Who thought different countries would buy my e-books so differently!

I have been assessing my book sales over the last twelve months.Variations are to be expected, but the shape of my sales statistics have been changing over the last twelve months much faster than I would have expected. The truly difficult part is working out why.

*For my analysis I'm only going to use sales in primarily English-speaking countries. I do sell a few books in Germany and France etc., but not enough to be statistically viable for analysis.

Astronomicon 1: The Beginning:

Last year this book was my bestseller in the US, but not any more. Now it sells best in Canada, with the UK coming a close second. US sales have become very weak and I have no idea what has changed.

Astronomicon 2: Distant Relatives:

This book's sales were always split down the middle between the US and the UK. The pickup rate from the first book to the second was markedly higher in the UK, but I always assumed that as I'm British, American readers might find my writing, especially dialogue, a little alien. Now it sells well in Canada and the UK but US sales have dwindled badly.

Astronomicon 3: Those Left Behind:

Annoyingly, this one was never a popular seller. I have always been a little depressed by that as I firmly believe it is the best piece of science fiction I have ever written so far. However it's Canadian sales have increased markedly over the past twelve months and US sales have all but stopped. UK sales have remained pretty static.

Astronomicon: Icarus:

By far my best selling book currently, but last year it was selling two copies in the UK for every one sold in the US. Now the US outsells the UK about 6 to 1. Canada also beats the UK hands down on this one and I have no idea why. It seems that:

• Canadian readers buy this book and then go on to buy all the other Astronomicon books.
• American readers buy this book with greater enthusiasm but most stop there.
• British readers shy away from this one, instead preferring to begin with Astronomicon: The Beginning.

Conclusions:

Astronomicon: Icarus has benefited from an ongoing 99c offer which has clearly boosted its sales greatly. Maybe US readers are more easily swayed by a low price offer? 

If I could persuade US readers to buy my other books after purchasing Astronomicon: Icarus, that would fix my US sales issue. Equally if I could somehow make Icarus as popular in the UK as it is across the Atlantic that would also be a major boost.

Anyway, for now my focus is on writing Astronomicon: Deadline, another standalone novel within the Astronomicon universe. Once that is ready for publication I think I will have to sit back and reassess my marketing efforts. If with each book I write, I learn more, hone my skills and expand my reach into social networking then success can be eventually achieved without relying on luck. Marketing is important but it gets easier with more and better books to market.

Still holding the 99c (79p) #offer on #Kindle #novel Icarus

E-book sales can be unpredictable at the best of times. I'm sure a lot of Indie authors have seen surges and lulls in their book sales for no discernible reason, but dropping the price of  Astronomicon: Icarus to 99c (that's 79p here in the UK) on Amazon has been the most successful offer I've launched to date.

As I've said before, science fiction thriller Icarus has had good reviews and no bad ones but, better than that, almost everyone who buys it seems to go on to buy all the other Astronomicon books. That's the best vote of confidence I could ask for. I should take this opportunity to again say thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review my books. It's nice to get feedback, especially the positive kind, and it helps encourage other people to give my books a try.

The most bizarre thing I've experienced with Icarus is that almost all my sales are on the other side of the Atlantic. The US and Canada account for well over 90% of the worldwide sales. Prior to starting the 99c offer, about 60-65% of my book sales were here in the UK. Why Icarus appeals so strongly to those on the North American continent is a mystery to me. If anyone over there understands why Icarus is SO much more popular over there, please let me know.

You can check out Icarus on your local Amazon website, see more reviews on Goodreads.com or find out more about the whole of the Astronomicon science fiction series on the Official website.

Is #99c the new #free for Kindle books?

When I first entered into the world of indie publishing, there were many fewer independent authors publishing books each year. Standing out from the crowd was much easier and there were many ways to get your books onto potential readers e-readers. Assuming your writing was good enough, that would lead to decent sales.

Things have changed. There seems to be little consensus on the numbers apart from there are many times as many authors self-publishing and marketing their works everywhere they can find. This obviously means that there is a lot more competition. Now I have never really been afraid of competition, but now there are SO many authors that it has tipped the market into a problem I would not have predicted a couple of years ago.

Just being a good writer is simply not enough any more. The days when you could just launch your book for free are going fast. I did some research on this but no-one seems to know how many free books are currently available for download. It is certainly measured in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. More and more readers are downloading more free books than they can sensibly read. This causes two problems. Firstly they might download your free book and never get around to reading it. But also, even if they read one of your books and like it, with a huge number of other free books out there they are going to have to REALLY like your book to spend money on the sequel.

How do you get around this problem? It seems the best solution is simply to stop giving books away for free. Persuading everyone else to do the same, although a nice idea, is never going to happen. But I have found that by pricing an e-book at 99c instead of giving it away free you get several beneficial effects:

1. You are not undervaluing your work. If you give it away for free, it makes it seem valueless.
2. If a reader pays even a token amount to download your book they are a LOT more likely to read it as they have already made an investment in it.
3. Sales at 99c count more towards your sales ranking (on Amazon) than give-aways.
4. You get a (very) small amount of extra money towards your monthly Amazon payout.

Find all the Astronomicon
 books on Amazon

As always I continue to experiment with different price points and a range of other ways to promote my books. I've tried a variety of time-limited 99c offers on several of my books with a variety of results, but now I have an ongoing 99c price on Astronomicon: Icarus on Amazon. Obviously the numbers sold do not compare to the numbers given away on a freebie offer, but it is leading to almost double the sales of the other books in the Astronomicon series.

If you have different experiences with pricing, please let me know in the comments below. The market is constantly changing and different genres seem to hit different classes of reader, so what works for science fiction may not work for horror or romance.

What does it take to make you #review a #Kindle book?

I guess this is the eternal question that most authors would ask their readers. I've been trying to find out the industry standard rate for book sales on Amazon to reviews left, but the data is either elusive or does not exist.

It would be nice if it was 2% or even 1%, but so far I seem to get one review for every 300 or so sales. One of my books does a little better than that, but there's not a big margin of variation.

All my books feature a page at the end politely asking for a review or at least a rating, I've tried to persuade readers to leave a review in discussions on Facebook and Google+, and I've even given copies away free in return for reviews (which in the majority of cases did not lead to reviews).

Obviously, there are review sites out there, but I am dubious as to how a review generated that way would compare to one by someone who chose to read one of my books because they liked the sound of the story or read the sample chapters and wanted to go on and read the rest of it. I'm doubtful that someone who reads and reviews books in order to create content for their blog/website is as likely to enjoy what they are reading and write as positive a review. I've heard horror stories about authors getting bad reviews from people who didn't even like the sound of the book before they read it and then the resulting review damaging future sales.

I hoped I could get some of my friends to review my books, assuming they like the genre, but I've had no luck there either. Most of them are not big readers anyway.

So if you are a reader, what is the key thing which makes you want to leave a rating or write a review?

Is one good #Amazon review worse than no reviews?

I may have made a mistake recently. I had five novels out on Amazon but, as you would expect, the most recent ones were better than the first ones. I would hate to reach a point where my writing skills are not improving, but an unfortunate consequence is that my older books won't be as good as what I'm writing now. As I've been writing a series of novels which should be read in order, I decided to revamp the first novel.

This wasn't just a quick edit or tweak. Instead I took the first two books, extensively edited them and combined them into one 390+ page novel. It was then submitted to the proofreading and editing process and given shiny new front cover artwork. I am very pleased with the results, but the changes were too great to simply make it a new edition of book one.

So I removed the original book 1 and book 2 from sale and launched the new one as a new release (Astronomicon: The Beginning). As a side-effect I lost all my original reviews, but with renewed enthusiasm I tried to persuade readers to leave reviews and ratings of the revamped book.

My efforts were quickly rewarded with a good review (4 stars and some most positive comments) but that's when the problem started. As soon as the book had one review, sales all but stopped. At first I put it down to the usual random fluctuation in sales, but nothing improved. Even a string of good ratings on GoodReads.com  made no difference.

It's been suggested to me that having one good review makes potential readers suspicious. They often assume that I've reviewed my own novel, rendering one good review much worse than no reviews at all.

Has anyone else had similar experiences?

Don't forget Icarus is still only $0.99

Whilst working the Trojan asteroid cloud, Captain Taylor and the crew of the deep space mining vessel Icarus discover a mysterious prototype ship drifting in space having suffered a catastrophic failure.

Battling the dangers of the asteroid field, the Icarus crew attempt to rescue the survivors of the stricken ship. Meanwhile a vessel from Earth is coming to deal with the damaged prototype but with a conflicting agenda. After unwittingly discovering the bizarre secret of the prototype vessel, the crew of the Icarus end up fighting for their very survival.

Although it's not the first book in the epic Astronomicon science fiction series, Icarus forms an excellent introduction to the Astronomicon universe. It is a stand-alone novel, but still firmly set in the same technologies, politics and history. It gives you an exciting taste of the Astronomicon universe without committing to the ongoing series.

99c US (or 77p here in the UK) is a bargain for over 160 pages of quality science fiction.

To find out more visit the official Astronomicon website or visit your local Amazon website. There are now four Astronomicon novels and another one on the way soon. The fifth novel, Astronomicon: Deadline should hopefully be published in the third or fourth quarter of 2014.

Is there too much new #scifi?

I've been writing and publishing science fiction for almost three years now. Science fiction has been my hobby and fascination for as long as I can remember, so when I started writing it seemed the obvious genre work within.

What I've learned from the last three years is that there are an incredible number of people writing science fiction novels and short stories, and probably just as many creating fan fiction for most of the well-known movies and television series.

I am coming to the conclusion that there's only limited space in the market and the huge number of science fiction writers out there is simply producing far too much material for the market. Up to a point the good stuff will float to the top, but I suspect that these days there is such a deluge of material that even some of the good stuff simply gets lost in the crowd. No-one can possibly be aware of everything that's published (and by that I am very much including the self-publishing world) so those authors without the marketing and promotion skills to draw attention to their work will tend to sink without trace, regardless of how good their writing is.

Short of persuading less people to write science fiction, I don't see any fix for this unfortunate situation.

Although my love of writing science fiction isn't about to end, I'm going to jump ship and try out another genre. What out "Crime Thrillers" - here I come!

Do you always start with the 1st book in a series?

I realise that this will vary depending on the series, but I thought the urge to start with the first would be much stronger with most readers than it appears it is in reality.

Each of the last two novels I chose to read were both members of their respective series, but neither were the introductory novel. I did not deliberately decide to jump in part way through, it was down to which books were physically available at the time. Although I would have preferred to start at the beginning, it was not a strong enough factor to stop me reading either book.

The art for any author is to make any subsequent novels in a series readable and enjoyable without any prior knowledge from previous instalments, whilst satisfying those readers who have absorbed every last detail from previous books. It is a difficult balance to achieve.

My Astronomicon series of science fiction novels has been moderately successful, but the sales curve has not matched what I expected. I always assumed that the first novel (Astronomicon: The Beginning) would outright sell the best, and then 50-60% of those readers would go on to buy the second novel (Astronomicon: Distant Relatives). Predicting the proportional sales of the third novel (Astronomicon: Those Left Behind) was going to be trickier, but I was hoping for it to sell at least 75% as well as book two.

Everyone has told me that it is clearly the best novel of the three, so I was hopeful that it would get close to matching book two's sales. However, for the last couple of months, book three has been selling more than book one and book two combined! Maybe quality matters much more than position number within a series?

What has your experience been of sales of novels within a trilogy or series?

What's the best price for an e-book by an unknown author?

You've finished your first e-novel, polished it, got it proof-read and edited and now it's ready to publish for the rest of the world to read. Whether you put it out on Amazon Kindle (KDP), SmashWords or Apple iBooks, you need to pick a suitable price for it. The price is one of the most critical decisions you will make and could make or destroy your e-books sales.


This guide will explain the pitfalls and help you decide on the right price.


Read more...

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.

What's the best price for an e-book?

Having now tried a variety of price points, it looks like I'm going to move the price of the introductory Astronomicon (The Beginning) back to $0.99.

It's still selling at its current price of $3.99, but just not achieving the numbers I need. Although I am making slightly more money from selling fewer at the higher price, this has serious repercussions when you assess the whole series. Just over half the people who buy book 1 go on to buy book 2 (Distant Relatives) and almost all of those go on to buy Book 3 (Those Left Behind). Overall, lower sales of book 1 means less people get introduced to the series and I lose out.

There are so many factors to take into consideration when choosing a price for your novels and sometimes the only way to find out for sure is to try out the variants and see what works best for you.

If you want to find out more, try this article.

The End is Nigh!

The 99c special offer on Astronomicon: The Beginning will be coming to an end this Sunday (25th August) and will returning to its usual price of $2.99.

Until Sunday you will still be able to download this 360+ page quality science-fiction novel from Amazon US for 99c (please check your local Amazon for the equivalent price in your region). Almost all devices can handle this e-book, including Kindles, PCs, Android devices and even iPhones and iPads.

"3 Space craft, 240 colonists, 25 trillion miles and an unexpected discovery that changes everything.

Classic science fiction that will appeal to fans of Arthur C. Clarke. Astronomicon: The Beginning follows the human race’s intrepid first steps into interstellar space, a colonisation mission to Proxima Centauri. The colossal distance and harsh environment are not all that stand between them and survival.”

Click here to find out more.

Looking to #promote your E-book on #Facebook?

If you're reading this, you're probably one of the many aspiring authors out there who have one or more e-books desperately looking for more readers. In the last few days an excellent new resource has been created to help you tap into the vast potential audience of Facebook users.

There are a great number of e-book groups, author groups and e-book promotional groups on Facebook. Finding good ones is tricky, finding ones that aren't just full of spam is even harder.

This new group has the advantage of being strongly moderated. Authors are encouraged to post announcement of promotions and freebie offers of their e-books but all posts are checked to ensure that everything is on topic and suitable for the group. We trying to foster a friendly and helpful atmosphere where authors can learn to maximise their potential and reach an ever growing number of potential readers.

Click here to see the Ebook Specials group.

Deciding what to write next...

It's been quite a few weeks since I finished writing Astronomicon 3: Those Left Behind, and now I'm reaching that time when I have to commit to which novel I'm going to write first. I've always got four or five books in active development, but recently I've been concentrating on developing ideas for just three.

Last week I thought I'd narrowed this to just one, but then I had some great ideas for one of the two I'd put on hold. Now to make it worse the book I'm supposed to be concentrating on has hit a plot issue which I seem unable to solve.

So now I don't know which of these books will become my next full-time project:

Astronomicon: Deadline
The very first humorous book based within the Astronomicon universe. One man's quest to get back to Earth in time to claim his mystery inheritance. Will pirates, an aggressive robot, a hi-jacking or the discovery of alien life get in his way?

Astronomicon: Holy Earth
After surviving one of the worst disasters in space exploration, Mina, a senior engineer in the Colonisation Program sets out discover how the terrorists got a nuclear device past the Program's state-of-the-art security. She uncovers a conspiracy that goes deeper than she could ever have feared and becomes a target for some very dangerous people.


For now I will keep working on the planning for both, and I'll let you know how things develop.

Cover art for Astronomicon: Those Left Behind

This is the excellent front cover design for Astronomicon: Those Left Behind. I hope you'll all agree that this is one of the best designs for an Astronomicon cover. It follows the same basic template as the other three books in the Astronomicon series, but features just about the most eye-catching imagery so far.

In case you are wondering, the image shows a planet being bombarded from orbit. When invading another world it makes sense to take out as much of their defence systems as you can before even considering visiting the surface, and a basic orbital bombardment is usually the best way to achieve that.

This image shows the Eridani homeworld, shortly before the Cephali ground assault commences.

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.