The very, very end of the series. What kind of trouble will a dragon and an assassin get into this time?
Dragon Assassin Volume 5
Coming May 1st. The omnibus of episodes 11 & 12.
Dragon Assassin #12
Dragon Assassin #12 is coming May 1st
Dragon Assassin # 11
Coming May 1st! The penultimate episode in the Dragon Assassin series.
Aiming For the USA Today Bestselling Stars...
A recent marketing goal of mine was to launch my Amber Fang books onto the USA Bestseller List. It’s perhaps surprising how easy it is (um, until you try it). In order to hit that list, a book has to sell in the vicinity of 6000 copies on three different vendors in the US in the space of a week (in my case the vendors were Amazon, B&N & Apple Books). My reason for aiming for this “feather” in my cap was to get a bit more buzz about the book. And, quite frankly, I was just curious what it would take to get onto that list.
I blustered full steam ahead, full of confidence!
I’ve read the accounts of several authors about how they hit the list—one of the best is by Nicholas Serik: Bestseller Mini Guide (sign up to his newsletter for more advertising tips).
The very basic method is to stack newsletter ads (that is have them run on the same day), run Facebook, Bookbub, and Amazon ads during that week, let folks on your newsletter know, and cross promote with other writers. Oh, and one more big thing, you need to get a featured deal with Bookbub (it's the Olympic Gold Medal of book promo). You pay for that honour, but Bookbub is such a large newsletter with so many readers that you are almost guaranteed to earn your money back.
I submitted The Amber Fang Boxed set to Bookbub, promising to drop the price to 99c during the sale week (it’s normally $8.99 for all three books). And it was accepted! They at first put the featured deal on a Saturday, which meant the promo wouldn’t benefit from the long tail of sales (Since USA Today measure from Monday to Sunday) so I asked them to move it to a date earlier in the week. And they moved it to a Tuesday, which was very helpful. They placed it in the Supernatural Suspense category, which goes out to 1.2 million people. Their chart said, on average, this promo would account for 1700 sales.
Being in supernatural suspense was perhaps the best fit for this series. That said, it is an odd trilogy—a mixture of spies, assassins, vampires, and more scientific than supernatural (vampires in this world evolved alongside us—so no one is turning into a bat in this book). So it’s a hard series to classify. More on that later.
I also applied for a grant to help offset the costs of this promotion. I live in Saskatchewan (it’s a prairie province in Canada) and we have a government agency called Creative Saskatchewan. Their motto is Create Export Succeed. If you are a Saskatchewan artist, writer, publisher, filmmaker, singer etc. this organization helps you get your product out to the world. I sent in a proposal and the jury awarded my project a grant that would pay half the expenses. This was both timely and particularly helpful because the grant meant that I could push the promotion further than my budget would have allowed on its own.
This was my budget (this is in Canadian dollars, so if you’re in the US don’t freak out! Just subtract about 25%). I believed this would be enough $ to reach the USA Today Bestseller list.
I followed the pattern of stacking ads leading up to the Bookbub Featured Deal. Amazon ads were hard to get going (they really don’t work well for big promotions) and Facebook, as per usual started costing more per click each day as it burned through the audience. There must be a magical meta world where Cost Per Click stays low forever, right?
Alas, not in this world.
Here are a few of the ads:
This was the most popular one. The “Buffy” quote really caught people’s attention. And the quote combined with the sell line, I think gave new readers a good idea of the contents of the book. And, judging by comments on the ads, only a few were readers who'd seen my work.
And that’s about it. Oh, except for the conclusions:
The Good News:
Bookbub was right when it predicted 1700 sales! The book sold 1421 copies on the day the Bookbub Feature Deal came out. I’m sure the long tail has added several hundred after that so it would be well over the average amount. Promo that day shot the book all the way up to #46 on Amazon, which is the highest point any of my books have been on that store. Amber also clawed her way to #14 on B&N and to the top 100 on Apple Books. Oh, here, why don’t I just show you too many screen shots of the successes:
Overall, in all markets, the book sold 5785 copies. I really wish every week could be like that. I’d be living in a Scottish castle. Of course, I’d move it to the Caribbean.
The Bad News:
I’ll cut to the chase. The book didn’t make the USA Today Bestseller list. Alas! And darn! And maybe a few of those other words my dad taught me (I call them tractor fixin’ words). During the sale week it sold 3757 copies on Amazon, 253 on Apple and 264 on B&N. That’s 4274 copies and short of what was needed. By about Thursday of the sale week, it was clear that it might not make the numbers needed and I decided at that point not to press down on the gas, as far as spending. Or pour on the gas, either. I did go over budget on Facebook ads (it’s too easy to do that!). Am I disappointed? Yes. It’s like mentally stubbing your toe. Or your ego. And I’m now hoping the long tail will keep the book selling.
The Conclusion:
Why didn’t it sell more? One reason is that many of my readers in Amazon read my Dragon Assassin series and aren’t interested in vampires. So if Amazon sent them an email about this book, they’d look at the cover and see an assassin, but no dragon. No thanks. Readers don’t tend to follow authors on Amazon as much as they follow genres. And I also didn’t do any author swaps, which was intentional because most of the authors I have connections with now are doing dragon stories. And a third reason is that the book might exist in too many genres. It makes the book great fun! But, again, readers who expect Twilight won’t like this book. Or even readers looking for supernatural Urban Fantasy, won’t find the supernatural in this book. That said, the readers who love it really love it. And the readers who meh! it, really meh it!
There are always meh sayers.
Would I do it all again? Of course. Not with this book because a second push would give diminishing returns (then again, never say never). But someday, I’ll try again.
Cheers,
Art
How Self Publishing Saved My Bacon in 2020 OR How I Spent $11,000 in Ads in One Month And Didn’t Have a Heart Attack OR How I Kept Writing This Blog Title Until The Universe Faded into…
This is either a nervous writer…or someone scored a touchdown.
Okay. Let’s start with the big one. Yep, back in February of this year of woe (2020) I spent $11,153.98 US in advertising (mostly for my Dragon Assassin series) but earned back $15,340 for a profit of $3341.88 US. Those are all insane numbers, especially the first one, so let me explain how I got into this.
I started self publishing my out of print books back in 2011 and I have also experimented with self publishing my Amber Fang series and have made a few thousand dollars each year in extra income. I’ve taken several courses on advertising (Self Publishing Formula Advertising Course being one of them) and read far too many books on marketing (David Gaughran being a favourite). About two years ago I noticed that there were several people doing well on Amazon with “dragon rider” books, that is books for YA that feature characters riding dragons. I had been writing more fantasy, so I wrote a series called Dragon Assassin. Scholastic Books has the rights in Canada, but I self publish the ebooks in the US, UK, Germany, Australia and NZ on Amazon. I am what they call a hybrid writer.
Hybrid always makes me picture a writer with feathery wings and a long scaly tail. But I digress.
You could add wings to this author if you want. That would make him a hybrid. Also, which Macbook is he using?
In 2019 I first released the ebooks as episodes (about 100 page stories). People will buy them outright or use their Kindle Unlimited account to read them and I get paid for the page reads. They were well received and earned back the invested money and a tidy profit. This is what the whole episodic series looks like:
Each episode had its own cover. Click the images to see what they look like on Amazon.
Every three episodes can be combined into a traditional novel. So this year I released them as “omnibuses”—and this lead to a much higher reach in audience. This is what they look like in that format:
Look upon these omnibi and despair. Sorry, I do like that Ozymandius poem.
I was still finishing writing the series (last one came out last week!). But the release schedule for these omnibuses started in February. That’s why I spent that crazy amount on ads: to get the books as high in the charts as possible (I used Facebook for 80% of the ads and Amazon Ads and Bookbub ads and various newsletters like Bargain Booksy for the rest). The only reason I felt comfortable spending that money was that I used Readerlinks, which tracks sales and income. And so I knew every day I was making a profit and could pay off the debt two months later when Amazon paid me (okay, I make it sound like I wasn’t sweating that whole time, juggling money around—I was).
Normally, I wouldn’t give exact numbers (and I won’t for the whole year). But this does give you a clear idea of how expensive that month was. And shows how it can be sometimes misleading when we only hear the amount an author makes in a month (without seeing the expenses). All of these graphs are from Readerlinks.
And this graph will give you a good idea of where all that advertising $ went.
I don’t know if the big splurge was worth it. The books hit #1 in various fantasy categories and started getting positive reviews. People with more advertising finesse than me probably could have accomplished the same result with less, but as long as I was making a profit, I kept charging ahead. I call it my “Cannon Fodder” advertising method. Each month I cut back on the spend, but continued to make around $US 3K profit. So that this last month my spend was only $780.00.
The series itself has sold the equivalent of 55,605 novels. I say equivalent because I am dividing the page reads on Kindle Unlimited into the pages of each novel (again Readerlinks does most of this addition for me). So the 9 Million or so page reads turns into about 30,000 books. And the other 25,000 or so is the “book” sales.
My next step, which is to promote the super omnibus (it’s already out) which gathers together the first 8 episodes of the series. I feel confident that it will do well in the new year once I give it a good push and that it will lead readers to the last collection in the series (that has episodes 9&10).
The first 8 episodes in one big omnibus stuffed with snark and dragons…
The biggest lesson for me is how marketing is quite a bit easier when you hit the right niche. My steampunk series, Mission Clockwork, did well, but anytime I tried to ramp up the spend to get more sales I ran out of people to market to. My Amber Fang books also sold well, but they didn’t hit the niche perfectly because they were more spy novels than vampire books. Whereas, with the “Dragon Rider” niche, there is almost always a profitable return on investment. Eventually I will run out of audience.
I have also learned that a niche really is a niche. My other books (steampunk and vampires, respectively) and even my fantasy novel, Crimson, didn’t get a huge burst in sales from the success of Dragon Assassin. These books didn’t have dragon riders on the front, so they weren’t of interest to my new readers.
The majority of these readers, judging by the all seeing eye of Facebook Ads, were ages 40+ with a good portion being in their 70s and at least 60% were female. I find that really interesting since these are older middle grade/younger YA novels. That means I haven’t even touched the “intended” market for these books. A traditional publisher in the US could publish them and find the younger audience much more easily that I could (since I’m marketing to people with credit cards).
This is a very happy dragon. He’s a bestseller.
Finally, this success came at the perfect time. This year nearly all of my school readings were cancelled and my traditional book sales in bookstores vanished. Plus, contracts I had with publishers were delayed while they waited to see which way coronavirus would shake the market. It would have been a very worrisome year without these developments. So I am thankful that the right things happened at the right time.
Now this “dragon” experiment is mostly done. Which means I’ll have to write something else, I guess. : )
If you have any questions, feel free to write them in the funny question boxes below.
Art