How do you sell a book?

[RiggerLee 63]

First, no I'm not dead.

Life has been kind of crazy here over the last few years. The phrase is overcome by events.

But while I've been setting around on my ass I was board, like really board. So board that... wait for it... I wrote a book.

Setting here patently waiting for the laughter to die down...

Still waiting...

Try not to hurt your self...

A paper bag will help with that...

Can you control your self now? Good.

So it's a very typical run of the mill scifi novel. I can confidently say that it is as poor as any first novel ever written.

So the question on the floor is how do you con, sorry I meant persuade, people into giving you money for a book? You know I'm not a salesman. I hate fucking salesmen. I don't have that gene. Has anyone ever written and tried to sell a book? How do you do it?

Where it's at right now:

Hired an artist, cover is done.

Hired an editor, feel sorry for this poor bastard, he had no idea what he was walking into. Editing is done.

Managed to format it. I think it looks pretty good on the inside.

Published it on Amazon through Kindle direct publishing. It's up right now in paperback, hardback, and e-book.

Rather then go with Kindle Select/Kindle unlimited I started serializing it on RoyalRoad and on Wattpad. I thought I might get some traction there and it has been getting some views but they have not translated into sales.

Tried to sign up with Amazon Sponsored Product Advertising. Got booted because there is a gun firing on the cover.

Signed up with GoodReads. Tryed to do a giveaway through them but my ad was rejected for being insensitive.  It's a note you can send to those not selected in the drawing. It was funny as shit but they didn't like it. So no giveaway on GoodReads. Might have dodged a bullet there. If my response to the losers that were not accepted in the drawing offended them then I shudder to think what they would have made of the book. Rather then a hundred glowing reviews I could have gotten a hundred pieces of hate mail.

Not sure what to try next. As you can tell this is not my lane.

Oh, I guess I should post the book here. I so suck at this.

Trapped in Time

This story is being serialized here as a promotion.

This book is available on Amazon in print. It is also available on Amazon in e-book. 

Feel free to continue reading on those platform

 

I copied that from RR. Wow that looks funky.

And the cover looks funky. It's way bigger then that. What's up with that? Can you see it?

Lee

[RiggerLee 63]

Oh, cool the cover actually loaded.

Win.

Lee

[Phil1111 1,256]

How can a new author increase distribution for his book? Is the question I asked Chatgtp. It came up with a eight point plan that seemed good. But it wouldn't allow me to cut and paste the suggestions here.

Edited July 28 by Phil1111

[RiggerLee 63]

More lessens. Signed up for X. Payed for Premium Plus in advance for a year. Set up my X Advertising account. Put in the ad... And imeadently there is a orange exclamation point. I find a message That the account has been locked because someone on the account had violated the terms of service? I had literally just signed up. Tried to find out what the problem was. Spent hours on line with a bot. It finally transferred me to a human, still by chat, they don't own a phone. Or it was supposed to. The chat just died. Nothing. Crickets. Tried to contact them by other means. Nothing. I payed for Premium Plus there is a line that they are actually supposed to answer. Nodda. Finally I get so sick of this that I cancel my whole account. They do not give refunds. $276.50 down the drain. Fuck my life. I swore that I would tell every one I met about this to the end of my days. I called my friend last night. Told him. Texted another. Told him. Meeting of the writer group coming up. You can bet that I'm going to tell all of them in the middle of the meeting. X is the Worst place to advertise of all of them. Never use X!

You want to know what does work? BookBub! Signed up the same night as X. Totally different experience. Smooth. No problems. It's generating lots of views. And it's generating lots of clicks. More views, more clicks, less money, then I was spending on Amazon Sponsored Ads and they love my cover rather then kicking me off for it. BookBub rocks. And #@%$  X.

Lee

[gowlerk 2,299]

4 hours ago, RiggerLee said:

I payed for Premium Plus there is a line that they are actually supposed to answer. Nodda. Finally I get so sick of this that I cancel my whole account. They do not give refunds. $276.50 down the drain. Fuck my life.

Did you try cancelling the charge through your credit card company?

[RiggerLee 63]

Hmmm. Thought I replied to the above. Not sure I would have grounds. They would just claim that I failed to comply with their terms of serves. bottom line is I'm screwed on that one but I also learned all I need to know about them early so minimal loss of investment.

Now we are on to google ads. Wow they have changed since I sold t-shirts through them. Way more complicated now. I think I finally got my campaign set up right??? It seems to be running anyway. There was this thing where the ads were being restricted based on "Click Bait"? There is an "Appeal" button but no way to submit any further information. Which is bull shit. Oddly enough, it worked. That restriction seems to have been lifted for those two ads. I have a bunch of ones that are paused because I thought I needed to configure them in all different ways? I think it might do that for me, like cycle through all the different images? I haven't actually seen one in the wild, which is a problem.

So I got it running finally and I instantly started to get thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks... All of which were bullshit. I do not believe that there are thousands of people in Algeria that are dieing to read my time travel novel. Apparently I have thousands of fans in Venezuela. Would you like to guess how many impressions Google served up to the US my home country to people who speak the language that the book was written in? Zero. Nodda.  Apparently they don't think that anyone here might be interested. So I blocked all those countries. It got a little better. They actually resorted to presenting 78 impressions in the US. That's interesting is that those 78 showing of the ad produced three clicks. So it seems like people in the US like the ad and might even be interested in the book. But no, they decide to shift the entire campaign to Korea and Japan. I let that go for a while cause people there do read but they completely stopped the views in the US and has not run the ad again since. So I just blocked those countries. We'll see what happens now. 

I don't know what to make out of this. Google ads at least seems to work but they go off the rails trying to waist your money. You have to watch them like a hawk. I haven't made a judgement on this yet but that's where we are at.

I was talking to Tom about this and he takes it as evidence of "Dead Internet Theory" I'm not sure we are quite there yet but with AI controlled bots I think we are getting close. We used to sell t-shirts and it worked. I don't know how any one sells anything on the internet now?

 

Lee

[gowlerk 2,299]

15 hours ago, RiggerLee said:

I don't know how any one sells anything on the internet now?

I'm selling tandem jumps every day. 

[RiggerLee 63]

Does google ads advertise them in Algeria for you because that's where they were determined to blow my budget. I finally restricted it to the US and Canada because I just could not control their ad spend. 

 

Lee

[d123 4]

Don't know any details except that ChatGPT confirmed it and this clicky:
https://baos.pub/if-you-write-a-book-in-norway-the-government-will-purchase-1-000-copies-d805f84d7ce
 

It might not work but I thought it's worth mentioning.

[RiggerLee 63]

I missed your comment but that is a really cool program. It might pay for them to be a little selective. Looking at the glut on Amazon, a glut that I am now a part of, I can see why most books fail. Self publishing has changed the world but the old publishers did serve a real purpose in gate keeping.

Wow. That got weird. So I was doing an update on RR and I decided to copy it over here... I got this. Not sure how to fix that. I guess it's technically readable. If you're really interested I guess you can suffer through it. Lesson learned. Write here first.

 

So I've been trying some things and if nothing else I've learned some lessons. 
Biggest project has been trying to learn about how to use Google Ads. It's changed a lot sense I sold T-shirts on it. It's complex and I don't think I have all of it figured out yet but I have learned some lessons. You get set up, You can upload different versions of your ad in different aspect ratios. So you can have like 15 different images. You can also include different titles, taglines, text etc. As far as I can figure it mixes and matches all of these options depending on the location and space that it is placing it in. Pretty cool. You can ad all kinds of keywords and audience segments. And you can choose locations to market it in. Then you give it a daily budget and it goes out and starts spending your money. I only gave it like $20 which is all I can afford and more then I can reasonable justify. 
This is when it got interesting. It proceeded to blow all my money in Algeria. I guess it thinks there are lots of scifi fans that want to read about time travel and dinosaurs in Algeria. It also pissed away my money in Venezuela and Indonesia and India. Bot farms. It pissed away all my money to bot farms. So I got all those blocked. Then it spent all my money in south Korea and Japan, better and not what I'd call my core audience. So I blocked those. Then I wound up restricting it to just north America and Canada. Then it spent all my money in Quebec the one place where they don't speak the language that it is written in. So in the end I had to restrict it to just the US. And now it seem to at least be working fine in that regard.
Key words. I put in all the standard ones for the book but I also included some less common ones just for fun. It's a book about hunting dinosaurs so I included things like Big Game Hunting, Hunting, Shooting. So now it decided to concentrate my entire budget on "Big Game Hunting" And I did get clicks from this but no book sales. I guess very few other people were bidding on Big Game Hunting. It was cheap. I cut those out. Now it finally resorted to advertising it in categories like Book Reviews, E-books, and Books. And I have gotten a couple of sales. Not enough to pay for it self but something. I haven't given up yet.

BookBub is still clicking along. literally It is producing clicks. Not huge numbers but at least I think I can say that it was from book people. I can't see exactly where trafic is from on Amazon for my sales but I think I can attribute sales to my little BookBub ad. It's click through rate is dropping so It may be running it's course. I'm thinking about doing a sale on Amazon and advertising it through BookBub. They have a different ad system to get on to their books on sale list. I haven't looked into that but it's on my to do list and probable my next move. Thinking highly of BookBub.

RR ad. Yep I payed my $55 to you. It has in fact generated traffic to the book here on RR. It has produced followers and it has produced Read Later. I can't directly attribute sales to it It was set up to drive traffic here on RR in hopes of spurring  sales. That part has not materialized but I still think it was worth it.

Russ Hall advised me to sign up with Draft2Digital. They distribute E-books all over to lots of small sites. I have to say that they are much easier to work with then Amazon and now my book is every where. Their E-book converter is much better smarter and easier to use then the one on Amazon. It produced a nicer e-book then Amazon did. The biggest one there is probable Apple Books. From D2D I can click on it and it takes me to the page on Apple Books. Looks good. The thing is I can not find it searching on Apple Books. The discover-ability is zero. At least on Amazon I can find the book. I haven't sorted through the others as closely to see what they are like. Two of them are very interesting because they sell to Libraries. Over Drive and Baker and Taylor.

Libby system. Didn't know a lot about this. So I went over to the local Library to ask them about how they do E-books. It was very gratifying to see my book at the top of a display in the center of the library. Turns out they are a part of the Libby system. They are part of a 60 library coalition that pool together to buy books. So is one of them buys my book on the Libby system then anyone in all 60 libraries can check it out. With only one copy only one person can have it at a time. It's like a physical book. That person has to "return" it for some one else to check it out. For best sellers they have hundreds of copies. She is going to order a copy for the library next week. That means that when any one in all sixty libraries searches for Science Fiction in their libraries E-books It will show up, at least if they scroll down far enough. Even if some one else has checked it out they can still see it and get on a list for it. They say that it's a very active system. So that looks promising. 

I'm working on an Audio book through Elevenlabs but that is going slowly. 

So that's the latest news. I think Overdrive and Baker and Taylor are worth checking out for access to libraries through Libby and other services.

Lee Hardsety

[wmw999 2,636]

Just as a note -- I recently bought and thoroughly enjoyed a self-published book (at least I'm pretty sure based on the editing quality), largely because of its placement. It was at a brick-and-mortar bookstore, prominently placed in a display about books on Alaska. I would never in a million years have found it otherwise. I've also recommended it to a tour guide in Alaska, thereby maybe elevating its profile further.

Maybe if there's a science fiction-related store where you live, or even a science fiction bookstore or a gamers' store, that might be a place where you could offer to bring some books and help them put together something that will attract attention. Maybe even an event.

Brick and mortar stores are having issues; helping one while helping your book is a win-win in my (ahem) book.

Wendy P.

[d123 4]

You know, if you collect everything you do, all these adventures, ups and downs that you go through to publish a book at the final you will have the 2nd book almost ready 

[RiggerLee 63]

The Audio Book is officially on the way. It was done with AI through Eleven labs. Not as good as a real narrator but not terrible. It will take a few weeks to show up but it will be on Spotify and a few other sites. I'll keep you posted as they publish. It will not be on Audible. They have their own AI and they wont let you use any other. And they have dained to invite me to that program. For now I've put a few chapters on YouTube. They will only let me upload a few at a time so look for more coming over the next few days. Check it out on YouTube. Go to the playlist and you should be able to play them all just like a book.

https://www.youtube.com/@leehardesty32

 

Lee