Self-Publishing Secrets

     I hope you aren’t here looking for the magic bullet of self-publishing success. The secrets I’m revealing here aren’t the how-to’s of self-publishing, because, seriously, there’s really no secret to that. Everyone and their grandma has a self-publishing guide on Amazon’s shelf. In fact, all you have to do is put “self-publishing secrets” in the title and it’s a guaranteed best seller.

     What I’m talking about are the real secrets.
Like:
     How much did you earn from self-publishing last year?
And:
     How successful are those blog tours?
And:
     How well do free promotions work?
Well, I’m going to tell you.

 

     The first thing I’d like to point out (and this is important for perspective, not just filler) is the fact that I am a hermit. Look back through my blog posts and Twitter feed and you’ll see that my offerings are sporadic at best. I’m not social. I’m jealous and guarded with my time. Even my dear family only sees me on a rare weekend when we all have magically synced schedules. To compound this genetic predisposition toward solitude, I was also born in the in-between age, when technology was becoming available to the yuppies and the rich kids that lived on the hill, but not everybody had seen a cordless phone yet. We didn’t grow up with technology. My TV was black and white as a kid (gasp!) because we were too poor to buy a color set, and black and white wasn’t totally abnormal at the time.

     You get the drift. I’m not comfortable with social media, THE NUMBER ONE tool for selling books.
     Strike one and two.
     The only reason why my reluctant approach to social media didn’t leave me with a third strike, dead in the water, is because I finish and publish my books. And the writing isn’t half bad.
I love writing. But not just any writing. I love writing about my worlds. My people that only I know and who I desperately want to share with others. Every spare moment that I can carve out for writing I devote solely to the creation of my novels. If I were to use that time to blog, or comment on other blogs, or chase bloggers for reviews, I wouldn’t have anything else to offer readers but blogs.
     But I decided that in 2013 I was going to give social media my best effort. Though I didn’t have the time for continual socializing, I was willing to invest in people who could, and try a (tiny) bit harder to be present myself.
     Here’s what I did-
I tweeted from my phone at least a few times a week.
I paid a company to take me on a blog tour.
I ran a Facebook promotion giving away a free iPad Mini.
I joined two Goodreads writer’s groups.
I subscribed to Netgalley for a month.
And I published five novellas in a series.
     How did all this work for me?
Tweeting-
     If a person’s success using Twitter is measured by the amount of re-tweets and mentions they receive, then it was a dismal failure. I mostly Tweeted release details, and sneak-peeks at upcoming cover art. I also did short blurbs from cool scenes in my books in the hopes of sparking some interest in them.
Fail.
     Everyone hates those. Wait, was that too sweeping a judgment? Okay, to be specific, I rarely got retweets of these Tweets, because, let’s face it, they’re basically ads and most people don’t like ads.
I also Tweeted about some writers and causes that I wanted to support, but my Tweets were clearly lacking the whipped cream and sprinkles that brings ya back for more.
     Bad Redhead Media gives some of the best advice that I’ve come across about using Twitter. Do I follow all of the amazing free advice she gives? No. Which is why Twitter doesn’t work for me. I’m a skulker, not a sharer. I read your Tweets. You don’t read mine.
     If you aren’t following Bad Redhead Media, do so NOW! She will deliver you from evil if you just obey…
     Here’s a link to her website http://badredheadmedia.com/
Blog Tour-
     One month, a couple dozen blogs, carefully prepared answers and blurbs, just watch the sales roll in. Right?
Wrong.
     I only have experience with one blog tour operator so I can’t speak for the entire species, but my tour was a rather dismal failure. The blogs that this company booked seemed to only run blog tours, one after the other, after the other, after the other… I can’t imagine what sort of following they have, maybe that’s actually what a lot of people look for? Natch. Not only was this promotion fairly generic looking, but most of the bloggers didn’t end up posting the interviews or other writing I provided. This may be the tour manager’s fault for not pushing it, or simply flakey bloggers, but it was disappointing and certainly not worth the money that I paid. I didn’t see any rise in sales to indicate a spike of interest from the blogs. Zip.
     But blogging does work. The key is finding people who actually like your novels and aren’t just accepting five bucks to paste you on their scrolling author page. When real people talk about you to their real followers, the response is boggling. A regular person wrote about my book, A Taste For Moonlight, on an average little blog last year and the boost in sales blew me away. I rocketed all the way to number three on Amazon’s best seller list and stayed there for over a month. Top 100, baby! Best feeling ever.
     The power of a single voice is far greater than you realize. I wish I knew who that girl was so that I could thank her. (Thank you!)
iPad Mini Giveaway-
     I also tried a Facebook contest to raise interest in my work, I’d heard great things about authors who gave away Kindles and such. (I’m laughing as I type this) Okay, how did it go?
I got 2,000 new likes on Facebook because of the like-gate on the contest. You couldn’t enter without clicking “like” first. Most of these people Tweeted about the contest for an extra entry, so for a month a couple thousand Tweets were flittering about with my name on them.
     Rise in book sales? New reviews? Tons of new Twitter followers?
     Nope. Not. At. All.
     The cost of the contest and the cost of the iPad Mini were definitely not returned. So funny and confounding, I’m still not sure why it didn’t work?
     My best advice on this one is, if you run a contest, find a way to make buying one of your books a no-brainer, like offering 50 extra entries for proof of purchase, or 100 extra entries for a link to a review of your book. And definitely do the like-gate if it’s on Facebook.
Goodreads and Shelfari-
     I joined a couple of their groups and did my usual sporadic participation. If you make friends and comment on posts often, you’ll keep your name on everyone’s mind. I notice people that regularly pop up in my updates and I remember them. Do people remember me? No. I don’t comment enough. I am a lurker, not a participator.
Netgalley.
     I joined a fantastic group of authors on Netgalley called Patchwork Press. They allow authors to buy month-long spots for a VERY reasonable price (under 50 bucks) instead of forking over the hundreds a private membership would require.
This was a promising one. I got a couple of new reviews out of my month long trial on a single title. It apparently works best with newly/soon to be published works, but really anything that a fairly new or self-pub’d author submits might find success.
     This one was worth it. http://www.patchwork-press.com/class-of-2013-2014/
     I’ve self-published five Paranormal Romance novellas for $.99 each, and three full length NA SciFi novels for $2.99 each on Amazon, and offer them on Prime. I also have the anthology of Par/Rom novellas as a single volume for $3.99. This one isn’t Prime and I have it for sale on Kobo, Nook, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
     Most of my sales come from Amazon. I’ve sold only a handful of books on Barnes & Noble.
I believe I averaged between 30-40 hours a month on writing and the little I did with social media to promote myself. If you can devote more time to writing, it will doubtless pay off exponentially as long as all of the following “IF’s” are checked off.
     IF you use Twitter correctly and Tweet about more than your own books, and IF you blog regularly and find regular people who will blog about you, and IF you run giveaways for real fans, and IF you join book groups and participate often, and IF you subscribe to Netgalley and submit your book for professional review, and IF (the biggest IF) your writing isn’t half bad and you produce new work regularly, then you can reasonably assume you’ll do at least as well as I have by self-publishing.
     Now, I don’t know how these and the following numbers stack up with other self-pubs because most authors are extremely tight-lipped about such things. I know that for me, finally typing them is a bit daunting. My husband even asked me whether I was “really putting it all out there.”
     Yep. This is the stuff that I wanted to know when I began this journey. Mainly, how successful can you be with self-publishing? Now that I have this knowledge, I feel obliged to help the people who haven’t gotten here yet.
     So, (deep breath for courage) this is how the hermit did-

     My total sales in 2013 were $27,975.47 and the commission I received on that was $9332.91

     I sold about 25,000 books.

     Boom. There it is.

 

 

And the winners are...

Thank you so much to everyone that participated in my contests! The iPad Mini went to Maria G. in California. Congratulations, Maria!

The Photo contest ended in a tie between two submissions (Yikes! Unprepared much?) Both participants submitted two photos each so we decided to use their second photo to break the tie, settling the score by one vote. Congratulations Lori!

I hope that everyone had fun playing. I greatly appreciate all the support I received during my launch party.

See you all soon with more tales from Beneath the Veil.

Free iPad Mini Contest!

My free iPad Mini contest will begin October 1st and end October 31st with the drawing held November 1st.

Enter to win!

Receive extra entries for submitting a creative photo of you reading your copy of the Beneath the Veil Anthology.

Vote or submit your photo here. 

Official rules:

Like the Aimee Roseland Facebook fan page and receive one chance to enter. Bonus entries awarded for tweeting, sharing with friends, and participating in our photo submission contest. One iPad Mini will be awarded by third party random drawing on November 1st, 2013. $50 Amazon gift card will also be awarded for best photo submission. Photo must include an image from the Beneath the Veil Anthology: cover, words, etc. No restricted images as per Facebook rules. Enter as many photos as you like, one per day, vote on your favorite once per day. Photo with the most votes will receive a $50 Amazon gift card. Five extra entries will be awarded in the iPad Mini giveaway per Facebook user's submission.

The Average Woman, The Alpha, and The Anti-Hero

Most writers have a dream. It usually involves a home office and a self-set schedule and freedom. What it doesn’t include is a frantic scramble to adapt to current sales trends and the retrofitting of a completed manuscript into the mold of what’s hot now. No, now. No! Right NOW!!!

To get the office in the house, you have to make sales. To make sales, you have to write what a decent portion of buyers read. That’s why we’re seeing a thousand knock-offs of the Fifty Shades of Grey series.

And it works.

Readers are eating it up. I just discovered a woman whose first two self-pub’d novels are selling at number one in their category just a month after publication on Amazon. I only read the teasers, but that’s really all I needed to find: first person writing from the female realtor’s perspective, a sex-driven alpha male forcing her out of her comfort zone, and even a special necklace thrown in for good measure. Yikes.... My biggest problem with this sort of formulaic writing - other than the borderline plagiarism - is...well...that I can’t do it.

I read an interview with one of my favorite authors a few years back. The interviewer was asking her how she did it, how she came up with such fresh ideas and exciting plot twists.

At that time I was still unpublished, still holding a notebook full of half-finished scenes and no completed manuscripts. I was on the edge of my seat, hoping for a gem, some miraculous Aha! tip that would show me how to put it all together. For years afterward I carried the disgusted sense of betrayal I’d felt upon reading her answer.

"It just...happens. Like I’m channeling them, just recording their life."

What!? Channeling? You’ve got to be kidding me!
Fast forward six years. Ask me how I get my ideas for my novels.

Okay, so I might not say channeling, but I understand now what she meant. When I’m writing hot, when the scene is flowing, things just happen. I didn’t plan for them to take the left fork in the road, but suddenly they did and it leads them into an unanticipated adventure that becomes the defining moment in the story.

I’m one of those kinds of writers. I begin with a glimpse of my characters: A magician on a stage. I see his eyes staring out at the crowd; see his gaze shift to the balcony. There’s a woman standing alone... And POW! I have to write their story. Yeah, like that. The story just builds itself. If I tried to write a knock-off of FSoG it would end up with the heroine dropping the sex-alpha out of a helicopter and flying off with a thief who was prone to wearing stolen earrings and finger-less gloves.

I just can’t do it, captain!
But what about the dream? The house and the office? How do I achieve success as a writer when I don’t want to write what everybody else is writing?

If you’re like me, you’ve realized that the dream is a bit bigger than the office. It includes what’s been typed on the screen of the computer on the desk. The stories that we writers have been constructing since we were kids.

The stories are the heart of the dream.

So, now the question is: how to write what we want to write, but still make sales?

I’ve read a ton of books on writing, and self-publishing, and marketing. I’ve read articles on demographics and sales trends. One piece of information that stood out to me, and that I’ve tried to take to heart, was to figure out what you like to write then figure out who likes to read that type of story.

This is where the title of my post comes into play.

I write romance novels. So the numbers I’m going to give you will apply to that chunk of readers. After pouring over a bunch of information compiled by the RWA and the Federal Bureau of Statistics I found these stats-

The average woman who reads romance novels is 42. 35% of readers are between the ages of 13 and 34 and 51% are 35 and over.

She is 5’4" and about 165 pounds.

She probably has had at least one child and is in a marriage or other long-term relationship.

She reads up to 5 novels a month and probably thinks that an e-book priced below $2.30 isn’t as good quality as those priced at about $3.00, but $.99 books are good to pass the time when she’s maxed out her budget.

30% of romance readers choose paranormal romance, but contemporary-mystery-romances are still the most favored sub-genre.

Her preferred method of finding new books is via recommendation by a friend, or seeing the physical title on a bookshelf at the store. She will also go back to an author who she’s read in the past if she enjoyed one of their titles before.

She probably won’t visit your author page, or follow you on Facebook, or go to a live event you throw, or watch your YouTube trailers, or follow your blog, or tweets. (But, 40% of romance readers will)

25% buy new novels on Amazon. 4% from Barnes and Noble.

Okay, can you see her in your mind? Is she basically you? Or probably you in a few years? You know this woman at the very least. You understand her.

You are writing for her.

Well, I’m writing for her. You might be focusing your writing for the twenty-something with no children who is highly connected to social media. That young woman is a powerful player. Connect with her, connect with the world.

Knowing who you're writing for is vitally important for marketing purposes. It's also a key component in figuring out where your niche is in the writing world.

And now that we have our heroine, let’s give her a hero.

The Alpha-

Just the name alone conjures up his image: Big. Dominant. Uncommunicative. Possessive. Powerful. Aggressive. Brooding. Stubborn. Injured. Spoiled. Hot.

Our alpha can take a beating and dish one out as well. He will kick ass for the woman he loves and take no prisoners. The alpha doesn’t talk about feelings. He doesn’t ask for anyone else’s opinion. He is gruff and masculine and has a past best left behind him. He will dominate our heroine, rescue her, possess her. She will be very feminine next to him. No matter her strengths, he will be stronger.

The alpha male is most attractive to alpha women.

Considering half of all romance readers have a master’s degree or higher, and live during a time when men are treated as equals and often stay home to raise the kids while she works, that’s not terribly surprising.

She wants to be a woman. She wants someone else to bear the burden of survival. She wants an escape.

The Anti-Hero is a bit more complex.

He often shows a wider range of emotion, especially humor and love. He has vulnerabilities, and vices. The anti-hero is physically attractive, but his strength is usually found in his wit and cunning rather than brute force. The heroine has a greater chance of rescuing him a time or two during their courtship than simply allowing him to drag her out of one pothole after another. The anti-hero gives our heroine the opportunity to be great.

This guy is most appealing to women who’ve run into the glass ceiling.

In today’s society women are too often compared to supermodels and movie stars. They can struggle their entire life and never measure up to these impossible ideals. They can work as hard (or harder) than their male counterpart and never receive the same recognition as him in business and academics. She is running a race she can never win and she’s more than ready to be the hero for once.

So, now that you know who you’re writing for, what next?

First, you need to decide if you are capable of riding the bandwagon. If you can spin out a super-similar story to the ones that are soaring high on the best-seller list then more power to you! The reason all of those knock-offs are selling is because that’s what readers want to read. If you can do it well, you’ll be successful, and there’s no better feeling than watching those sales numbers climb and climb, and reading a boatload of five star reviews.

Nirvana!

If you’ve decided that you can’t stick to the formula, welcome to the club! For me, writing is far too organic to attempt anything more structured than a general outline (which usually falls by the wayside halfway through anyway).

When you love what you’re writing, or better yet, who you’re writing, the words just flow. Seriously. And if you have a favorite author, I bet you’ll notice that when it gets down to brass tacks, their hero’s all fall into one category or the other.

No way, this one was a vampire and this one was a human and this one was....

Stop. Think about it. Yes, they are all very different characters, but at their core? Most successful writers write what they love. And they usually love one male type, or the other.

I’m definitely drawn most to the anti-hero. He’s my dude. And no matter how hard I try to write about the alpha, he always evolves when I’m not looking into my anti-hero again.

I love writing. But I’ve found that when I try to force my characters into a mold they don’t fit in, I stop loving it as much. The words dry up and I stumble along, miles behind my daily word goal, wishing my anti-hero would come along in his homemade blimp and rescue me from the desert...

It all comes down to this:

Know who your audience is.

Figure out who your hero is.

Accept that recognition for all your hard work may take time.

And...

Start channeling.

　

Summer Love

Dawn pours a gilded light through the night clouds,
Round and grey and filled with stormy promise.
The summer bats weave a wobbly path to their hidden roosts,
They know the day's sterile sun is best avoided.
Moist, scented air rises from the shadowed lawns,
The musky pine bows,
The leaves and flowers.
Few disturb this peaceful quiet.
This moment between night and day when you realize you're dreaming.

How Science Supports Reincarnation Or: Why I believe you were once Joan of Arc

Instinct.

It’s the scientific explanation for why animals can perform complex tasks without training or guidance.

 

Instinct is a word that’s thrown around a lot, “He instinctively recoiled.”, “I went on instinct and distrusted him.”, “It was basic instinct.” But when you stop to really consider what’s being said, the implications will shock you. True instinct is something incredibly amazing. We’re talking about cellular memory; the ability of a single cell to remember a complex experience and pass that memory on through generations.

 

Like the Monarch butterfly. Monarchs make an inexplicable journey every year from North America down to Mexico. These little creatures are born with the knowledge of how to get to their overwinter sites, though each generation has never experienced the migration before. This is an extremely complex memory to pass on, perhaps more so even than animal mating dances and emotive facial expressions. They are born knowing how to travel over the Earth. They are born with the memory of their predecessor’s experience. Incredible.

 

We all know that every piece of us has been recycled countless billions and trillions of times. Every part of us was here from the firmament of the Earth’s first eons as a planet, to the sultry days of the dinosaurs. All the matter that makes up our bodies right now has always been affected and entrenched in this world. If you look at the palm of your hand, you must realize that each cell and hair and drop of blood you see was once a kernel of wheat, a snowflake blown through a Russian palace, and the salt on a dolphin’s back. The people we are now were formed from all the people and creatures that came before us. From the bodies of our parents, then from the things our mothers ate. And every carrot, lima bean and sip of water that she had was passed through something else as well. When Victor Lindlahr said, “You are what you eat,” he wasn’t kidding.

 

Now consider that you are what you breathe. The theory of Caesar’s Last Breath states that if you take into account the volume of air held within a human’s lungs and equate that with the volume of air on the Earth and the passage of time, that at this point we’ve all breathed in at least one molecule of the breath that Julius Caesar of Rome released as he died on the steps of the Senate. In fact, all the air we breathe has passed through all the people and animals and oceans and plants and dinosaurs and...well, you get the picture, everything that ever existed. DNA has been retrieved from specimens that are thousands of years old. It’s no great stretch to imagine that we’ve been breathing in all sorts of bits and pieces of DNA from some pretty amazing sources our entire lives.

 

All living organisms contain DNA, including our friend the Monarch butterfly. DNA that carries instructions on how to build a new human or butterfly or lima bean. It also obviously stores important information such as the flight path the Monarchs should take down to Mexico. It isn’t a leap of logic at all to infer the possibility that the fresh DNA we consume every day could pass its encoded memories on to us. We must at least agree that the experiences of our parents and their parents and so on could be, like it is with the Monarch, passed intact down through the ages as a key part of evolution. If a flight path can be recorded and passed on, then so should a more simple experience, like, say, the moment you saw your husband returning from the war. So what if it was a war that occurred one hundred and fifty years ago? If a part of you was there, then why couldn’t that memory still be contained in the DNA you carry?

 

The simple answer is: it can.

 

So when you tell me that you can remember a dark tent, lit only by candlelight, filled with men who stand shivering and wet with the rain, and when they speak to you it’s in a language that rolls in familiar tones, and that the name on their lips is Joan...

 

I believe you.

 

 

This is for all my disbelieving friends out there who think that denial of faith in a deity precludes having faith in reincarnation. There ya go.

 

 

Postcard from The Hermit on the Hill

I was thirteen when I discovered books. (Hold a sec while I find the key that puts an echoing emphasis on that word...hmmm...Italic? Not quite. Bold caps? Close...) BOOKS!!!!!! There, that's better.

I was a painfully shy person for most of my life. Never really connecting with other people and more concerned with homework than watching TV. I was a hermit and I liked it that way. Then I discovered books and....well not much changed other than my greater enjoyment of my hermitood.

Books became the center of my universe the summer of my mother's accident. She'd shattered her sacrum and was flat on her back for a year. That injury changed our lives in so many ways. Turning me into a reader was just one of them; the other changes will have to wait for another blog. To keep my mom company, slash, entertained, slash, sane I started reading to her. We took turns reading that first novel since I wasn't terribly interested in the love affair between a Native American and the white woman he kidnapped and mistreated (which was apparently leading to their imminent love?!?), it was called Ghost Fox. While I was reading it, the story was just a bunch of words. When my mom read it? Wow....

I remember very clearly waking up from the trance-like state I'd fallen into when she finally stopped speaking. I had been in the story's world. Literally. I was there. It was incredible. From then on books were my everything, just like that. You could pay me in books (one guitar = one year's subscription to Harlequin Book Club). You could count on a book being somewhere within five feet of me no matter where I was standing. I began speaking in Romance-ese with the word "cheroot" falling out in some conversation, and inciting laughter from an aunt that still haunts me today.

I was my mother's constant companion, as well. I'd run to the library to rent books once we burned through everything my older sister had. Flowers in the Attic (the entire series), Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (her entire shelf), Julie Garwood (The Lion's Lady!!! My heart still melts...) anything and everything with romantic swirling letters down the spine got grabbed.

I read a minimum of three books per week for ten years. Romance then horror, then paranormal and....well everything else eventually. The point is that reading was my recreation. That's why it was so natural for me to eventually transition into writing. I had so much inspiration for so long.

What I didn't have was experience with the social aspect of marketing my work once it was published. I didn't have a Twitter account, or Facebook, or a blog until I realized that you can't simply publish a great story and be successful.

I'm sure this is a common theme, other people must struggle with the whole gratuitous blabbering thing that we do on Twitter and whatnot. Chasing down readers. Man, back in the day? Readers were the ones on the hunt. When the internet eventually became the place to go for information, and I'd read everything in my chosen genre that was being offered, I'd scan through websites searching for a list of all the books containing certain subjects in the hopes of finding something new and awesome.

Now you can't blink without brushing up against a dozen new authors. The market is saturated with self-published novels. There are so many out there for readers to choose from that unless you were born with a bullhorn in your mouth, they're more than likely going to float right past you on their way to the next bright flame.

So what's a shy little hermit to do?

Try, I suppose.

Just keep trying to call out above the babble, I am here, I AM HERE!!!!


http://www.amazon.com/Bain-Baraxus-Bridge-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00783IMXY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345494485&sr=8-1&keywords=aimee+roseland

http://www.amazon.com/Vanik-Baraxus-Bridge-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00904LM5E/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1345494512&sr=8-2&keywords=aimee+roseland


Aimee