Tag: Indie Authors

SFFMP 148: 12 Ways to Keep Your Backlist Selling and Maintain a Steady Income

Group Discussion, Podcast

The guys discussed the various tactics they’ve tried and promotions they’ve participated in that have helped keep their older titles selling, especially in finished series that haven’t seen new releases in a while.

Here’s the short list, though they also answered listener questions and expounded on these quite a bit. As usual, it wasn’t a short show!

1. Run a sale on Book 1 (free/99 cents) while booking promos
2. Put together a boxed set of the first 3-4 books and run promos on it.
3. Publish new stories (short stories or novellas, if not novels) that tie into your old, completed series.
4. Publish short stories for your old series in multi-author anthologies that will lead people into your books.
5. Join or put together a multi-author boxed set, using one of your old Book 1s. It’s a chance to basically promo something new for all the authors involved.
6. If you have a number of series, consider putting together a “sampler” boxed set with your own Book 1s (maybe publishing something new to entice regular readers who already have the other stuff to buy).
7. Relaunch with new blurbs, categories, and new covers, especially if your original ones were done on the cheap and/or don’t seem a perfect fit.
8. Facebook/AMS ads for a steady trickle of sales.
9. Sales/freebies combined with joint authors promos or newsletter swaps.
10. Keep your community active and engaged in social media with polls/discussions/artwork. Word of mouth is easier to get when you’ve got people talking.
11. Create print copy giveaways on Goodreads, or on your own blog. Engage the readers. Make them do something different, or fun, to “enroll” in contest.
12. Network with other authors. Offer to write a “guest” blog post. Offer newsletter swaps.

 

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SFFMP 101: Getting an Agent After Self-Pub Success and a Print Only Deal with Annie Bellet

Author Interview, Podcast

On today’s show, we chatted with return guest, urban fantasy author, Annie Bellet. She first visited us on show 33. Since then, she’s published her earnings on her blog (she made over $250,000 in 2015) and taken on an agent and a publisher for a print-only deal (she kept her ebook rights).

Here are some of the things we discussed:

  • Leveraging self-publishing success to get an agent
  • How to choose an agent if you’re lucky enough to get some nibbles (and when you might want to pass)
  • Whether traditional publishers are open right now to print only deals
  • Whether trad publishers are currently likely to be interested in series that were previously self published
  • What stats/bragging rights you should have prepared to share that might interest an agent
  • Keeping a series alive and selling even when releases aren’t as frequent as you’d like
  • Whether permafree or 99-cent Book 1s are still working to help get people into a series
  • Staying wide in all the stores vs. dabbling in Kindle Unlimited
  • Running Facebook ads for boxed sets
  • Whether Annie’s publisher has handled marketing for the new paperbacks and hardbacks or if she’s responsible for that
  • Conversion and what’s good sell through in a series
  • The challenges of keeping a pen name active and selling

You can grab Annie’s first 20-Sided Sorceress ebook for free in all the major stores (Amazon link here) and also check out the new print omnibus of the first four adventures.

 

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SFFMP 36: Susan Kaye Quinn on Tips for Going Pro, Genre Hopping, and Selling Lots of Science Fiction

Author Interview, Podcast

Today we chatted with best-selling science fiction author Susan Kaye Quinn, and she had a lot of amazing advice. Here’s a look at some of what we covered:

  • How important the science is in science fiction (Susan has a PhD in engineering, so she knows her stuff, but says she puts emotion before tech)
  • Trying to develop new worlds and plots versus using popular tropes
  • Blurbing: do you use your own words or fall back on taglines like (this is Jo’s contribution) “Indiana Jones meets Firefly in a submarine” (FYI, Lindsay would totally read that.)
  • Some of Susan’s favorite marketing tactics that have worked over the years and that continue to work (she talked about big levers versus small levers, choosing to do things that get a big response)
  • Genre hopping — avoid or do it if you like it?
  • Kindle Unlimited and thoughts on serials now that the KU rules have changed
  • Overrated and underrated types of marketing (Susan isn’t a big fan of Facebook advertising and doesn’t think social media matters much when it comes to selling books)
  • Strategies for getting readers to pick up other series you’ve written
  • Getting more people onto a mailing list and how often to email them once they’re there
  • Tips for keeping everything in perspective once writing is your full-time job

For more great advice from Susan, check out her books for authors:

Also check out the video Susan mentioned, Facing Your Fears in Indie Publishing.

 

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Editing for Self Publishers with Tammy Salyer

Author Interview, Podcast

Tonight, we talked all about editing. We had author and editor Tammy Salyer on, and she answered our dozen-odd questions about copy-editing, proofreading, and substantive editing (the latter being something that proved difficult for some of us to pronounce… not saying any names here!). Since Tammy writes military science fiction and is working on an epic fantasy trilogy, she was a great person to have on our particular show, to give us information about genre stuff as well as regular editing issues. Here’s a taste of what we covered:

  • What are the differences between proofreading, copy-editing, and substantive editing, and how does an author know what he or she needs?
  • How can good editing make the marketing side of things easier?
  • Are there any common mistakes that new authors (or old ones!) make?
  • What should you do if you can’t afford to hire an editor? Are there are any tips or is there editing software that can help?
  • What are red flags that you should look for when hiring an editor?
  • What are samples pages and how can they help you find a good editor?
  • How slavishly should authors cling to grammatical rules?

Click to download the mp3.

 

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For more information or to check out Tammy’s editing services, visit her at Inspired Ink Editing.

If you’re interested in Tammy’s books, you can check them out on Amazon or visit her author page for more details.

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Marketing and E-Publishing Predictions for 2015 — what we believe will still work and what won’t

Group Discussion, Podcast

We have guests scheduled for January, so this should be the last show with just the three of us for a while. We discussed whether marketing and selling books got harder for indie authors in 2014 and, since there are only a couple of days left in the year, we gave some publishing predictions and some marketing trends that we believe could come to pass in 2015. At the end, we also shared a few of our own writing/publishing resolutions for next year.

Here’s a look at some of the topics we covered:

  • How has Kindle Unlimited effected us and will authors continue to have to deal with subscription services (possibly more of them from Amazon competitors) as time goes on?
  • Are things getting tougher, and was it indeed the year of the quitter, as discussed in Kris Rusch’s Things Indie Writers Learned in 2014?
  • How networking and collaboration on projects and marketing may become even more important to authors in the future
  • Will multi-author bundles still be popular, or will they be replaced by something else?
  • We might see more co-authoring, shared worlds, and pen names where multiple authors write under the name to increase the number of annual releases
  • Pre-orders, are they useful now and how might one take advantage of the benefits in the future?
  • How Lindsay started a new pen name in October of 2014 and did well with it, even as a completely “new” (anonymous) author: Pen Name Launch 1 (results after 1 month) & Pen Name Launch 2 (results after 10 weeks)

Click to download the mp3.

 

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Interview with Lindsay Buroker!

Author Interview, Podcast

Last Tuesday we hosted our first live event on YouTube!  Indie author Lindsay Buroker takes the spotlight as three other authors ask about everything from marketing to writer’s block!

Here’s the audio-only MP3 file.

 

 

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