ROBUST discussion

I have no idea whether Laura Landon is another refugee from trad publishing or a brandnew heroine of the indies, nor of whether she's a true romantic, as suggested by the covers in her sig, or another pornographer traveling under a false flag, but she's sold over 100,000 copies of her romances since February at 99c. That's enough to make a modest living when projected to a year. It's also proof one way or the other about the argument that keeps shooting up here about both 99c prices and the demand for true romance v the market for pornographers.

Found at http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php...

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I'm usually a lurker, but I'm so excited about the success I'm having being indie published I couldn't help but jump in here.
All three of my books sell for .99, and since February of 2011, I have sold over 100,000 ebooks. This is amazing to me.

A Matter of Choice
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #189 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#2 in Books > Romance > Regency
#5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Historical Romance
#5 in Books > Romance > Historical
8 wks as #1 or #2 Kindle Regency (Released June 30)
Hit 100 within 1st wk of its release
#1 after 17 days

Shattered Dreams
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #409 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#9 in Books > Romance > Regency
#20 in Books > Romance > Historical
#21 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Historical Romance

When Love Is Enough
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#25 in Books > Romance > Regency
#41 in Books > Romance > Historical
#46 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Historical Romance
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Well, they aren't clean. I went to a couple of romance review sites and a couple of her books are classified as steamy, but they don't seem to be erotica/romantica.

Her only publisher links lead to a place that kind of seems like a vanity publisher from what I can tell.

There's negative reviews mentioning editing (a couple of continuity errors and some comments about her prose) issues, so these don't seem to backlist titles from a big imprint.

So, this is kind of in-between I suppose. Not someone blowing everybody out of the water because she's clean, but neither is it erotica.

Thanks, J.A. 100,000 in sales in six months, even at 99c, sounds to me like she's building a reader base, and fast.

Mmm, my books have been higher in the rankings than those of Lisa Grace for several months, and nobody offered me a movie contract. Maybe there's not too much mileage for Steven Seagal in literary criticism.

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Angel in the Shadows, Book 1 by Lisa Grace
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,670 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#2 in Books > Teens > Horror
#75 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Occult

Angel in the Storm, Book 2
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,483 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#32 in Books > Teens > Horror

Not to mention the movie option contract for both, plus I have a major house (acquisition editors-2 of them-contaacted me and they are reviewing what to offer me for my series in October. Not bad for only being out as eBooks since May 23, 2011 & July 1st, 2011
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Regency Romances are hot sellers.

I'm glad for her. It sounds like she's got a good solid market going.

I've sampled the book and will take a look.

There is another book fairly high on the charts - 'Mill River Recluse' though I'm not sure who wrote it off hand.

It is a Dollar Dreadful - and a very good one, if you don't mind a very slow start. I started reading it at B&N yesterday as I was checking out the new mini-Nook.

The mini-Nook?

I WANT one!

I've never coveted a gadget like this.

It is SMALL and light. I can put it in my purse without breaking my shoulder.

I adore my Nook - and will have to find a good home for it. But I'm determined to replace it with a mini-Nook.

I'm off on another tear about pricing.

I'm watching a Rom Com author drop the prices of her books right down the tubes to FREE and she's squealing about it like a kid with a bug down her dress.

There has to be something wrong with my head.

All I see is how much money she's LOSING - she SAYS she's 'sold' 5k units in September.

I'm saying she LOST $10k in September.

Maybe it's because she has 5 books that she feels she can afford to make $1.5k instead of $10k.

But I think she's nuts.

Yes, I've toyed with different prices for the last year.

'Swallow the Moon' is free (with a coupon) for the re-launch and I've dropped the price from $4.99 to $3.99.

I've got cleaned up version of 'Impressive Bravado' going out free with an ISBN and the Smashwords Premium Catalog. With the blurbs for the other 2 books tucked into the end.

That worked for me last year - a single freebie with links to 'the good e-books'. I'm even hoping that Amazon picks up the price difference.

But if I make 'Swallow the Moon' a Dollar Dreadful, y'all can beat me with a stick.

Coupla points, Kat. The romcom bat with the bee down her dress is getting 5000 name recognitions, maybe more. That whole John Locke deal, out of which for several years worth of work he got very little money until right at the end when he made his million out of a totally unrelated book, and then cut a tradpubdeal, was about name recognition. Learn the words "name recognition" off by heart, until you mumble them in your sleep.

We share you pride in SWALLOW THE MOON. But you don't price books according to their cost unless you deliberately want to limit their market. You price according to what the market will bear within your marketing strategy. A marketing strategy for StM with some credibility would be to make it free for a week (or have a giveaway on Librarything), then 99c until the end of October or a week into November to start some word of mouth, then put it back up to $2.99 or $4.99 or whatever for Christmas.

I'll have to think about that.

I've been hoping that one of the major Indie reviewers will get around to reading it. The book is in the hands of 10 review sites.

There is no sense advertising a book to other writers. It has to go out to readers.

I thought about it.

If it was anyone else, I'd dig in my heels like a calf-roping horse.

However, you've yet to steer me wrong. LOL

So STM is $.99 on B&N - which will eventually put it on sale elsewhere, until Nov 1.

It's not working.

No sales on B&N and only 2 sales on Amazon.

Better luck next month, I guess.

I'm sorry to hear that, Kat.

One more thing you can try, and that's a giveaway on Librarything. That's gotten Andrew McCoy's THE MEYERSCO HELIX a review already, though no great sales, yet.

And you must decide which of your books will be the introductory offer at 99c at Christmas and which the pricier version and arrange it in good time for the price to be posted everywhere.

What I'd like to know with these people who sell thousands is - how much paid advertising have they done and where? There seems to be the idea that once you hit the top 100 in a category, your sales will take off, (though I hit #6 in Christian Fantasy in the UK in July and it did me no good whatsoever).

Has anyone tried a Goodreads ad? Is that worth the money?

I ran ads on Huffington Post. Total waste of money.

I've got a banner ad on Nookboards that gets 300 impressions for 2 or 3 hits a week. Not sales, hits.

The ones that seem to do the best are Daily kindle Reads and Kindleboards. But that is a 6 month to a year wait.

Katie wrote: "There seems to be the idea that once you hit the top 100 in a category, your sales take off."

No relation, sorry. Iditarod, in the top ten in both the major English speaking markets in several categories for nearly a year now, often at No 1, miserable sales through the summer. It just happens to be in categories that favours novels with low sales. Larsson, in the top ten (hardly ever lower than no 3) in both markets for the same time, but in the literary criticism category, outsells Iditarod by about 150:1. In the winter months Iditarod sold more respectably; whether it will pull back up towards Christmas and the race next March is an open question.

Those rankings are subject to too many variables to conclude anything useful.

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On advertising, one fellow on the Kindleboards said he had good luck with what he called a "Goodreads campaign", presumably something they offer here.

My take on spending advertising money on books except at launch is that it is a waste of money. I've never heard of advertising on a book that isn't selling, for whatever reason, kickstarting that book.

Anyone else notice that most of their sales tend to occur mostly at the end and at the beginning of the month? That's how it goes for me.

I have one book that has sold only one copy on Amazon: Sheet Music. It's frustrating because in my not-so-humble opinion, it's a pretty good book. When I had it on Smashwords (free), hundreds downloaded it and nary a one reviewed it. I don't know if anyone read it.

Maybe your books are read by poor people, Sierra, who have to budget their salary every month. That should please a liberal.

Yep, I'm happy with that. I suspected the same thing about the budgets because Social Security checks come out in waves that cover the end and beginning of the month, but it could also be people getting paid around that time at work.

I get 1 or 2 sales in the middle of the month.

Usually B&N - though not this month. I had 200 downloads of LDL in July. Not 1 review. I'm convinced that people hoard cheap books and never read them.

I have a few in the middle of the month, too (though not always), but I am seeing a pattern to the late/early month thing. At first I thought it was just a fluke, but it has continued for a few months now.

I had something happen recently that puzzled me. My Dickinson book sells slowly, but in the span of just a few hours eight copies were sold. Where did those buyers come from?

Sometimes I really wish we could track sales by geography. It would be great fun to know who was buying the books.

K. A. wrote: "Sometimes I really wish we could track sales by geography. It would be great fun to know who was buying the books."

You can get a sort of idea of geographical spread of sales. There are some places where the Zon royalty is reduced to 35%, and you'd be surprised how many books you sell there. And Apple reports to Smashwords by geographic region, and Smashwords in turn shows you a table.

Patricia wrote: "I had something happen recently that puzzled me. My Dickinson book sells slowly, but in the span of just a few hours eight copies were sold. Where did those buyers come from?"

Something happened for sure. Maybe a tweet about it to just the right group of people. But how to find out what?

It's one of those mysteries I'll have to live with. I kept thinking I'd see eight returns, that it was all a mistake, but nothing came back.

How about someone talking forty copies on Barnes & Noble all at once? Or twenty on Apple? Are those the signatures of retailers stocking up? Or what? And six copies at a time ordered from Createspace also seems an awfully round number, half a dozen.

Kat's right. It would be nice to know. But these numbers are only superficially more information (much more) than one ever received in trad publishing. Without an understanding of what they mean, they could mean anything.

Yesterday I tried to buy a second copy of Noir Nation (a Kindle anthology with one of my stories in), but Amazon.com signalled that I had this book already and made it impossible for me to buy another copy. I emailed Amazon and they advised me to removed the copy I had so that they could send me a new copy.

That seems daft to me. They must be missing millions in repeat sales. I wanted to keep both copies, as the new version incorporates edits that I suggested, and I wanted to compare.

All they need do is add 1, 2, 3, etc to the filenames.

J.J. wrote: "Yesterday I tried to buy a second copy of Noir Nation (a Kindle anthology with one of my stories in), but Amazon.com signalled that I had this book already and made it impossible for me to buy anot..."

I think they want to keep the reviews with the book so they don't alter the editions. They limit the number of purchases per customer because, once purchased, the book is readable on all that account owner's devices. I've seen posts where people say they appreciate that feature because they've tried to purchase books without realizing they already own it.

It's possible Amazon is also doing something else with that one-title per account: They're keeping an author from pricing a book at 99 cents, then buying a thousand copies just to game the rankings and visibility on the site.

It would be tempting to someone with the extra cash.

There are rumors that some have used Amazon gift cards, giving them out to all their friends.

You don't need to distribute gift cards. You can gift the book to others via a button on the book's Amazon page. But if you really want to game the system, you'd need to have a lot of email addresses where you can send the gifts. I don't know if Amazon considers a gift a buy, or it takes having the person accept the gift for it to affect the ranking.

If I had a couple hundred people to spam I might try it.

Any less isn't going to do me a bit of good.