Month: April 2018

SFFMP 178: Making Good Money with Serial Novellas and YA Fantasy with Sarah K.L. Wilson

Author Interview, Podcast

On this week’s show, YA fantasy author Sarah K.L. Wilson joined us to talk about the successful Dragon School serial she’s publishing on Amazon (and in Kindle Unlimited). She’s put out nine installments since the beginning of the year, publishing a new one every 18 days, and she’s kept them selling with Amazon ads and sheer momentum.

Here’s a little more of what we covered:

  • Going from writing novels to publishing a (planned) 20-installment fantasy serial.
  • How complete each story is and whether Sarah employs cliffhangers.
  • Whether she’s got it all outlined or she’s pantsing it.
  • The challenges of finding your readership on Amazon (or any online store) when you’re targeting a teen audience.
  • Handling cover art for serial installments that you’re publishing frequently.
  • Sarah’s pricing strategy of 99 cents for the first installment and 2.99 for the others and whether there’s been any pushback from readers.
  •  Finding success with Amazon ads by monitoring them daily and tweaking whenever necessary, including adding new ads to the rotation regularly.
  • Sarah’s less than stellar results with Facebook ads.
  • How her income breaks down, sales versus KU.
  • What a typical launch looks like for her now that she’s almost 10 installments into her serial.
  • The link to Michael Cooper’s read-through calculator, which Sarah is using to calculator her ROI: https://www.facebook.com/groups/781495321956934/1111894655583664/

You can visit Sarah on her website and also check out her books on Amazon. The first installment in her serial is Dragon School: First Flight and is currently 99 cents or free to read with a KU subscription.

 

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SFFMP 177: Paying the Bills as an LGBT Urban Fantasy Author with Holly Evans

Author Interview, Podcast

We’re joined this week by LGBT urban fantasy author Holly Evans. She believes LGBT spec-fic is an up and coming sub-genre with a lot of potential, and even though it’s niche, she’s able to pay the bills writing it. Whether you’re interested in it or not, a lot of today’s interview should apply to any author thinking of writing in a smaller niche. Interestingly, Holly found more of an audience when she went wide with her books than when she was exclusive with Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.

Here are some of the specifics that we covered:

  • Getting started in the crowded urban fantasy market.
  • Tropes for urban fantasy and also for LGBT fiction.
  • Why LGBT spec-fic may be an up-and-coming market with room for new authors to jump in.
  • What qualifies something as LGBT (i.e. do the main characters have to fall into that category?)?
  • If romance is expected and how explicit sex scenes should be if included.
  • The pros and cons of selecting the LGBT category on Amazon and other stores (easier to rank versus perhaps being overlooked by people who don’t think they’re looking for that).
  • Avoiding stereotypes.
  • Why Holly decided to leave KDP Select and publish her books to all the other stores.
  • How she’s found success in the other stores in only a few months.
  • Writing shorter series and wrapping individual books up so you can start new ones easily.
  • Whether there are any downsides to writing short.

You can visit Holly on her site and check out her books in all the major stores. Her newest series, Forged in Blood, is out now.

 

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SFFMP 176: Launching Well as a New Author, Writing Quickly, and Keeping the Momentum Going

Author Interview, Podcast

This week’s interview features NYT best-selling indie fantasy author Jasmine Walt. She talks about how she burst onto the scene a couple of years ago with her popular Baine Chronicles series and breaks down why she think it hit big even though she was a new author at the time. We also ask her about her various collaborations and how she’s kept the momentum going with the numerous new series she’s started.

Here are some of the specifics:

  • Expectations for urban fantasy, fantasy with romance, and reverse harem fantasy.
  • Writing stories that combine a lot of elements and aren’t exactly to market.
  • When taking on a collaboration partner can make sense and mistakes to avoid in co-writing.
  • Jasmine’s process that helps her publish a novel almost every month.
  • How much outlining she does before she starts writing.
  • How her first launch went and what she did to get pre-orders and sales as a brand new author.
  • What a launch looks like for her these days as a more established author with a fan base.
  • The challenges of having success with a second, third, etc. series after the first one was a hit.
  • When it’s time to move some series out of Kindle Unlimited and try to build a readership in other stores.
  • The factors that go into deciding how long a series should continue.
  • What Jasmine does for the back matter of her books.
  • Whether hitting bestseller lists (New York Times, USA Today, etc.) are useful for marketing or just nice accolades to have.

You can visit Jasmine on her website and check out the first of her Baine Chronicles novel, Burned. It’s available in all stores. Her Dragon’s Gift series (reverse harem fantasy) and recent release Cursed by Night are available on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.

Also, if you listen in time and you’re interested in going to the conference Jasmine is putting on in May 2018, here’s the link for that:

http://bostonfantasyfest.com/

 

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SFFMP 175: The Rapid Release Strategy, Getting Reviews as a New Author, and Where to Spend your Advertising Money

Group Discussion, Podcast

This week, Jo, Jeff, and Lindsay answered listener questions on a variety of topics such as how to spend $1,000 on advertising to get the most out of your launch, how to get reviews as a new author, whether we use review or street teams, and how often to release books if you’re banking them to do a rapid release. We also answer the question Jeff always asks our guests… if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

Here are a few of the more specific topics we covered:

  • Writing and publishing in multiple sub-genres at once, yay or nay?
  • Advertising strategies for a book launch.
  • Street teams and whether we use them.
  • Amazon closing its submissions to Kindle Scout.
  • Selling boxed sets at more than $9.99 and still getting a 70% royalty at Kobo.
  • Doing hard cover omnibuses and large print editions of your books.
  • Going wide with audiobooks or staying exclusive with Audible.
  • Jo’s experience with Kindle Worlds since they started including KW stories in Kindle Unlimited.
  • Whether it’s worth maintaining an author presence on Facebook even if you’re not planning to spend money on ads.
  • When you’re doing a rapid release strategy for a series, how often you should get those first few books out there.
  • Where to invest $1,000 on advertising for the launch of a new series.
  • How long to let Amazon AMS ads run.
  • Our previous podcast on Amazon AMS ads with Tom Corson-Knowles.
  • Will people do newsletter swaps with you if your list is small?
  • Finding fantasy and science fiction authors to swap with via the SF/F Cross Promo Bulletin Board Facebook group.
  • Whether single-author boxed sets are still useful to put together.

If you have better answers to any of the questions than our venerable but not infallible hosts had, feel free to chime in below!

 

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