How to attract readers

[AnnGirdharry]

hello,

I've been writing short stories for several years and only recently decided to self-publish some of them. This was a deliberate decision and I did it to try to build an ebook readership before I publish my first full-length novel.

After researching the issue with ebook bloggers and marketing gurus and such-like, it seemed that a freebie or a very low-cost offering is a necessity for any new writer publishing their work for the first time on-line.

People told me there is so much free reading out there and readers are not going to try a new writer unless that writer has been recommended or unless the investment of time or money is low for the writer's first work.

This suggests that not only a low cost book is needed but a short one too?

I am glad to see this seems to fit in with Rev Bob's comments and experience as he's detailed above.

Chance, luck, skill, timing, patience, persistence- all seem to be factors at play for a new author?
Any comments?

regards,
Ann Girdharry

[gmw]

Originally Posted by AnnGirdharry

[...]
This suggests that not only a low cost book is needed but a short one too?

I am glad to see this seems to fit in with Rev Bob's comments and experience as he's detailed above.

Chance, luck, skill, timing, patience, persistence- all seem to be factors at play for a new author?
Any comments?

regards,
Ann Girdharry

Yes, short seems to be a good idea (says the man whose first published book was 140k words ). Low cost, or free, seems the only way to attract many readers to take that first look. While I said previously that downloads do not equate to reading, I do suspect that free combined with short encourages more people to actually try it out. However, so far, readers of my free short stories have not translated to sales of the novels (despite good, albeit very few, reviews of both - I think people, fairly naturally, find any book with just a few five star reviews a bit suspicious).

I was going to suggest that Rev. Bob might be over-thinking things with the pricing strategy. I think that presentation and exposure are more important than price (at typical Indie prices), especially with a new release. If you want to see people actually reading your work then you need to find ways to try and make sure they know about it - which means doing more than I have ever done in terms of marketing.

Chance plays an large part. For example: my experience so far has been that people are generally kind, they leave good reviews rather than bad. (I'm fairly sure not everyone that has read what I've written can think as kindly of it as the reviews would suggest - the world doesn't work like that - but the ones that have left reviews have been kind.) But there are people, as I've seen elsewhere, that appear to delight in being critical. Get a few of those pick up your work and the impression that shows on your book's page may be much less attractive. It's one reason why editing and so on can be so important - you want to try and ensure that they worst they can say is that they didn't like it.

But I still fall back to the idea that you should not get hung up about marketing for your first publication - unless you expect it to be your last. I'm quite sure I'm not the only reader out there that will pretty much ignore a new writer with only one or two works on the table; if I find someone I like, I want to know there is more to be had.

Which brings us to patience and persistence. Keep writing (if that's what you want to do) and keep publishing (if you think the result is good enough), and the eventually you might find success (in terms of sales and/or recognition). The important thing, for me at least, is that I've enjoyed what I am doing - that way any success that might eventually arrive becomes a bonus rather than an expectation.

[Rev. Bob]

One thought on length: make sure people know what they're getting!

Amazon's good about showing buyers the estimated page count for a book, but other retailers... not so much. Nobody wants to spend three bucks on something described as a "book" that turns out to be a short story of a few thousand words. Likewise, half a dozen shorts totaling less than a hundred pages do not constitute a "box set"! On the other hand, someone who just wants a quick read may be unhappy to find out that he's picked up a 600-page opus. Indie prices are all over the map; a 99-cent ebook might be anything from a single short story to a first novel to a bulky anthology. Nobody wants to guess about what they're getting.

Misleading your readers that way, either deliberately or by accident, is a good way to earn low ratings. Save everybody the trouble and put a line in your blurb about the length. You don't even have to get very specific; just calling it a "short" versus a "novel" or "novella" gets the idea across, and something like "this 7000-word short story" is easy to work into a blurb.

[Cinisajoy]

Agreeing with Rev. Bob. Do not mislead your potential readers.
The thing about finding critics is make sure they read in your genre.
I once wrote a review in which someone commented I was being an "overly-critical critic".
Well if you write a biography and have represented yourself to the subject as a professional author, I expect you to present a professional book and not have a glaring error.

[Nancy Fulda]

I still think the best way to attract readers is to write stuff so awesome that people just have to tell their friends about it.

[AnnGirdharry]

Save everybody the trouble and put a line in your blurb about the length

Wise words, Rev Bob.
I didn't know that some retailers don't flag up page length as clearly as Amazon. Are you thinking of any in particular?

On another forum I read a rant from a reader about how they bought a Kindle Single and felt cheated by the length (weird because the Single concept is explained but there you go ....)

I know that by including the word count in the blurb, I've had my Tales of the Unexpected series picked up by readers who like to read shorts during their commute.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by AnnGirdharry

I didn't know that some retailers don't flag up page length as clearly as Amazon. Are you thinking of any in particular?

Kobo doesn't indicate length at all, or at least not that I've ever seen. Google Play lists number of pages, but they also generate their own weird page maps, so I don't know how true those are for indie works. Smashwords records word count, but doesn't even try to translate that to pages. B&N and Books-A-Million only show page counts for print books; for ebooks, B&N shows download size in megabytes, and BAM shows nothing. I'm not sure what other places (like iBooks) do.

So, yeah - if you want people to know how long your story is, make sure it's in the blurb. Don't assume the e-tailer is going to do any analysis whatsoever.