Recent days at Casa De Quack have been a hodgepodge of working on my WIP (The Duke of Eden) and monkeying around with marketing. I've made no secret of the fact that I'd love to write full-time. My last post, Digit Envy, made that pretty darned plain. In a lot of ways, I guess this post is a follow up to that one. It's to tell y'all about my trials and tribulations along the path of making my dream come true.
I think a dream becomes a reality in stages. It's a lot like going to sleep or waking up. Unless there's a real jolt, a real emergency, we don't drop off to sleep the second our eyes close and we don't wake up the second our alarms go off. Both are processes and I've decided that turning a dream into reality is a process too.
Often - but likely not often enough - I give myself a hard time. But part of the process of figuring out how to get enough of it right is to recognize what I got right already. I have got some of it right - stop it; don't make that face; do you want your face to freeze like that? My first step to getting it right was to gather the courage to put my work out there. It does take courage. While your books are on your hard drive, they're still yours. Put 'em out there in the world, and they belong to the reader - not just the words, but whatever the words may reveal about who you are or why you are whatever you've become so far. Writing is an intimate act and every time a writer shares her work with another person, the writer is sharing a very personal, very private experience with the reader. Yes, putting your work out there is the first step. If you haven't taken it yet, I encourage you to try.
Get your book formatted. Download GIMP and design a cover or go to Createspace or Lulu and use their cover formatting software. I was lucky enough to be married to a graphically gifted computer guy. But even if you lack that advantage, I bet you know someone good with art and computers. Offer an illustrator credit for the first cover or give it a shot yourself. You may find another hidden talent. But get a good cover because it matters. And format your manuscript right. Again, my hubby is a big advantage for me, but you can format for Kindle and Smashwords and Createspace. Those three are the keys to the world. They'll get your book everywhere in ebook and paperback format.
But I digressed. I'll climb down off my soapbox now. Yes, I got my books out there and they're well-formatted and have good covers. I like to think they're well-written, fun reads that'll take readers away from their everyday world. I even like to think my books will take the readers over the top of everything reality was or is and show them that we're only limited by anything if we allow ourselves to be limited. But yeah, the books are there.
After my books started getting out there, I realized something very important, very fundamental. My books could be the prettiest and best-written things on the planet and it wouldn't matter. They weren't going to sell themselves. Oh, don't get me wrong. You can write a book and publish it on Kindle and then concentrate all your efforts on writing the next work. From time to time, one of those books on Kindle will sell, even if you do nothing else. And if that's enough for you - then great. But if you want your stuff to sell well enough to start supporting you, if you want a sometime dream to be an everyday reality, well, that's going to take marketing and you might need some help. My hubby had already been helping with covers and formatting, but I think that at first he saw the whole book thing the same way I did - as my little hobby. It was all a process but together we realized that there are a lot of paths to the future and books could become a way to support our whole family. Hubby and I have always been a team, but we teamed up all over again. And QA Romances was born.
Hubby designed our web page and our Facebook page. So we're out there with some of the social marketing stuff. As we got our name out there a little more, I was invited to join a group blog - All Day, All Night Romance Divas. And that's a great thing. It gets my work out there a little bit more. I make it a practice to visit other blogs. I learn a lot from other writers and I try to comment on their blogs. That serves a dual purpose. I can dialogue with other folks who are further along on the journey to success. And I can get my name out there so that their fans, or other writers or whoever can be exposed to me. I always put a link for this blog on those comments. I'm hopeful they'll visit my book page, find something they like and buy it through any of the fine sites where my work is sold.
I've also gone into Author Central - a powerful new tool for indies from the fine folks at Amazon. I've played with the book descriptions and was able to format them more professionally. I've also re-written some of them to give a little more info about the books. There's a very fine line between not telling enough and telling too much. The book descriptions remain a work in progress. But I was also able to upload part of the text from each book in a "from the inside flap" section. That means that Kindle readers get a little taste of the text and I hope it makes 'em want to download the sample. It is even more important for paperback readers. The "from the inside flap" section will be the only sample text they'll get to see. Hopefully it'll improve sales of the paperback. Cutting the price would improve those sales more, but for now the CS/Amazon royalty structure doesn't give the author much wiggle room. The paperbacks are priced at $13.99 and at that price I make $4.53 per book on Amazon and $1.58 per sale at all the bookstores CS/Amazon distributes to. I'm glad to have the work out there but yes, $13.99 is a lot for a paperback. As the numbers show, most of the price goes to the retailers. Amazon has been great with royalty for Kindle. Hopefully, it'll consider changing the royalty structure for CS (an Amazon company) so that indies can compete on paper too.
Today I've been working on my WIP, The Duke of Eden, which should be out and available soon. I'm on Chapter 11 or at close to 54,000 words. So I'm closing in on the end. While I've been writing, hubby the magnificent has been working on a new project - bundling. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before, but thanks to Joe Konrath - King of the Kindle - whose blog I read today. Joe's blog was giving advice to a writer trying to build his sales on ebook platforms. That was certainly a timely topic for me because, as last week's blog here at QA stated, I've been suffering from a bad case of Digit Envy. And we'd already started working on increasing market share. Amongst Joe's other excellent suggestions was that bundling several books in a package increases the products you're selling. Like Joe says, virtual shelf space is a big deal. More choices mean more sales because different things appeal to different folks. Hubby's bundling my Forever Series - A Faerie Fated Forever, A Golden Forever and A Sixth Sense of Forever. We're gonna put 'em out on Kindle and Smashwords. I'm playing with price point in my head, but I'm thinking possibly $5.99. Once we get that bundle done, out there and available, we'll probably bundle E-Mail and Griffin's - an "At The Crossroads of Love & The Law" bundle. Down the road, after Duke is out (soon), we'll bundle it with Brotherly Love - possibly as "The Cowboy and The Duke" bundle.
Meanwhile, hubby's playing with all the covers to see if we can come up with some that really suck in the readers. Graphic images often do that, even - or especially - for ebooks. Lord knows, erotica sells better than nearly anything else on all the platforms. Why? I'm really not sure. Maybe we'll explore that topic soon. What else is ahead? I've already started thinking about my next book and will blog about that soon. There are always more stories than time. If I ever get to write full time - I'm guessing that there will be time for a lot more stories, but there will still be more stories than time.
Now I've got a question for you. I hear from lots of folks all over the web - way too many folks for it not to be true - that I need to be on Twitter. DO YOU TWEET? DO YOU FOLLOW WRITERS ON TWITTER? ARE YOU A WRITER ON TWITTER? I'm a Twirgin. Yes, America, I'm a complete Twitter Virgin. It's sort of hard for me to imagine that people would be that interested in what I do all day, but if it'll help build my market share, I'm willing.
I've always said I'd never do Twitter, but I guess it's like they say - never say never. If I can Tweet my way to a connection with current fans and find new ones that way, well, I guess I'm willing to do that too. Yes, I'd be glad to tweet my way to sweet sales....... (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
But I think I've made real progress on my journey. Enviable digits and a full time writing career aren't really dreams anymore. Now they're goals. A goal is something I can reach. I'm on my way, boogling one little step at a time.