Getting readers to read your #science-fiction

Selling books is tricky. Most of the indie authors I speak to seem to find it almost impossible, struggling to sell even one book per day. If you are not already well-known, it's hard to persuade people to part with their money. It's a gamble for them but there's a way around that.

Amazon and Smashwords both provide a try-before-you-buy option that authors can offer to potential customers. The problem seems to be that few readers seem to take advantage of it. We all need to make an effort to remind readers that the facility exists, allowing customers to download a portion of the book to their favourite e-reader device for free. It costs authors nothing and takes away the risk of making a bad purchase for customers.


Over the past months I've also posted free samples in a variety of other places, including Goodreads, my Astronomicon blog and Wattpad. I've given up on Goodreads as I've made no headway at all with that, and my blog doesn't really get enough visitors to make any impact. The only place I've been able to successfully encourage people to take a look at my work is Wattpad.com, and I would not rate that as a great success. Like any popular social site, it's hard to stand out from the crowd and get that all-important word-of-mouth marketing going.

My most successful offering of free chapters has been Astronomicon: The Beginning on Wattpad. I've managed to get a few hundred reads there, but I'm still looking for that elusive means to turn it into tens or even hundreds of thousands.

Do you read excerpts or sample chapters?

Amazon routinely provides the first three chapters of e-books for free. Other publishers and book sales sites usually offer similar arrangements. I've seen a lot of indie authors posting excerpts on their social networking feeds and blogs. There's an awful lot of free material out there for us all to sample.

So, my question is, does anyone actually read it? How often do you think that an unknown author sounds interesting so you download the free sample material and give it a go?

Most people I've spoken to about this seem to have the opinion that reviews and reputation far outweigh the marketing effect of free chapters. How many people actually download the free chapters? How many then don't get around to reading them anyway?

Have you ever had a reader say that they read your sample chapters and then went on to buy the whole book?

Marketing our books is usually the hardest thing for indie authors. It would be helpful if self-publishing sites like Amazon gave authors some helpful stats on pageviews for our books and the number of sample chapter downloads. I would not be surprised if my monthly sample download count is substantially lower than my book sales.

Is it worth #publishing one chapter at a time?

The world of indie publishing is a large and often complicated world. There are an ever increasing ways to publish your work and everyone seems to have different idea of what works. I suspect that different genres and formats are better suited to different methods and media, but are there any firm patterns emerging?

I've tried publishing e-books, paperbacks, short stories and even publishing one chapter at a time on Wattpad.com. The latter has been an interesting experience but I don't feel it's worked too well so far.

I decided to publish the whole of the first Astronomicon novel chapter-by-chapter on Wattpad.com, but rather than just cutting and pasting each chapter, after much research,  I went for a slightly different approach. I created shorter chapters by cutting each chapter into several shorter ones. This both catered for the tendency towards short attention spans online and gave me many more chapters to post. I am currently posting about five chapters per week so having more chapters extends the run time of the experiment. On Wattpad it seems that a lot of short chapters work better than a few long ones. I guess short instalments are more accessible and less of a commitment?

If you want to see this format, check it out on Wattpad.com. There are 25 chapters posted at the time of writing this. What I am most interested to see is the fall off rate of each chapter, to see how many people are still reading by the last chapter. It could prove to be a useful diagnostic tool as any poorly performing chapter, in terms of keeping the readers' attention, should stand out. This may allow me to improve the guilty chapters and increase the book's ability to grip readers.

I will report back soon.

#Sci-Fi Fans: #Free Chapter Every Day!

Eight chapters so far, but I'll be posting a new one every day until the whole book is posted. To avoid the wait (or just for convenience) download the whole book for your e-reader from Amazon for just 79p (99c).

Astronomicon: The Beginning FREE TODAY!

For two days (today and tomorrow) Astronomicon: The Beginning is available as a free download from your local Amazon. Don't miss out on this excellent offer!

If you do miss the free offer, don't forget that you can always check out the first six chapters for free any time, buy using Amazon's amazing Click to LOOK INSIDE. You can also have the free sample chapters sent to your Kindle or compatible device (Android, PC, MAC or iOS) - it doesn't get much easier than that!

Click here to download Astronomicon: The Beginning now.