Secrets of Indie Success

[davidwfleming]

I've been checking out the Creative Penn Podcasts at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/ (actually, I downloaded off of iTunes) and there's a decent amount of valuable insight and experience to be heard. One of the guests mentioned the value of building a mailing list in indie ebook success. This was at least the second time I'd heard this.

Now I have had a "Newsletter" tab on my blog for several months with no real takers and then it occurred to me that I have to make a value-proposition to the page viewer. So I've since changed the tab to "Coupon Code" and am offering people who sign up for my list 50% off my novel.

Does anyone out there have any experience in generating a mailing list, successfully or otherwise?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by davidwfleming

Does anyone out there have any experience in generating a mailing list, successfully or otherwise?

When I was doing all of my selling through my site, I saved every sale's email address and created an email newsletter for those people. It was a great way to alert those people to new books and other goings-on. As long as your numbers are less than a few hundred, it's manageable (I usually sent the mails in 2-3 batches at a time).

Unfortunately, I now sell my books through other sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, etc, and I can't get access to my customer list. This is why I've been fazing out my regular newsletter, and in my last one I'll be asking customers to subscribe to my Tech Catcher blog or like my Facebook page, for future correspondence.

[davidwfleming]

So, if I'm hearing you right: selling ebooks through your site was a good way to develop a mailing list but now with the dominance of Amazon it's harder to get access to new customer data. Solution...? Like I mentioned, I'm trying the coupon code approach to get people to sign up but there's no rule that says you can have just one newsletter tab on your blog. I may try another tab of "free ebook" or "free short story" were I also try to get people to sign up.

As an aside, I have an audiobook available through CD Baby and they are very good about providing customer email addresses. They just ask that you give customers a one-time opportunity to opt-in to mailing lists.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by davidwfleming

So, if I'm hearing you right: selling ebooks through your site was a good way to develop a mailing list but now with the dominance of Amazon it's harder to get access to new customer data. Solution...?

The best solution I have is to edit either your book descriptions, or your author descriptions (or both) on sites like Amazon, and add links to your blogs and other social media sites with urgings to subscribe to keep up with the author's goings-on. This phases out the newsletter in favor of the blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you use.

Not a bad idea to add pages to the blog just for freebies... why not?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

The best solution I have is to edit either your book descriptions, or your author descriptions (or both) on sites like Amazon, and add links to your blogs and other social media sites with urgings to subscribe to keep up with the author's goings-on. This phases out the newsletter in favor of the blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you use.

Not a bad idea to add pages to the blog just for freebies... why not?

Yep, put the contact information both in the books and in the author bios/information on the sites where it is being sold and provide an incentive for them to contact you and sign up ... such as a free books or connected story or ....

[davidwfleming]

I heard a good tip on the Creative Penn podcast that authors seeking reviews from popular blogs should take some time to format their emails like advertizements, complete with inserted book cover images, taglines, smartlinks, the works. So as to rise above the competition.

I think it's good to spend some time crafting one of these and use it as your template. So that's my tip for the day. I'm curious to hear any other tips on getting:

Reviews
Subscribers
Blog Pageviews
Links
Social Proof (engagement) on blogs and forums
...Customers

Lets get some discussion going!

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by davidwfleming

I heard a good tip on the Creative Penn podcast that authors seeking reviews from popular blogs should take some time to format their emails like advertizements, complete with inserted book cover images, taglines, smartlinks, the works. So as to rise above the competition.

So... they want us to make our emails look like overdone spam? Great. What's next... singing telegram MP3s? I'm not sure that presenting myself like a cheap carnival huckster is going to support the image of a serious SF writer...

(sung to the tune of "We're In The Money")
(tap-tappity-tap!) I am an author...
(tappy-tappy-tap!) I am an author...
(ta-tap-tappity-tap!) I'm great and you guys should review my bitchin' books! (ta-tappity-tappity-tappity-tap!) Yeah!

Um, so I've got this story about n-dimensional physics...

[Crossroad Press]

Can't agree more that it's important to build the mailing list. Even if the people who buy directly from us choose to buy at Amazon, or B&N it allows us to send notices of new books and products, and to keep building on what success we've had.

I wanted to mention a new service that approached me - it seems to have promise. You can use this to host readings, virtual "events" etc. You can have 20 people in the room with you and with a "hand-raising" sort of technology you discuss one on one with the host. You can have a number of rooms, all who see the same reader/host and interact with him / her so you could do a rather large online reading or q/a through these guys. It's called SHINDIG and (you guessed it) they are at Shindig.com ... I'm going to give it a try soon.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Crossroad Press

Can't agree more that it's important to build the mailing list. Even if the people who buy directly from us choose to buy at Amazon, or B&N it allows us to send notices of new books and products, and to keep building on what success we've had.

I wanted to mention a new service that approached me - it seems to have promise. You can use this to host readings, virtual "events" etc. You can have 20 people in the room with you and with a "hand-raising" sort of technology you discuss one on one with the host. You can have a number of rooms, all who see the same reader/host and interact with him / her so you could do a rather large online reading or q/a through these guys. It's called SHINDIG and (you guessed it) they are at Shindig.com ... I'm going to give it a try soon.

Very interesting! Thank you! And do let us know if you schedule something!

[kennyc]

The New Business Model of Book Publishing
Posted: 04/16/2012 11:21 am by Jim Kukral

I've written previously about how Amazon's Kindle and their KDP Select program is bringing new writers to the book publishing world, bypassing traditional publishers. But sometimes, established writers are finding a new voice there too.

Randy Cassingham is one of the first online publishers: his This is True column went online in 1994. It's his full-time gig: over the years, it has brought him several million dollars in income, and he lives on 45 acres in western Colorado, where he looks at gorgeous snow-covered mountains from his home office.

"TRUE" (as Cassingham calls it) is biting social commentary, using weird news as its vehicle. It's funny and has a loyal following: thousands pay $24/year to get the full column by e-mail each week. Tens of thousands get a free sampler. It might be the first example of an online "fremium" business model. In the early years, he turned down two unsolicited syndication deals to bring the column to newspapers -- turning them down because he didn't want to give up control of his work, he says.

Good move: now he's compiling his archives into Kindle books, where he can get a 70% royalty on sales, rather than the 12.5% that Dutton (part of the Penguin Group) pays him when it turned another of his websites into a book.

And it's working: Cassingham told me that in the first two weeks of Kindle book sales, the five volumes he has posted so far earned more than $1,400 in royalties from Amazon. "I'm boggled," he told me by e-mail. "Imagine if I actually concentrated on this income pillar. Or had more than five books available. Or I sent one or more titles out for review somewhere, or advertised, or did ANY kind of promotion to anyone other than my existing readers!"

Imagine indeed!

Then he realized that a throw-away human interest feature he includes in This is True, the "Honorary Unsubscribe" of someone who died in the previous week, could also be good book material.

"These are the people you wish you had known," he says. "Take the inventors I've featured. Did you know the same guy invented both the computer hard drive and the video cassette? What a fascinating guy!" He has also featured the inventors of the contact lens, the hovercraft, the Hawaiian shirt, even the guy who thought of putting a peanut inside an M&M. Then, he says, getting excited as he looks through his archive, "there are the medical researchers, responsible for saving thousands, even millions of lives, spectacular entertainers that died virtually forgotten, and..." Just as he says: the kind of people you wish you had known.

That book just came out on Amazon's Kindle this week, and it's the first of several in that series. Cassingham told me that "I'm glad I have a block of 100 ISBNs" -- International Standard Book Numbers, which are used to identify books for retailers, including Amazon -- "I'm going to need them."

....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-ku...b_1428197.html

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I sprinkled a few excerpt posts amongst various Facebook sites this weekend, to see if it gets me a bump in sales. Thing is, though, I've done this before, and it's given basically zero results. We'll see if anything develops this time.

[kennyc]

Please let us know.

I posted a note on Goodreads over the weekend and got a good review of my poetry collection. Of course it has three strikes against it from the beginning....it's poetry....it's by an unknown author...and it's not free.

[davidwfleming]

I did a double post on Sunday on my blog (two very short satire pieces) and got a personal best number of pageviews (179). Most of these came from Stumbleupon users.

I'm not sure what kind of numbers other writers are getting with their blogs but I was happy to see this result.

In the past I've been able to get over 100-pageview days but that required almost a days worth of effort, commenting and liking other blog posts.

It really can be a struggle to get noticed.

I also did some SEO work on my blog and created a sidelink for my book. I entered in various testimonials for my audiobook and lengthened the description.

It's occurred to me recently that since SEO is 'keywords, keywords, keywords' that landing pages should have an appreciable amount of text to warrant the attention of search engines and websurfers. Also, I think it's beneficial to have multiple calls to action and multiple selling points on a landing page.

All this is probably old hat and to be expected by most using the web, but I still have to learn it all as if from scratch.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by davidwfleming

I'm not sure what kind of numbers other writers are getting with their blogs but I was happy to see this result.

My numbers are pathetic... always have been. Clearly the few people who know of my sites can't be bothered to share them. I'm a voice in a vacuum.

[davidwfleming]

Steven,

Are you on Twitter? I can't find a way to follow you on Twitter on your blog.
I use a Twitter widget to post my latest tweets on my blog and also list my handle on Goodreads and in my about section.

Now I don't actually have all the answers or secrets of this but my best guess is the best way to get more numbers is to raise one's profile online. This means a whole lot of Goodreads friends, twitter followers, facebook likes etcetera. The payoff for doing this is that it can help you be found by other authors who will help to promote you.

Also the best way to raise you blog numbers is to like and comment on other blogs. This will get you comments, which is a formal of social proof. This is the foundation for my blog engagement.

Also, I'd suggest making a stumbleupon account and stumbling all your favorite blog posts.