Advertising.

I talk with a lot of other writers. We always ask one another about advertising and various methods of promotion. Some of the authors I converse with over this topic claim that they do well with advertising on Amazon.com. It makes some amount of logic, as Amazon is very close to becoming a publishing monopoly. They do seem to control access to the marketplace in all other ways, so why not advertising, also?

However, after years of trying out various advertising campaigns at Amazon I have never encountered a situation wherein I profited from putting my money there. That is, no ad campaign returned to me even as much money as I put into it. The opposite was almost always true. If, say, I put $400 into an ad campaign I might get $150 or $200 in cumulative sales over the course of the campaign. Only once did I squeak out a tiny bit of profit from an Amazon ad push, and only by a few dollars.

So, for me, advertising on Amazon is a complete waste of my money, my effort, and my time. My last bit of money spent there advertising my work was, in fact, the last money I will ever spend there for that purpose.

That is all.

I'm not sure why, but my COALITION: Zombie Trilogy is the best selling of all of my books since I republished a number of my titles after regaining publishing rights from a former imprint. It has done well in ebook format, but dollar-wise is doing even better in audio book sales. WORKING CLASS HERO has the edge in total ebook numbers, but the audio of that book isn't nearly as high in sales.

Sales.

As I figure out the details of promoting books online I find that I have learned a few tricks that push my sales up a bit. One line of advice that I got from another writer was to use a service that adapts your books to audio without having to spend any money for production. All you do is audition voice talent, pick the person best suited for the job (there is an amazing amount of voice talent in the pools) and the production is out of your hands other than delivering the manuscript and approving the audio versions. After that, the audio is passed through another round of professional editors who clear it for audio publication.

I have been surprised at the sales of the audiobooks. All I have to do is promote my novels as I normally do, and the audiobooks tag along, sometimes outstripping the ebooks in dollar sales, if not actual numbers (since audiobooks are more expensive than ebooks).

It's part of the massive learning curve of having to promote my fiction rather than leaving it up to a traditional publisher who might be incompetent at the task, or who doesn't care (sometimes both). I may not be great at promotions at this point, but I'm better than I was at it, I'm still learning, and I definitely do care.

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Here's a question and answer bit I did at a website concerning my superhero novel, WORKING CLASS HERO. I'll be adding the second book to that series very soon, and have plotted a third book. If sales and/or my desire to continue warrant, I'll be doing more in that series. I like the characters and I enjoy the act of creating new stories in that world.

Q&A for my novel WORKING CLASS HERO.

Yeah, baby.

Book Promotions.

Back in the days when I sold my stories and novels to publishers of various sizes, my major responsibility for promotions was something akin to press assists and not much else. I'd send out some review copies, do Q&A with reporters, chat up the books to journalists and magazine editors, and do author appearances in bookstores and libraries. But that was pretty much the extent of my involvement.

The way I saw it back then (and justifiably so), it was up to the publishers to promote and advertise the stories, scripts, and novels I had spent so much time creating. As I like to paraphrase, "I'm a writer, not a salesman, dammit!"

These days, of course, I have to promote and advertise. All on my own dime. And I have to do a lot of experimentation, because by and large other authors who know how to do this will not share such information in a market that is already packed beyond capacity and highly competitive. (Writers some years back ceased to consider fellow writers as colleagues and see them now as competitors.) So a huge learning curve has ensued.

I have had to learn where to advertise and how to do it. I won't belabor the finer points but even when you find a good spot to advertise you have to tweak the parameters of what is advertised and how to utilize various codes to ensure maximized results. It's not easy and even though I've figured out how to get positive results, I'm still not skilled at it. But what I have learned over the past few months is where to put my ad dollars and how to pull an ad when it's not generating more income than the cost of the ad campaigns. Fortunately, the two methods I now use most often do give me that option. I can edit, or pause, or completely halt an ad campaign if I'm not making more than it's worth.

Disappointingly to me, most of my sales--in fact about 90%--come in the form of ebooks. I never have become accustomed to reading ebooks, but I reckon it's because I'm too conservative to have ever given my reading habits over to that format. I do read more ebooks than I once did, but I prefer to buy print books. I will be purchasing more of my books in print format to sell at convention and library appearances in future and hope to see those gain a larger portion of my overall sales.

At any rate, the books I've been pushing most of late are titles that I've gotten back into print since retrieving the rights from a former publisher. All three have been rewritten, re-edited, and graced with new cover art and contain my preferred texts. So grab one or all of them if you want to spend some quality time living in another world for a few hours. All books are now also available in audio book versions.

WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman.

THE COALITION Zombie Trilogy. The three original titles all contained under one cover as a single volume. In audio book, ebook, and paperback!

DEADLOCKED. My first zombie novel back in print in my preferred text with many added and restored sequences. Three formats: audio, ebook, paperback.

Putting the Books in Print

Well, I've spent the better part of the last few weeks putting several projects into print. One of the first things I've wanted to do was get my back-list into the light of day again. These are the novels that were once under the roof of different publishers and which rights have now reverted to me. So for the next few weeks I'll be concentrating on that project, maybe dropping another new title into the mix along with my latest, THE EMISSARY.

In this modern situation of book publishing, promotions has pretty much been on the shoulders of the author. Even with a major traditional publisher the home office expects the author to spend a hefty portion of their advance on advertising and promotions for the book they just sold. Fuck that. I would often arrange book signings on my own, but I'd be damned if I was going to spend my advance on expensive advertising (beyond sending out some review copies).

At any rate, in getting my older books back onto the market under the Last Hemlock Press imprint, I have to do my own advertising. So I went to a number of my writer/publisher friends to ask them how to go about it and what were the best venues for doing it. There was some interesting stuff to discover, but most of it seemed on the level and logical.

However, in doing my own investigations into the nature of this business of acting as the creator, the publisher, and the advertiser I quickly found out that a vast industry of ripoff artists has emerged and developed like a skein of pond scum. For instance:

Every book needs a cover. And you need a good cover. Fortunately, the big thing currently is that the most popular covers are created via photo manipulation which only requires some talent with a photoshop-type computer program, and access to various photographic images that can be purchased inexpensively for manipulation and alteration into a work of art that can become a book cover. It's a fairly cheap process that can be accomplished in quick order.

Except that there are uncounted numbers of outfits charging crazy prices to create covers. In casting about for decent artists to create my covers I talked with folk charging anywhere from $300 to $700 just to make a photo-manipulated cover. Keeping in mind that most books never earn out to the tune of a thousand bucks, paying that kind of cash for a cover is unreasonable. Fortunately, I found talented Photoshop artists willing to create covers for me for a fraction of what I was being quoted by the more vile of the lot.

My advice (which has worked well for me, so far) is to look for photo-manipulation artists who create good work for a tiny portion of what the more well-known are creating. They're just mucking about with arranging images. It ain't rocket science.

With advertising and reviews I would bump into requirements from both advertisers and reviewers who refused to look at the manuscripts unless I could prove that they had been professionally edited by one firm or another, needing to produce documentation that this had been done. Since I still had my files from when each of my books had been published previously (with my own revisions, additions, and corrections) this was something that had already been accomplished. But I'm not willing to jump through that kind of hoop, so I pretty much avoided any reviewer or advertiser who made such a stipulation. They remind me of those Komodo dragons who bite prey animals, knowing that most of those creatures will get away, but which will sicken and die from the lizard's toxic bite and provide meals for the greater Komodo dragon community. I chose to just avoid these drooling creeps.

After weeks at this new game I have educated myself and found some things that work, and some things that do not. I quickly found out that I should avoid the promotions opportunities that are very, very inexpensive. They might seem like a good deal, but they're really just a mild little scam that some guys have concocted to grab a few bucks from the millions of self-publishers trying to find fame and fortune.

Oh, well. This is a long learning process and I'm basically still a freshman in this. So I'll cast about as logically as I can until I either find a bit of success, or come to the conclusion that there are just far too many people doing this and that it's almost impossible to fight through the crowds. People keep telling me that about 6,000 self-published books appear every few days. I'm not sure if that's true, but for some reason it sounds right and is about as sobering and depressing a number and situation as I have ever encountered.

Keep on keepin' on, as my dad used to say.

DEADLOCKED, available in both ebook and paperback.

THE EMISSARY, ebook, paperback, and audio coming soon.

THE COALITION Zombie Trilogy collected under one cover. Now out in ebook and paperback.

Coming soon will be the reintroduction of WORKING CLASS HERO. It's still available in audio. But the ebook/paperback versions will be out soon, along with the sequel that I want to see in print. With a third book waiting in the wings.