Marketing and Selling Ebooks

Whether you have already dipped your toes into the epublishing waters or not, it is virtually impossible to sell books when you are an unknown author. If you plan on joining the rush towards publishing on Kindle in the near future, you need to be aware that it is not a get rich quick scheme, whatever some people will try to tell you.

I am a newbie to this Kindle publishing game, as you will probably know if you've read the previous post about Kindle. At the moment I have two books out there, one of which is selling at the rate of one or two a day, while the other has only had three sales in the same time period.

Amazon Kindle Select Free Days

When I put my first book The Creative Writing Workbook up I decided to offer it as a free download for five days, bad mistake, I had over 1400 downloads during that time..In retrospect I should have left the promo until the book had been up for at least two weeks, and used the free promotion for just a day or two. I then offered the second book, a collection of short stories, flash fiction and poetry for just two days. The second book got less than a hundred free downloads and I think that is because short story and poetry collections do not sell very well. 

If I had read Jeff Bennington's  book on the subject of publishing and marketing your book with Amazon I would have done things very differently. The kindle author community is a very supportive one with most people passing on tips they have found useful for getting known and selling more books. I will certainly follow his step by step process when the first Lambeth Croak novel, Death Comes Stalking is published, hopefully in the next week or two. For the time being I shall just carry on writing and getting my work out there. Do you have any tips or questions on marketing and selling Ebooks, if so then please leave a comment before you go.

Coping with the Ups and Downs of Kindle Publishing

It is just over three weeks since I published The Creative Writing Workbook and just after that my book of Short Stories and Poems. They did well on the original free downloads, the workbook much better than the short stories, which surprised me. I have had a few sales since then, but looking around at similar titles, and what other authors are charging, I have changed the cost of the books from $2.99 to 99cents a copy that's around £1.50 and 77pence for UK readers. The books are quite short and the price drop feels right, although it won't show up as that for several hours yet because the Amazon publishing machine has to do its work.

Reviews and Changes

So far I have had a few good reviews on the first book and one or two for the second. I hope to have the first Lambeth Croak novel fully edited and up there in the next couple of weeks, and I will start that at $2.99 and see how it goes. I do not plan to offer it as a free download until it has been up for a few weeks, then I'll see whether that will work for me. Over the last three weeks I have altered the original books slightly, once where I caught a couple of missed typos, and again to play around with what categories worked best.

A Learning Process

Writing and publishing books on Kindle is a learning process, one in which I am still a beginner, but not too different from the norm, if the forums are anything to go by. I keep hearing that getting an author's page up on  Good Reads, and a separate author's page on Face book is the way to go, but have not done this so far. Kindle is still in the experimentation phase for me, I am continuing with the freelance writing because while it would be nice to make some money, I do not see this as purely a money making exercise.

If you are thinking about publishing your own work on Kindle, I would definitely say give it a go, but don't do it without Alexander Newnham's step by step guide to Create a Kindle Book, I hope he makes a fortune. I would not have got through the nightmare process of turning a word document into something okay for Kindle formatting without this book. If you do plan on publishing your own work to Kindle, then the £2.49 price tag is a gift that no Kindle newbie should be without.

Philip Marlow and Lambeth Croak British Noir

The first book of the Lambeth Croak series is almost finished, it's taken a lot of time to get to this point, not least because I get too caught up in other forms of writing. I belong to a writing group and the task we had a week or so back, was to write to a favourite character in a book. I chose to write my letter to Raymond Chandler's famed Philip Marlow. below is the piece that I wrote - in case you are wondering I have also used the main character from my nearly finished book Death Comes Stalking book one of the Lambeth Noir series.

Dear Mr Marlow,

I would like to know whether you think you would mind being portrayed as a British, dual heritage, female, reluctant private investigator, a tough dame.

Would you, to quote your creator Raymond Chandler, bring on a man with a gun whenever the action flags, especially if you were a woman?

Your creator describes you as a knight in tarnished armour, who walks the mean streets, but is not himself mean. My character walks the mean streets of South London, rather than the mean streets of LA, but there’s a similar amount of Art Deco architecture (mixed with Georgian and Victorian of course because this is, after all London). As a woman, she does not have even the fictional tarnished armour that Chandler ascribed to you, but neither is she herself mean.

My character can wise crack when the occasion demands and likes the occasional drink, scotch, rather than bourbon. While she is unlikely to get involved in the shenanigans of the rich, as you did in the Big Sleep, she does, on occasion have to deal with people who walk a thin line between legal and illegal – which you also did. Although perhaps Eddie Mar, the nightclub owner was closer to that fine line than most of the people that my character has to deal with.

While you may be shaking your head at the thought of a dame chasing murderers, might I remind you that sometimes, you dealt with dames who were just as guilty as the men. In conclusion, I can only say, that Chandler made your character so real to people, that you were forever imprinted on many people’s minds with the celluloid image of Humphrey Bogart – I’m afraid my character is no Lauren Bacall. The books, wherein you walk the pages have, for the last twenty years, been Penguin Classics – something very few crime writers and their characters have managed to aspire to.

I should say goodbye here, but instead, I think I’ll say so long – and at the risk of melding one character onto another, in closing I have to say if you need me, whistle, you know how to whistle don’t you Sam?

The Creative Writing Workbook

I have always written. As a kid I would write daft stories and rhymes and got one on Australia published when I was 11 and entered a competition. Experience of Writing was part of my first degree and I did a lot more writing then and had a short story published in Wild Thyme Writer's Group booklet, that was early 2002.

For the past seven years, aside from supervising postgrad students at Derby University, I have been blogging and earning some income with freelance writing. I had a Kindle for my last birthday in March and that decided me to join the growing ranks of indie authors. My first book, which is the title of this post, The Creative Writing Workbook  was published on the 27th April and offered for free download for a few days.

 Around 1400 people downloaded the book and since then I have even had a few sales and a couple of great reviews. I also had a really lovely email from a girl called Hannah in the United States who told me tha reading my book got her writing again - even better than the few sales I've had so far.