Category: the descendant

As promised, about six weeks post launch of THE DESCENDANT here are some early results.

If you remember from my last post THE SELF-PUBLISHING EXPERIMENT PART 7: PUBLICITY AND MARKETING, we (i.e. Darkwater Books) plan to deploy a number of strategies. Not all have been implemented yet.

I’ll cut to the chase. The reboot of the pre-existing Alternate Reality Game brought about 50 ‘likes’ to The Descendant facebook page, where you can read about the competition to win a Kindle Touch. Based on views at Where is Gabi Beltran? and its Youtube channel, I can see that about a hundred people were following the story, at some stage.

This enhanced content around THE DESCENDANT certainly increased the extent of THE DESCENDANT‘s Internet footprint. That is, when you type ‘the descendant’ into a search engine, results that are relevant to this book appear in the top ten results. Not easy to maintain given that in 2011 a major Hollywood movie (‘The Descendants’) and a major Malaysian, Chinese language TV drama (The Descendant, 2012) of the same title are competing for space in those results.

A big Internet footprint won’t sell books – directly. It may, however, contribute to credibility.

In summary, all these promotional activities, including me sending out emails to my mailing list, resulted in sales of around fifty ebooks/books in about four weeks.

Not too spectacular. But then, I doubt any single Joshua Files book sold much more via Amazon, during the same period. Certainly THE DESCENDANT often ranked at a higher level than any of The Joshua Files Kindle books.

I was aware, by then, that discoverability is the be-all and end-all of sales at Amazon. Other self-published authors had been reporting via their blogs that advertising and blogging, Tweeting and posting in Kindle forums etc, was having minimal effect. The only marketing tool what appeared to have any effect was the Kindle free promotion, available to authors who had enrolled in the KDP Select program.

We geared up for a two-day promotion by scheduling the following:

1. Pre-notifying sites like Pixel of Ink. If you fancy paying for an advert on Kindle Nation Daily, there is that too. (We didn’t)
2. Prepare an email for any mailing list
3. Schedule regular tweets. However, be aware that if your project is heavily retweeted, as THE DESCENDANT was (for which many thanks, guys!!!), some people are going to see a lot of tweets about your freebie. It may tip into spam… On the other hand, advertising gurus tell us that in these times of information overload, we need to see something twenty-odd times for it to register. One person’s spam may be another person’s vague awareness of your books’ existence.
4. Ask any influential contacts to retweet your freebie. I’m massively grateful to Chicklish and SFSignal for their power tweetage of THE DESCENDANT freebie. Once those guys were on board, the book really began to shoot up the charts.
5. Line up some kind of online news/promotion for when the free-promotion ends. I’d arranged with YA author Luisa Plaja,one of the creators  of the popular Chicklish blog, to have an interview about THE DESCENDANT appear on Chicklish on the Monday after the free weekend. I’d also written a blog post for the Demention Blog, about my favourite post-apocalypse novel. That’s more of a Joshua Files tie-in, but still – on Amazon, all my books are linked.

The free weekend went pretty well! By the last six hours THE DESCENDANT on Amazon UK had shot to #1 on the Free Kindle action & adventure chart, #2 in the thriller chart and at its peak reached #14 in the overall Free Kindle chart.

Which means that for that time, and for all the time it was in the top ten (which was all of the 2nd day), THE DESCENDANT  became visible to anyone browsing the top 10 of Action & Adventure and Thrillers.

Things didn’t go as well on Amazon US, where it only reached #633 in the overall free chart and #17 in Action & Adventure.

The numbers:
Amazon US – 580 free downloads
Amazon UK – 2118 free downloads

What’s the point of giving your book away to the only people who might have bought it? Seems counter intuitive, right?

However, my approach is that your email and Twitter contacts deserve a little something for bothering to keep in touch with an author. If they manage to grab a book they’d like to read while it is free, more power to ’em.

Meanwhile, the Amazon free Kindle promotion acts like a catapult. It shot THE DESCENDANT  from a rank of #70,000 overall to #14 (in the Free chart, but that’s a lot of visibility).

Once the promotion ends, Amazon takes around an hour to calculate its new position in the Paid Kindle chart. Amazon watchers are guessing that recent algorithms count free downloads as 1/10 the ranking value of paid downloads.

(A few months ago the Amazon free Kindle catapult had a more pronounced effect, because the free books were ranked 1:1, but those days are gone. Easy living lasts for so little nowadays…)

On the Monday after the promotion, THE DESCENDANT  ranked at #3266 in the paid chart. However! Then the real sales catapult began! Now priced at 99p, the rank rose throughout the week. By Friday it had peaked at an overall rank of #191.

Just to stress how unusual that is for me, I have NEVER seen any Joshua Files book at a higher rank than 450 in the Amazon UK chart.

From #191 the book has begun a dignified slide down the chart. At the time of writing it is now #1307. The paperback version is also selling, albeit in very modest figures.

As of now, THE DESCENDANT is my best-selling book on Amazon. Selling even better than APOCALYPSE MOON – which only came out in April.

THE DESCENDANT sold 400 copies (about 380 ebooks, 20 paperbacks) in a single week. Not earth-shattering but not nothing either, and lot more than Amazon sales of The Joshua Files during the same period.

The question is – how to sustain that? This will be the next challenge.

 

Question: How much work does it take to write a self-published book?
Answer: about as much as for a traditionally published books

The first part of any experiment, and in many ways the most enjoyable part, is the experimental design.

I love to design experiments. It’s the beautiful phase, where everything is theoretical, and in your head, everything works. That’s some time before you spill radioactive isotopes in the water bath and incur the wrath of the entire lab.

Even executing the experiment isn’t too bad. It’s the eventual failure of most of them that makes science so hard. Starting out, you know that the experiment will almost certainly fail; either at the pathetic stage of not actually working, because you need better reagents, or at the heart-breaking stage where it worked, but the answer was NO.

No, that is not how I, Nature work. Try again. Or give up. Who cares, puny scientist? For lo, I am Nature.

Remember that – the answer is very often NO. If you can fully accept this setting out and still work hard, stay positive and concentrate on all the details, then you have much of what it takes to be a scientist.

The experimental question is this:

Can a modestly successful, internationally-published author (but not a ‘household name’), produce a quality product that will engage existing and new readers and make the author more money than if the manuscript had been sold for a modest advance?

(N.B. It’s important to stress that whatever the results of the experiment, certain extrapolations will always be invalid. Failure won’t mean that all self-published authors will fail. Success won’t mean the end of traditional publishing. Success/failure can’t even be successfully applied to MY next project. Once in a while an author has a runaway success. More frequently we provide a regular drip of content, slowly building an audience. I’m guessing that I’ll be in the latter category. This isn’t pessimism, just an acknowledgement of the balance of probabilities.)

Let’s say that I might have been able to get £5k for this manuscript. (Given that THE DESCENDANT is an adult novel set in the world of a YA book series, a sale would have been impossible via my own publisher, since Scholastic only publish children’s books, but let’s just use £5k as a representative advance).

My ALCS & PLR fund is about £2,000 this year. I’m a strong believer in bootstrap finance for start-ups, so this means I can use this as surplus profit from The Joshua Files to be invested in my imprint.

£2,000 is the total cash budget. So the book needs to make £7,000 for me to break-even including an opportunity cost*. (but only £2K to recoup the cash.)

Designing this self-publishing experiment, I asked myself a few questions:

1. Which formats should I produce? ebook only? Enrol in Kindle Select? Make a print version too? POD or short-run offset print?
2. Availability of any print edition – make available for sale in the UK and US? Or just one of the two?
3. What kind of revenue model are we looking at? How many copies need to sell at what price to recoup the cash investment?
4. Marketing – how much to spend and how?

The one thing I never had to consider was this – would I hire an editor.

OF COURSE. No question. Not only that but I’d substantially rewrite the original manuscript, which was the first thing I’d written since my days of Blake’s 7 fan fiction. The manuscript couldn’t be structurally edited too severely, because the Joshua Files mythology and the details of the Alternate Reality Game rest on many elements in THE DESCENDANT.

But edited as much as the manuscript could take? Hell, yeah! The first thing I did was to spend six weeks rewriting the 2005-version of the script.

My accomplice in this was, I’m delighted to say,  the experienced senior children’s book editor, Polly Nolan. Polly and I worked together on ZERO MOMENT and DARK PARALLEL while Polly was Editorial Director of Fiction at Scholastic Children’s Books, UK. When I told Polly my plan to publish THE DESCENDANT, she was incredibly supportive and agreed to take the project on. I couldn’t quite afford the three rounds of editing I’d had with all the Joshua Files books, but I knew Polly well enough to know that if the manuscript isn’t too structurally flawed, she can do most of the job in one round.

Imagine my relief when Polly declared that the manuscript ‘didn’t need too much work, structurally’. (Another nice comment was “I’m enjoying very much.  I can tell it’s one of your early books, but that doesn’t mar my enjoyment of it.” See how lovely it can be to have an editor?)

I had to do my own proof-read. Not ideal, but here’s a tip – use a Kindle and make the font really large. Mistooks juts lep out.

All in all, the actual creation of a manuscript that I felt able to publish took the following: 9 weeks (first draft – intense writing whilst recovering from a broken leg) + 6 weeks rewrite + 3 weeks editing + 1 week typesetting (Amazon help a good deal with hand-holding an author through this). Plus Polly’s fee.

Total time of mine? 19 weeks. ICE SHOCK took less (about 13 weeks) and APOCALYPSE MOON  took more (about 21 weeks).

THE DESCENDANT, at approx 90,000 words, therefore represents a similar authorial effort from me as one of my Joshua Files books.

Next: Design and Decisions: In which I ponder formats (print? ebook? US/UK?)

*:
For pesky business pedants; yes I admit that the opportunity cost is arguably higher. I could have used that time to write another bestseller, or even this book, with a traditional publisher, might have sold more. But creating ‘entertainment products’ is a very unsure thing. No-one knows what will be a hit or not. Nicholas Nassim Taleb correctly identified best-sellers as ‘black swan’ events.