It’s taken me most of the day to review all of the responses to the survey and all I can say is WOW! I really appreciate so many of you taking the time to provide such extensive answers. There were so many kind things said in the responses that I was starting to get a big head partway through the process, but by the end the pendulum had swung back around the other direction and I came away just this side of terrified that I’m going to end up disappointing everyone before the series is over.
Deep breaths, Dean, everything is going to be okay. 🙂
There were a number of interesting threads that came out, some of which I should have anticipated, but all of which were helpful. I’ve made a goal to respond to many of the people whose comments sparked an epiphany of one kind or another. Out of ~180 respondents I’m hoping to personally reach out to a bit more than 50 of you. I sincerely wish that I could send each and every one of you an email, but I think it’s going to be a stretch to get even just 50 of you properly thanked around the other commitments I’ve got on my plate. (Also I wish that I’d added a spot for everyone to enter their name on the survey. I left it off because I didn’t want everyone to have yet another thing to fill out, but now I wish I could address me emails to you all by your actual names.)
I wanted to share some of my realizations while they are still fresh on my mind, so here goes. (Warning, I get into some of the business side of writing and publishing 🙂
Firstly, many of you started reading my books at some time in the last few months and are still working your way through trying to catch up. I’m a binge reader (and binge television watcher for that matter). When you combine that with the fact that I sometimes forget just how many books I’ve released in the last few years, I hadn’t thought about the fact that some of you are recently arrived to the game and haven’t had time to catch up. I’ll do a better job keeping you all in mind going forward 🙂
I also hadn’t realized that price was such an issue for so many of you. There was a lot of talk about bundling, discounts, and sales which shouldn’t have caught me off guard as much as it did. I’ve ‘grown up’ as a writer subscribing to what Scott William Carter calls the ‘WIBBOW’ test.
WIBBOW stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing, and (for me) has always boiled down to the fact that there are a million creative ways to market a book, but that oftentimes those efforts aren’t as effective at selling new books as just writing the next book would have been.
It’s a good rule of thumb that is probably directly responsible for me completing at least four or five books (because I used time I otherwise would have spent marketing to actually sit down and write). Marketing can be a dangerous trap for new writers because it is the fastest way to move the needle sales wise, but it’s a very short-term kind of thing. Writing a new book is often times a better investment of a writer’s time from a long-term perspective (because it is something that only they can do), but when you’re starting to worry about whether or not you can pay your mortgage sometimes long-term goes out the door.
As you get a bigger and bigger backlist though the mathematics around promoting can change. Instead of doing a lot of work to bring in one reader who will then read the one and only book you have available, you do a lot of work to bring in one new reader who can read ten of fifteen of your books.
I’m getting to the point where there are some benefits to marketing, it’s mostly just a matter of figuring out which marketing efforts are going to be worth the time and effort.
Up until now I’ve avoided changing my prices because it felt like a significant investment of time that was unlikely to pay off. I’m going to experiment with that now though in the hopes that providing a temporary price break on a few of my books will cause them to see a corresponding increase in visibility. To that end, I’ve gone in and dropped the price of Trapped and Bound to $.99 (everywhere but on Google Play for reasons that are too complicated to get into here). I’ve also dropped the price of Hunted to $2.99.
That means if you haven’t tried out the Dark Reflections books you can now get the first two for less than four bucks, which is an even better deal than if I’d gone ahead and made Bound free like I’d been considering doing.
This is obviously a risk on my part, so the question of how long Bound and Hunted remain at the lower price is entirely dependent on how many copies they sell at that price.
At this point I’m only planning on leaving Trapped at $.99 for a few days, so you’ll want to jump on that as well. Dropping the price of Trapped is mostly meant as a ‘thank you’ gesture. It’s a book that hasn’t sold as well as some of the others, but one that I think many of you would really enjoy, so I’m doing the next best thing to giving it away for free.
I try not to send out a lot of unnecessary emails. By and large the only time I email everyone is when I’ve got something new (a new book or a new format for an existing book), but I’m going to make an exception to that rule because I really want everyone to know about the reduced prices on these books and I know that there are a lot of you who don’t check my blog very frequently.
The third surprise for me was just how many of you have read, are reading, or are planning on reading both my Reflections/Dark Reflections books and the Guadel Chronicles books. Reflections are Paranormal Romance or Urban Fantasy depending on the book in question, while the Guadel Chronicles are Epic Fantasy.
I like to read both, but it was great to hear just how many of you are crossing over between the two series.
There was a desire for both print and audio versions, but it was a fairly small minority for both. Unfortunately that does jive with what I’ve seen so far. I haven’t sold very well in either of those two formats, which is why I haven’t put more time into getting them both up and running for my later books. Audio is still probably going to be a ways off, but I am getting started on print again.
There was some mention of wanting to get my books through libraries. As much as I’d love for libraries to start stocking me on their own, that’s probably something that will have to be driven by the individual fans that would like their local library to stock my books. Most libraries will have a process whereby you can request specific books, so if you’d like to be able to check out my books you’ll have to look into that process.
Kindles Unlimited (Amazon’s new all you can read program) was mentioned. I would love to be part of Kindles Unlimited, but unfortunately the ‘stock’ version of their program would require my books to be exclusive to Amazon, which wouldn’t be fair to all of my fans who purchase their books from iBooks or the other retailers.
My understanding though is that there is a select group of authors that have been invited to take part in the Kindle Owner’s Library (where you can check out a book each month if you are a Prime member), and presumably Kindles Unlimited without requiring exclusivity. If you’d like to see my books in Kindles Unlimited please reach out to Amazon and let them know that. If enough people send feedback to that effect there’s a good chance the nice people at Amazon would choose to invite me into that exclusive club. 🙂
I was also surprised by the number of people who mentioned that I should go do book signings (I even got a suggestion for Sturgis 🙂
Someday I’d like nothing more than to be able to travel and do some book signings/conventions. Everything I’ve read though seems to indicate that I’m still much too small of a fish for something like that to be worthwhile—I’d spend pretty much the entire time sitting behind an empty table.
That’s the bulk of the responses that I feel like I can share at this point—stay tuned over the next few days for other exciting developments. 🙂
Dean
P.S. Katie usually proofreads my blog posts before they go up, but I’m keeping her so busy with covers right now that I didn’t feel like I could ask her to do that right now so you’re getting this in all it’s unedited glory–apologies for the typos.
