My Last Great Effort

With Two Gun Hart having been released, and my 4th of July promo of The American Game behind me, it's now on to promoting Relic Worlds.

This is the last great effort I will be making to try to succeed in the entertainment industry.  I tried for more than 20 years to succeed in the film industry, and have tried for about the last 5 to succeed in the book industry.  I know 5 years isn't a lot, but it's the amount of time people typically give for something to work, and it's about time I grew up and get on with life.

So it's now or never.

It's appropriate that Relic Worlds be that last effort.  Star Wars and Indiana Jones were my two earliest influences into storytelling, and this series is a combination of those two giants in my mind.  So if it is to be my last big project, there couldn't be a better one.

This doesn't mean that if it fails, I'm going to stop writing and doing projects all together.  First of all, I have two other efforts pushing forward.  I'm publishing a couple games, and I have my Command Combat Battle Reports show on Youtube.  If either of those succeed, I'll be able to make them my day job, and writing will go right along with them.

But if all of them fail, (fail meaning I can't make enough to earn a regular living,) then I'll just have to put more time into having a regular career, and my writing and video making will all take a backseat.  I'll always do them, but at a slower pace.

And by the way, it's not that my earlier projects failed.  It's just that they make enough money to be side projects, not enough to pay rent and bills.  Two Gun Hart was a particular surprise.  I expected that to be a big national story and even reach a bestseller list, like the New York Times, or something like that.  Disappointingly, the media has ignored it.  NPR, which I particularly had faith in, never even responded.  (Well, one show responded to say they weren't interested in that, but possibly in another story of mine.  He sent me a sample of an earlier show that I should strive for, one in which a person goes to see a psychic and believes he's being followed by the ghost of a celebrity.  Yeah, I should strive to that rather than an Italian-American hero who broke from his family and the stereotypes.)

I now have more faith in Relic Worlds because it does not depend on the standard media which follows trends rather than logic.  I have control over how much it gets out there through social media and online communities.  I just have to get good at that.  As an introvert, that is a daunting task, but one I will have to work on to make a career out of all of this.

KDP Select Free Promo Days - The Results

 After several weeks of preparation for the KDP Select free promotion, I was ready for the event itself.  I had activities scheduled for each day of the event, from July 1-5.  Below are the activities and the results on each day.

July 1:  I posted information about the free book promotion on my own Facebook and Twitter accounts.  Since Facebook is looked at primarily by my friends, I explained on it what the KDP Select program was, and why I was giving books away for free.  To people who are not in this industry, the entire idea seems odd, so I wanted to explain how giving books away for free was actually helpful to me.  I said also that it would be great if people could pass this on to anyone they thought might enjoy it.  I immediately saw results, with friends sharing the post and putting their own explanation on it.  They downloaded the book, and even downloaded copies for other people.  I had planned on gifting the book to some people and asking them to gift it to others, but I didn’t need to because so many people did it already.

            I also posted details about the sale to groups that are relevant to the book.  In this case, that includes baseball and Civil War groups, as well as some general history groups.  I was a little worried how they would take it, but because I had been actively part of these groups for the past week, it worked better than anything else I did during this promotion.  A bunch of people liked it, commented on it, and shared it with their friends.  They even thanked me for giving it away for free rather than getting annoyed that I was promoting on their site. 

I also posted on writing and reading groups I belong to.  These are the least effective as so many authors post on these all the time, but you occasionally get that writer/reader who’s interested in the graphic if it stands out who shares it.

Finally, I talked about the sale on Twitter with specific hashtags, including: #Amazon #eBook #BookBuzzr #BookGiveaway #BookMarketing #Kindle #KindleBargain #KDP #WLCFreeToday #FreekKindleReads #free… #Kindle #Freekindle #freebook #FreeKindleBook #ReadThis #authorshelpingauthors.  This last worked better than expected.  I’ve never been good with Twitter and rarely does anyone respond to anything I post, but all day I was getting notifications of people retweeting me, favoriting my posts, and following my Twitter account.

The result of this first day was 166 downloads, #3 in historical fiction, #52 in literature and fiction, and #1,330 overall on Amazon.  This was down from around 13,000.

July 2:  My paid promotions kicked in, and the number of downloads soared.  This is the greatest lesson you could learn from all of this.  Pay for the promotions on several sites that are effective where they tweet about you, post on their website and on their Facebook page.  That’s where you get the numbers.  I immediately saw my numbers jump before I did anything.

            I also went through my social media and I responded to comments, liked other people’s comments about things unrelated to my book, (this grabbed their attention without me having to say anything.)  I should mention here that my profile picture is a picture of my book, so every time I commented or even liked anything, people saw my book cover without me having to say anything about my book.

            I also wrote a thank you on my own Facebook and Twitter to those who had helped spread the word about the book, then I gave the good news about the results, giving them the credit for getting it there, (and not mentioning the paid promotions.)

            The results were #2 in both historic fiction and literature fiction behind a book called The Widow of Larkspur Inn in both categories, and #106 overall with a total of 1,471 units downloaded that day alone.  I was achingly close to achieving one of two very important goals:  #1 in my category, or in the top 100 overall.

July 3:  Unfortunately, I was not to reach any of them.  I had peaked already, and the next day, as the paid promotions faded, my numbers slipped.  I still had some promotions to go as I was sending direct tweets to a list of Twitter handles: @DigitalBkToday @kindleebooks @Kindlestuff @KindleEbooksUK @KindleBookKing @KindleFreeBook @FreeReadFeed @4FreeKindleBook

            One place I saw something that I might try in the future; someone placed up a meme with information about their book.  More people read memes than text on posts, so I might try that in the future.

            I also found reasons to post information about the sale again on some of the same groups, and on my own.  Typically that reason was to give everyone an update on how the sale was going, and informing them that it was still going on.  I told them about the results of the day before, that I was on the cusp of being #1 in two categories, and in the top 100 overall.  I didn’t tell them it was slipping.

July 4:  And it continued to slip, even on this day which was supposed to be the biggest one of all.  It had gone on long enough by this point that I was having trouble making excuses to talk about it and make it feel organic.  I continued to post on free book groups on Facebook, which allow you to post once a day, and I gave some updates on my own profile.

            My girlfriend Jamie had a good suggestion as well that I tried.  I found several posts other people had put up that I believed others would want to see.  I shared it on a page or group of my own with hashtags that were popular, (especially #4thofjuly) and I also put the hashtag of my book #americangame.  I also posted a link to the book on my author page with the hashtag #americangame.  That way, when people were going through #4thofjuly they would come upon one entertaining entry that also happened to have #americangame.  The hopes was that people would shift onto that track and find the link to the book itself.  I don’t know how well this worked, as it was in the middle of a lot of other things, and in the middle of a holiday, but I’ll be trying it again for Relic Worlds.

            I posted on my blogs in multiple locations and put links up to see the blog.  It was discouraging, an exercise in futility.  It seemed like the harder I worked to post about it, finding new and creative ways to make it look organic, the more it slipped in the ratings.  All the while I saw other people’s postings on Facebook about their fun times at 4^th of July parties on a beautiful day while I was stuck inside trying to give away my book.  At last I gave up, put it all away, and went to a party.

July 5:  I did the one thing I had forgotten to do on either the 3^rd or 4^th, I posted the book trailer.  This was especially useful in reenactor sites as I used reenactors to make the trailer.  After the link to the trailer was a link to the book.  I tweeted and posted about this trailer all over the place.

            I got some more views on the trailer, and it no doubt got some final sales, but the promotion had lost its impetus.  It closed still at #2 in historic fiction behind that same Widow of Larkspur, #21 in literary fiction, and #638 overall.  I might have regretted not putting the trailer up sooner, as I had intended, but it wouldn’t have mattered, as I discovered in going over the results.

            First, I had intended to put the trailer up at some point during the weekend.  Something I discovered with this promotion, and, funny enough, I happened to see in the news while doing these promotions, is that people tend to post during the weekend, but rarely read anything.  This is especially true on holidays, and even more common on sunny holidays where everyone is out at grills and pool parties.  According to the news report, the most effective days for social media are Tuesday and Wednesday morning.  I guess it helps people get over the hump of the week.

            I also discovered that shorter promotions, 2 to 3 days, are more effective.  The intent is to get your book into the top list in your category and overall.  Though I didn’t reach number 1 or the top 100 overall, I got close to both, and would still have been visible when the book came out of being free.  Mainstream shoppers would have seen it suddenly appear high on the rankings in Amazon for sale at $2.99.  Instead, because the free promotion continued to go on, it slipped after reaching that top spot until it tumbled back down to the 600s.  That’s still pretty good, especially compared to where it had been, but it’s less impressive.  I discovered through this that it’s best to have your book launch to the top through an efficient and compressed promotion, then pull it out of the promotion so everyone else can see it.  If it doesn’t work, you still have a couple days left on your KDP Select free promo days to try again.

            What I was surprised to see were the other books that were in the category lists with me.  Both historic fiction and literary fiction were mostly romance novels.  The historic fiction ones tended to be geared for older women, and the covers had an upper class woman in fancy clothes standing in a romantic field near an upper class European home.  Often a man was there with his shirt unbuttoned and muscles rippling underneath.  (His face was often unseen.)  The covers implied some connection between the woman and this wealthy, mysterious stranger, and the titles confirmed it.  At the end of my run, the book that was in the number one spot was titled A Daughter’s Inheritance.

The literary fiction ones were the opposite end of the spectrum.  Women wore ripped clothes, or clothes that were too big as they seemed to be falling off, and a bad boy with torn blue jeans and no shirt or a tank top, again with rippling muscles and no face, stood nearby.  Their titles implied what the covers were implying, the women were winning over the bad boys.  The book that bumped The American Game from number 2 was entitled These Hoes Ain’t Loyal.

I don’t know what to make of this, except that I’m concerned for the independent book world if these are what hold the top spots most of the time.  Almost all the rest of the books that shared the top 25 were classics from mainstream publishers.  It’s disheartening both in regards for independent publishing, and feminism.

There was one other element though that seemed to put books in the top list; one which I will exploit on my next attempt.  The top books tended to be parts of series.  This meant readers were following these books, and the author was served in that readers were downloading an earlier book for free, then purchasing the sequels if they moved on.

So that’s what I will be doing with Relic Worlds.

KDP Select Free Promo Blog Entries

I promised to write about my experience with the KDP Select program as I did it, but, as often happens, I wound up being so busy doing it that I didn’t have time to write about it. I’m glad I did, as I feel that I stretched as far as I could with the information I had, and if I had taken time to write about it, I wouldn’t have done everything I hoped.

I’m now going to write about each part of the KDP Select free promotion as a separate blog entry.  The first one will be about selecting and preparing for the days of the promotion.  Each subsequent entry will then be about the promotion itself.  I’ll put the first few up today, then the rest will go up after the promotion is over.

In the meantime, the promotion itself is still going on through the weekend, and my book The American Game is available for free on Amazon at:  http://www.amazon.com/American-Game-Jeff-McArthur-ebook/dp/B00LJII7GG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1435946633