In which I think out loud

On February 5, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

So, I was just talking with Tobias Buckell about mailing lists over on Twitter, as one does, because Twitter is a very strange place and sometimes you just have conversations with people whose books you own like it’s a perfectly normal thing. Here’s the thing: This sale is on day three and I am already powerfully tired of talking about it. I was thinking earlier today about Warren Ellis’ email mailing list, and about how lots of authors I know (by “know,” read “am aware of”) have such things, primarily because they control them and there’s no way for, say, Twitter to decide that I have to start paying them a nickel every time I want a Tweet to be potentially visible by all 5000 (!!!) of my followers.

The other thing is that, despite my apparent enthusiasm for it, I actually don’t really enjoy turning my blog into a promotion machine for my books. I feel like it’s necessary, which isn’t the same thing, but I don’t like it. This is my blog. It is for swearing. Not marketing. I’m not threatening to pull all book-related stuff from here, because that would be crazy, but I figure if I could somehow get several hundred people signed up for a mailing list, an email or two to those people might be a bit more effective than spreading promotion all over my blog, and it would certainly be easier.

So I’ve done two things tonight. I’m actually pretty happy with what the sale has done for my numbers already, so I’m gonna cut way back on promotion here and on Twitter– because I’ve sent Amazon some money to promote it themselves. I have a number of reservations about their new ads system, and I’ve seen some indications that writers don’t think it works very well, but to hell with it; it’s worth a try. I’ve targeted other books specifically: stuff by Andy Weir, John Scalzi, and Douglas Adams, mostly, with a few other geek favorites thrown in. It’ll run concurrently with the sale until the sale is over or my budget runs out, whichever comes first. We’ll see if anything changes.

Here’s the second thing. My first poll!

To be clear: The mailing list’s primary reason for existence would be promotion, and its use would be– I cannot stress this enough– minimal. I mean, it’ll ramp up around when the new book comes out, or when there are sales, but I can’t imagine more than a couple of mailings a month at the most.

Let me know what y’all think.

On #Facebook advertising

On December 31, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

I haven’t gotten around to writing the “How to Sell your Book on the Internet” post– it’s coming sometime this week, and I’m hoping it’ll be useful– but I just watched this video and it’s crazily interesting. It’s nine minutes long, so gird up your loins, because I know none of us have attention spans anymore. It’s worth it, though:

This is not okay.

On December 4, 2014December 3, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

I’m calling for an official Grammar Boycott of McDonald’s until we get a retraction and an apology.

In which I make a thing

On May 25, 2014May 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Writing3 Comments

When I got up this morning that planter box was a small pile of lumber in my garage and the 450 pounds of dirt inside of it were in my car in the driveway, so I figure I’ve accomplished all necessary Grown Up Shit for the weekend. Note the post hole digger in the background; the posts in the corners are six inches deep in the ground, so the box ain’t going nowhere nohow. (Also note that one two cubic foot bag of soil claims to weigh 40 pounds. This is bullshit; maybe if it’s completely bone dry, and this soil was very definitely not bone dry. I’m estimating 75 lbs. per bag based on being too lazy to just weigh the shit and feeling like the internet’s estimate of 12o lbs. is insanely high.)

Anyway, point is, soon there will be tomatoes growing in here. I like tomatoes. They’re tasty. And that, shit, I still have to mow, so I guess I’m not done with Grown Up Shit after all. God, I hate outside.

I made Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 free again yesterday and didn’t tell anybody. This was an experiment; I wanted to get some idea of how many sales/downloads I would get absent my own promotional efforts, if I just let Amazon and the whims of the Internet determine how many copies moved. There’s probably some interference happening from the day of the week, although I’m not sure whether Amazon would be busier on a Wednesday than a Saturday. (I am less likely to order from Amazon on the weekend because Sundays add an extra day for stuff to get to me; I don’t know if other people think like I do. The Internet seems to think that Wednesday is slower than Saturday.)

Anyway, point is: there were 84 downloads on the free day earlier this week, which I hyped heavily and repeatedly on every online venue I had available to me. Yesterday, with literally no promotion whatsoever, there were 21 downloads– all of which, presumably, were to people unknown to me, since unless someone from the blog or from Twitter or whatever just happened to click through and notice it, there’s no reason for anyone to have known about it.

This tells me that Amazon is not going to help me very much with promotion. This also tells me that I’m probably going to have to invest in some sort of paid advertising if I want sales/downloads to grow beyond the people I have immediate access to– because the first 100 or so copies downloaded (free or otherwise) appear to have gone almost entirely to people either from the blog or from my actual life, which means that my supply of additional humans who I know that might download my book is probably dwindling. The next time I do this I’ll keep it free for a couple of days and see what happens on day #2 of the promotion. Don’t hold your breath, though; I’m likely not going to make it free again until I make back what I paid for the cover, which will take a couple more sales if I don’t pay attention to the fact that I have to pay taxes and maybe another ten if I do.

I feel like there was one more thing I wanted to blog about today, so there may be yet another post later tonight. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

On marketing

On May 15, 2014May 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing6 Comments

This post is gonna be super meta and maybe a little whiny, so feel completely free to ignore it. I got home and died on the couch again tonight (second night in a row!) and my head isn’t completely on straight at the moment, so… yeah.

It occurred to me earlier this afternoon that, while I’m excited to have Benevolence Archives: Vol. 1 out there in the world, I’ve kinda unintentionally shot myself in the foot with regards to plans for later this summer. Part of the reason I got the grant money was because I was going to publish my other novel, which is actually novel-length, not a 30,000 word novella, sometime in June. I’m not sure if that date is still in the cards because finishing BA took a lot more of my April and May than I intended and Skylights needs some real revisions before I can have it ready for publication– and my artist still needs to put the cover together. It’s my next project after I finish the story for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award contest that I’m putting together right now, but it’s still been delayed repeatedly.

Here’s the problem, though: I get pretty detailed sales data from Amazon, right? While I think I’ve decided that I’m fairly happy with sales (they’re not high, but “dozens” is legally accurate) I am pretty sure that I know exactly who each of those sales has been to. There was one in the UK somewhere that could have been a few different people (or a stranger) but I’m pretty certain that I can trace every single other sale to someone I either know in person or have met through this place.

(This is the bit where I sound whiny, and I’m not sure how to fix it.) Don’t get me wrong: I love everybody who’s shelled out money to see the nonsense I write when you can see most of my nonsense here, daily, for free. But I’ve kinda fucked up here: because I know my book is selling virtually exclusively to people with previously existing connections with me and not to random Amazon customers, it makes me really nervous when I have to go right back to the same well in, say, a month and a half, only in a month and a half I’m demanding that you shell out $5.99 for a 100,000-word novel rather than $3 for a novella you can read in a few hours. And then there’s novel #3, which I’m writing this summer, which presumably would be finished/available by this winter, and the teacher book that I haven’t even mentioned around here but now I’m really thinking about making into a real thing.

I gotta find a way of broadening my reach past people I know, is what I’m saying. This blog has over 2600 followers but the majority of those aren’t really interacting with the site that much; daily hits are a tiny fraction of that. I’d think about following Gene’O’s advice about trying to broaden my Twitter reach (and I’ll link those posts as soon as I can find them again) but nobody clicks on links on Twitter so I’m not sure how useful that is.

I dunno. Marketing’s not my thing. Gotta get better at it, I guess.