December 1st marked the end of my month long give away over at GoodReads which I discussed in my last post. 974 people entered the contest to win one of the 5 copies I was giving away.  And 159 people have added the book to their “to read” list.  After the contest ended, I even received an email through GoodReads from another reader who was sad she didn’t win, and asked politely if I could spare another copy.

I’ve sold two copies on my own to friends, with requests slowly trickling in from other friends and family members.  I also mailed complimentary copies to a few reviewers and colleagues a few weeks ago.  As of this post, I have  two reviews at Amazon.com which are both positive.

Speaking of Amazon, I’ve been enjoying the advanced features they added to their Author Central program this year. I especially like the Sale Rank feature, which allows you to see where your book (hard copy or Kindle) ranked for up to one month.  Here’s an example of my own book in paperback sales the week after its release:

You can sign up for an Author Central account here.  It’s free.  I highly recommend it, especially for CreateSpace/Kindle authors whose book may only be available at Amazon.  It’s a way for you to have your own space on Amazon, especially if you have more than one book.  You can connect with readers and they can connect with you.  You can even have your outside blog connect to your Author Central page if you wish.

Besides your blog, you can also list book signing events, upload photos of yourself, check out customer reviews of your book(s), and also edit the product details of your book and upload editorial reviews if you wish.  I’ve tested the waters on most of these features and they usually show up on Amazon the following day.

As of today, Author Central added two more features.  You can now track your book’s sales by week and by Geographic location.  Big brother, anyone?  Just kidding.  The feature is actually provided by Nielsen Bookscan, which collects point of sale date from thousands of retailers each week, both online and off. They claim to report about 75% of the nation’s bookstores, so not all sales might be reported, but it’ll be enough for you to be able to at least see where your book is selling. Amazon says the data will be concentrated around large cities and the areas will not overlap.  But this feature does NOT include Kindle sales. I especially like the quick look at the bottom that shows your book and if it’s gone up or down in sales rank. But what does this feature mean for indie authors?  Well, it’s a great way to see if your books are selling in and around an area that maybe you haven’t marketed to.  It’s another way to find out where your readers are!

When you sign into your Author Central account for the first time after the 10th and click on Sales Info, you’ll be asked to take a quick tour which explains everything about these new features. Afterwards, you can click on the Help link and give Amazon feedback.  If you like the new features, tell them!  As consumers, we are always quick to point out the bad stuff that happens and we often forget that the good stuff is just as important.  So, if you like utilizing Author Central, tell them!

In other news, I received the new 3G Kindle as an early Christmas gift this month.  I’ll let you guess what book I downloaded first!  Believe it or not, it wasn’t AYSD?.  It was my 2nd book, Stealing Wishes. I did this mainly to get the reading experience that any Kindle owner has had of my book.  SW continues to sell anywhere from 5 to 10 copies per month on the Kindle, so I wanted to experience it first hand for myself.  And I must say, I’m impressed – not just with the feel of my own Ebook, but with the Kindle in general.  Now that I’ve joined the Ereader world full force, I’ll post more about it next month.

As I mentioned before, I began the week with an email blast to friends, family, and colleagues. This resulted in an immediate sale of my book on Kindle, and one sale from my CreateSpace EStore, the first time I’ve ever sold a book to an outsider directly through CreateSpace, believe it or not.  The following day my book went live on Amazon, despite CreateSpace telling you to allow up to 15 days for this happen.

Due to time constraints, I needed to get a copy to a book reviewer in Arizona ASAP, and I had yet to receive my own copies from CreateSpace.  I decided to order a copy directly through Amazon – thus adding to my book’s sales rank.  Amazon came through and shipped the book via an expedited method just as I had chosen, so the reviewer will have his copy even before I receive my own. If you have the money to invest in paying list price for your book, I don’t advise against this…but tread lightly.  Yes, it affects your sales rank positively, but if you let others know you are doing this it could be seen in a negative light as cheating.  Remember back in the day when people were calling up bookstores and ordering copies of their book?  So, don’t beat me up over this.  It was one copy, and the reviewer had a deadline to make.

Now, despite the expedited shipping costs for this one copy, you might think I’m stupid for paying list price for my own book.  Well, I did the math just to see what the difference would be. My book has a list price of $10.95.  Let’s say I ordered just three copies. That’s a total of $32.95, and enough to get me free shipping through Amazon.com.

Because I signed up for ProPlan through CreateSpace, I’m only paying $4.09 per copy there.  That’s $12.27 total and you do have to pay shipping.  In this case, I have a choice of $4.47 for Economy and $9.99 for Standard.  Let’s go with standard which brings my CS total to $22.26.  That’s still a $10.69 difference, in CS’s favor.

But, don’t forget this!  When you order copies directly through Amazon, you will still earn your commission from those sales.  I earn $2.48 per copy for sales made through Amazon. So, I’d make a total of $7.44 back from the 3 copies I buy. Subtract that from the $10.69 difference and you get $3.25.  Divide $3.25 by the 3 copies and you get roughly $1.08 per copy.  So, I’d really only lose out by about a dollar per copy if I bought directly through Amazon. Yes I know, that’s $3 I could have save, and even more if I chose Economy shipping (which I did for my own CS order of copies last week).   And if you are shipping multiple copies to various addresses, you could save time, shipping expenses, and packaging expenses by dropshipping your book through Amazon.  And overall, affect your sales rank positively.

But as I said before, don’t do this unless you have the money to blow or you have special circumstances where you just can’t wait to get copies in yourself, or you don’t have time to pack and ship them yourself. And if you are like me, every penny counts, especially this time of year.

So enough number crunching, right?

As I mentioned in my last post, the biggest part of marketing I’ve done thus far is offering free copies on GoodReads, which I listed even before the book had published.  This is still running as of this post and doesn’t expire till December 1st.  This also stands to give me what could be my biggest return in readers yet.  As of this post, 565 people have signed up for the 5 copy giveaway and 94 people have added the book to their to-read list. Now it’s impossible to judge just how many of those 94 people will actually get to my book, but it’s nice to think that at least my book will remain in the attention of those readers for a while after the give away has expired.  If even half of those people bought my book, I’d be a happy man. And here’s one way to make sure those people don’t forget you:

Go to your book’s page on GoodReads and scroll to the bottom.  Here you will find a list called Community Reviews, and you’ll see every person who marked your book to read. You can click on each of these people if you want and add them as a friend.  And if they add you back, they’ll be able to see your updates.  What a great way to build your fan base!  You are probably wondering if I did this, right?  Well, yes and no.  I scrolled through the names and first only clicked on those who had an avatar.  If they didn’t, I assumed maybe they don’t use GoodReads that much.  So, it was a quick way to narrow them down.  For the ones I did click on, I took a quick look at their profile to see how active they are on GoodReads – how many friends do they have, how many books have they read, etc.  Sounds picky, but I wanted to make the best out of this as I possibly could.  By friending people on GoodReads (or any other social network for that matter), you should take a sincere interest in what they are doing out there as well, and not just use the service to selfishly try to build your own readership.

By the way, have I mentioned how much I love GoodReads?  I find myself using it more than I do Facebook.  If you are on GoodReads, feel free to find me and friend me!

And speaking of Facebook, despite having deactivated my account back in September, I chose to sign back in yesterday and post a few announcements about my book.  I posted a link to Amazon, Nook, and Kindle. And guess what happened?  8 paperback sales through Amazon yesterday alone, shooting my rank up to 15K in book sales.

And that was the end of Week 1.  What’s next for me?  Well, hopefully my own copies will arrive next week, which means a trip to the post office where I’ll pack and ship most of my copies to other reviewers and colleagues.  In my next post, I’m going to talk about Author Central, a service that Amazon offers free to authors.  I’ve talked about it before, but AC recently made some changes including a neat way to track sales.  More about that in December!

And here I am, almost a year and a half later finding myself with one foot back in the marketing boat again.  My 3rd book, Are You Sitting Down?  just became available in paperback as of 11/10/10. It’s been available on the Kindle since October 3rd, and has earned 3 sales prior to the official launch with little effort on my part. Yeah!

But now that ominous and forboding blank Amazon page is looking back at me.  The product details have loaded, but the blurbs and product description have yet to come on board (as of this article).  The search inside feature is not available just yet.  Createspace says to allow at least 15 days for all of this to come into fruition.  And we aren’t seeing stars yet since there are no reviews.  Very few people have even read the book, and those really only include a handful of friends and authors who wrote blurbs for the cover.

I began my official book marketing campaign just a few days ago with a give away of 5 copies over at GoodReads which ends on December 1st when the lucky winners will be drawn.  I didn’t know about this feature until this year despite previously giving away copies of my books in other ways like on my own personal blog, so I wanted to give it a try.  So far, 526 people have entered the give away and 82 people have added the book to their to-read list (as of this article). And with 18 days left to enter the raffel, I’d say the potential here for readership is amazing.

This week I also began a small email campaign.  I composed a quick email announcement and sent it out mostly to personal and author friends and some family members. I don’t have a huge network to take advantage of here, but I do think a “mailing” list is an excellent tool to utilize if you can. I awoke the next morning to discover I had gained 1 Kindle and 1 Paperback sale as the result of my email blast. Terrific!

Today, I’m hitting the forums, particularly those available on Amazon in the various communities, which can often be found at the bottom of product pages. There are tons of these that ask for authors to “come tell us about it” if you’ve written a book privy to a particular genre.  It’s hard to judge what response you’ll get, other than from other forum posters who might reply to you.  But there are lots of people who follow these forums so you never know who might be reading.

Along with Kindle, I also loaded my book to the B&N Nook last month, which also gained 1 quick sale right away. I plan to load the book to Smashwords this weekend.  I’ve had mild success with sales there of my other books, but I’ll take what I can get.

I also have a few reviewers eagerly awaiting hard copies, and a few coworkers wishing to buy copies directly from me. So the next biggest investment will be in copies.  I’ll probably also use a few as handouts in exchange for reviews on Amazon.com. Amazon reviews and their 5 star rating system have been a great debate recently as to how successful or useful they are, but for me, as an author, I still like seeing them and outside of indie blogs, it’s the most relevant spot you are going to get reviewed.

What else?  There’s Twitter.  Yes, I tweet.  I should also probably reactivate my Facebook account, if for nothing but to shout out to all those people I went to high school with that my book is now available. 

Over the next few months I’ll dive back in the depths of my POD Diary.  Rather than concentrating on sales and $$$ like I did last time, I’m going to focus on readership this time.  My biggest investment last time was in a book cover program which quickly paid off from sales.  This time I have the book cover itself to earn back as I paid for the rights to a photographer’s artwork for this cover.  So, while behind the scenes I’ll be crunching numbers, I wanted my revisit to the POD Diary to be more about marketing this time…something that would be more useful to other indie authors out there rather than how to balance your checkbook.

So here we go…turn the page….Dear Diary,

It took several months for the book to become available on Amazon. Six months in fact.  Having emailed Lulu support several times during that wait period and after getting no help, I decided to give up on the project and I retired the book immediately.  It loaded to Amazon anyway though and while I have never promoted it, I did go ahead and load it to the Kindle where it has been downloaded enough to gain a sales rank in genres such as Writing Skills and Authorship.

Since the project was retired, but live on Amazon, I also expected never to collect any royalties from the sale of hard copies.  My fault for letting my anger get the best of me. But that’s where good ole Lulu didn’t fail me…at least I hope they didn’t fail.  To date, I’ve collected royalties for a total of just 5 copies: 3 in the US and 2 in the UK!

After much inner debate, I’ve decided to “unretire” the book.  With that decision, I’ve lowered the list price of the paperback to just $9.50 on Lulu and the E-Book to just $4.50, cutting most of my royalties. This may or may not affect the current list price at Amazon where the book is $12.50, but can be purchased starting at $9.50 from third party marketplace sellers. I don’t care.  More than anything, I want the book to be available to those who need it most…indie authors who may not have a lot of money to invest in their work, but have a lot of heart already invested in it. And may just need some help in the right direction.

The information presented in this book has not been changed.  In fact, I have reviewed it against Amazon and the information is still as current today as it was a year ago when I compiled it.  While I’m sure I could build upon the material, the purpose of the book was always to be a “quick” reference for indie authors.  I do not feel the need to broaden it, and I believe it can be a very important “go to” book for authors who are out of money and looking for quick ways to market their own book on Amazon.com, the world’s largest online book seller.

So, to kick off the “rebirth” of my POD Pocket Guide, I’m offering ten free copies!  That’s right!  Ten free copies!  To be eligible, just leave a comment with your email address on this post. On June 30th, I’ll pick ten winners at random. Yes, there’s a catch.  First, you must live in the United States.  Second, you must commit to leaving a review of the POD Pocket Guide on Amazon.com once you’ve read or used it.  If you can meet these two requirements, then leave a comment on this post to enter the raffle.

Can’t wait till June 30th for a free copy?  Buy or download it right now at Lulu.com!

It all starts with sales reported to me from Lulu.com.  In order to keep the price of my book affordable, I opted for a lower royalty, just 67 cents per copy sold through a distribution channel outside of Lulu.  Here are the total copies sold through Lulu and the total money I made from each as of June 8, 2009.

Lulu:

23 copies sold through distribution channels – Amazon  (67 cents each x 23 = $15.41)

2 copies sold through UK distribution channels (67 cents each x 2 = $1.34)

3 Ebook downloads direct from Lulu ($4.00 each x 3 = $12.00)

1 print copy sold direct from Lulu ($3.86)

That’s a total of $32.61 earned direct from Lulu.com the first year.

Sad, isn’t it?  Not really.  Obviously, I sold more copies through Amazon than I did direct from Lulu. Perhaps I could have done more promotion.  Perhaps I could have directed more people to Lulu instead of Amazon to increase my earnings per copy.  However, the majority of readers are more likely to buy through a site they know and trust, such as B&N or Amazon, rather than buying direct from my Lulu bookstore.  Had I never once mentioned the book was available on Amazon, and had I only directed people to Lulu, maybe my earnings would be better…maybe not.

But don’t frown.  That’s just Lulu.  Let’s take a look at Kindle E-reader sales for the year.  For the sake of price changes, discounts, and the various number of copies sold per month, I’ll just show you how many copies sold each month and then give you the grand total of my earnings from Kindle alone.

Amazon Kindle:

June 2008: zero copies sold

July 2008: 2 copies sold

August 2008: 23 copies sold

September 2008: 25 copies sold

October 2008: 25 copies sold

November 2008: 29 copies sold

December 2008: 22 copies sold ( December/January show a decline in sales probably due to the holidays.)

January 2009: 17 copies sold

February 2009: 24 copies sold

March 2009: 73 copies sold (Release of Kindle 2)

April 2009: 33 copies sold

May 2009: 43 copies sold

June 2009: 7 copies sold as of June 8th

Grand total earned from all Kindle sales: $1044.80.  Not too shabby.

I invested in a total number of 30 author copies.  The majority of those copies were given away to friends and family or included in marketing kits.  I did sell five copies to coworkers and through the Amazon Marketplace at $10.00 each.

Total earned from direct author sales: $50.00

Last, we have sales through Smashwords.  A total of 23 copies have been downloaded since I published the book here back on February 18th, 2009.  However, I’d like to point out that I used Smashwords mainly as a marketing tool to help gain Amazon reviews.  Here, my book was offered for free in exchange for an Amazon review.  I only gained royalties from three sales totaling $5.81.  I have not yet been paid for these sales since Smashwords has a minimum requirement of $25.00 in earnings before they pay out.

This brings my total earnings across the board to a total of $1133.22.

That’s a far stretch from being able to afford my cost of living for one year.  Not really even enough for one month.  It is 3 car payments though; it’s even enough to pay my utility bill for 16 months.  As I reported in my last diary entry, almost all of this money was invested in marketing and review copies. But I have no debt as far as this project goes, which is more than some self-published authors can say.

Now, let’s take a quick look at reviews.

To date, I have 10 reviews on Amazon. Nine are from people I have never met face to face.  That’s important because reviews from friends and family are nice, but they are always going to be positive. The first review came from an Amazon Top 500 Reviewer who I sent a review copy to.  Three of the reviews were a result of my free Smashwords Ebook give away. And two of the reviews were cross posted from other review sites. My current Amazon rank is at 1.2 million, but has been as high as 101,000 although it fell fast. My current rank on the Kindle is 104,705.

My first review outside of Amazon came from Rainbow Reviews.  I was sorely disappointed in this review, not because it only gave me three stars, but because the quality of the review itself is horrible.  The reviewer just reposted my book blurb, then pointed out three paragraphs he liked and wrapped up the review with two sentences which pretty much anyone could have come up with just by reading a few pages.  Thankfully, this review was not cross posted to Amazon.

The second came from Floyd M. Orr at PODBRAM.    Floyd cross posted a version of the review to Amazon for me.  I have to admit its a nice critical and well rounded review, just as a review should be.

The last review I received outside of Amazon was from Cheryl Anne Gardner at PodPeep. Cheryl was the first to really point out a lot of my subliminal underlying tones of the book and to really embrace the humorous aspect of the story. Cheryl also cross posted the review to Amazon for me.

And this is where my year ends.  It’s certainly not where my story ends.  Like I said in my last post, this is a good place to end the diary even though my journey as an author is far from over.  I’m not going to recap my mistakes or what I’ve learned from this diary.  I’ll leave those things up to you to find out for yourself in all my previous posts. I have no philosophical words of wisdom to share with you. The diary speaks for itself. I’ll still be sharing news and thoughts about self-publishing in general from time to time on LLBR, but this is where the POD Diary comes to a close.

What’s next for me, you ask?  Well, I’ve often referred to myself as a literary medium.  There’s always another character or storyline in my head waiting to be born, usually several at a time actually.  I’ll still be promoting my book and seeking out reviews, and checking my Amazon rank every other day, and wait eagerly for more Kindle royalties, but it’s time to put my focus into something new.  Another story, another character is calling and I’ve ignored the messages long enough.

For the readers out there who took time to read my book, I thank you.  And for the writers out there who have followed my diary this past year for information or inspiration, I say to you what I say to every author I encounter who takes the self-publishing path:

Don’t give up!

In the past, Amazon has usually paid out around the 27th of the month and only once have they been any later (for me).  So, when June 1st came and I still had not been paid, I sent an email to DTP (Digital Text Platform) Support asking when I would get paid.  By the way, their email address is dtp-feedback@amazon.com but don’t expect an immediate response as it appears only one person is running the show.  After sending the email, I also looked for information on the Community Forums and started participating in this discussion concerning the delay of payment and the fact that June sales had not started showing up on the sales report screen. As usual, threats of civil lawsuits and breech of contract bantar ensued (Amazon terms state they pay out in approximately 60 days). DTPAdmin finally replied to the discussion on June 4th with this…

Hello,

The problem with the the sales report for June has been fixed and you should be able to view them in your account.

Further, payments for the month of the March, 2009 have been processed this week. Please note, it can take up to five business days for the funds to appear in the available balance of your bank account. It will be paid by bank transfer directly into your bank account. Please allow until after that time before reporting your Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) payment as late or missing.

If you have not received payment for the months prior to March, please write to us at dtp-feedback@amazon.com so that we can research further. Please make sure to write to us from the e-mail address associated with the DTP account.

Thanks!

Also, on June 4th I received a similar reply to my email stating the same thing.  As of today, June 6th, I still have not received payment. Luckily, unlike some authors, I have always been paid on time in the past when my sales equaled at least $25.00 for the month.  Many authors report in the forums that they haven’t seen payment in over 90 days, but I have a feeling some of these didn’t reach the $25.00 benchmark and may not be aware of it.

Late royalty payments definitely make for some grumpy authors, and lots of b*tching in the forums.  Unfortunately, the forums are pretty much like a lonely ship on an angry sea with no captain.  There are more soap boxes than there are stars to flag what may be useful to you.  Also note that even when you sign into the archaic DTP Admin screen to check your sales, it still says “beta” at the top left and has for over a year now.  Even notifications of follow-ups to forum posts are emailed to you from Jive Adminstrator (null@amazon.com).  I can’t help but wonder, just how jive is he?  And yes, administrator is misspelled in the email.

This also puts a big damper on Amazon’s integrity, if they have any left.  In the forums, authors are already saying they are pulling the plug on their books on the Kindle.  Overall, it’s just another way of Amazon saying they can do what they want and when they want it because of how big they are.  The approximately in their 60 day payment terms pretty much leaves us at their mercy no matter how much of a bad taste it leaves in our mouths.  And yes, authors, it is just one more way that Amazon has “failed” you.  Just search “#amazonfail” on Twitter to learn more.

For me personally, yes, I am a bit disgruntled over the situation mainly because my own Kindle sales averaged $248.50 for the month of March, my biggest royalty yet.  (Hey, maybe Amazon is waiting for their own deposit to clear so they can pay all of us?) I could definitely put that money to good use.  I could also update my POD Diary budget for you before the diary comes to an end in just two more days.

So, with that said, let’s update the figures anyway just to show you where I am.  My last budget post was dated April 28th and reported the following…

Total money invested on this project to date (after book sales only): $62.69 (debt)

Profit made to date on this project after all sales and services: $503.68

As you can see, the March Kindle royalties will finally bring me out of the red! Once I receive that deposit, my self-publishing debt on this project will be erased, and it only took a year to do it!

My total profit after book sales only: $185.81

My total profit to date after all sales and services: $752.18

Now that book sales number is nothing to frown at.  I was never in this for the money, so I am not disappointed in the least.  Remember, I turned around and invested most of my earnings over time in more author copies, marketing materials, and the like.  I gave away free E-book downloads to gain more reviews at Amazon.  I invested in a fancy book cover software program in the beginning to improve my book cover.  I used the program to help other authors for a tiny fee, but the software was soon paid for. I also intentionally kept my Lulu royalty low to make the book affordable.

Check back on June 8th for my final POD Diary post.  My book was published one year ago on June 8th, so I think that is a good place to end the diary even though my journey as an author is far from over.

Occasionally, I’ll check my sales rank over at Aaron Shepard’s Sales Rank Express.  This site only presents the basic information you can already find on Amazon’s product page, but it’s quicker sometimes than navigating through Amazon, finding your book, and scrolling down to the product description, and also not getting distracted by ads or by surfing for things you want to buy like I usually do when I go to Amazon.

Rankforest is a free site that will track your book over time if you want to see how the numbers fluctuate.  The free service part will update every 4 hours for you.

RankTracer is also another that has come highly recommended to me, but a three month track of your book will cost you $6.00 here. Books & Writers will do the same thing for two books for just $10 a year.

If you aren’t concerned with how much your sales rank changes by hour, then I suggest checking your book’s page once a day either in the morning or the evening and write down that number on a calendar every day.  Note when there’s a big spike in the number.  Did someone review your book around that time?  Did you post a comment on a blog or website the day before? Note the spikes in sales over time and what might have caused them.

Some authors have tried to affect their sales rank by holding a buying promotion.  Whether it works or not, I don’t know but this is where you email or contact as many people as you can and request them to buy your book from Amazon on a certain date and at a certain time.  The spike in sales will definitely affect the sales rank, but you have to consider that not everyone might purchase your book at that specific date and time.  If you ask everyone who did participate to email you back and let you know they bought your book, you might be able to better obtain an exact number as to how many copies sold during your promotion and helped you achieve whatever rank you earned that day.

Check out these numbers from Rampant Techpress.  Supposedly, a major publisher tracked 25 of their books over a six month period and compared Amazon sales rank to the number of books they sold.

Amazon        Actual
Sale Rank     Books Sold per week
———     —————–
75-100         250-275/wk
100-200        225-249/wk
200-300        150-200/wk
450-750         75-100/wk
750-3,000        40-75/wk
3,000-9,000      15-20/wk
10,000+            1-5/wk

Morris Rosenthal, author of Print-on-Demand Book Publishing, has a slightly different opinion and reports the following figures…

So, why are we obsessed with our Amazon Sales Rank?  Well, no matter what the number may be, if the number is rising it means a sale, which means a royalty payment in the end.  It might not be much of a payment, but keeping your book at a higher sales rank definitely increases exposure, which hopefully increases sales and increases money in your pocket.