pricing ebooks--conflicting advice

Pricing of ebooks seems like a tricky proposition.  Amazon encourages pricing ebooks at a certain level by offering higher royalty rates on ebooks prices between $2.99 and $9.99.  They pay 70% royalty on such ebooks, whereas ebooks between $0.99 and $2.98 only earn an author 35%.  This ends up being a lot less money earned.

But of course, the question is: will a cheaper ebook sell a lot more copies, and thus even out the price differential, while at the same time reaching a broader audience (and increasing future sales of future books)?

I've read lots of conflicting advice and opinions on this one.  There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal about author Darcie Chan and the success she's had publishing the her ebook, The Mill River Recluse.  In the article,

She noticed that a lot of popular e-books were priced at 99 cents, and immediately dropped her price from $2.99 to 99 cents. The cut would slash potential royalties—Amazon pays 35% royalties for books that cost less than $2.99, compared with 70% for books that cost $2.99 to $9.99. But sales picked up immediately. "I did that to encourage people to give it a chance," she says. "I saw it as an investment in my future as a writer." The strategy worked. Several reviewers on Amazon said they bought the book because it was 99 cents, then ended up liking it.

She took some other interesting and smart marketing steps for her book (some of which I might try), and also got some positive mentions on web sites that helped her start to sell a lot more books.  Sales started to grow fast.  So far she's sold more than 400,000 copies, earning more than $130,000.

Sounds nice.  My sales of Tornado Siren have not been quite that strong.  Not even close.  (Yet.) (Says the perpetual optimist.)  And sales have actually dipped quite a bit since the end of the summer, and now they're getting very, very slow.  (I've seen NO holiday season boost.)

Hm.  So, I wonder, should I lower my price to see if that will help boost sales?  It's been at $2.99, but is that making it hard to attract readers who have never heard of me?

And then I read this post on Joe Konrath's blog, a guest post by Elle Lothlorien, who writes about the opposite effect.  She found that raising her price on her ebook, Sleeping Beauty, from $2.99 to $5.99, helped boost sales, and made her a lot more money at the same time.  Her theory being that people don't value things that they don't have to pay as much for--so you enjoy your expensive cup of coffee from Starbucks partly because you paid more for it.  

For authors with one book, it’s worth considering creating “imputed value” first with higher pricing. With a decent novel, this will “prime the pump” with positive reviews from readers who are invested and who want to like your book. This in turn will lead to more sales.

I'm not exactly sure what to do.  The nice thing, though, about ebooks is that it's pretty easy to change the price.  I've been reluctant to do so, but it feels like I should try something.  So I'm going to experiment a little.  I'm going to try lowering the price to $0.99 for a month, and then try raising it to something above $2.99, maybe $4.99, and see what happens.

Tornado Siren e-book: progress report (4 months)

I wish I could say that I was writing these reports to brag (but if you look at the numbers, you'll certainly see that's not possible), but it's more to give me a chance to add things up, and to inject a little dose of reality among the tidal swell of hype that gets put out about e-books.  (A story in last Sunday's NYTimes Magainze reported that self-publishing phenom Amanda Hocking sells 9,000 ebooks a day.  Wow. I could go for a day like that.)


Tornado Siren has been an e-book for a little more than four months now.  It's been selling some copies, at a slow but steady rate.  Hard to know what the average amount of sales is for an e-book (mine is self-published, but the print version was not).  Most people are busy talking about the exceptions, but that's true of print books, as well.

So, here are the sales numbers for Tornado Siren so far, by platform/version:

Kindle:  96 copies  (10 so far in June)
Smashwords:  6 copies sold
Nook :  9  (6 through Barnes & Noble, 3 through Smashwords) (this is a little fuzzy to me)
Sony: 1
Apple:  6

Total:  120 ebooks



I broke 100!  And Amazon has actually put real money in my bank account. With print publishers you have to wait forever to get paid, and even then they hold back money for returns, and even then the statements are often incomprehensible.  I can check the ebook total sales on line, any time I want.  Once a month, Amazon has been putting money into my checking account.  Not much, but in my writing life, every bit counts.

It's hard to tell what sort of promo helps or not.  Fellow writer Laura Axelrod ran a very nice, multi-part interview with me on her Gasp! blog, but sales seemed to go nowhere that week, then jumped a bit the following week.  Is there a lag?

May ended up being a good month, with Tornado Siren selling about one copy a day, a mere 1/9000th of what Ms. Hocking sells.  Joe Konrath sells about 700-800 copies of day.  Though, do note, they each have many more titles for sale.  I just have the one little novel.


Smashwords has dropped off a lot in sales for me, over the past month or two.  I have no idea why, though people are still downloading the sample (also a a slower rate).

I have some plans for a bit more promo (a constant refrain, I know), and we'll see if that makes a difference.  No matter what happens, I'm certainly glad to have picked up more than 100 new readers so far this year.  Here's hoping that number continues to grow.

Tornado Siren part of Read an E-Book Week (and half off)

There's a time for everything, and apparently the week of March 6-12 is the time to read e-books--it's officially "Read an E-Book Week."  It even has its own web site, with the history of e-books (they've been around a lot longer than you'd think) and other information and special offers.

My little part of "Read an E-Book Week" is a special promotion through Smashwords for Tornado Siren.  For this week, you can buy the e-book version of Tornado Siren for half off ($1.50 vs. the regular $2.99) at Smashwords.

It's a fun story and now it's even on sale, and Smashwords lets you read a pretty sizable free sample, in a variety of different formats.  I hope you'll check it out. 

Tornado Siren ebook--week one report

So my novel, Tornado Siren, has been live as an ebook for a week on Amazon for the Kindle, and a little less than a week on Barnes & Noble for the Nook, as well as on Smashwords.

I've done a little bit of the basic kinds of promo--I put out the word via Twitter and Facebook.  I updated my Goodreads settings.  I updated my web site and blog.  Sent out an e-mail to my list (about 700 people), telling them that it's out and asking folks who have read it to consider posting a review on one of the online sites.

So, how's the experiment going so far?

The nice thing with ebook publishing is that I can actually look up numbers to find that out.  Though that might also be a downside for a compulsive numbers guy like me.  (Don't ask how many times a day I check.)

In the first week, Tornado Siren has sold 14 copies for the Kindle (13 in the US, 1 in the UK), 2 on Smashwords (and the sample has been downloaded 14 times), and none for the Nook.  I didn't expect sales to be so heavily weighted towards the Kindle--does anyone actually use Nooks?

Also, my friends have come through nicely, and added a bunch of reviews to all of the sites, which I think might help.  Most of the people I know already own paper copies of the book and have read it, so they're not likely to buy the ebook.


So, for the first week, with no big promo and no publisher behind it, this seems like a reasonable amount of sales.  I guess.  (I'd love to have it become a fabulous bestseller overnight, of course.  Though I have to say that each book sold was a thrill. )

What happens next?  Certainly the buzz to family and friends will die off in the next week or two, as people clear out their email inboxes.  After that, I'm not quite sure how random readers are going to find this thing.  Earlier this week, I searched for Paranormal Romances on the Amazon Kindle site (its default search is by "relevance").  Tornado Siren was on the list, but it was at number 707.  I imagine I'm about the only one obsessed enough to page through to number 707.  Since the book is self-published, it's not eligible for most reviews, plus the print version was reviewed (though those reviews aren't yet showing up on the Kindle site).

 I might pick up a few random readers from my web site and blog (I get a few dozen a day, but probably a lot of the same people).  I'm looking at other possible promo ideas--there are some book review web sites out there, with a focus on ebooks.  I don't have a lot of cash to pay for online ads, and generally people seem to think they don't work.  (I need to do more research on this.)

It seems like if your sales are high, and you can leap into the top 100 in your category on Amazon, you've got a good chance of continuing those sales.  But without that start, I'm curious to see how I can get people to buy and read the ebook.  Still, at least now it's possible.  For more than a year, no one could read except if they checked it out from one of the few libraries that carries it.

I'll keep working on it, and I'll report back on my progress in a couple weeks.  And also, a big thanks to those of you who have posted reviews or bought the ebook already!  I very much appreciate the support.

Tornado Siren is now an ebook! (part 2: the how to make an ebook)

So this week, I finally got my act together, after procrastinating for almost a year, and published Tornado Siren as an ebook.  Every time I read Joe Konrath's blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, I felt more and more stupid for delaying.  But I was short on time, I needed a new cover, blah, blah, blah, excuses, excuses, excuses.

This week I finally just gave it and stopped doing all my other work and just decided to jump into the creation of a Tornado Siren ebook.

The first problem was that I needed a cover.  The text of the book was mine, but the old cover belonged to my publisher, Behler Publications.  And plus, the old cover was okay, but not great (and the print version wasn't a big seller, so maybe the cover wasn't helping much).  Plus, I needed a cover that would work as a much smaller image.  The original book cover was designed for a 8.5 x 5.5 inch book.  Ebooks are sold on the basis of thumbnail images (though, if you think about it, so are all print books sold on Amazon).

I talked to a neighbor who is a designer, hoping to get her to design it for cheap (I'd given myself a hundred dollar budget), but she was too busy.  Still, just talking about it helped generate some ideas.  So I spent a couple hours on photoshop, found some public domain tornado images, downloaded some new fonts, and put together a cover.  I'm still thinking/planning to find someone to help me do a better cover, but the one I came up with will do for now.  (That's it at the top of this post.)

Once the cover was done, I needed to format the manuscript for the various platforms.  Most important was the Kindle sold by Amazon, but I also wanted to have a version for the Nook sold by Barnes & Noble, as well as versions for any other reader.  For the other readers, I could use Smashwords, which creates ebooks in multiple platforms. 

The good news is that each of these platforms makes it pretty easy to upload your file and prepare it for publication.  This is especially true of books that are primarily text-based, like novels, without much in the way of tables or images.  The bad news was that my most recent version of Tornado Siren was in pdf format.  This meant I needed to buy a pdf unlocker.  I got DeskUNpdf from DocuDesk, since I already use their DeskPDF writer (all the time).  This gave me access to the file, but also meant I had a lot more formatting to do.

In addition, I also wanted to proof the book one more time (the printed version had one or two typos that had been bugging me for years), so that took a bunch of hours.  I resisted the urge to get into a full scale rewrite of it (since I have my hands full with two other big writing projects), but I did do some minor edits.

Once I got rid of text errors and ugly formatting problems, I was ready to format it for the publishing platforms.  Each one required something a little different.

Kindle
I started with the Kindle version.  I found some online help, from blogger/screenwriter, John August, in his blog post "Kindle formatting for web geeks" and also from Joshua Tallent's Kindle Formatting site.  The key takeaways from these sites were 1)  Keep it simple.  Try to strip away any formatting possible from the document (including fancy fonts, headers, footers, page numbers, etc.).  2)  For the Kindle conversion, I needed to have Word save my doc as a "Web site, filtered".  This second point proved very helpful.   I also discovered from Kindle forums that to get page breaks before Chapters, I needed to take out Section Breaks and replace them with plain Page Breaks.

The Kindle site  allowed me to preview my file, to make sure I didn't have any big errors showing up.  The preview is rough, but close enough.  It took me a couple tries, to make sure I had nothing strange showing up.  I had a printed version of the book already, which reminded me to make sure I had a copyright page and the other various info I'd need in the text.  I shifted the acknowledgments to the back, because I wasn't sure how much front matter Kindle users would be willing to page through.

Once I had the document together, I entered my summary, bio, cover, tag words, genre (I chose Fiction, general, and Romance, paranormal), the price, and all the info I'd need to get paid.  Seems like I'll get paid monthly, about 60 days after the sale goes through, if I earn more than $10.  I chose to price my book at $2.99, of which I'll earn 70%.  Then I pushed the Publish button and I had to wait about 36 hours before the book was live and for sale.  Now that it's up, I can check on the my sales whenever I want, which is another big difference from print publication--with Behler, I'd get paid once a year and there was no easy way to check the progress of sales to date, and even though my book was on Amazon, there was no way for me to track Amazon sales, other than through its sales ranking (which is a strange mysterious number that new authors follow obsessively).

So now it's online, at http://amzn.com/B004NSV4M8
I had one sale pretty quickly, and Tracy and I bought a copy to view on her Droid phone, just for kicks.  I was not able to enter editorial reviews from the printed version, and it doesn't seem to want to link any of the reader feedback from the printed version to the Kindle version, which is kind of annoying. 

It's hard to tell exactly how to make this book easier to find on the Amazon site.  It probably needs to sell a bunch of copies and receive a bunch of positive ratings, in order to start moving up in any search results.  Right now you'd have to know exactly what you were looking for to find it. We'll see if I can find a way to make it easier.

The Nook
This was my second priority, though I'm not sure how many people actually use Nooks versus Kindles.  I'm guessing it's a lot less.

The Barnes & Noble Nook publishing site is called Pubit, and it was pretty similar to the Kindle site and very easy to use.  The formatting for the Nook needed to also be very clean, but in this case, I saved the document as a Word 97-2003 doc.  And rather than Page Breaks before chapters, I needed to insert Section Breaks.

One plus of the Nook interface is that I was able to enter some of the editorial reviews that Tornado Siren received, but unfortunately, I couldn't enter the Publisher's Weekly review, because I don't have a name of the reviewer (which stinks, because a PW review would lend some credibility).  The cover size was also a little different from that of the Kindle, so I needed to work up a slightly larger cover.  I also had more room for the description of the book and the author bio, which was good.

I posted it to their site yesterday, and in less than 24 hours, it was live, here. 

Like the Kindle, the Nook offers a dashboard for authors/publishers, to make changes to the cover, descriptions, price, even the book text.  For some reason, even though I have a live link and can get to the page myself where someone can buy the book, it doesn't show up on the B&N site when I just do a search for "Tornado Siren" in NookBooks.   I'm assuming this is because my title hasn't been populated into the database yet, but I hope it happens soon.

I never had a sense that the print version of Tornado Siren sold many, if any, copies on BN.com, versus many hundreds of copies on Amazon.  I'm very curious to see if the NookBook version is able to sell anything.


Smashwords
This site has been around for a while, and they publish e-books in a wide variety of formats.  Smashwords offers a healthy royalty on books sold through them (85%), plus they sell through other resellters, like Apple, Sony, Apple, and more.   Their "meatgrinder" conversion engine allows you to upload one file, and then they translate it into the different formats required.  In order for this to work, your document has to be very minimally formatted.

To help you get it right, they put together a 72-page guide (that you can read on line) to guide you step-by-step through the process of formatting and publishing.  I followed each step, exactly as they set it out.  For Smashwords, I had to take out all page breaks and section breaks, giving up the notion of a clean page break between chapters.  Otherwise, the formatting was fairly similar to that needed for the Nook (the file was a  Word 97-2003 doc).  They are very specific about what you need on your copyright page, and had some great suggestions for other material you can include at the back of the book (author bio, contact info, etc.).

Again, like the other platforms, I uploaded my various info, cover, and hit the button.  My file converted with no problem, in a couple hours, and is now for sale on the Smashwords site, here:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42708

It is now awaiting being given "premium" status, which means they'll distribute it to other sites (Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple, and Diesel).  It'll take about a week to get approved, and after that it could take another 2 weeks or more to appear on these sites.

They also sold me an ISBN number for $9.95, on credit versus my future Smashwords royalties, which was required in order to be carried by the Apple and Sony ebook stores.  (I couldn't use the print ISBN number for the ebook).



What next?

It was pretty easy to get all of this done.  If I'd started with a clean Word file, it would have all gone a lot faster.  I also spent some time tweaking my description and bio. 

The really cool thing is that I can go back and upload a new cover, or summary, or bio, whenever I want.  And I can easily track sales.  If I get any.

That's the big question, of course.  Will anyone buy these ebooks?  Smashwords is pretty upfront about this on their site FAQ--they don't suggest you're going to sell many books.  It all depends on marketing and luck.  I have a limited amount of time/energy/money available for marketing at the moment, but I'll definitely work hard at spreading the word to friends, family, and other contacts.  Smashwords actually offers its authors a very sensible marketing guide (available for free, online), which I found helpful.


I'll let you know how it goes.

Tornado Siren is now an ebook! (part 1: the why)

So, first, my big news:   my novel, Tornado Siren, is now available as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, and other formats (via Smashwords).

Tornado Siren was originally published by Behler Publications in January 2006.  Behler is a small publisher just in its second year when they picked up Tornado Siren.  I did what I could to promote the book (detailed in a previous blog post here), and we sold a small amount of copies (not nearly as many as we'd hoped).  Last year the book went out of print.  It had stopped selling, wasn't in bookstores, and Behler had not yet put out an ebook version.

I've been interested the idea of ebooks for a while, even though I don't own a Kindle or Nook, and don't know if I will.  The ability to distribute a novel or nonfiction book so easily and cheaply seems like a pretty amazing idea.  And obviously a lot of other people think so, too, because more and more ebooks are purchased all time time, with ebook sales rising fast.  What's especially cool is that you can tweak the marketing of an ebook easily--swapping out covers, descriptions, changing prices--to find the balance the works best.

For unknown writers (like me), ebooks offer a great chance at broader potential distribution and the ability to compete on price.  The complexities of printed book distribution, especially for small (and new) publishers, meant that my book was in almost NO bookstores, even after it was released.  The exceptions were stores that I contacted myself and where I had readings.  It was hard to sell books if they weren't in stores.  Having the book listed on Amazon made sales somewhat easier--hundreds of my friends, family, and contacts (and even people I don't know), bought copies through Amazon.  But even with discounts, the book cost more than $10, and readers had to wait, and they had to know about the book.  And wait.  And pay shipping.  And the price could only go so low, because so many people (publisher, distributor, Amazon, and me) needed to get paid.  On the sale of a printed book on Amazon, even at full price ($14.95), I tended to make about 67 cents per book.

I've been reading a lot about ebook publication, and Joe Konrath's blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, was certainly the most enthusiastic.  He's has some amazing success with his genre fiction by publishing his own ebooks.  He's always been a good self-promoter of his work and is extremely prolific.  He was also very willing to share the numbers about how many books he was selling and how much he was earning.  (And I like numbers.)  His blog also features many guest posts from writers who are also having significant success selling their books at ebooks.

So why not publish Tornado Siren as an ebook myself?  I could have have waited for Behler to do it, but they didn't seem in any hurry to make that happen.  Plus, if I published it as an ebook myself, I'd earn a lot more on every sale.  For example, Kindle books sold on Amazon, can earn an author as much as 70% of the sales price (if they're priced between $2.99 and $9.99).  So even if I sold the book for $2.99, I'd be earning almost $2/book.


Most importantly, I'd have a chance for readers to start to find me again.  The book could remain continuously accessible (you don't even have to down an ebook device--you can read ebooks on your PC), for a very long time.  Plus, my book could now compete on the basis if price with books from established publishers.  Ebooks from the big houses tend to run around $10 and up.  I could price my book at $2.99 (or less), and cost would not longer such a barrier to a reader trying an author who's not a bestselling writer.

And it wouldn't cost me anything.  That's right, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords will all publish your ebook for free.

Still, I put it off for almost a year.  Which was probably a mistake, because getting in early means you get in when there is much less competition.  Thousands of new titles are being added every week.  The need for a  new cover and the general lack of free time in my life kept it from happening.

But in the end, the decision was easy.  What did I have to lose?  It would take some time, but not much money (maybe some money for a cover).  I could direct viewers of my web site and blogs to buy copies.  I'd continue to have a chance to read more readers.  And I could try new marketing strategies, new summaries, and even pitch the paranormal love story aspect of the book more actively.

I'm not giving up on print publishing.  I have an agent who is pitching two of my newest novels, and I desperately hope she'll find publishers for them and that they end up in bookstores across the country.  But for Tornado Siren, this seemed like the way to go. 

I'm trying to temper my fantasies.  My book isn't going to sell like Joe Konrath's stuff.  But even if I find dozens or hundreds of new readers, I'll come out ahead.  (Maybe I can make enough to buy the kids some pizza.)  And maybe those new readers will come back and read some of new novels, when they're available.

(next: the how)

glad they still like me

It's always a good thing when people say nice things about you, especially if they happen to publish your books. Lynn Price said some very nice things about Tornado Siren over at her Behler Blog. (She even posted the first two chapters, so folks can get a sneak preview.) The book's been out for a while now, so it's not just the standard PR, book plug sort of thing. As I try to put the last few chunks of work into the new manuscript, it's reassuring to be reminded that people liked the first one.

Reading from Tornado Siren at Brookline Booksmith on 12/4/08

Tomorrow, as part of Brookline's First Light Celebration, I'll read from Tornado Siren at Brookline Booksmith. Local authors will be reading from their books from 5pm - 8pm. I'm on stage (in the basement) at 6:30pm, if all goes as planned. I'll have fifteen minutes to make people fall madly in love with the novel. No sweat.

If you're in the area, please stop by. There are lots of good books being highlighted. (And we don't want to feel lonely down there, with just a bunch of us writers.) This set of readings is organized by the Brookline Authors Group, which has been meeting for about a year now, and has put together a cable video series on books, as well as other events.

Tornado Siren: Wordle Version

Tracy showed me this cool web app, Wordle, that takes a bunch of text and essentially turns it into word art, using the frequency of words in the text. Here's what my novel, Tornado Siren, looks like, in Wordle:

Tornado Siren highs and lows

I was doing some googling the other day and discovered that it's possible to buy a used copy of Tornado Siren for as little as $2.21 at alibris. There's even a signed copy going for $2.28 (so apparently my signature is worth 7 cents. Who knew?)

However, on the same site, you can also buy a copy of the book for $199.44. (New.) I'm curious as to how they arrive at this price, and a little sad that if they were able to convince someone to pay this hunk of cash, I don't think I'd get a cut. So, I want folks to know that if you're looking to pay that much for one of my books, contact me directly. I will undercut any exorbitant price on any of my books or plays by 10%. Or, if you're really trying to pay the most possible, I will agree to take 10% above whatever price you find on the internet.

If you're too cheap to shell out cash for the book, it is actually owned by a few libraries. At least ten that I've been able to find, thanks to WorldCat (though they don't have every one that I know about) : Brookline, MIT, Cambridge, Corunna Michigan (I have family there), Gainesville Florida (thanks, Mom), Oklahoma City (which makes sense), Phoenix (which seems random), Amherst Virginia, and Meridian Idaho (which makes me happy for some reason).

If you don't see your city listed, then you know what to do--make that request from your system today (pretty please). (Tornado Siren, Patrick Gabridge, ISBN #1-933016-36-1)

marketing efforts: book clubs (and my meagre resources)

Getting ready for the BEA helped reinvigorate me for marketing Tornado Siren. Just before the conference, I sent in $40 to ReadersCircle.org to get on their preferred titles list for a month, which puts an image of my cover the front page of their site. They get more than 35,000 page views a month, but we'll have to see how many of those visitors click through to my page. My traffic is up, but it's definitely still slow. It's tricky trying to figure out where to stick my very finite resources (I'll have to find a way to barter with fellow playwright blogger Malachy Walsh for some marketing tips...).

I also used the ReadersCircle site to approach book clubs. Last week I sent e-mails to almost 40 clubs, half in my area, and half in Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas/Colorado, to let them know about the book, and offer to talk to their groups either on-line or in person (f0r the New England ones). The response had been mostly deafening silence until today, when I heard from the Boston University Barnes & Noble. She said that the book isn't right for their book club, but she was interested in the book and ordered copies to shelve in her store. So that's a success. Now I just need that to happen about five hundred more times.

I know this is extremely unlikely, but if any of you who are reading this are in New England and don't have a copy of Tornado Siren (surely not possible), be sure to head down to 660 Beacon Street next week and make them happy they ordered the book. (It'd make me happy, too. And make you happy, because it's a fun book.)

Trying to figure out how to sell novels has been an interesting puzzle, and I'm still trying to figure it out. In some ways, marketing a play production is easier, because it runs for a few weeks, you market the hell out of it (with scant resources), and either you sell tickets or you don't, and then it's over. And you've got a cast and crew plugging the show to their friends and family. With a book, there's no cast and crew. Just me--and my friends and family have all done their duty. Getting the word out there to the rest of the besieged world is the tricky part. As soon as I stop marketing it, that's it, people aren't going to buy it and read it. Which would suck.

Tornado Siren Marketing: What I've Done So Far

I'm trying to stick with my plan of 30 minutes a day on marketing my novel, Tornado Siren, and 30 minutes on screen stuff. So far, I've spent more than 30 minutes on the book mostly making a list of exactly what I've done so far, so I can get my head around what's worked and what hasn't. Next I need to make up a list of what I want to try next (and then actually do it).

So, here's what I've done so far:

• Designed and printed post card. Got 5,000 copies. Have about 1,800 left.
• Mailed out post card to a couple hundred people. Gave away lots more.
• Got www.tornado-siren.com web domain registered. Put together a web site for the book.
• Set up an Amazon Day, where I e-mailed all my friends and family and encouraged them to buy on the same day (in the hopes of increasing the Amazon ranking, and thus gaining more notice). It worked pretty well (we got to #484 overall, and in the top 100 for fiction). Not sure how many we sold, but it was close to 100. This was the most successful book selling that I’ve done, and really fun, too, because it reconnected me with a lot of old friends.
• Came up with a list of all bookstores in Oklahoma. Called most of them and then had publisher send them advance copies. Didn’t seem to accomplish much—I don’t know if they’re currently carrying the book.
  
• Worked out a deal with an Omaha bookstore to offer a discount on the book with a ticket stub from a play festival (in which I had a play). The theatre offered a discount to patrons who brought a copy of the book. Sent post cards to the theatre to give out. Didn’t seem to generate many sales.
• Did a signing at a Washington, D.C. theatre festival where I had a play. Learned, the hard way, that having the signing after the show is a bad idea. Intermission would have sold a lot more books. I also tried setting up a cross promotional deal with area bookstores, but they weren’t interested.
• My parents and my in-laws have all sold dozens of books for me to their friends and co-workers. Not unlike as if I was a Girl Scout selling cookies. I have to say, these readers have been some of the most appreciative that I’ve encountered.
• Did another signing at a play reading event. I signed books at intermission and sold half a dozen or so, which felt good.
• Set up my first book store signing, at the MIT Coop bookstore. It was an early signing, 5:30pm, which was problematic, but it was my first, so I got about a dozen people, who bought almost 20 books. This store rarely does events, so they were pleased with the turnout. I’d postered all around campus and sent tons of e-mails. The e-mails helped but the posters did nothing.
• I set up signings at other bookstores: Harvard Coop (good audience, decent sales, great staff), Book Ends in Winchester (local flooding was a problem, but 2 people showed), Salem (driving rain kept away all but 2 people), and two signings at a Barnes & Noble in Worcester (where the books were sold on consignment)—the first one was great, with coverage in the local paper (though the article brought in only 1 person) and my wife’s book club showing up. The second signing brought in only 1 person.
• I tried to get signings at half a dozen other stores in the Boston area, but was turned down.
• Went to a local weather conference, and gave out a few post cards and made a possible contact at a book store, but sold no books. (Started to figure out that weather geeks are more interested in non-fiction around tornadoes than fiction.)
• Got a copy to a meteorologist friend, who is friends with the publications director of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). This landed me a nice blurb in the Bulletin of the AMS. This, in turn, got the book noticed and mentioned by the Weather Guys, who write a blog for USA Today. I wrote to people that I knew had read the book and asked them to write comments to the blog, and got a great response (28 comments). The coverage sold a few books, and word popped up on another blog, but that was about it. (I had fantasies of it catching fire from this coverage.)
• The book got three reviews (Curled Up With a Good Book, Romance Junkies, and Publishers Weekly) thanks to my publisher’s efforts, and I got one from a playwright binge writer (on Ink19, which was my very favorite). All were positive, but all were on-line only, and it’s unclear if they lead to many sales. We still haven’t had an actual print review. (The best print coverage I got was in Worcester.)
• I tried my Boston Globe contacts, but they only write about theatre (and not about playwrights writing books).
• I researched all the big media markets, looking for weather forecasters who were black and/or female, and gave this list to my publisher (my main character is a black, woman meteorologist), who sent out copies. We also sent one to Al Roker. Never heard a peep from this. (I’d hoped at least one might read it and like it.)
• I searched Yahoo for groups interested in romance novels (mine has a romance in it, but isn’t a “romance novel”) and groups interested in tornadoes. I joined a couple, made an initial post or two, but didn’t find a way to make any progress. I still feel like this could pay off, but I must be missing something.
• I gave books away as raffle items, to my daughter’s school, and to the weather conference I attended. This didn’t really seem to lead to anything further.
• I contacted some of the biggest stormchaser web sites, and even got a nice mention on StormTrack.org, which is a biggie. Sold a couple books that way.
• Sent books to a bookstore in Denver, where my old theatre company, Chameleon Stage, was having a signing of some of our collected monologues. (I should follow up with them.)
• Went to NYC for two signings sponsored by my publisher. Unfortunately they were at odd times, on weekdays (one in a restaurant that changed its name that very week, so was tough to find). We had half a dozen authors or more at each event, but the audience was entirely made of spouses and people that I’d e-mailed (and just a handful of them). I don’t know that any books were sold.
• Got my publisher to enter the book in both the Massachusetts and Oklahoma state book awards competitions. (My publisher paid for all the books.) But I didn’t win.
• I set up an interviews with shows on a Worcester Community Access TV channel, but for the first one, the producer never showed up, and the second one got canceled. It started becoming clear that it wasn’t worth the gas, so I let it go.
• I participated in an author’s weekend sponsored by my local library, where I got to do a reading and a signing. My friends and neighbors came out in support, and I sold about half a dozen books. There might be some ongoing contacts that come from this event. (We might start a book show on the Brookline community cable channel. We’ll see.)
• Put in requests with my local libraries to carry the book. (And had family members do the same.) They did buy the book and it’s now often checked out.
• Sent a copy to my screenwriting agent/manager in Hollywood, with the hopes that it might lead to it getting optioned by someone. Nada.

That's mostly it. Mostly I've learned that selling a first novel, by an unknown author is very, very, very, very difficult.

I'm certainly interested in suggestions/ideas (other than, "get it on Oprah.")

In The Dumps: Need a new plan

A friend scored a copy of the Bookscan sales report for my novel, Tornado Siren, last night, which was both helpful (good to be reminded of the reality) and depressing (reality bites). The book got off to a good start when it came out early last year, but since then sales have been slow. I've had a lot of experience marketing plays and play productions, but trying to sell books has been a whole new thing.

I've sold a lot of books just on my own to friends and family, which has been enormously helpuful. But most of those don't show up in Bookscan (which is what editors and agents can look at to see how well my book fared). I'm with a very small publisher, so their marketing and distribution power is tiny, and now that the book has been out for a while, it will be very hard to get additional reviews and press. (We're hitting the hot patch of tornado season, which might help make people interested in Tornado Siren.)

So I felt depressed for a while last night (you know--I suck, no one is ever going to read or buy this book again, I should have been working harder, I waste too much time, what an idiot, I don't know what the hell I'm doing), but I know that I just need to make a plan and get to work.

I'm in the midst of writing a new novel, so time is short. But I think I'm going to shoot for spending 30 minutes every day marketing Tornado Siren, and 30 minutes on screenplay marketing. I'll try this for the next 30 days and see how it's going. (My own little marketing binge.) I haven't spent much time at all on marketing either of these aspects of my work this year, but if I don't do the work, the stuff won't sell (duh).