Have you heard about these? They're popping up around the country. I went to a local one on Tuesday. It was supposed to teach me how to use the new social media to do marketing for my business or product. It didn't. It seems all the presenters care about is how many Twitter followers they have. Yawn. I mean it doesn't matter. Most of the presenters never worked in any job with "Marketing" in the title. Now I'm not saying that in order to be a good marketer you have to have experience, but you do need to know the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are that you need to make sure that you are reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. And that you utilize all available marketing options that you have and don't limit yourself to one (just because it is cool.).
In other words if I am selling car insurance and I'm telling you how good the coverage is and how cheap the rates are and you don't drive - you're going to hit the delete key. (In the old days you would have hung up on me.) I would rather get my message across to the right person (a licensed driver who owns a car) at the right time (right before their premium expires), with the right message. (Save on your premium with my plan.) Right message, right person, right time.
How to do that is the challenge. Do you do it by getting 50,000 followers. Maybe, perhaps a couple of them meet the criteria. The rest of us will hit the delete key. More challenging is to hone your message and deliver it to the right person.
How do you do that? I don't always know, perhaps when I finish watching season 1 of Mad Men this summer I'll pass it along.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Pricing - tough choices
I received a note from Amazon Digital Publishing the other day that they discovered that my book, For Sale in Palm Springs was available for free at another book sellers. That's right Amazon. I made the book free at Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel. Why? Because those platforms are not as popular as the Kindle and I was hoping to stir interest in the series by making the first book free. The second reason that I made it free is because I could. That's right, my distributor Smashwords has a $0.00 price option. Amazon does not. But, now that they have discovered that I give that book away at those site, they have decided to follow suit. What does that do to "sales"? Well, so far this month more than 3,500 copies have been downloaded. Wow! So how do you follow that up? Well, I decided to reduce the price of my other 4 books to $0.99 (minimum price on Amazon.) That means that on each book that Amazon sells I will receive $0.35. Y'all need to buy a lot of books in order for me to be able to pay for the electricity to power my computer that I use to write these. But then I read that some woman in San Francisco is earning $10,000 per month from selling books at $0.99. I'm going to have to buy one to discover her secret.
Monday, January 31, 2011
When does one become an expert?
Over the weekend I attended a class. It was a very good experience in that I learned that what I was doing and my experience doing it was fairly decent. I didn't really learn anything else from the class other than that some folks make e-book publishing hard on themselves in order to save a few pennies.
On the way home I thought about putting together a presentation about my experiences in the past five years of publishing e-books.
Five years? Well, maybe six. But e-book readers have not been around that long. True, but computers and Palm devices have and that is where I got started. Up until late last year I published e-books in .PDF and .LIT formats as well as Mobi for Palm devices (never sold a Mobi version of any of the books.) and distributed them first on CD, then later through email (I even learned how to use PayPal and implement a shopping cart!).
When Amazon Kindle came along three years ago, it was a salvation. Finally a large scale e-book publisher that could distribute a little guy like me globally. Then Smashwords came into being. While their initial masher (the application that converts your Word file into different formats) was a bit clunky and error prone, they quickly fixed it and it now spits out a number of different formats for different readers quickly and clean. Sign me up! Smashwords followed that up with becoming a distributor of e-books with a number of online sellers - sign me up again!
At this point, I have written five different books, sold over 10,000 copies since burning my first CD with PDF files back in 2005 but don't consider myself an expert.
I certainly wouldn't want to stand in front of a class of impressionable e-book author want-to-be's and tell you how to do it. Since things constantly change in this world, the presentation I put together today will be out of date tomorrow. The terms and conditions I present today will be superseded by an update tomorrow.
Do I have some experiences to share? Well, I have written and converted quite a few books (and endless revisions) to a variety of formats (some have gone the way of the Betamax). I've created websites, blogs, and done some interesting marketing to try and get people to read my writings.
But I am by no means an authority on the topic and don't think I'll be putting a presentation together soon. But if you want some advice for someone who's been to the rodeo - let me know.
On the way home I thought about putting together a presentation about my experiences in the past five years of publishing e-books.
Five years? Well, maybe six. But e-book readers have not been around that long. True, but computers and Palm devices have and that is where I got started. Up until late last year I published e-books in .PDF and .LIT formats as well as Mobi for Palm devices (never sold a Mobi version of any of the books.) and distributed them first on CD, then later through email (I even learned how to use PayPal and implement a shopping cart!).
When Amazon Kindle came along three years ago, it was a salvation. Finally a large scale e-book publisher that could distribute a little guy like me globally. Then Smashwords came into being. While their initial masher (the application that converts your Word file into different formats) was a bit clunky and error prone, they quickly fixed it and it now spits out a number of different formats for different readers quickly and clean. Sign me up! Smashwords followed that up with becoming a distributor of e-books with a number of online sellers - sign me up again!
At this point, I have written five different books, sold over 10,000 copies since burning my first CD with PDF files back in 2005 but don't consider myself an expert.
I certainly wouldn't want to stand in front of a class of impressionable e-book author want-to-be's and tell you how to do it. Since things constantly change in this world, the presentation I put together today will be out of date tomorrow. The terms and conditions I present today will be superseded by an update tomorrow.
Do I have some experiences to share? Well, I have written and converted quite a few books (and endless revisions) to a variety of formats (some have gone the way of the Betamax). I've created websites, blogs, and done some interesting marketing to try and get people to read my writings.
But I am by no means an authority on the topic and don't think I'll be putting a presentation together soon. But if you want some advice for someone who's been to the rodeo - let me know.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
2010 sales are outstanding
Well, thanks to a special Amazon Kindle promotion in October, book sales hit an all time high in 2010 with over 4,400 books sold by Amazon that month. Total sales for the year on all platforms was nearly 10,000 books and we want to thank all our loyal supporters for making this year a success.
Research is continuing on my newest book, Guilt by Association, with another research trip to Palm Springs at the end of February. Without giving away too much of the book's plot, I've located a trade-person who is very knowledgeable in the topic that killed our poor victim and will be interviewing him to get a lot of details.
In the meantime, other work is continuing, we've revised the first book For Sale in Palm Springs to make it easier to read on Kindle. We've already uploaded that revised edition to Smashwords which makes it available on Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony eReader and Diesel and KoboBooks but we were hoping that some of the downloads on Amazon would quiet down enough to upload the revision. (Amazon places a one week hold on book sales when an author makes a change.)
We'll try to update this blog a bit more often this year, please drop me a line if you enjoy the books and are following along.
Albert Simon
January 2011
Research is continuing on my newest book, Guilt by Association, with another research trip to Palm Springs at the end of February. Without giving away too much of the book's plot, I've located a trade-person who is very knowledgeable in the topic that killed our poor victim and will be interviewing him to get a lot of details.
In the meantime, other work is continuing, we've revised the first book For Sale in Palm Springs to make it easier to read on Kindle. We've already uploaded that revised edition to Smashwords which makes it available on Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony eReader and Diesel and KoboBooks but we were hoping that some of the downloads on Amazon would quiet down enough to upload the revision. (Amazon places a one week hold on book sales when an author makes a change.)
We'll try to update this blog a bit more often this year, please drop me a line if you enjoy the books and are following along.
Albert Simon
January 2011
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Palm Springs Plumbing
We're currently working on the sixth Henry Wright Mystery, Guilty by Association, and are working hard on research. Since this story involved syndicates and plumbing - yes, we know it's an odd combination - research takes some interesting forms. As a result, with this story set in the Inland Empire city of Palm Springs, we're spending a lot of time there. During our research we discovered that a lot of plumbing in Palm Springs is actually outdoors. This area has the greatest concentration of private outdoor swimming pools anywhere in the United States. That started us thinking about a mystery surrounding a swimming pool. Certainly there must be a story for our intrepid detective Henry Wright to investigate? If you have been following our blog, we have posted the first few chapters of Guilty by Association on scribd.com for your comments. We'd love to hear from you and listen to what you think of our story so far. We'll be working on it during the summer when once again we move our household to Palm Springs. We'll post an update here at that time. Until then, stay hydrated!
Friday, May 21, 2010
Palm Springs Mid-Century Modern
During our recent visit to Palm Springs I became more familiar with the mid-century homes featured in my first mystery book, For Sale in Palm Springs. In that story, a Realtor is brutally murdered inside a home that he has listed for sale. In odd coincidences I found myself walking through an Alexander tract home build in the late 1950's with a realtor. Was there a murderer lurking around the corner? Hiding in a closet? No, not during this trip, but these homes are certainly interesting and the father and son team that built them in the late fifties and early sixties put up so many that they doubled the size of Palm Springs by doing so. We're sure there is another murder mystery lurking within these homes and the neighborhood, we'll just have to spend more time in Palm Springs.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Pricing - always a difficult topic
After selling the Henry Wright Series - currently 5 full length books and two short stories - on our own through DesertDreaming.com, we are now only selling through online distributors - mainly Amazon and Smashwords. Links on DesertDreaming will take you to Smashwords, we will no longer be emailing out files and CD production has stopped a while ago.
Why the change? When we first decided to publish these as eBooks online - after receiving a lot of rejection letters from literary agents - there were no Kindles, no iPads, the only place to read the books was a PC or a Palm. Since December of 2009, 3 million Kindles have been sold. In the first month of availability, Apple has sold 1 million iPads. DesertDreaming is going to ride that initial wave of eReader adoption by making sure that all of its works are available on these devices and that they are priced right so that everyone will read them.
That leads us to the topic of pricing. We just changed the price of 4 of the 5 books on Amazon and Smashwords. Amazon puts a 24 hour hold on books after prices are changed, so right now Amazon book sales are suspended until tomorrow. For Sale in Palm Springs is still 99 cents on Amazon, we'd give it away for free if we could, but Amazon won't let us. (Smashwords does, you can download it for free!) We've just set the other prices at $1.99 per book, the short stories - available on Smashwords - are still 99 cents.
It's tough to decide to reduce prices, but with many other eBooks priced at $1.99 and a lot of pressure, it was the right thing to do. No eBook author is in this for the money (at $1.99 sale, Amazon gives the author $0.70, or about 1/3). You need to sell a LOT of books to make this a full-time job.
Will the price drop spur sales? Who knows? The challenge remains to write a compelling story with a good set of characters that everyone will want to read.
Albert Simon
Why the change? When we first decided to publish these as eBooks online - after receiving a lot of rejection letters from literary agents - there were no Kindles, no iPads, the only place to read the books was a PC or a Palm. Since December of 2009, 3 million Kindles have been sold. In the first month of availability, Apple has sold 1 million iPads. DesertDreaming is going to ride that initial wave of eReader adoption by making sure that all of its works are available on these devices and that they are priced right so that everyone will read them.
That leads us to the topic of pricing. We just changed the price of 4 of the 5 books on Amazon and Smashwords. Amazon puts a 24 hour hold on books after prices are changed, so right now Amazon book sales are suspended until tomorrow. For Sale in Palm Springs is still 99 cents on Amazon, we'd give it away for free if we could, but Amazon won't let us. (Smashwords does, you can download it for free!) We've just set the other prices at $1.99 per book, the short stories - available on Smashwords - are still 99 cents.
It's tough to decide to reduce prices, but with many other eBooks priced at $1.99 and a lot of pressure, it was the right thing to do. No eBook author is in this for the money (at $1.99 sale, Amazon gives the author $0.70, or about 1/3). You need to sell a LOT of books to make this a full-time job.
Will the price drop spur sales? Who knows? The challenge remains to write a compelling story with a good set of characters that everyone will want to read.
Albert Simon
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