10 TIPS TO REDUCE YOUR EDITING COSTS: Preparing your MS

This is going to be a short and sweet post because I am currently undertaking the second round of edits on 'Vengeance'. Any of you second + bookers will know how consuming this is. For you newbies, rewrites and edits take almost as long as the original writing - if not more.

Writing 'The End' at the end of your story is a bitter sweet triumph. Seven novels in, I now reserve the popping of the champagne cork for the actual publish date; instead I buy in the quality coffee, a bulk supply of Jaffa cakes and A4 plain paper.

So editing. It's a difficult beast to wrestle. Everybody I've ever spoken to in the indie publishing field agrees that a professional edit is essential to avoid public devastation in the review game. I agree absolutely. Readers have an amazing ability to spot a type error or grammar error at a hundred paces.

But here's the real pain of an edit, and it's not that someone helpfully rips apart your beloved MS, it's the cost. For a full professional edit on an 80,000 word manuscript you can pay anything between £400 and £1000.  A perfectly reasonable amount considering how many hours of somebody else's life a complete edit and commentary takes.

But...

The sad fact is, most indie published books will be lucky to sell 30  copies a month, and because of a whole other blog post of reasons, most indie books have to fight their way on the $0.99 platform, which Amazon penalises with a 30% royalty. I guess, by now, those more mathematical than me have worked out that to just cover the editing costs alone, you need to sell ..... one hell of a lot of books! I mean, you have to be selling at the same level as the blockbusters.

So what can you do? You can reduce your editing costs substantially (I pay around £200 for an 80-100 word edit) because I have proved with my editor that I'm not a big job. I ensure that my MS is in a state that makes it a relatively 'easy' job that doesn't take a lot of their time.

Here's how I do it, and as ever with my 'advice' posts, I'm still living and learning, and making those big old mistakes, so this isn't expert and I haven't perfected it all yet - not by a long way, but the more I do it, the better I get at it.

1) I PLAN and PLOT out my books carefully, minimising plot inconsistencies as much as possible.

2) I accepted my weakness in never learning formal grammar (80's empathy, write a diary entry type of English education) I purchased  a grammar book and I tried to learn it, cover to cover. I learned why we actually use commas and punctuation - and no, it's not where you naturally breathe or pause; it's all to do with clauses. LEARN YOUR CLAUSES!

3) Follow, with diligence, the their / they're / there / its / it's / you're / your checklist - every time any of these are used in a sentence, stop and double check - and then triple check. These are the MOST COMMON ERRORS, and unless you consciously attack them, they will slip through.

4) Put your MS onto 140-150% ZOOM and edit it big - I know it will look ugly and you'll want to look away, but it makes you read your MS sentence by sentence and makes smaller, minor errors like possession apostrophes and the list above, a lot more obvious. It stops you scanning, which we all inevitably lapse into.

5) Complete your primary edits AS YOU GO. At the beginning of each writing session, start by heading back over the section you read before. This will not count as a full first edit, but it is great for the first stage of snagging those pesky errors, putting you in a much better place for your first rewrites, and it is relatively painless.

6) Make a proper CHARACTER LISTS / NOTES as you go, you'd be amazed how hard it is to keep track of those minor extras. Note any details you give, such as eye colour, hair colour, tattoos - you'd be amazed how you can slip like that.

7) Get some A4 paper and after the first edits of each chapter, write out a quick set of notes on what is happening and any threads that need to go throughout the rest of the MS. UNDERLINE THREADS in red, so it makes easy reference, these threads might be symbols, objects, concepts etc. Don't write too much for each chapter; just a few lines 5-10.

8) Eradicate any non necessary words. Read sentence by sentence. Is every word needed? Can you SIMPLIFY and REORDER the sentence structure so it reads with more clarity and simplicity. This doesn't mean you should eradicate some of the longer, more poetic imagery or sentences, but use them sparingly to create the biggest impact; they're precious.

9) Check that DIALOGUE PUNCTUATION. If you're not sure then learn once and for all how punctuation works in dialogue clauses.

10) EDIT SOBER and fresh. As Hemmingway once reportedly said, 'Write drunk, edit sober'. To be honest, I try to do both sober now; it's less of a hangover in all senses. Of course when I embarked on my first novel it was the romance of the paperback writer, late nights into early mornings, bottles of red wine and glasses. Now, you're most likely to find me writing early in the morning with the fresh coffee, freshly showered and ready for 'work'. As a result, my writing is much cleaner (in all respects LOL) I now save the red-wine for the inspiration moments, the note-taking and the poetry first drafts :)

When all of this has been done, then it's time to find an editor who will be brutal and honest. If you've already been brutal and honest with yourself, then their lives will be easier and it will cost you less in all senses.

Remember, it is NOT your editor's job to take your drunken, inspired, creative outpourings and tidy them up into a novel that is readable and five-star worthy; they're there to edit, not re-write.

 Also, a small caveat, this post has not been edited, and so the errors in it go to serve my point LOL.


So, fellow writers, I'd love to know how you approach your edits? Drop your advice in the box. Feel free to disagree. Living and Learning.

PIRACY KILLS ART

Today I have had to contact FIVE different 'file-sharing' sites to have my 'pirated' book files taken down. This is a huge disappointment to me; I like to believe that the human race is essentially decent and yet I am staggered to see how many members and Facebook likes these sites have.

Not only do I NOT expect this kind of cheating and stealing from fellow members of the human race - I am stunned that READERS - yes, beloved, intelligent conscientious READERS, could ever think that this is okay.

If you want my book that badly and can't afford the £0.79p for a book that took me over two years to research and write, then contact me - I'll send you a FREE copy! In fact, if you head on over to my site www.theknighttrilogy.com I am GIVING EVERYBODY a FREE copy.

You see it's not about the money (well, sadly I do need to eat and fund a roof over my head and pay for the girl's school shoes, swimming lessons and ....) but it's the principle. You can have all of my books 1-3 in the trilogy for £2.50 so why would anybody want to cheat me out of that?

Piracy is a betrayal. It's grubby and it's self destructive. People want writers and artists to produce work and yet a frighteningly large proportion of people seem unwilling to pay for it. Newsflash - AN AUTHOR CANNOT INVEST THE TIME TO WRITE  IF THEY CAN'T SUPPORT THEIR FAMILY - they have to go and work at something different, something that will pay! And for every hour they are stuck in an office job, stacking shelves in the supermarket or doing something else, they are NOT writing your beloved stories.

I am an independent writer. I am not rolling in film-deal royalty checks (and it wouldn't matter if I was) The people who download my book on file sharing are AS GOOD AS ROBBING MONEY OUT OF MY POCKET. People who would never dream of sneaking up beside me whilst I'm pushing Betty Boo in her pram, in order to stick  their sticky little paws into my handbag and steal money from my purse, will sit in their homes and happily, without conscience, steal from me. This really, really saddens me - what are we without moral integrity?

The Indie Author: The tethered Cash Cow?

It's now officially official, there has been a reading revolution and it has happened super quickly. In 2011 14.9 million e-readers were shipped world wide, add that to the 14.9 million of 2012 and the predicted 10.9 million expected to be shipped in 2010, we get a shed load of people who own an e-reader. (That's not counting the tens of millions who own a tablet with e-reading application)

Undoubtedly Amazon led the way in the e-Reader revolution with its Kindle e-Reader. The mega powerhouse that is the Amazon book store was suddenly portable and instantly on hand to anybody with one of their magical little devices.

When coupled with its incredibly easy to use self publishing platform the indie book revolution exploded into the world. I was fortunate to be at the right place in the right time at the end of 2010 with the release of my first indie published book.

At the time, Amazon offered writers like me the opportunity to indie publish their work and have a 'level' playing field amongst the traditionally published houses - in fact a possible advantage. Offering 70% royalties on books over £1.49 was an incredibly enticing opportunity. Some writers who were canny enough to be prophetic already with a back catalogue of 10+ books even found themselves making hundreds of thousands of pounds (and we've heard about the millionaire indies, John Locke and Amanda Hocking)

But with the e-Reader thing going bonkers and the self-publishing world changing every turn of the Atlantic clock, the bubbles of optimism were sure to burst. And so they have...

The impact of the $0.99c Price wars: And the real winner is...

Firstly nobody really understood or thought that the price wars would impact on indie works so much. Humbled by their legacy-reputation of vanity publishing, indies soon realised that in order to gain a readership they would have to lower the price (and value? of their book) to $0.99 / £0.79p. I resisted for a long time, not because I believe readers should be milked for every cent, but because I knew that the $0.99c route was a very perilous one indeed. In the end market forces forced the decision on me and I lowered the price of my first book to $0.99c. It was a gamble that paid off in lots of ways but Amazon was quickly becoming Saturnine; yes, you can lower your book to $0.99c but you will only get 30% royalty.

There are now hundreds of thousands of $0.99c books on Amazon, and that is a lot of $0.70c profits filling up their coffers.

I am yet to understand why there is this difference in % royalties other than Amazon knowing that they are on to a very, very good thing and the indie writer is now nothing more than a domesticated cash-cow: Tethered fast by the KDP select program which insists on exclusivity to take part.  Goodness knows why (other than it being an overt attempt to monopolise the book selling world)

KDP Select & The dangers of all your eggs in one basket: 

In principle this is an excellent facility. When it first came out I jumped at it and had several very successful promotions. However it was early days for The Knight Trilogy, and at that time I was happy to be 'exclusively' on Amazon. But as time has gone on and I've had my docs specially formatted for Smashwords premium catalogue (allowing me access to iTunes / iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Nook and Kobo platforms, establishing profiles on each of them) I am reluctant now to pull The Knight Trilogy out of those for the sake of being able to freely give away a couple of thousand copies on Amazon.

 I'm increasingly wary about putting all my eggs in one proverbial basket - especially with a predicted fall in e-Reader sales (predicted to be as low as 8 million in 2014) as Apple, Samsung and Android tablets come storming up the market. (For more information on these market trends head over to http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Tablets-Surge-Ereaders-Struggle/1009555 )

I opted out of the KDP select program for this very reason about 12 months ago in order that I could investigate other platforms - unfortunately, such is Amazon's hold on the worldwide market that sales on sites such as Smashwords and e-zreader are very minimal.

How to make a living on Amazon: Series and coming to an agreement with your readers

I'm lucky that the genre and audience I write for lends itself towards series, which means I can afford to have my first book on at 0.99c and then have the rest of the series on at a more realistic living price. (Point of note: I have a 88% follow through on readership, with readers happy to pay £1.49 - £2.49 for books in the rest of the series.)

Interestingly though the readership thing is complex and despite having an 88% 'loyalty' for The Knight Trilogy, my stand alone novel 'Beautiful Freaks' has really struggled and I am probably going to have to lower that to $0.99 for a time (Gut galling as it is by far a more technically accomplished book and a gorgeous story - it's the favourite of all I have written)

I love writing, I love story telling even more. I want to spend my life writing books but I need to be able to pay my mortgage and put shoes on my children's feet. So I'm going to marry my love of writing with my business head; I am writing a 7 book series - and no I'm not compromising on quality. It took me four years to write the Knight Trilogy. I am planning on writing and publishing book 1-2 of The Meadowsweet Chronicles this year. I couldn't have done this four years ago (or before completing NaNoWriMo or investing in Scrivener) but I am more skilled, a stronger writer, wiser about what my readers want from a book. My readers want beautifully, passionately, honestly told stories that let them escape. They do not want the wordsmithery of Umberto Eco or the almost too clever genius of Will Self that leaves them feeling intellectually unworthy. My readers are clever, astute, savvy and will not take any messing - they know what they like and they have high expectations: I strive to meet them. My love of writing and their love of reading will make us a happy bunch.

From the business point of view, the books will be lower priced at the beginning of the series (after all my readers are taking a gamble with their hard earned cash) and then we will come to a compromise whereby the reader acknowledges my need to eat and their need to read on. However, I will never screw my readers over by whacking them with a $24.00 price tag for one of my new releases! (They'll stay below the $3.99 tag)

N.B Bundles: You can see from the image that another way around the 30% royalty issue is to bundle all your books into one and then charge $3.00  for the complete bundle. This way your reader is still paying the golden 0.99c a book but the writer is getting 70% royalty. It's swings and roundabouts - you lose the potential of a higher gain by readers going onto buy 2-3 at a higher price but you capture a 70% royalty outlay from the start. A few of these a month really boosts your royalty account.

How to bite back the hand that feeds: Refuse to play Amazon ball.

There is no denying that as an indie, I NEED Amazon and apart from their blatant exploitation of my vulnerable position as an indie, they serve me very well. Over 90% of my sales come from Amazon and it is because of them that I have bread on my table (I could afford wine to go with it if they cut me a 70% royalty on 0.99c!)

But there are ways that we could change things and one of these is promoting more of our work with the Smashwords links. Smashwords is a 'hidden' shop. Authors and those in the writing community are mostly aware of it and it has become very much the place where authors buy their own reading material. Smashwords offers a set royalty of 70% regardless of list price. It also allows the author to run coupons, giveaways etc without the demands of exclusivity.

Smashwords gives readers the choice of their download format - catering for almost every form of e-Reader and tablet device. Just because a reader has a Kindle it doesn't mean they are trapped into buying their works from Amazon - we can chip away at their sales monopoly. Readers can hop over to Smashwords, fill their Kindle with $0.99c books and know that the writer is getting a fair deal - a living wage.

Call to arms: 

• When tweeting links to your books alternate them between the Amazon page and the Smashwords page. 
• Write a blog post explaining to readers the buying options they have and how you are striving for a better deal for writers. 
• Refuse to put all your books on Amazon at $0.99 and help to push the 'norm' back to $1.49 and a 70% royalty agreement
• Love Amazon for all they do for us but don't let it be unconditional. Run your giveaways through Smashwords and spread your book across various platforms (Beware the falling e-Reader sales) 

USEFUL LINKS:

SMASHWORDS PAGE: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/katiemjohn 

e-READER ARTICLE at emarketer.com http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Tablets-Surge-Ereaders-Struggle/1009555

Added at 3.39 Saturday 23rd Feb: 

As I said in the post, things change so rapidly and here is living proof over at Publishers' Weekly

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/56042-indie-booksellers-sue-amazon-big-six-over-e-book-drm.html 

It seems that it isn't only authors that are feeling the tethered effect of the Amazon powerhouse. Several independent booksellers are suing publishers over DRM and the monopolisation of the e-book market by Amazon.

 “Consequently,” the complaint states, “the vast majority of readers who wish to read an e-book published by the Big Six will purchase the e-book from Amazon.”

Bloggers and Authors: War & Peace.

This Friday I sent out some Twitter #FF love to some of my favourite Book Bloggers, spreading the love between this author and some amazingly supportive people who have helped me on my journey to selling thousands of copies of my book and helping me to personally connect with my readership.

I've read with some incredulity that there is (or certainly seems to be) a certain tension between Authors and Bloggers. I just don't understand this -  *head-desk*.  It's not an overt thing but every now and then there are mutterings on the old Twitter stream or in various posts; usually when some author/blogger drama is erupting.

There was one last week (purposely keeping out of that one) and out the old tension came, [sic] "Bloggers are evil" v "Writers are precious and precocious". To be fair there have been those spectacular circus-moments of social networking when some poor misguided author (I always assume to be intoxicated because they wouldn't surely commit such kamakaze self destruction otherwise) responds to a Blog Post about their book. These attacks are rare but excite a lot of valid criticism, but rare or not - they give a lasting impression. As we all know, it only takes one rotten apple to spoil the taste of the rest.

As a writer I've been involved in the on-line book community for over two years and I have to say I have had nothing but positive experiences. I've also been the beneficiary of some incredible generosity. That DOES NOT mean that I have never received a bad review or a cutting blog post about my work. Fortunately they have been few and far between (enough not for me to  knock my confidence or belief in my work). I always read all blogposts and reviews of my work; always with the humility before opening it that if they liked and loved it, then I am relieved and happy and if they didn't that is entirely their right.

Bloggers are people and it would be foolish and arrogant to assume that everybody you met in your day to day life fell in love with you - why is it any different for a blogger and your work?

Book blogging is a big commitment, it requires dedication, inspiration and effort. It has many rewards and is a great way of sharing and connecting with people, but every blog is the personal domain of the blogger and their opinions and critiques should not be censored because they are 'afraid' of booklash. (I meant to write backlash but I kind of like the pun)

There is no denying that a negative review, especially on a very successful and 'influencial' blog can be damaging to a writer's potential sales and it is incredibly galling if the reviewer has clearly misunderstood your work or clearly rushed / scanned the reading of it. Sometimes their review is biased by outside influences ie/ they don't like the genre

So whether a newbie (or intoxicated) may I offer this very-simple-never-to-be-broken rule: NEVER respond to a negative review or blog - never, not even to "inform of inaccuracies."

IF YOU MUST respond then do it positively: Find links to three of your most glowing reviews and Tweet and FB them. That way you can rest peaceful that you have regained control of the situation.

Finally but importantly THANK YOU to all those wonderful bloggers who have helped me on my journey and become good friends.

Creating the Real: A Writers' Paradox.

I've discovered that the daily life of a writer is full of paradox and contradiction. One of the greatest of these is the relationship between fantasy and the real. Now this is perhaps more pronounced because I write Contemporary Fantasy in which there is an overt movement into the 'unreal', but I believe that the very nature of writing makes this paradox a concern regardless of which genre you write.

The whole paradox centres around the idea that a writer, is by very definition an individual who constructs reality. And a 'good' writer is one who can create an alternative world with authenticity. Research is a very valuable starting point but it's not enough by itself. A 'world' can be meticulously planned out and researched but can still ring untrue in the minds of the reader.

Authenticity is the ultimate aim - but how can an invention of the imagination be authentic?
When I think about this idea I come back to the idea of the Simulacrum: a notion we briefly explored at university and which was reduced to a scrawled side note in the margin along the lines of

"An accurate copy of something that never existed in the first place." 

Followed by the mysterious "Plato" which could also have been "Pluto" depending on how much you squint to read my appalling handwriting. 

Being a good student I will have probably gone and got a book out of the library and looked it up - but being a typical student, I was probably half cut on cheap French red at the time and so my full understanding of it might be somewhat 'flawed'.

I've since come to understand the word Simulacrum to basically mean similar to - which is no major revelation when you actually break down the impressive looking word. Somewhere along the way it has managed to pick up an attachment of inferiority, as if it lacks the sacred qualities of the original. An idea that the pop artists of the 50's and 60's took great delight in challenging. 

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to show this concept is by showing you Magritte's: 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' - God love those surrealists and their witty banter. I remember seeing this image for the first time when I was about fifteen and that moment of intellectual awakening never left me. Of course there are now even simulacrums of this piece, indeed a whole website dedicated to it cecinestpasunsiteweb.com - how can anybody fail to love post-modernism and its irony!

This idea of the Simulacrum has been a fascination to writers, artists and philosophers for as long as thought has been thought about. The idea of image making, either in writing or any other art form has always posed a delicious contradiction.

Back to Plato  who gave a good example by using Greek Statuary; carved proportionately bigger at the top than at the bottom so that mere mortals looking up at it would see it 'correctly' - the idea that distorting the real creates an illusion of the real - and possibly a more accurate version of the real. Writers such as Palahnuick, Ballard and Everett are masters at these alternative realities exposing a more accurate version of the real world than the real world itself  - just think Orwell and work 'Nineteen Eighty Four'.

Nietzche argues that as soon as experience is articulated / translated into language then the reality is no longer. Baudrillard takes this one step further arguing that the experience made language becomes its own version of real - something that every writer lost within their own created worlds understands possibly more than most. It's certainly the argument that I am going to throw out next time some non-writer friend looks at me with a clear sense of fear at my diminishing sanity when I say things like, "Well, don't you have voices in your head that talk to you?" or "Of course my characters are real people!"

So fellow writer friends - how do you navigate this paradox? I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Give Your Writing the Gift of Time: A Friday musing.

This is something I have touched upon before - and it's the idea of time and writing. I often read interviews or look at fellow writers' websites and marvel at their catalogue of work; some seem so positively prolific that I can only assume that writing is pretty much all they must actually do. In truth the idea of this makes me slightly jealous - to have created so many fully formed stories and characters.

Then just when I'm feeling down on my self, thinking I should be dedicating more hourage to the writing and less to the sleeping, I find a fellow writer who also struggles with an 'efficient' output of work; whose every page and scene is laboured over, crafted and re-crafted; whose characters have to go away for a sabbatical or a conference with others and then come back to instruct their keyboard-slave on what to write.

I'm not implying that this somehow makes these works more worthy, or better crafted - it doesn't; some writers are naturally gifted with the ability to let it flow and pour and it still be well written - but it does mean these works are different; they're different in that these laboured, matured, time laden works are different to the books they would have been if they'd been published within months of conception.

It's taken me four years to write the Knight Trilogy - which isn't a bad pace at approximately a book every 14 mths and the last one has taken me the longest. Now of course that is because life of a working-mother-writer is quite full on, and writing has to be slipped in around the edges of a frenetic life -but just when the frustration of not being able to spend whole blissful quiet days of writing really hurts, I tell myself that my circumstance may have some writing advantages.

Because I am forced to set my work aside (often for weeks at a time) it allows a certain maturation to take place - like cheese. (Hmm, perhaps not the best example - let's say wine.) And it's amazing what transformations take place in this set aside time; illuminations regarding character, realisations of structural gaps, full 180 degree changes of direction, an avoidance of repeated word use (I seem to have words of the moment) and a greater clarity about style. You'd be amazed how many times you write a sentence one month thinking it to be the most weighted, poetical sentence you've ever wrenched from your mind, only to read it a month later and realise it sucks and clearly you were under the influence.

One day I am going to be 'brave' and 'free' enough to pound out a novel and get it out in a three month span; this is a personal challenge I have set myself. And, if you are a speedy writer / publisher maybe think about setting yourself the challenge of filling a whole year writing one work (that doesn't mean write it in January and re-visit it in December for edits lol!) You might just be amazed how your work shifts and changes.

I'd love to hear your experiences. Are you a super sprinter or a measured meanderer?

Hitting the Wall: Dealing with Writers' Block.

One of the questions I'm asked most as a writer is, "What do you do when you get writers' block?". It's a question I never really find that easy to answer, well not succinctly anyway.

Writers' block is a strange concept. Today my lovely writer friend Joanny @JoaOropesa asked me this question - she referred to it as 'hitting the wall' and somehow this simple, brilliant phrase inspired me to write this post. You see I always deny that I get writer's block - I think this is because the idea of it terrifies me; as if I might just wake up one day and have nothing left to say, no stories left to tell. I can't tell you how much that idea saddens me. But as for hitting the wall....

Yeah, I hit the wall all the time and the way that I deal with it - I walk away from it. I'll give it an hour or so, labouring over a scene but if it's not walking, I close the file and do something else. I never know exactly when I'll return; it might be an hour, a week or even a month - it's never gotten past three before. I use the time to go and read some of the awesome books I have gathering dust in my TBR pile. I return to my notebooks and re-read them. I go to the bookshop and buy history books to do more research. I sketch out plots and ideas of other books. I increase my blogging, play with my website, design my cover, interact with my readers - you see, I'll do pretty much anything but agonise over my MS.

This doesn't mean I've left it body and soul: you carry your stories with you. I daydream the settings I've invented, chat to the characters I've created - because I know that the story will come, the wall will suddenly develop a door - and then it will just be a matter of waltzing right through it.

I think in these modern times of indie-publishing and networking, there can be a terrible sense that all of our writer friends are cleverly spinning out works with ease. It only seems like last month when they published book one of their series and already they are getting ready to release book two. It can sometimes feel a little bit like a race. I give myself a stern talking to about this. I'm happy they can produce talented work quickly - but it's not who I am. I've always been a four hour casserole girl over a stir-fry. It's taken me four years to get the first two books of my series out. Book three is coming along nicely - although on saying that, I haven't touched it in a fortnight.


So - this wall business. You've got to find your own way. You can determinedly bash it down brick by brick wielding a big hammer. You can spend your day scrabbling up it and for every three steps upwards you take two down, or like me you can turn around, enjoy the flowers and the sky, have a chat with those standing around you - and just wait for the door to appear.

My 90 Day KDP Select Experiment: Day 30

This post follows on from the post My 90 Day Select Experiment. Why I signed up.

Now I'm a month in and I thought I'd let you know how it's going. Two of the primary reasons I joined KDP Select were; firstly, market forces were already making me almost entirely Amazon exclusive anyway (my sales from other platforms were very tiny) and secondly, I had slogged to no avail to crack the American e-book Market.

Despite various attempts, giveaways, U.S blog visits, tweetdeck scheduling, I was reaching a readership of about 10 people a month in the US.

DECEMBER SALES IMPACT: (Joined KDP Select on 20th Dec.)

The intial thing I did when I joined KDP select was to take advantage of their free promotion tool. I set a 2 day free promotion for the 20/21st of December and the U.S downloads went bonkers. Over the course of those two days I gave away over 1500 copies in the U.S alone. This was exciting, but then everybody loves a freebie and I wasn't overly confident on how it would impact on actual paid sales.

Impulsively, I stuck it on for another free day on boxing day, thinking it a good gift for anybody with a new kindle. Again I had almost a 1,000 U.S downloads in 24 hrs. During the rest of that month there were 900 paid sales of #1, 'The Forest of Adventures', in the U.S.

One of the reasons I had been so happy to give away so many copies was because #2 of the series, 'Immortal Beloved', was already published on Amazon and I was banking on the giveaway copies of #1 converting to #2 sales. This happened to a pleasing extent. Around 40% of the giveaway copies translated into #2 sales. In truth I had hoped for more, but since receiving my own kindle and going crazy for all of the freebies, I understand that sometimes the freebies (no matter how promising) tend to languish in my TBR collection. I'm still hoping that my book will be rediscovered when peeps run out of an immediate read.

As a result of the U.S sales I made it into the top #5000 ranked paid books on the Amazon.com and bagged a whole load of lovely new readers and positive reviews. It also made it to #11 of Paranormal Romance #20 of world myths #25 of fairytales.

My stable U.K market followed the same pattern and I made it into the top #600 of the paid Kindle charts, becoming a #1 bestselling fairytale and sitting comfortably in the top #20 of three other categories.

IMPACT ON JANUARY SALES:

U.S - The impact has been significant. Now my U.S market is significantly stronger than the U.K, having sold almost 500 copies. Interestingly the sales conversion rate from #1 to #2 is around 80% - so this either proves that when peeps pay for the book they read it quicker and go on to purchase the sequel, or that peeps are gradually getting around to reading #1. Although I have slipped back down in the U.S rankings to around #10,000-#20,000, it is a considerable jump from languishing around #300,000 mark.

U.K - It's difficult to read the impact this month on U.K sales. The maket for kindle books is still considerably smaller than in the U.S. I do think that maybe as a result of giving so many away there has been a slightly negative impact on the sales of #1 this month, however it isn't anything disasterous and the sales of #2 are more than financially compensating for it.

FUTURE: I still have 2 days of promotion left and I am going to hold onto these until the end of March, closer to the realease date of #3 'Starfire' - I think that this will make an excellent launch promotion and also hopefully boost the sales of all the series into the next quater.

OBSERVATION ABOUT PROMOTION SETTING:
It would seem (from very early analysis) that it is better to block the promo days together. Allowing more time for the book to travel up the freebie charts gets it far more visual coverage on the Amazon sites. It also seems to have a less negative impact on some readers' attitudes. Running the promotion for 2 days and then again for 1 day a fortnight later invited a very irate reviewer who expressed 'hatered' for authors who make some readers pay $0.99 for a book and then go on to give it away free. As a result she gave me a 1* review which was a shame when given because she felt cheated out of 0.70 pence.

KDP Select isn't going to be for everybody. I think that I have found it works for me because in my case 'The Forest of Adventures' is part of the series 'The Knight Trilogy' - I'm not sure that stand alone books would find the same benefit - although on saying that do go and check in with Jeff Bennington (you can find him on twitter @Tweetthebook). His book 'Reunion', a stand alone paranormal, crime, thriller followed almost the same pattern as mine but with even better results, reaching the #20 of paid U.K sales following promos.

Whatever you do, do your research - read around and check in at twitter. Lots of writers are sharing their experience of KDP select and it's an interesting range of experiences.