Looking Back at June
I’d mentioned in an earlier post how I changed my book costs in Amazon’s Canada and Australia markets to be numerically identical to my US prices (e.g. if a book costs US$4.99 here, it costs CAN$4.99 in Canada and AU$4.99 in Australia).
I checked my end-of-month numbers and whaddya know—I had 355 downloads of Storm Season from Canada thanks to the Stuff Your Kindle/eReader Day, AND I’ve had 5 purchases for Olympic Cove books, including one complete read-through of the series except for High Tide (but that read-through happened yesterday so I’m hoping they’ll come back for High Tide).
As for Australia, I had 252 Amazon downloads of Storm Season from Australia due to SYKeD—no sales yet, but an Aussie author on TikTok said that she’s going to spread the word about my lowered prices so we’ll see. But it’s not fair for Amazon to have all the bennies so I’ve also gone into Google Play and Draft2Digital and changed my book prices for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand there as well.
TL;dr—This has been my best-selling month this year to date thanks to SYKeD, changing book prices, and the release of High Tide, and I’m hoping to bump that up even more next month with the release of Hurricane Warning and the omnibus edition of Olympic Cove.
The Promo Whirl Begins
Firstly: High Tide is live on all major ebook retailers. The print version will come out on Friday.
Secondly, this is how my release day is going so far:
- Got up at 3:11 AM, checked that High Tide had gone live on Amazon, grabbed the ASIN link and added it to the book file’s Olympic Cove Series and Other Work pages, and republished it.
- Checked that Draft2Digital had processed the book file and generated an ISBN, grabbed it and added it to the book file, and republished it.
- Checked that Google Play had processed the book file, grabbed the store link and added it to the book file’s Olympic Cove Series and Other Work pages, and republished it.
- Went back to bed for a few hours.
- Woke up and checked that High Tide had republished at all retailers. It had, yay!
- Updated the book page’s buy links here.
- Submitted High Tide to BookBub and added all the required links.
- Finished making ad graphics (I needed pull quotes).
What I will be doing for the rest of the day:
- Creating a promo packet that can be distributed to author buddies for inclusion on their blogs.
- Creating an AMS ad.
- Promoting High Tide on all appropriate FB book groups.
- Creating a TikTok promo video for High Tide and uploading that.
- Promoting High Tide on other social media.
- Sending out a newsletter with buy links.
- Setting up the book on BookFunnel so that I can send book links to my Patreon members
Once that is all done, I may relax with a well-deserved rum and coke. Or I may work on Hurricane Warning, who knows?
And High Tide is off
I’ve just uploaded High Tide (Olympic Cove 5) to Amazon, Draft2Digital, and Google Play (hi, Susan!) and it is currently churning through their servers. As soon as I have buy links, I’ll update the book page and let y’all know here. The print book will probably be available at the end of the week.
And yes, I’m currently working on Hurricane Warning (Olympic Cove 6) and have a projected release date of 8/6/24 for that book. 22,000 words done, another 70,000 to go, whee! For now, however, I’m gonna go grab a protein snack and hit the hay. Night!
And the numbers are in
I swear, changing my Amazon book prices in Canada and Australia was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
When you publish a book in Amazon, you choose a price for the book. You then have two options—Amazon will set the price in all of its other markets based on the US price. This has been a no-brainer so it’s what I’ve been doing. And my Canadian and Australian/NZ sales have been non-existent, which struck me as strange because those are two big markets for English language books.
Until I read an article that said people who let Amazon set the price for their books in Canada and Australia/NZ are pricing their books out of the market. Most Canadians are willing to pay CAN$4.99 for an ebook, but Amazon had been pricing my ebooks around CAN$7.99 because of the conversion rate, and Australia was getting hit even worse.
So I went in and manually lowered the .ca and .au prices for all of my books to make them numerically identical to my US prices (e.g. if an ebook cost 4.99 in the US, it now costs $4.99 in Canada and Australia which appears to be average for the market).
The proof in the pudding came last week when I participated in Zoe York’s Stuff Your Kindle/eReader Day with Storm Season (Olympic Cove 1). The idea with this is to set one of your books free for a day (or a weekend) and let romance readers pick it up with the hopes that they’ll like it so much they’ll buy your other books. Granted, the bulk of readers are only picking up free books, but a small percentage of them will read through a series, and that can add up to decent income and new readers who will want your other books.
Anyhoo, I just checked my numbers for the weekend and not only did I give away a BUTTLOAD of copies, I’ve also been getting significant read-through of the Olympic Cove series. And whoop, there it is—someone in Canada is reading the rest of the series. This, after not making a single Canadian sale all year.
I need to check on average book sales in other foreign markets and see if I need to make adjustments there as well. My primary sales come from the US and UK, with a handful of French and German sales here and there (and someone in the Netherlands who’s reading through the Olympic Cove series—thank you, whoever you are). But there are a bunch of other Amazon markets—if my books are overpriced there as well, you bet I’m gonna adjust prices to make them more competitive.
Some good news for my Canadian and Australian readers
As you may know, Bob, Amazon bases foreign ebook prices on what the ebook costs in the country where it’s originally published. Since I’m an American, my ebooks are initially priced in US dollars, and then Amazon extrapolates that price into other currencies for international ‘Zon markets.
Except that this can really hurt people in markets where the local currency is lower than the US dollar. I was recently made aware that Australian and Canadian readers are getting absolutely *reamed* on book costs because of this, which is not right.
As I am not a greedy a-hole and want to keep my books at a reasonable price so that more people can read them, I have gone in and reduced the prices of my ebooks on amazon.au and amazon.ca to numerically match my American prices—i.e. most of my full-length novels will now be CAN$4.99 and AUS$4.99, with novellas being cheaper. My one historical romance Behind the Iron Cross is the outlier at $5.99 in both countries, but it’s a huge book so it costs a buck more. I’ll be analyzing costs in other countries and applying additional corrections as needed, and once I learn the pricing controls on Draft2Digital I’ll be doing the same over there.
What can I say? I’m all about keeping readers happy.
High Tide is Done (Hi, Susan!)
As of 9:00 PM last night or thereabouts, I finished the last sentence in High Tide. It tops out at 94,742 words, and I’m going to let it simmer for a week while I finish the outline for Hurricane Warning and get started on *checks* Chapter Three. The plan is to set up a pre-order this weekend for June 25th, which will give me more than enough time to get it whipped into shape and reader-ready (my editor and my trusty betas are standing by). Then all I have to do is finish, edit, and publish Hurricane Warning, and hopefully all the readers who refuse to read a series until its done will come running. One can hope.
I’ve also made a wee change in the schedule I posted last Friday. I am going to keep posting A Court of Green Clover on Vella as well as the other novellas in the Division Street Fae series, but I’m not going to publish them until they’re ALL done and I can rapid release. Considering that I already have Hurricane Warning, To Love a Wild Swan, and Mage of Fire on my To Be Written desk already, I think this is more than acceptable.
I’m also going to take advantage of my lighter week to whip this house into shape and catch up on a lot of chores, both business and personal, that I’ve slacked off on for the past two weeks. First and foremost on the list is moving the hella powerful portable AC from the guest room to the library so that it can cool off the lower front half of the house, then installing the old window unit we’d bought for the kitchen in the guest room in case anyone comes to visit. The joy of not having a working downstairs HVAC system while heading into a Texas summer, am I right? Also another reason I really need to sell more books. *sigh*
The End is Nigh
Bet you thought I forgot about you. Not a chance.
I have been busting my ass for the last week writing a chapter a day on High Tide (and putting them up on Vella—I’m currently up to 58 episodes so that tells you something). As of last night I finished Chapter 22, which means I have three more chapters and High Tide is finished (hi Susan!).
Now, it still needs to be edited, and according to the Vella rules I can’t publish the story until thirty days have passed after I post the last chapter and mark the story complete. Which means the earliest I can publish High Tide is on June 19th.
Am I gonna do that? Nah, because I want to give myself a little wiggle room in editing, getting stuff to the editor and betas, getting stuff back from the editor and betas, doing the weasel word pass, the spelling/grammar/punctuation pass, and the final polish. So you can expect to see High Tide available on all platforms on June 25th. I’ll even set up an Amazon pre-order on Monday so that I’m locked in, how’s that?
So what comes after High Tide? Well, my mind is still firmly in Olympic Cove so I’m going to go straight onto Hurricane Warning. This is the last book in the series and will be Chiron’s story, wherein you learn his background with Asclepius, where exactly Asclepius has been all this time, and the role they play along with their lover Dr. Nessa Bryant in the final battle against the Mad Nereid. And since people seem to like following progress reports, I’ll post them here daily.
I’ll also be working on finishing A Court of Green Clover (Division Street Fae 1) at the same time, but that’s 1) a novella and 2) already half finished so I can do that in the evenings after working on Warning. What I would like to do but will not promise because every time I do that I get bit in the ass is the following schedule:
Finish High Tide and publish it.
Finish Hurricane Warning and publish it.
Turn Olympic Cove into an ebook box set and publish it.
Finish A Court of Green Clover and publish it.
After that, I would like to work on Crystal Reflection (Paladins of Crystal 3), To Love a Wild Swan (Hidden Empire 3), and Mage of Fire (Two Thrones 5). I strongly doubt I can finish all of these in 2024 but I’m going to give it the old college try. After that, I want to finish off the last two books in the Paladins of Crystal series, then trade off between Hidden Empire, Two Thrones, and Division Street Fae. Two Thrones has a projected eight books and Division Street Fae has five books. Hidden Empire does not have an end date and can continue on as long as I come up with stories for it.
And then there’s Pacifica Rising, my poor lonely SF romance series that does not follow the android/alien/lab creature trope. Is there an SF equivalent of romantasy? I know some people hate the term but it’s a damned handy marketing term. Speculative romance? Romascifi? I need to come up with a better term. But I’d really like to finish the other five books in that series as well (I see you cheering there, Jackie).
So now you’re all caught up to date, and I need to get to work. See you tomorrow, kiddos.
Good To Know
Apparently I either bored, grossed out, or offended four newsletter subscribers with my most recent newsletter because they unsubscribed. Which, as I said in my previous post, is fine—I want people who are reading the newsletter because they’re actually readers of mine who want to know what I’m doing, not folks who signed up just to get a free book. I really hate using terms like “organic” to describe the former people but you know what I mean.
That being said, I can also understand why some people might not want to hear about the cancer and how I was feeling at the time (namely, terrified and convinced I was going to die in ten months due to a reading on the PET scan that was, in fact, not osseous metastatic disease as suggested by the doc who wrote the report). I won’t really be discussing it again in future newsletters apart from brief reports on my six month checkups, just in case you’re on the fence about subscribing.
Still, I need to talk about more than just the latest release and whatever backlist book I’m promoting in a given newsletter. Courtney Milan does a beautiful job with that, talking about all the various teas she tries and throwing in little personal elements before she promotes her book. I tried talking about jewelry but that petered out quickly, Maybe I should talk about crafting in general? Crafting is part of my writing process, after all, and I usually have at least one project on the go at any time and I can show progress pics, or talk about why I picked that project, or mention the company that charged me for patterns I didn’t buy and never wanted, and that they stole from other creators. Ahem.
I’ll think about it this week. In the meantime, since I don’t have access to ABC or any of the streaming services hosting the Oscars I’m gonna catch up on the winners over at TikTok. While we still have it, anyway.
New Newsletter Subscribers
A newsletter is an important promotion tool for an author, especially indie authors, because it’s your direct pipeline to your readers that no middleman can touch. With a newsletter you don’t have to worry about the Book of Face throttling your posts, or some bozo billionaire tanking another social media platform (or the government trying to shut down a SM platform, grr). As long as you have a list of genuine fans and readers you can email them directly about upcoming publications and sales, give them pertinent buy links to your Shopify store, show them adorable pictures of your cats, etc.
The trick is to build your newsletter list in such a way that it contains only the people who actually read your stuff. Yeah, a huge NL list is great, and there are all kinds of ways to boost your NL numbers through things like swaps and paid promos. But if 80% of your NL members come from those mechanisms, they probably signed up for a free book and aren’t really going to bother opening your newsletter when it hits their inbox. The word here is “organic.” You want people to sign up because they found you, think you’re interesting and your writing is fabulous, and they want to hear more.
Why am I rattling on about newsletters? Well, I’ve had three people sign up to my newsletter in the last month or so through the signup form here on my website. This freaking delights me because it means (at least, I hope it means) that these three subscribers are organic—they like my work and they want to hear about new releases. When I send out a newsletter next week with a pre-order link for A Court of Green Clover, I can pretty much guarantee that they’ll want to buy it or read it on KU (as an aside I’ll be releasing ACoGC on Amazon and KU first, then after the KU period expires I’ll be releasing it wide, so if you prefer to buy your books on Apple or Kobo you will be able to pick it up in three months).
Right now, my newsletter list is only a skosh over 500 members. I prune out the hard bounces and the unsubscribes without rancor because those are the people who wouldn’t have opened the NL anyway. The important thing is that even with pruning the member list is growing, slowly but surely. Or to quote Sall Field as Norma Rae, “You LIKE me, you really, really LIKE me!”
Happy Anniversary to Myself
According to Facebook today is my eleventh anniversary as a published novelist. Eleven years ago today Evernight bought Storm Season, setting me off on this crazy adventure.
So much has changed since 2013. I lost one cat, gained two more, became an indie author and started writing MF romance as well as MM romance, went through financial tribulations, and had cancer last year. I also wrote a total of seventeen novels (sixteen as Nicola and my alternate history mystery as Melanie Fletcher).
Which is actually pretty good for someone of my generation. Yeah, I know Millennials and Gen Z can churn out tons of books a year because they have the energy and drive to do it. But for someone who is in menopause and is already missing a couple of body parts, seventeen books (eighteen if you count Shifter Woods: Claw since it’s 42K words which puts it into novel class) is something of an achievement. Of course that number would have been nineteen or twenty, but My Adventure With Cancer ate a good third of last year along with four teeth, five lymph nodes, and a strip of my jawbone.
So I’m busy playing catch-up this year and trying to finish those three books as well as the ones scheduled for this year, all while looking for contract tech writing or instructional design work because this house desperately needs a lot of repairs and I’ not making enough money from the books to pay for all of it. Oh, and I’m waving off my drunken slattern of a Muse who keeps popping up with new books ideas while I still have at least six to finish first. And yes, I’m completely aware these are First World problems and there’s a genocide going on and I’m incredibly lucky and should just shut up and be happy about my anniversary. I know this, truly.
It’s just that to me, money = time. I don’t want to be filthy rich—I do not have the temperament for it. I just want to have enough money where if the washing machine starts leaking or the refrigerator stops dispensing filtered water I can call a repairman instead of looking up ways to fix it myself, because that takes me away from writing. I want to have enough money so that I can pay for expensive CT scans and my medical insurance deductible for the year without fretting about how I’m actually going to cover that bill, because that takes me away from writing (as an aside, if anyone needs cover art done my schedule is open and I’m ready to make something amazing for you). I want to have enough money to put solar cells on the roof with a battery so that if this summer is as hot as last summer I won’t constantly be worrying about the grid going down, because that takes me away from writing.
The ironic thing is, if I cranked out a bunch more books I’d make more money and a number of these problems would be eased. So I probably should shut up and get back to work.
Nicola Cameron Writes 