Twitter: Spam vs. Marketing

A few months ago I took down all of my programmed tweets that directly marketed my ebooks. I did this out of frustration with how many of these tweets I was seeing in my own stream. They vastly outnumber tweets where anyone actually says anything about how their day is going or whatever. When I attempted to make  list of tweeps who "tweet real stuff" I only managed to accumulate 24 people, out of a potential group of nearly 2000. This makes Twitter really boring to me. I felt like I was just looking at a stream of spam, and it didn't help that 4 out of 5 of these marketing tweets used quotes from the novels with grammar errors or style issues in the quotes. One vampire novelist's quote said something along the lines of, "A dead body! Someone sucked his ass dry!" Now, just give that one a minute to knock around in your head. Not a pretty picture, is it? A couple of times I couldn't help myself--I had to @ the person with the troublesome tweet and point out the problem. This was never received very well (I can't imagine why!). Seriously, though. You're tweeting something from your book. Why not choose a line that actually flows well?

Yeah, that's what I end up thinking, too. They've probably already chosen the best line in their book.

But I digress.

Back to my point: I got fed up with all the marketing tweets especially since most of them seem to come from people who otherwise are not engaged with Twitter at all, or very little. I nixed my own, and kept an eye on my sales. At first, nothing changed. Then I had a couple of pretty dry months. Then, April happened. In which I more than tripled the the best month of sales I ever had before on Amazon, and had my second best month ever on B&N. What changed?

Well, in April I was giving away two books. I released The Plane and the Parade so I was giving away The River and the Roses. And I had just started giving away Myadar's Snare then, too (I still am; get it here.) And because I wanted to be sure everyone knew about these giveaways, I did a lot more tweeting about them than I had been. I also sent out some direct messages--I really hope those didn't annoy anyone, but since what I was DMing about was free, I decided it was a risk worth taking. Since the free books are located here on the blog, I can't be sure that the tweets led directly to the sales--after all, for that to be the case, a lot of people would have had to click through on the pictures in the margins here or on the links on the ebook description page or something. I also joined several Goodreads groups in April and added my books to a few bookshelves, so it's quite possible that made a big difference--although I only did that with the Myadar books, and I sold a bunch of Veronica books as well as Broken Ones, too, which I didn't post.

So I've decided to give marketing tweets another try and see what happens. Right now, I'm only going to send out 2 or 3 a day. This is extremely low. Michael Hicks, who is my hero because he started out like any indie publisher and worked his way to where he quit his day job and bought a house in Florida with a pool, for pity's sake, sends them out every 60 to 120 minutes, for instance. He's being moderate compared to some of the spammers I mentioned above. I just really don't want someone who only has three dozen followers to open their Twitter account one morning and have to scroll through my fifty marketing tweets clogging their stream.

So we'll see if these tweets do anything. I may eventually up it to 6 a day, although I'm going to give it some time first. I'll give an update when I've seen what happens. By the way, if you don't already follow me on Twitter, you can do so here.

How do you schedule your tweets? Have you found that one kind of tweet is more effective for your sales than others (a book description, a quote from the book, a quote from a reviewer)?

When you see promo tweets, is there one kind you prefer? How do you feel about seeing a lot of promo tweets in your stream?

Inspired to make a pledge

Okay, I know this is going to sound cheesy, but I was watching an episode of Glee, where they're singing Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror," and I got really inspired.* Not to write (although I've had a lot of inspiration for writing lately, for which I am grateful), but to make a pledge. It's still a bit hazy, but let's see... I pledge that when I break $1000 in sales (this is still quite far off), I will donate $100 to some sort of children's charity. It was a line in the song about not having a right to ignore a hungry child's need... Anyway, once I break $1000, $100 to a children's charity. And when (yes, when) I start making at least $500 a month in sales, I'll sponsor a child. I did this before for a while but had to stop because money just got too tight. I'd like to do it again. And if I ever become one of those epub authors who makes more than $50,000 a year, maybe we'll adopt a child. That's something I've always wanted to do, and if you ever read my family blog you'll know it's something we may have to do if we want a second child (although that's still not a sure thing). Adoption is so expensive though, so I'd have to be making a lot more than I am now to even consider it.

*This is weird for a couple of reasons: first off, I'm really not sure what to think about Michael Jackson when it comes to children, and unless you knew him personally, you can't honestly tell me you have all the facts either. But I am uncomfortable with at least some of what I do know, so for him to inspire me to want to make a pledge to help children, well... Anyway, secondly, it's all the more apparent that I am a sucker for Glee performances, because the previous performance in the show, a mash-up of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" and Destiny's Child's "Survivor" already had me all worked up thinking I could take on the world. This is nothing new, actually. I straight up cried during Amber Riley's performance of "Beautiful"--and I still do every time I watch it.

So anyway, you folks who read this blog can hold me to my pledge. I will announce it when I break $1000, and you can say, "Hey, that means $100 to a children's charity!" and you can even suggest some good ones.

How about you, have you been inspired in unlikely ways lately? Do you have any pledges you've made or would like to make?

Marketing: Doing Nothing Works Better?

In the first week of March I made a list of things to do for my writing/publishing goals. Among those things was to start marketing my books again, at least on Twitter. Over the last year I've gone through different phases with the marketing. I got a couple of book review bloggers to look at my books, but mainly I've sent out tweets promoting them. In the beginning this did seem to make a difference. Then I stopped doing anything to promote the books and even pretty much stopped blogging, because I was pregnant/a new mommy and my head just wasn't in it. And now since early March I started up again. Here's what I've observed:

Marketing seems to have no effect on my book sales, at least the tweet marketing. In past months when I wasn't doing any I sold an average of five books a month. This month, with renewed attempts to market, I've sold one.

I've been giving away books as thank yous to long time followers (let me know if you didn't get a DM on Twitter with a coupon code--I think TweetAdder has been patchy with this) and also new followers. The long-time followers got a coupon for Veronica in Paris, and the new followers got a coupon for Broken Ones. So far, about a dozen people have downloaded Veronica in Paris, and one person has downloaded Broken Ones. Generally, I sell about three copies of Veronica for every one copy of either Broken Ones or The River and the Roses. I thought it was because Veronica is priced at $0.99 and the other two are $2.99. But this would indicate that some other factor is at work, since I offered both for free.

Veronica is a novella, while Broken Ones is a full length, if short, novel. I've heard that novellas are popular--I didn't really believe it, though, because I like long books for the most part.

Veronica is a romance and is set in Paris, so it has a travel aspect. Broken Ones is a ghost story. Could people be tiring of the glut of paranormal novels out there? I think this is a possibility. Look at the popularity of The Hunger Games and the Steig Larsson books. No paranormal there. And everyone on Twitter seems to have a paranormal novel to sell. Myself included, of course. It's frustrating because I like paranormal stories a lot, I always have. But I think maybe some of these authors are just trying to sell what they think is popular. Did they all watch every single episode of Charmed via DVR, like me? I don't think so! Anyway, whether all of these authors are sincerely into vampires (or witches as the case may be) or not is irrelevant. I think paranormal may be in oversupply.

Then there's also the possibility that more people downloaded Veronica because they've known me for a while now and they wanted to give my book a try. It was free, so why not? Whereas with Broken Ones, it was offered to folks who've only just "met" me so it's much more of an unknown entity.

What do you think? Have you offered a book for free? What results did you get?

Do you think there's an oversupply of paranormal fiction? What genre are you into these days?

Weekly eBook Sales Update.

Things are moving along!

The only fly in the ointment? Two readers have reported some formatting issues in two different Kindlebooks. I suspect it's the em-dashes, which some ereaders don't translate correctly. I am, at the moment, pretty stumped about how to fix this. The two readers both got their books from Smashwords (right Kathryn?) so I have no way of uploading the html version Guido Henkel teaches you how to make which is the only one that would address this, as far as I know. Smashwords only takes .doc files. So mostly at this point I'm crossing my fingers that the formatting won't be bad on most ereaders. On my laptop, using Amazon's Kindle for PC app, I am unable to reproduce the formatting bug. And I'm also unable to bring it up on my actual Kindle.

Another possibility would be to find/replace all my em-dashes and make them into "--" instead. I'm reluctant to do this without more of a sense of how pervasive the problem is, though. The "--" just doesn't look as professional to me. It's probably just me being anal. What do you all think?

Anyway, to the numbers!

Smashwords, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 5
Veronica in Paris = 2
The River and the Roses = 4

Amazon, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 4
Veronica in Paris = 4
The River and the Roses = 2

B&N, total sales by title:*
Broken Ones = 0
Veronica in Paris = 1
The River and the Roses = 0

*Keeping in mind that B&N has a reputation for being slow to report sales.

Total sales of all titles, just this last week: 14

Total sales since the beginning: 22

My sales have almost doubled since the first week. This is very encouraging! I've been submitting my books for bloggers to review. I'm hoping once the books get reviewed, they'll really start selling.

By the way, if you have a minute, something you can do for me is go to the sites of each book and select some of the tags associated with each. For instance, The River and the Roses has the tags: psychic, ghost, mystery, etc. The more times people click on these tags (signifying that they agree with them) the higher up in certain lists the books go.

For Amazon, US, go here. That should bring up my three ebooks. Select one and scroll down the page until you get to the tags. Click on a few of those. That simple!

For Amazon, UK, go here.

For B&N, go here. Edited to add: I can't seem to find tags on B&N--did you? I think maybe they don't do them. Please let me know--sometimes I don't see the same stuff because I published the book.

Smashwords doesn't do tags the same way.

Anyway, THANK YOU whether you have a chance to do that or not--just that fact that you are here, reading this blog, shows me that you are supporting me.

Please comment and let me know how your own pursuits are going!