5-Step plan to selling ebooks
From author David McGowan:
I am a writer. I must dirty my hands with the marketing and promotional aspects of the business, because it is just that – a business. As a self-published author, you need to get your hands dirty in this side of things. But it can be fun when you do it right and start clocking up sales. Trust me.
. . . .
It seems harsh to call The Hunter Inside
a product. It is a novel that I poured blood, sweat and tears into. Well, maybe not my own blood, but you get the picture. There’s certainly plenty of blood flowing through the pages!
. . . .
It’s all well and good learning the craft of writing and honing your skills, developing characters and a plot and carrying it all the way through to those two, sigh-of-relief-inducing words, ‘The End’. But reaching an audience is the thing that is more difficult for indie authors. We have to figure out how to market a self-published novel to reach the widest possible audience.
I’ll talk about the five-step routine that everyone does, but whether you can get it to work for you is another matter.
. . . .
Which takes me onto my last point. Number 5. An extension of engaging, or ‘building an author platform’. Put time and effort into your blog and your website. You can build a blog/website easily using WordPress. That’s what this is – a WordPress blog. A distinction I am starting to make and think about is the difference between the people who like to read this type of post that I write, and those who seek out my website simply as readers of my fiction. If my readers only see articles about formatting for Kindle, or the rise of eBooks versus print books, or the Amazon lawsuit, then they might instantly be turned off. ‘Mr McGowan, author, we have come here to find out about your work. What is in the pipeline? Tell me about your characters. Give me more, more, more because I’m your fan. I’m your Constant Reader, so give me something juicy to read’. OK, so I have a fairly decent blog and site, but I’m starting to think about making a distinction between the articles and advice and motivational pieces I provide for writers, and having a dedicated place for my readers to visit. So I might even have a second website, just for my readers.
Link to the rest at davidmcgowenauthor.com
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
I have a blog under my name for readers restricted to my books that are published or are soon to be. If anyone Googles my name, that’s where they wind up. That’s the blog that feeds into my author page at Amazon.
And I have my pen name blog where I talk about digital publishing, creating covers, photography (lots of that) and today Amazon Montlake which just welcomed me into the fold and how to put a table of contents at the end of your book so as not to clutter up the front.
At the back? Really? Because I always go to the front for the TOC and to the back for an index. I don’t mind skipping a page or two of clutter–I DO mind assuming there’s no TOC and then stumbling over it later. Seems Montlake might have thing a bit bass ackward.
It has nothing to do with Montlake.
I’ve seen it done and it seemed more elegant to simply have a contents link after the title page and then start the text, than to have all the blue links for what might be two screens. If the reader wants to have a TOC, it’s there, they can click on it and go anywhere in the book. If they don’t want to see all of it, it’s one line and less for the eye to bypass.
It also appears at the bottom on the app. That’s where most readers go to find the part of the book they want.
Note: Smashwords does not like ToCs at the back instead of the front. (I had to re-format a book where I’d tried that.) I think it messes with their online reader script or something. Meh.
(I did a mini-ToC at the front: [Title of Book, linked to chapter 1], About the Author, Chapter List. Alas, alas, chapters must be at the front. *sulk*)
Amazon doesn’t care. Further, Amazon tends to automatically jump to Chapter One whenever it finds such a mark!
For the book I put up after finding that Smashwords won’t allow for ToC at the Back, I at least tried to make it an interesting ToC, with a line or so to “place” what that chapter was about.
What Dean Wesley Smith does is something I think is IDEAL:
Fiction doesn’t need a TOC for every chapter — especially if you have lots of small chapters. Frankly it’s annoying because all it does is force people to page through several pages of TOC, or if the thing is set up to skip the TOC, it makes the sample size smaller. Also if you title chapters, like I do, it can be a kind of spoiler.
So DWS just puts the major parts of the book in the TOC: front matter, story, author bio, and… chapter index, which is at the end. Or if the book is broken into parts or acts, he puts those in. If there’s a glossary or anything the reader might want to refer to, that’s in there.
With fiction, a chapter listing is more like an index or glossary. The ePub standard for TOC (which is what Smashwords cites for what they want in TOC) is meant to adhere to good navigation principles, not meant to frontload TMI in the story.
I certainly hope Smashwords doesn’t have a problem with the DWS style of TOC, because it makes soooo much sense.
“…it makes soooo much sense.”
It totally does! To me it’s the perfect compromise between front and back TOCs. Score one for Dean, and one for you for bringing it it my attention.
It makes sense, but as I said — I put in Story, Author Bio, and Chapter Index, and it bounced (my only bounce to date, with the Meatgrinder). I put the Chapters in the front, and it passed.
You’ll have to get DWS to beat up Coker about it.
A note: for my short stories, that don’t have anything that says “chapter X” in them, the ToC is Frontmatter, Story, and Author Bio — and does not bounce. I think the Meatgrinder looks for “Chapter X” text and cries if it’s not where it expects it to be.”
I usually do two files with minor changes for SM and Amazon. I prefer tables of contents that say something.
IMO, bad:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
IMO, good:
Chapter #1: The End of The World
Chapter #2: Angels and Endings
Number 2 let’s me get excited about the book. Number 1 is just ‘chapter’ followed by a number.
99% of the time I don’t do a ToC now though. It’s just too much hassle and SM tends to be a real hassle when it comes to ToCs. Short to moderate fiction doesn’t need it. (Shock.)
I put a lot of items at the back of an ebook – copyright notice, about the author, etc. They all show up in the TOC for readers who want to see them.
I lay out POD books in the traditional way, but I think readers of ebooks like to hit Chapter 1 quickly, particularly if they’re sampling. If the Start code in an ebook doesn’t work on some platform, I don’t want the reader to have to wade through lots of other things before he/she arrives at Chapter 1.
And, of course, Smashwords doesn’t like that, along with lots of other things I like to do with ebooks. Smashwords is a much smaller player than Amazon or Pubit, but they’re by far the biggest pain to deal with, at least for me.
Total agreement here.
Agree. That’s why I stopped using Smashwords. It was when I got an email telling me my formatting was “wonky”. Using words like that might be amusing for hobbyists but it’s unprofessional for professionals.
I find this issue of how to balance the two parts of my “brand” very difficult to resolve. I started out with a website that was primarily geared to my first book, Maids of Misfortune, that was designed to interest my readers by emphasizing Victorian San Francisco. I also had a separate straight-forward blog where I quickly became involved in describing my self-publishing journey.
The blog flourished, as I made a minor name for myself in the business of being an indie author, but the website languished, getting very few subscribers or hits. When the second book in my series, Uneasy Spirits, came out I combined the two sites, with a page for my blog entries, and a page entitled Victorian San Francisco that was devoted to providing material that I believed my readers would be interested in about the historical context of my work.
Occasionally I would also post a piece about a historical subject on my blog as well, but I was becoming less and less satisfied about how I well I was serving my readers. I could have gone back and created a new blog that was just historically oriented, but I have disliked having to subscribe to different blogs for the same author myself, so for now I have decided not to take that option.
Instead, what I have decided to do, just recently, is to create a linked table of contents to my historical blog posts on the page that is entitled Victorian San Francisco. This way someone who has recently encountered my books can quickly connect up to my historical posts, and if they subscribe to my blog be alerted when I have written new material, which I will do with each novel and short story.
I know that those who have subscribed to my blog for its material on self-publishing may not be interested in these blog posts as they appear, but it should be pretty clear from the titles what the subject are, so they can just ignore if they want.
Anyway, this is an experiment, and I would certainly be interested in hearing more about what other people do to resolve this problem.
M. Louisa Locke
I agree that networking and promotion is very important. In fact, it is crucial for a writer to do so or else no one will know about them or their work. It might seem like a lot of work, but they will make lots of great connections, friends, and followers. Connections can offer great information, such as suggest helpful websites, and provide their expertise and suggestions on different issues.
I also agree that creating separate websites and blogs for different topics/purposes is important for gaining and keeping readers/visitors. For each topic/purpose, a writer should have a separate website/blog dedicated to it. It’s important to have a narrow topic, because that is being a specialized expert, which is important for a Web presence.