other than software folks care? I totally get you about the non-splash of a single book, that's a good dose of reality. I'm a nobody, which seems to point to some improvement around my own PR work, possibly. I think the space for this specific topic is not very crowded, but, that said, there *is* an interesting dilemma involved - there are a great many software people that would not buy or consume such a book of their own accord simply because it is personal growth that often takes a back seat to technical skill. Maybe I need to tune the message better, or to a previous point here, target managers or people in a position to guide or influence the technical realm. You can tell I am still analyzing the hell out of this

Question: Is there a time boundary for Kindle Select? For example, can I choose to start to participate in something like a month? Or does it have to occur within a certain amount of time from publish date?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[icey502]

So, holding my nose for a moment...I am not a marketing person either... I'm thinking of it as something of a social experiment. Given the niche as @ChickenHawk rightly points out, facebook, linkedin, and stackoverflow seem like the places to really connect to such audiences, simply because the targeting is more precise. Through some initial homework, I see that there seems to be no "nice" way to directly and accurately track conversions from social channels, because there is no way to feed the info back from Amazon. So the only way seems to be "inferring" a sales correlation by jiggling one social channel at a time. This is to say nothing of using of the actual landing page instead, but I did not want to deal with another step in the process (yet).

Next steps will be starting Thursday/Friday of this week....will post the details.

 

[ChickenHawk]

Question: Is there a time boundary for Kindle Select? For example, can I choose to start to participate in something like a month? Or does it have to occur within a certain amount of time from publish date?

Happily, you can do this at any time. But when you put your book in Kindle Select, you will need to be exclusive to Amazon for a 90-day period. Also, if you ONLY want to do it for 90 days, make sure you uncheck the auto-renew option, or you'll be in Kindle Select indefinitely.

I considered the Kindle Select avenue, and still might do that, but the same problem appears to exist there: for example, how many software folks are in that program?

I hadn't thought of that. That's a really good point!

 

[icey502]

make sure you uncheck the auto-renew option, or you'll be in Kindle Select indefinitely.

Thanks for that, I might have completely missed it!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[icey502]

Update on this thread....last week I ran a facebook "promotion" to see whether I could generate page-likes to the book facebook page. I ran it for three days, filtered by certain countries and heavily filtering by interest area (all technical or software related fields). That exercise generated a total of 1,654 page likes over the time span. It resulted in zero incremental book sales (which was not directly the point anyway, the point was just to see if the audience would take a look). This was an interesting exercise for a bunch of reasons, but I ended up thinking that I need to get some advice before taking further steps on it. Which, ironically, is a piece of advice that I give in the book too

This week I will either do another similar experiment, or try the Kindle Select approach and see what happens.

 

[icey502]

Latest dashboard below. These are almost entirely sales from people that I know. They also don't seem to want to post Amazon reviews despite giving me positive feedback verbally :-(

Still doing homework on that dreaded thing called "marketing". One of the folks that is pretty successful on their own branding in the genre, recommended that I start a blog and gradually build it out over the next few years. Seems entertaining, but also seems like a crapshoot for a large time/energy investment. Shrug.

 

[icey502]

Update: this past week, I experimented with more Facebook-based ads, but I was not seeing results that I wanted (probably due to my own challenges with writing copy). That experiment is not over, but I shifted gears and enrolled in KDP select (@ChickenHawk .....) to see how that goes. I also posted an Amazon ad for the Computer/Technical target audience. I will post an update if I see any blips as a result.

The other approach I am taking is along the lines of others in my industry, which is oriented around building more online presence and trying to identify a niche. I think I am starting to realize what that niche actually is - actually it has been screaming in my ear which has apparently been deaf for a long time - and I am contemplating how to sharpen that up. If anyone is interested, I completely re-tooled my own landing page in Wordpress, the new one is still evolving but much better than the previous version: http://softwareplusplus.com

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Mattie]

I don't know if this will help you, but I just sold some books off of this site the last week. And just found it last week. It's like pinterest but for content. So I just made a board to try it out. http://learni.st/

 

[icey502]

Thanks for the link, will check that out.

 

[icey502]

Back for another update. Since my last post, I enrolled in KDP select and have been hard at work doing blog postings and trying to boost my social networking skills. Thanks to a well-known person in the field giving me a bump (and me giving him a public thanks) I am starting to see a few more lends and sales, latest dashboard attached.



What seems interesting about all this, is that my goal is starting to shift from the science-experiment of writing the book, into a niche specialty around the effectiveness of software teams. Right now I am continuing to explore that avenue.

Exploring...at the same time as working on another book, that is And apparently my wife has caught the bug, so there might be a kickstarter coming. If anyone is interested in keeping tabs on that one, I will update further. I am planning to apply some of the things @SinisterLex told me in this thread.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Berliner030]

I've published about 60 books so far (started in May last year; 10 non fiction books, 50 fiction books, $12k/m total income; only on Amazon).

- Do you have a paperback version of your book? My non fiction paperbacks sell much better than the ebook versions. Eg. my best non fiction book makes about $600 (ebook) and $3.000 (paperback). That's about 1/3 of my monthly income. People who buy non fiction don't want to read only - they want to work with non fiction books (underline sentences, make additional notices etc.)
- I don't know what's your exactly niche and quality but with "software development" you've just a small audience (in comparison to eg. cookbooks). Maybe clickbank is the better way to sell such a product. You should also think about a course. I mean: For software development you need a specific software for progamming. You can easily make screen recordings while you speak about it. So its easy to make a course out of your content. For software development you need very specific knowledge (it's not only research and copy & paste information) so I would price it high!

If I had specific knowledge in such a topic like software development I had tons of ideas: beginners guide (your first app), a guide for advanced and professional programmers, a theoretical guide, a practical guide (with examples), how to market your app, additional video courses for everything, a forum, partnerships with the company of the programming-software that you use, etc.

Try to think like your customers. Where are they looking for information about your topic? Do they really trust in a $2.99-books? Etc.

Wish you everything best.

 

[icey502]

I've published about 60 books so far (started in May last year; 10 non fiction books, 50 fiction books, $12k/m total income; only on Amazon).

- Do you have a paperback version of your book? My non fiction paperbacks sell much better than the ebook versions. Eg. my best non fiction book makes about $600 (ebook) and $3.000 (paperback). That's about 1/3 of my monthly income. People who buy non fiction don't want to read only - they want to work with non fiction books (underline sentences, make additional notices etc.)
- I don't know what's your exactly niche and quality but with "software development" you've just a small audience (in comparison to eg. cookbooks). Maybe clickbank is the better way to sell such a product. You should also think about a course. I mean: For software development you need a specific software for progamming. You can easily make screen recordings while you speak about it. So its easy to make a course out of your content. For software development you need very specific knowledge (it's not only research and copy & paste information) so I would price it high!

If I had specific knowledge in such a topic like software development I had tons of ideas: beginners guide (your first app), a guide for advanced and professional programmers, a theoretical guide, a practical guide (with examples), how to market your app, additional video courses for everything, a forum, partnerships with the company of the programming-software that you use, etc.

Try to think like your customers. Where are they looking for information about your topic? Do they really trust in a $2.99-books? Etc.

Wish you everything best.

Thanks for the advice. Interesting about paperback, I will explore that one. Re: price, I guess the only way to find out is to experiment with it. Lots to think about here, much appreciated.

 

[icey502]

@Berliner030 I started looking into the physical-print side of things, and naturally ran across CreateSpace. Any thoughts on pros/cons of that avenue, other than the relative ease of doing it? I'm also wondering about the advantages or disadvantages of buying custom ISBNs, or if that even matters much. Any pointers welcome

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Berliner030]

@icey502

For fiction: I had no financial success with my paperbacks but the pen names with paperbacks look more professional. So paperbacks are great for the reputation and this can affect the digital sales. Moreover: When the customers see the higher price of the paperbacks in comparison to the digital versions... They think that it's a great deal to buy the digital version.

For non fiction: The customers don't consume non fiction like fiction - they have a problem and they want to work with your book/information. A paperback is much more comfortable because they can underline things, make own notices and so on. You can create a nice looking layout, add notice pages, add exercises and/or checklists etc. You can also add more pictures because a bigger size doesn't reduce your royalties. At the end you can give your customers good reasons to buy your (more expensive) paperback.

Many selfpublisher make a huge mistake: They just convert an eBook to a paperback. So they miss the opportunity eg. to create a layout but that's an important point for the competition. Even a housewife can write a book, set a price, create a good cover and a nice product description etc. but a great formatted paperback needs more creativity and design skills... so not everyone can do this and that's a big advantage for us.

You should also look at the paperbacks of the big publishing houses in your niche. Look at their rankings, layouts, book sizes, prices etc. It's a different market so you have to analyse this market carefully like you've done it with the eBook market (hopefully).

Again: Everyone can analyse the market and publish a good book with a great looking cover, product description etc. but the creative details are the reason for success. Unimpressive points like "how to find the right words to ask your readers for a review at the end of your book" or "how to create a deep relationship with your readers during your book" (just examples). But there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. It depends on your niche, your target audience etc. so you'll never find a tutorial about it. Be creative and think about every step you make.

Wish you everything best!

PS: I've no idea about custom ISBN's. I think that's just important for extended distribution.