The Ins and Outs of My Recent Fussy Librarian Promotion

First, Happy Valentine's Day! I hope someone gave you a valentine.

Second, if you're not familiar with ebook promotional newsletters, basically, a company creates an email list of ebook buyers (subscribers have to opt in, but it's free to them) and then charges authors and publishers to include their books in a daily email to subscribers. There are many of these services now. BookBub is the biggest name (and the hardest to get into), but there are others, including Book Gorilla, Bargain Booksy/Free Booksy (they separate free books and cheap books into their two emails and if you want both, you have to subscribe to both.), The Fussy Librarian, and Ereader News Today (ENT). When books are on sale but not free, the email entry has an affiliate link and the company gets a small cut from the sale.

On February 8, I ran a Fussy Librarian promotion for The Sixth Discipline (a free ebook!) . The results were pretty good. I had not used FL in a while, so I didn't know what to expect.

I gave away hundreds of copies, mostly on Kindle. And of course, even though the email itself usually generates "sales" for the one day it runs, Amazon's online algorithms push popular books to readers so increased "sales" continues for a few days. As you can see in the screen snap below, the promo offered links to the the book on Kindle, Nook (B&N), Apple, Kobo and Google Play. The results in the list below the screen snap are "sales" for the day of the promo plus three days after.

Vendor:           No. of Copies given away February 8, 9, 10, and 11

Amazon Kindle: 277 (plus 5 paid*), 88 (plus 2 paid*), 28 (plus  1 paid*), 21 (none paid*)
Google Books: 20, 3, 2, 0
iBooks/Apple Books: 19, 0, 0, 0
Barnes & Noble 0, 0, 0, 0
Smashwords: 0, 1, 2, 0 (note: their link was not listed in the ad; these are normal numbers for comparison)
Kobo 0, 0, 0, 0

* The Kindle version wasn't free in all Amazon bookstores so the paid numbers represent foreign sales.

Note that The Sixth Discipline was my first published title, and it came out in 2011. It is free on Amazon only because Smashwords lets an author make a book free, and because Smashwords is a distributor as well as an e-tailer, the book is thus free on other platforms as well. Amazon practices price matching (which is why you see "Tell us about a cheaper price" links on a book's Amazon page);  if you make the book free elsewhere, Amazon will make the Kindle version free also. These days, I usually give away from zero to three Kindle copies every day, so promotions are helpful to boost "sales."

I think in a way, these numbers do a good job of representing how well each vendor is doing at ebook sales. Amazon is way ahead of the pack; its second day number beat all the others' first day totals combined. But Google and Apple both have a significant ebook presence, On the other hand, Barnes & Noble is pretty much dead in the water, and Kobo is going nowhere (at least in the US; it is more popular overseas where Amazon is less dominant). This explains one of the main reasons Amazon can tempt authors and publishers into enrolling their books in Kindle Unlimited: they give up small sales numbers on other platforms in return for money from KU borrows.

Right now both The Sixth Discipline and its sequel No Safe Haven are available only in ebook form but I am having new covers made, and formatting the books for print. I hope to have paperback versions available in a month or so. I might run another promotion after that, as a test of the new covers.

A word to other authors: Giving away this book makes some sense because there is a direct sequel that is not free, and I always see increased sales of it after a promotion of the first book. Giving away a standalone book is not usually as good an idea.  For one thing, a huge number of free ebooks are never read. Making a book free eliminates the cost barrier, so a lot of readers download a free book first, and then look to see if they want to read it. If you have books that are very similar, it can still be a good idea to make a book free for a day or two, in that it can drive up your sales numbers on Amazon temporarily and thus get the book in front of a lot of readers through the "customers also bought" function. That's another benefit of Kindle Unlimited; authors can make their books free or discounted for short periods of time.

You can reach the world via Google Books

To be frank, I don't sell very many ebooks via Google Books. I give away about 6-10 copies of The Sixth Discipline (free almost everywhere) every month, through Google Books, but it has been a while since I broke double digits on annual sales.

But what's amazing is, where the books go. Through Google Books I have found readers in the US and the UK, but also in Poland, Lesotho, Indonesia, India, Myanmar, the Philippines, New Zealand, Colombia, South Africa, and  Romania. That's amazing!  My words have traveled a lot farther than I ever did.

How my recent promotion illustrates ebook market share

The Sixth Discipline, the first book of my two-book Haven series is always free, thanks to price-matching. Smashwords lets authors make ebooks available for free, and since that platform can also be used to push the book to iBooks, Nook, and Kobo, as well as smaller vendors (but not Kindle or Google Play), that means self-publishers can make books free on those platforms (and Nook now allows free books to be published on their platform, too). When an ebook is free elsewhere, Amazon will price-match the Kindle version. As you can see by the results below, the Kindle version matters a lot!

The Sixth Discipline was published in 2011, and had its big run in 2013 when I got a BookBub promotion for it and gave away 20,000 copies. Since then, its distrbution numbers (you can't call them sales figures when the book is free) have slowly dwindled. There are a lot of free books, many of them newer, and in a good month, I had been giving away maybe 20-30 Kindle copies, and 10-20 on all other platforms, combined. 

Update:  B&N reporting was very slow and just came in, so I changed the numbers from the original post to reflect those "sales."

The promotion consisted of paying for an entry in The Fussy Librarian daily "free books" email. That email lists links for up to five vendors. The results are in, and for the day of the promotion and the day after, I gave away this many copies:

Kindle =  377
Nook = 8
iBooks = 32
Kobo = 0
Google = 19

A few things jumped out at me. The most obvious is the dominance of the Kindle market. I gave away six times more Kindle copies than all the others combined. The lack of Kobo copies wasn't really surprising since  have never had big numbers on Kobo, but only 8 copies for Nook was telling. I do't think B&N is doing at all well with the Nook.  Also interesting is that Google Books' total was more than double Nook's, while iBooks beat out Google and Nook combined.

And of course, the whole point of paying money to give away a book is that I hope to sell the sequel, No Safe Haven.  Time will tell how that goes.

Amazon Exclusivity: What does it buy you?

The answer is, it depends. Mostly, in my experience it depends on your book. If you're self-publishing in the US, your biggest single market will almost certainly be the Kindle store. This is not to say that other markets should be ignored. Barnes & Noble (Nook), Apple  iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords sell plenty of ebooks.

Pricing and Countdown Deals

However, selling a book is not always as simple as slapping a price on it and saying "For Sale." Amazon limits the minimum price for a Kindle book sold via KDP to 99¢. It encourages you to price the book between $2.99 and $9.99 by offering the maximum royalty percentage for books in that range. If you enroll your book in the KDP Select program, it means you cannot sell it in ebook form anywhere except the Kindle store (This doesn't apply to print sales). It also means Amazon offers incentives not otherwise available.  Specifically, you can run Kindle Countdown Deals where for the limited number of days specified, the book is available at a sale price (US or UK only). As opposed to you simply lowering the price yourself (which you could do at any time) the regular price still shows up, but it will be crossed out to show the book is on a limited time sale.

Kindle Unlimited (KU)*

The other big benefit is that your book is available in the Kindle Unlimited subscription program. KU subscribers are Amazon customers who pay a monthly flat fee. This allows them to read any book they want in the KU program. There's a limit to how many they can have at once, but not how many they can read. Amazon pays the author not a flat royalty per book, but a per-page-read fee. The amount is not guaranteed, but lately for the US KU market it has been running about 0.0048¢ per "Kindle edition normalized page"**. It is usually less in the foreign KU markets, but the US is usually the biggest one anyway. 

Genre, length, and readability will affect how much money your book can make in the KU program. My experience is limited since I have had only three books in this program. The enrollment is not a marriage; you don't have to keep the book exclusive forever. When you sign up, it's for a 3-month period and then you can renew again every 3 months, if you wish. If you don't renew, your book is no longer in KU and you can't run price promotions. With Saronna's Gift, which is a science fiction romance, I made enough with KU borrows to make it worthwhile to say in for two full periods, that is, 6 months. With Turnabout, a YA science fiction novel that is in no way a romance, I never made much in the KU program so I let it expire after the first 3-month period. Note that Turnabout is also considerably shorter-- only about 80,000 words, which meant less money per KU reader.

To sum up, I would expect a book that was a page turner, a romance, and fairly long would do very well in KU. And, for what it's worth, here's my advice:

• Always start in KDP Select to see how the book does
• Set a goal for KU borrows (say a third or maybe half of what the royalties are) and drop out when you go below your goal.
• Once you're out of KDP Select, go for every market you can! 

Footnotes:

* I am aware that KDP Select also gets your book into the Kindle Owners Lending Library, but frankly, I don't think this is nearly as big a deal as KU so I didn't spend any time talking about it.

** Amazon calculates pages in its own way, but Alien Bonds was 128,000 words and Amazon said it had 658 KENP pages. That's approximately 195 words per KENP page.

Google is now making web cards for books!

A recent post on The Digital Reader blog (also on Facebook, if you prefer to follow it that way), describes how Google is creating "knowledge panels" (I always just called them web cards, although I suppose they are a special kind of web card) for books when you search on the book title.

See below for examples from two of my books, the first being one with both print and ebook formats and the second for an ebook-only title.

Naturally enough, the "Preview book" link takes you to Google Books. This is true whether there is a print version or not. There is no mention that I can find of Smashwords, Amzon/Kindle or any vendors other than Google, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, except that the GoodReads site is owned by Amazon and always includes their links.  

The only title I don't have on Google Books is Where Magic Rules, and its web card doesn't get a preview link at all. Maybe I need to load that one onto Google Books, too?

Is Google serious about its ebook platform?

Almost a year ago, I blogged about starting to load my books onto Google Play/Google Books.  I just got Saronna's Gift loaded yesterday. I've had very few sales on Google Books, but I figured it couldn't hurt to expand. For a while there was a major hold-up in loading new books because Google Books had no filter to stop people from pirating other people's work. I'm not sure when that was resolved, because they're not good at communicating. When the new book would not load all the way, I didn't get any message as to why; it turned out there was an epub problem, but I had never gotten a notice about it.

I have to say, Google has not made a lot of (or maybe even any!) improvements in the "Books Partner Center" in the last year. The interface is still clunky, and seems to be designed by geeks, for geeks. I guess you could call it the UNIX of book platforms; but unlike UNIX, there's no graphical interface available to make it easier.  One of the things that takes up a lot of room on the report screen is the pie chart it draws to show you the percentage of books that are live and for sale.

That's a lot of screen real estate for something that will usually be 100%. 

Features that are still clunky or problematic:

• You have to download a new CSV file every time you want to see your sales figures. There is no way to generate a report on screen.  This is my single biggest complaint. What a pain! Even Barnes & Noble is better than this.
• Reporting is erratic. I checked every day after I ran my last promotion, and it took a full week for the books I had given away to show up in the sales transaction report. On the other hand, I often see sales and giveaways the next day.
• If you want to run a Google Books promotion, you have create a CSV file and upload it. For every book, you need to provide the following info:  Identifier, Title, Currency, Amount, and Countries. Except that their program doesn't actually use the title column, so you can leave it blank. And you can say WORLD for country if you want it everywhere. 

The message you see on loading a book is the reason it's still worth it.

This book is live in the Google Play store in the following regions: AR, AS, AT, AU, BE, BG, BO, BR, BY, CA, CH, CL, CO, CR, CZ, DE, DK, DO, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, GT, GU, HK, HN, HR, HU, ID, IE, IL, IN, IT, JP, KG, KR, KZ, LT, LU, LV, MH, MP, MX, MY, NI, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PH, PL, PR, PT, PW, PY, RO, RU, SE, SG, SI, SK, SV, TH, TR, TT, TW, UA, US, UY, UZ, VE, VI, VN, ZA. It is also listed on Google Books.

Of course, if you need all those country codes explained, you'll need to look it up elsewhere. Google is a huge company. I expected better from them, so this makes me wonder if they really care about Google Books or not. 

More on Google Books

I now have 6 books for sale in Google Books/Google Play. I still think their interface can use some work, but when everything is exactly right (all the fields are filled in, the cover and book/epub file have been uploaded) it takes seconds for Google to process a book for sale. Amazon and Barnes and Noble both take hours.

Book 7 will be along shortly. My husband is home form the hospital, but he still needs a fair amount of help.

TRIBES is in Google Play!

I haven't posted much lately because of a family medical emergency, but I did find the time to investigate what it takes to load a book onto the Google Books/Google Play platform. Their interface is not nearly as easy to use as KDP, Nook Press, or Smashwords, but I managed to get Tribes loaded into their system.

Some early observations on the author interface are that it could really use some work. It requires an ISBN to even start the process, for one thing, as it uses that as an identifier for the book. Also, there are fields that need to be filled in that seem to rely on controlled lists, but the lists are not on a pull down menu; you have to type them. For example, the Book Industry Study Group (BISAC) subject/genre field. I had to find the online list to know exactly what to type. Also, the upload process is odd. It says basically "upload content" and you then upload the epub or PDF file and an image file for the cover, but there's not a specific place to do each. The first time I loaded the epub and the cover together and it only kept the cover file. I had to upload the epub again.

Finally, once the book is there, you can't see an online list of sales; instead you have to download a CSV file. That seems incredibly clunky to me.

I picked Tribes for this trial because it's standalone book, but when I have time, I plan to go back and add some more books, possibly the two Haven books. I got the idea to try Google Books from another author's posting on Facebook, so I will be curious to see how well the book does.

Correction:  Google Books doesn't require an ISBN, but it does use it as a file name identifier, so if you don't have one, it makes up its own identifier.