#ROW80 Goal Achieved! New E-Book #FREE 'til Friday!

Well, I actually pulled an all-nighter on Sunday night, re-releasing all 3 of my previously published works with  new and improved back matter (samples, works list, etc) but more importantly for this ROW80 round, published A Matter of Honor: A Mister Wickham Adventure.

Then, I went off to work, got quickly sucked into a busy day, and logged onto the Amazon KDP Select dashboard at lunchtime to find that, unpromoted, the book had 300+ downloads and had jumped to #488 on Amazon's free book list.

Of course, that's all very exciting, especially since this short fiction is a tie-in to my on-going serial novel, The Perfidious Mister Wickham.

I'd like to think that this one has a shot of getting into the Top 100 by the end of the week, but in fact, it was only released to maintain continuity with the serial novel (a post for another time, but it turns out there is no better or more stressful way to keep yourself on-track writing a novel than to promise legions of fans that there will be a new chapter out every Monday!)

So, I wasn't really prepared or planning to do much promotion, and I guess we'll just see where Monday's momentum takes this one.

I hope you'll take a moment out of your busy day to grab a free copy for yourself, (click here for US readers, or here for UK readers) - and of course all Tweets, FB posts, etc. will be greatly appreciated!

Have a great day, and I'll look forward to penning another post sometime soon!

Best,
Edward

Free 'til Friday!

Greetings, friends!

I know I've been a little quiet here for the last week, but I've just made the transition back from Indonesia to the United States, started a new job, and am in the process of moving into a charming little cottage that requires just a bit of work to make it perfectly livable...

So, to give you something to read besides my blog posts, my latest short fiction, Lethargica, is free until Friday, June 22nd.... Here's the direct link to Amazon to grab a copy - or, if you've already got one, please tell a friend or two so they can save themselves 99 cents!

If you're up on Twitter or Facebook, it would be wonderful if you would share this link with your followers and friends: http://amzn.to/KhZV2T

I'll have a big update post this weekend to recap how this final KDP Select promotion goes, and to bring you up to speed on my various projects, but in the meantime, I wish you a great and productive week, and hope you enjoy this latest freebie!

Best regards,
Edward

Epic Fail? Yes, it Was Awesome! Plus ROW80 Check-In, Crossover Karma, and more!

At the Wat Chan Temple

Well, checking in from the People's Democratic Republic of Laos, where I've been traveling for the last few days. Tomorrow it's onward to Vietnam, first stop, Ho Chi Minh City (still commonly referred to as Saigon!)

First, a big thank you to anyone who supported my first Indie Crossover Karma artists, the rock/rap group 7LIONS - after the millions of votes were tabulated, they came in a close second in Macy's iHeart Radio contest - so, while it's unfortunate that they won't be headed to Vegas in September to play that big festival, hopefully the fact that they beat 22 other bands and solo acts from around the nation will help move them closer to getting a big recording contract, and it's certainly helped showcase their music!

The Final Analysis

I am also happy to report failure in my attempt to break into the Amazon Kindle "Top 100 Free" with my latest short fiction release, and also the failure to give away 1000 free copies of Lethargica. Why am I happy? Because we learn more from our failures than our successes, and I learned a lot with this latest release, all of which I'll document for the benefit of others in a future post.

Another product of the week that will get more discussion in the future was the creation of a Social Media Plan - something that every self-published author needs, and that I now (finally!) have...

Meanwhile, what about those darn ROW80 goals?

WRITING

- Wr0te Another Chapter of The Notorious Mister Wickham - yes, I know I'm supposed to be working on Charming, The Artillerists and Merry Christmas, Mister Washington, but it's bad form to argue with your Muse!

PUBLISHING

- Publish German Translation of Happily Ever After - I sent a follow-up note to the German lady who has offered to do the translation - she's very busy, so who knows? (FYI, I'm looking for a French translator, too - so, if you know anyone, leave me a comment!)

FITNESS / LANGUAGE

- Sigh... this keeps falling through the cracks... Between a shoulder injury, lack of a fixed schedule, and lack of gyms in the little towns in which I keep finding myself, I'm finding this hard to stay on top of. But I am trying to send as many SMS messages to my French-speaking friends in French, and am studying off and on... Bad me! Will try to do better and have something useful to report next Sunday.

NETWORKING

- Stayed caught up on the Author Karma Facebook Liking List...

- Wrote a guest post for Nicole Basaraba's Writer's Uni-Verse-City on the topic of short stories...

- Created a Social Media Plan

PROMOTION

- Ran the last of my target KDP Select Promotions!

ADMINISTRATION

- Create a “Short Story Contest” website Cancelling this goal... Maybe next time!

So, that's what's new in my neck of the woods... Will look forward to reading about what other folks have going on, and happy to entertain your questions or comments.

Best always,

Edward

Book Release Event: LETHARGICA is FREE for Kindle Starting Friday...

It's always a pleasure to be able to put out a post like this, announcing the release of a new work of short fiction and giving my readers a chance to grab a free copy. This Friday and Saturday, my latest story, Lethargica, will be FREE on Amazon for the Kindle.

I hope you will help me achieve my goal of breaking into the "Top 100" on Amazon with this release of a story set in World War One. It's a beautiful and tragic tale of a man and a woman separated by an ocean, a war, and perhaps something even darker and more horrifying.

Early reviewers write: "I really liked this one... The writing style reminded me of Tim O'Brien meets Humphrey Cobb meets Ken Kesey meets Joe R. Lansdale..."

 "...a touching tale, written in Edward Carpenter's unique voice. It has very poetic prose with a wide variety of adjectives and metaphors that build the mood of the piece perfectly."

So, what can you do to help?

Well, you can click the buttons below to share this post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+1, to help spread the word - it's really the most effective way to help people discover a new author! Or send an e-mail out to your friends listing these links:

US readers: http://www.amazon.com/Lethargica-ebook/dp/B007Z9AKJK/
UK readers: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lethargica-ebook/dp/B007Z9AKJK/

You can also watch the video trailer for this story at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeUv_AK8LvU - and again, sharing, Tweeting, and +1'ing this video will be great for helping generate awareness...

And, you can be sure to download your free copy on Friday or Saturday - remember, you don't even need a Kindle to read this and other great stories - free apps are available for all smartphones, the iPad, and even PC/Mac computers.

Thanks for your support, and I look forward to hearing what you think of this book.

Best always,
Edward

Friday Video Blog - "Lethargica" Trailer Released!

The trailer for my newest short fiction on Amazon is out today - if you've got a minute, take a look and see what you think. If you have the time, post a comment with your thoughts - your perspective and critique are always appreciated, and help me improve myself as a writer (and a film maker!) 

I hope you enjoy this little film, and if your curiosity is piqued, you can click here to read a sample or pick up a copy of this bittersweet tale for 99 cents on Amazon...

 

Thanks, and feel free to share this post on Twitter or Facebook if you enjoyed it!

Best always,
Edward

KDP Select “FREE for FRIDAY” Promotion Recap

Continuing the analysis of the KDP Select program and particularly the use of “free” days to promote short stories, I recently concluded the third of my planned “FREE for FRIDAY” promotions.

The genesis, some of you might recall, was that when I released Happily Ever After as a KDP Select title, I used all 5 free days at once, and while the book did well, with 190 downloads on the first day (and 656 total) the number of books downloaded for free dropped off considerably after the first 2 days of the promotion.

Thus, with Seven Lives to Repay Our Country, I decided to test the effect of 1 and 2-day promotions, and also to find out just what effect social networking played on the efficacy of such giveaways.

Finally, I wanted to establish a baseline for the “KDP Select Bump”, if such a phenomenon actually existed.

So, what did I learn from this promotion?

Well, a few interesting things.

Results: Seven Lives to Repay Our Country rose to #8 on the Fiction/Genre Fiction/War list, and #35 on the Fiction/Short Story list, with 102 copies given away.

Observations:

• Social networking saturation. The first “FREE for FRIDAY” event got 45 signups on FB and 11 on Goodreads. This one got 5 and 6, respectively. This shows that a potential disadvantage to splitting up your promotions may be that you lose the attention of FB / GR fans on subsequent promotions. For example, suppose you have 100 fans on each site. The first time you do a promotion, you invite them all, and 60 sign up. They download your book, but on a subsequent campaign, they probably won’t sign up since they already have it.

• People don’t Share. I posted a couple of notes on FB that specifically asked people to click “SHARE” to help the note go viral. Total shares? Four. My observation is that unless something is really cute, sad, funny, or bizarre (and usually image-based) people simply don’t share. They may “LIKE”, but that doesn’t have the same impact.

• Effectiveness of Twitter. Since I didn’t really use Twitter intensively in the first promotion, it’s probable that my Tweeps didn’t suffer from the same sort of saturation, and Twitter is also a platform that lends itself better to sharing a link and a short blurb with a lot of people. This time, I sent 22 total tweets (@ an average of 2 people per tweet) and got 21 Re-Tweets as a result (about a 50% return.)

• Guest Blog / Author Interview. I had a an author interview at Shut Up & Read and a guest post at Believing in Horses, both of which referenced the promotion. Judging from the scarcity of the comments at both sites, I believe these probably did not measurably impact the current campaign, but since they’ll be out there for a while, they may lead to paid sales in the future.

• Staying Power. When the promotion ended at midnight on April 6th, this story was ranked 12th in Fiction/Genre Fiction/War list, and #35 on the Fiction/Short Story list... But the interesting thing is that it stayed on the free list for the next five hours, actually rising to #10 by 3 am, and #8 by 5 am, before finally disappearing from the list at 6 am.

• The “Kindle Select Bump” - it's too early in the month to tell, but past data indicates there should be an increase of about 4 times sales over months without a "free" promotion.

Analysis:

There was little apparent impact from the Facebook / Goodreads events and the guest post / author interview. And based on the second “FREE for FRIDAY” (where I intentionally did no promotion) we know that no promotion = low free downloads. Thus, the only factor that seems to have driven downloads was the Twitter campaign.

Those 22 Tweets to 44 followers generated Re-Tweets that reached approximately 97,292 people. If we subtract out the number of people who probably downloaded just based on the story being on Amazon’s “free” list (using the number from the un-promoted free day as our baseline) we see that about 80 downloads were probably due to Tweets that sparked a reaction.

Thus, we hypothesize that in the future, we can expect 4 downloads per Tweet sent out, and of course, we’ll test this with our final promotion.

Finally, we may have a partial explanation for the “Kindle Select Bump” – if the book stays on the “FREE” list (even though the price shows 99 cents) for 5 hours Pacific Standard time, that means anyone picking books off that list as late as 8:59 am on the East Coast, or 1:59 pm in Europe will see the book at or near the top of the list, but if they click to get it, they’ll see that it costs something – a price they may be willing to pay based on its ranking.

Future Plans:

Based on this information, I will plan to use the last 2 “free” days for this title to run a promotion that ties together everything learned from this one and the 3 promotions which have preceded it, and tests the hypothesis about the “return on investment” for Tweets, the optimal length of a promotion, use of a “Core Group” of supporters, and the extent of the “KDP Select Bump”, which so far appears to increase sales of all books by 4 times the number sold in a month without a promotion.

Hopefully this synopsis will be valuable food for thought for any authors currently planning their own future promotions, so if you know anyone who might benefit from this information, please forward them the link!

Best to all,

Edward

ROW80 Round 2 - Checking in from Kuala Lumpur!

Well, the first few days of ROW80 have been productive enough. While traveling around Malaysia, I've found the time to finish all the chapters of my novel that are required for this second round, so anything done in the next 70-odd days in that regard will be icing on the cake. I've also done a decent job of keeping up on the fitness and French study goals; knocked out a few more pages on "Charming", popped over to Author Karma and did my 30 minutes of networking, and have drafted an analysis of my latest KDP Select promotion which I'll post up here in a day or two. Major milestones listed below. Looking forward to seeing how everyone else is doing this week!

WRITING

- Write 6 Chapters of “The Notorious Mister Wickham” - 100%

- Finish “Charming” - 80%

NETWORKING

- Build my “Core Group” to 25 people - 8%

PROMOTION

- Run 3 KDP Select Promotions - 33%

KDP Select "Free for Friday" Follow-up...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post to share the results of the first "Free for Friday" promotion for Seven Lives to Repay Our Country, which I had re-released as a KDP Select title after seeing negligible sales through Barnes & Noble, iBooks, etc.

To recap, with an aggressive promotion through Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and this blog, the story was downloaded 166 times in the US, and hit #6 in its genre. But, I was curious to know how much the hard work of promoting actually helped.

In order to see whether the book would have received almost as many downloads simply by appearing as a free title on Amazon, I set up a "Free for Friday" promotion for last week - when I knew that I'd be in Hong Kong watching a rugby tournament, and as far away from my computer and the temptation to promote the book as possible.

The result? A mere 20 downloads. Promotional efforts, even if they weren't optimal, had generated 8 times the interest in the book as it would receive otherwise.

Or was that actually the case? What if the niche for this book was really saturated, and the low number of downloads only reflected this, not a difference in the value of promotional efforts?

Clearly, it's time for another round of testing!

Thus, in April, I'll run another pair of "Free for Friday" events, with promotional techniques refined based on my learning experiences from the first event.

• Synchronized and relevant "guest blogging" or author interviews.
• Development of a Core Group of readers willing to help with promotion.
• Use of a Facebook post designed to go viral through "shares" vs. "likes."
• Segmented promotional help requests.

If this third event also results in a high number of downloads, it will lend credence to the idea that promotion makes an impact, and may show that some techniques are better than others when it comes to promoting a book.

Stay tuned!

Edward

A Round of Words, Around the World!

So, wag of the finger to myself - I missed the Sunday check-in last week for ROW80, but in my own defense, I was in Las Vegas, spending a weekend playing rugby and poker with my old teammates from New Mexico State University.

Picked up a few stitches in the upper lip, but had a great time overall. Now down in San Diego where I've been visiting family and friends for the past few days, and am about to drive up to LA to have dinner with more of my many fabulous brothers and sisters before flying out to London, on to Geneva and Naples, and much later, back home to Jakarta.

In the midst of all this, as you might imagine, there hasn't been a lot of writing going on.

I have made the decision to remove Seven Lives to Repay Our Country from Smashwords, and make it a KDP Select title, but I'll explain the rationale for this decision in a later post.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll get back to work on writing and editing at 30,000 feet, but today's all about family and friends. So, thanks for stopping by, and I'll look forward to having a more substantive report on Sunday.

Best to all,

Edward

ROW80, Listopia, eTLC, etc

Greetings, fellow readers and writers, from chilly Newport, Rhode Island, with a warm welcome to everyone arriving from the Beck Valley Books blog hop, and of course everyone participating in ROW80.

First, a small request for everyone who is a member of Goodreads - would you please consider clicking this link and voting for Happily Ever After (#3) and Seven Lives to Repay Our Country (#6) on this list of 99 cent fiction?

And, before we go much further, a link to a little humor - this office really knows how to pull together as a team to accomplish their goal! Kudos to Nicole Basaraba for inspiring me to try to put a few smiles in my ROW80 updates!

ROW80 update: It turns out I've been both more and less productive than I'd originally planned; I'm ahead in some areas, behind in others, and in at least one case, have gone totally off the reservation!

1. Submit 1 book proposal - DONE!

2. Publish 1 non-fiction book.

• Translate all material: 10 Jan - DONE!
• Edit all material: 15 Jan - Rescheduled to: 15 Mar
• Publish: 16-21 Jan - Rescheduled to: 25 Mar

3. Publish 1 non-fiction article or essay online.

• Finish draft: 20 Jan - Rescheduled to: 20 Feb
• Submit for editing: 25 Jan - Rescheduled to: 25 Feb
• See published: Apr issue of “Current Intelligence”

4. Publish 1 more short story on Amazon.

This is the interesting one. The story I was originally planning to self-publish was just submitted to Glimmer Train's "Short Story Award for New Writers", where it will be competing with an estimated 4,000 other submissions for selection and publication. Yes, I really do think it's that good. If it's not selected, it will be a tough call whether to use it as a "control story" as I test the traditional publishing vs. self-published e-book route for short story writers, or simply to enroll in at once in the Amazon KDP Select program and let the market, rather than editors, decide how good it is.

That said, to meet the original goal, I now need to write, prep, and publish another story by February 21st, all while traipsing across the United States and Europe. Can I do it? Stay tuned to find out!

A few final notes. I've just enrolled Seven Lives to Repay Our Country in the Electronic Text & Literature Cloud (eTLC) - authors and readers, you might like to check out this resource for independent literature, and Wednesday is the time to join Novel Publicity's Author Karma event on Goodreads. Join the group, RSVP to the event, and meet a few more fans and friends.

Best regards,

Edward

Wednesday Blog Hop, KDP Select Results, ROW80, etc.

Welcome to everyone stopping by courtesy of the ROW80 challenge or the Beck Valley Books weekly blog hop.

January's numbers are (mostly) in, so for the benefit of other self-publishing authors (and interested readers) I'd like to recap my experiences with Happily Ever After and Seven Lives...

First, let's talk Amazon vs. The Rest (iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, etc.)

Here's where I'd like to solicit advice from other authors and readers, as January had zero sales for Seven Lives across the spectrum of non-Kindle e-readers. Thus, my question of the week - how do you market to users of Nook, I-Pad/I-Phone, and other e-readers? What has worked for you in getting your books out to this demographic?

Now, I'd like to give you my information about the Amazon KDP program and the results I experienced. This was the first month that I had a pair of books for a rough comparison, one enrolled in KDP Select, one that wasn't.

The KDP Select program is supposed to benefit indie authors by offering 2 major features; a "free promotion" (5 days of "free" status in a 90 day period) and the opportunity to get a proportional share of $700,000 when Amazon Prime members borrow their book. In exchange, the author agrees to publish solely on Amazon for 90 days.

My first question was, "is it more effective to use your 'free' promotion days consecutively, or break them up?" - and looking at the graph of free downloads, I believe the answer is that a 'free download' period should be limited to 2 days at a time. Thus a KDP Select author might introduce the book free for a weekend, and then offer a "free for Friday" or similar incentive 2-3 more times in the course of their 90-day intro period. The benefit here? 25% of all paid sales were recorded in the 4 days immediately following the 'free' promotion. Thus, one can imagine taking advantage of this "sales bump" on consecutive occasions if the promotion is segmented, rather than used in one fell swoop.

My second question was "how effective is this promotion, anyway?" - well, Happily Ever After went to #3 in Germany on Amazon.co.de's Fiction --> Fairy Tales category, and #33 here in the US. Free downloads totalled 656, with 75% of those coming from Amazon.com, and the majority of the other 25% coming from the UK and German sites. All that sturm und drang only translated into 17 paid sales and 2 "borrows", but that was about 3 times the sales for Seven Lives... So, free promotions definitely raise awareness and distribution, and do appear to have an impact on sales. The question is, do you need the KDP Select program to make this happen? I plan to try offering a "free-kend" for Seven Lives just by going into the KDP Dashboard and setting its price to zero, and then compare the results and report them here.

If anyone has questions for me regarding my experiences, feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer them here.

Now, as for ROW80 goals, I'm definitely off-track at this point for French and fitness; I'm finding it hard to get focused on either while I'm on the road. On the other hand, I have found a new house (off to sign the papers for the mortgage today) gotten a SC driver's license, and finished a prerequisite course for my future job. I also did send off the proposal and sample chapter for The Complete Idiot's Guide to Indonesian, so fingers crossed that I'll get a positive reply in the coming months. Meanwhile, I'll start writing the book, so that if it's accepted, I'll be ahead of the curve, and if it's not, I'll still be able to self-publish it.

Last but not least, doing the research for a historical fiction novel that's not even a part of my original ROW80 goals has given me some great material for a new short story (Napoleonic War era) and has been a fun and instructive process.

That's it for me, at least for today.

Hope you've found some of this interesting, and I do look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Best regards,

Edward

New Story Released for Amazon Kindle!

Well, it's been a few weeks since my last post, but just to catch you up, I was traveling most of the month of December, and have spent the last few days editing and publishing a new short story, which is now available as a "Kindle Select" title, which means it will only be available electronically through Amazon for the next 3 months.

You can read more about this slightly twisted fairy tale on its book page (here) which includes a link to a sample, but for the next 5 days it's FREE on Amazon (click this link) - so feel free to grab a copy and be sure to tell your friends!

This will be my first experiment with using the Kindle Select program, and judging from some of the things I've read, I'm not certain how it will work out, but we'll see. This will be part of the research going into my project on writing a guide for other authors who want to self-publish short fiction as e-books.

Best New Year's wishes to all!

Edward