ROBUST discussion

At one point, in a thread far far away, Andre suggested I do a Kindle Board promotion since I gained a lovely dry spot in sales on Amazon.

I did so. For 4 weeks, then let the threads die.

With those results, I went ahead and made Passion of the Different free through price matching on Amazon. They caught it with one little 'report a lower price' thingy from me. Quick and easy. Somebody at Amazon ate their Wheaties that morning.

Results:

Kindleboards Promotion earned me Two sales. One for Passion of the Different, another for Defenders of Valinthia.

Setting the first book free, the stats jumped. 709 downloads, the 'other' books sold 10 copies.

Kindleboards @ 1 month... blargh, something went wrong I suppose.

Free First Novel @ 2 weeks, sales improve.

Passion of the Different jumps betweem 1K to 3K in free rankings, and between 35 to 90 in it's catagory for best seller rankings. So at least I'm hovering in the top 100 some, for Romance: Fantasy, Futuristic and Ghost.

http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Differe...

Interestingly, over at Smashwords... sales are up higher than expected. It's no breakout moment, but better than nothing.

In case I haven't said it lately... love you guys. Like brothers and sisters. So if you tell me that sacrificing a black chicken in front of a Barnes and Noble will help, I might end up in the media as the animal killing nutcase. LOL.

That chicken idea might give you a significant boost, but I doubt they'll let you check your stats from prison, so you'll never know for sure. Better just keep doing what you're doing.

Today I've been mulling over this advice found on The Passive Voice blog:

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/09/201...

It's making me think about giving up my one promotional activity (except for freebies) because I don't have it in me to do conversations on Twitter, and I know that my tweets are looking exactly like spam. At least I don't spam via DMs. I'm close to closing down the Twitter account and just relying on KDP Select promotions.

It's funny you mention that Patricia. I've never done a Twitter conversation either. My own Tweets are just blog updates, mostly. I've been debating over the last few weeks if I should just close my Twitter account, so your comment stood out in my mind.

I'm checking out that link. Thanks for sharing. ^_^

I'm having two conversations on Twitter right at this moment - one on the language of music and one on how many bugs you can pick up in a hospital waiting room over 3 hours.

But then, I'm a little mad.

Daniel, I decided to dump my author account. Did it yesterday. Twitter apparently keeps the account intact for three months to give people a chance to change their mind and re-register. I doubt I'll change my mind.

I have another account in a fake name where I do carry on some conversations and Tweet about non-book things, but I don't use the account very often. I'll keep that one.

Katie, sounds like you're one of the authors who do Twitter the right way.

I've had good results with 'Swallow the Moon' as a free e-book.

Twitter - I want out of Twitter. I don't use it as a social media - I just spam with it.

Well, I'm sticking to Twitter for the time being. But Dakota had a complaint from a fan about the mechanics of it, where apparently tweets sent automatically from Twitter to Facebook cannot be shared onward. So one has to keep up both Twitter and Facebook, which is a nuisance.

I'm concerned that you people get these bees in your bonnets and go running hither and thither, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is absolutely no evidence that Twitter doesn't work for this or that.

For instance, if it is as negative as is said to push books on it too blatantly, fine, then don't even mention the title, just say something interesting and link the books, perpaps even indirectly through a blog.

But just to chuck Twitter because you got up feeling down this morning is shortsighted.

Daniel, I'm sorry KB hasn't worked out for you yet, but you're making a common mistake of expecting a direct, short-order link between promotional effort and sales. That sort of approach works for newspaper advertising for mailorder merchants, who can tie the sales directly to the ad. It doesn't work for much else.

My KB page for Stieg Larsson Man, Myth & Mistress has been seen over 4000 times by readers who by the funnelling effect of the entire board are guaranteed, proven, habitual book buyers. I use the page http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php... as a showcase to direct visitors to from Twitter and Facebook, rather than directly to Amazon (every photo and every link on the page goes either to Amazon or to the CoolMain Press pages for the book).

Dakota for a single series has three pages. The first is less than a year old and has been seen over 2000 times by these selected book buyers.

It takes some work to keep up these pages, but I've found that a few minutes once a month in the public fora keeps me in the readers' minds. There is ample evidence that the readers also cruise the fora supposedly only for writers, in particular the thread on bestsellers, and people who write interesting blogs. (I've had quite a few posts asking me why my blog isn't daily, to which I answer honestly that there is only 24 hours in the day and my blog is esssentially a writer's development tool rather than a sales tool),

I've been on KB a bit over a year, and I'm very impressed. Recently, for instance, they change the charter, the TOS, to my suggested wording because I didn't like the loose way it was drafted. What more can you ask than a pinpointed market, a showcase as elegant or blunt as your HTML skills allow, and a very agreeable management.

But to make a direct connection between x sales and y effort on KB. Man, I was once paid seven figures in base salary (and several times that in stock options and bonuses and benefits like a plane which I used to go to the opera on the other side of the world) for my felicity in making the figures sound like whatever the devil my clients or board wanted them to sound like, but even my statistically very flexible tongue boggles at the very idea of a direct link in any shortish period.

I'd suggest you give KB a little time every week, and keep it up for a year, and then shut down activity and see if it affects sales.

KB will get you a huge amount of hits per page. The average person has to see a book name a dozen times before it sticks - so a bump once a week will help.

Besides that - occasionally you get to see Andre get into a dust-up. (snicker)

Speaking of Stats - I posted my 6 month sales by vendor to my blog http://jordanscroft.blogspot.com

That's impressive, Kat, but how many of those are paid sales, and how many Select freebies.

I don't get into "dustups" KB. The mods rush in while I'm still smiling. You haven't ever seen me in a serious argument. On KB I just flick off attempts to involve me with the contempt such kiddie-korner polemics deserve.

The majority are freebies, there were only a couple hundred sales. Still, it beat the heck out of last year.

I know there were 12k downloads in 2 days in June.

We haven't seen 6k days at CoolMain for quite a while now... That's excellent, Kat.

Most impressive, Kat.

Andre, I didn't wake up in a down mood and decide to dump my Twitter account. For some time now I've been using that account to push various books, but my followers were primarily (perhaps all) writers doing the same thing. We all knew about each other, so it wasn't like our tweets were introducing any of us to something we didn't already know.

Saying something about anything but the book, and then providing a link to the book is still, after a certain point, spam, plain and simple. I'm weary of the whole thing and, really, was never all that much into it anyway. And I couldn't make myself get a Facebook page. I'm just not that social even when it's merely virtual.

However, there is an aspect of Twitter that I enjoy (which is why I kept my fake-name account). It's just the book-pushing aspect I'm not interested in. I follow three feeds daily by going directly to their Twitter pages, and I sometimes communicate with those tweeters.

And I come to Robust for the people, not the promotion. There's so much more here to enjoy.

Patricia wrote: "...And I come to Robust for the people, not the promotion. There's so much more here to enjoy."

Ditto me.

Thanks for the passive guy link, I don't avidly follow anyone and I missed that one. I too have been re-thinking my Twitter use. I was finding myself retweeting too many book promos, so I watch that I don't tweet more than once or twice a week for any one book (or author) and I also vary the time of day for those posts. For my own book I pretty much only tweet if there is news or to post a new blog.

But I think the jury is still out on whether Twitter or FB or even GR has any effect on sales, and besides I enjoy the information and interaction I find there. I was in on that conversation with Katie vis a vis the bugs in hospitals. I have had ongoing discussions with a few other sports fans on Twitter and met a few non-authors there. I have my private fave lists and check them every second day or so. I have said this before but though I have separated my FB personal and author sites, I have not done so on Twitter, nor do I intend to. Twitter is a really cool place to the insatiably curious soul that I am.

I actually came to this thread because I'd run across another interesting tweet (on the best way to tweet, lol) by chance from one of my followers: Here is the link, for what it is worth: http://www.juliesjournalonline.com/an...

Against Andre's advice I do not go on KB anymore, I just don't have the stomach for it. If I'm to have this job of promotion I must make it as pleasurable as possible or I will never do a good job...

Sharon is right, the promotion is really getting burdensome. It's a long time since I wrote anything new, and that is what I actually do, I'm a writer and editor, except I now do so much marketing, I have no time to write or edit, or even read. Wrong balance altogether.

Sharon, I have to admit that I'm tired of Writers' Cafe on the KB Boards. There is too much of a pack mentality and two authors in particular manage to annoy me every time I go there. I do still enjoy reading some of the other boards, though, especially if I can find a thread that has been started by a reader and isn't loosely veiled market research by a writer.

I know who you mean. One has to wonder when they ever write anything, the amount of time they spend posting platitudes to every single thread going, posturing as experts in everything.

It's not so much the experts who annoy me, Andre. It's the ones who delight in gossip and the ones who beg 'feel sorry for me, I've only sold 10000 this week' who get my goat.

Yeah - those 'poor, poor, pitiful me' types.

They sell the pants off me.

I hang out on The Passive Voice blog. Nice people low on ego, high on information.

They just all seemed to act as if they were in high school, never an intellectually stimulating convo (you know, like the ones we have here, kench) and God forbid if anyone suggested authors aught to take care with their writing/formatting/editing on Kindle.

True, there's all that, but I do my business there, and hang out where I feel at home, which is ROBUST. That the management is superior to some of the members isn't a good reason to give a place a miss. The same is true of Brooks Brothers and Neiman Marcus.

I just got kicked out of GR, not once but thrice, each time in the middle of a post. I know I should draft to Word first, but probably not gonna happen. Even with the kids back at school, GR has been 'over capacity' the past two days... grrrr...

Rant over...

I find it fascinating that KB works for you Andre. After a year and a half there, I was never able to do business with that lot. I suppose it speaks to my promotion skills, but it also speaks to my nature, not going to change that any time soon.

I wasn't comfortable with the way the KB site works (the technical side of it), so didn't stay long. Robust works much better for me and my inabilities.

I can't tell if KB ever helped my sales. But I met Andre there, and followed him here - which has been wonderful and fun.

I still bump my books from time to time. It never hurts to give a book a bump.

Andre must have been picking up women all over the net because I met him on the Indie Spot and followed him here.

Ha ha, I do remember that it was someone I enjoyed from KB who mentioned ROBUST. Can't remember who now but it was a guy and I do remember chuckling when a few months later he seemed to have disappeared.

It's my pheromones. They're so powerful, they work right across the Atlantic and a good chunk of the large North American continent as well.

I've become used to strange women kissing me and rubbing up against me at parties and even on the street. They don't mean anything by it; they just can't help themselves.

If I recall, I followed Andre here from KB.

I know when I'm active, I sell stuff. When I'm not, I don't. And most of my activity is just passive hanging out. Of course, these last couple of months, all my life transition stuff has driven my online presence into a bare minimum, which is a shame both in that there are a lot of interesting people I know online and that I have no media/marketing/whatever presence.

Sharon wrote: "I just got kicked out of GR, not once but thrice, each time in the middle of a post. I know I should draft to Word first, but probably not gonna happen. Even with the kids back at school, GR has been 'over capacity' the past two days... grrrr...

Today was the first day I didn't see that message myself, Sharon. I so feel your pain there!

Didn't mean to make such a dust-up, folks.

Andre, my decision to let the promotions die on KB after a month was all about metrics, bro. I measured two short-term promotions that used different tactics side by side. It already proved your statement, KB is a longer-term time investment than the free-book leading into a series thing. In December, when Heroes of Valinthia is released, I'll be doing a much longer, side by side promotion that's designed to last six months on KB. My old motto is..."If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

Because I had the near blank-slate in sales to begin with, I figured the numbers would be revealing. I didn't mean to implicate KB as a place to 'not' promote, just sharing stats. In no way am I discouraged about anything. I thought perhaps the sacrificing a black chicken joke was enough to color the post as light hearted. ^_^

As for Twitter, I primary wanted to use it to promote my blog, which in turn is about my books and the various stages I have fun with in writing them. According to analytics, the last 6 months out of the year, I have zeroes across the board for Twitter-Directed visits. Unique or not. Since my blog is pulling anywhere from 200 to 900 visits a month, an average of 40% being first time visitors, with nothing coming from Twitter in all that time... I am considering closing it. The original purpose isn't being served anymore by that tool.

If I'm ever in 'despair' over anything, I promise you'll all know it in a most mind-jarringly way. I start talking about the human id and the demons that roam our imaginations leaking out through the sub-conscious, or start references to Criminal Psychology 101 College manuals on how unjust a sane mind can be. Since I didn't commit to any such talk, I can promise with a large, happy smile, that I'm using the stats to formulate a strategy that works with KB, since the last tactic yielded such a percentage. Tweaking the business model isn't the same as throwing it away, I promise. :)

Now if only GR would have let me post this an hour after Andre's response like I wanted to... my apologies Andre. I didn't intend to boggle your statistically flexible tongue. It's my fault, really, because I don't post often enough to reveal my truly, twisted yet highly mobile mentality.

Just remember, I'm the guy who bakes sweet potato fries on the same pan as regular steak fries. In some third world countries, I think they hang people for that...

I didn't perceive any gulf here, Daniel. I just naturally write passionately. I'll look forward to the result of your test later this year.

Sure, Jeremy, but your 'hanging out' is well focused to attract likeminded posters to your Facebook page, for instance in the periods of history that you are interested in.

I hadn't thought of it that way, but true enough. :)

I've sold 3 books on Kobo, it's a record.

Andre Jute wrote: "Sure, Jeremy, but your 'hanging out' is well focused to attract likeminded posters to your Facebook page, for instance in the periods of history that you are interested in."

Someday when I can afford a PA, I will be better at that too...

Ha ha, another crossed post. That's a good start, Kat...

Daniel, your free sales stats are remarkable. I just came off a FREE KDP Select promo of my book (posted elsewhere in ROBUST) and my downloads were rather dismal.

You must be doing all the right things. Keep it up!
And please I beg you, keep that big wide smile on your face, my tender id cannot tolerate despair...

K.A. wrote: "I've sold 3 books on Kobo, it's a record."

It took me most of the year to just hit 18, so I know how you feel. ^_^

@Sharon Thanks for the kudos, and I'm sorry your Free KDP promotion didn't go so well. I won't lose my smile anytime soon, I promise. Your comment actually made my day. :)