Even more important, is the power of the friend recommendation on social networking. If I like a book, and I am following the author and they say, “Hey, I am going to do a Free! promo on my first or latest novel, this weekend only, tell your friends” I will tell my friends (or maybe they will tell me) and they will download them and read them and share them themselves. We will have more common books and authors to discuss and new books or series to read. That has worked very well, but, I agree, it doesn’t work for everyone as I can only follow and read and recommend so many authors or books.

I’ve seen this trend, but another intriguing one as well. When Locke started all the FREE stuff and .99 sales, a bunch of indies jumped on the bandwagon. Soon, people were willing to pay more for a book because they were tired of downloading junk. We saw in 2010, the front pages of Amazon loaded with .99 and $1.99 books. Two years later? More like $4.99 -$6.99. People (readers) have always been book hoarders. How many times have I gone to the library only to check out three times more titles than I ever read? Or a garage sale or resale bookstore? I have STACKS of books I bought even full price I haven’t gotten to. This is why social media has to be paired in our marketing because it creates a relationship. We’re no longer just any book but a “friend’s” book and not only does that bump it to the top of the reading list, readers are far more likely to review and spread the word.

I’ve long extolled that writers couldn’t rely on algorithms, promotions and pricing. Those only take us so far in a market that’s exploding and in an age where advertising is virtually invisible. It’s a race to the bottom of who can give away the most for free.

And if we study the numbers, an author will make far more money selling at $3.99 than $10.99, because this moves more units overall and encourages people to take risks. Also, I think we are in a new age. We haven’t had enough years to see enough data. Are there times of year that there are more sales? This is true in traditional. Why are we immune? Also, I think this will be a lot like the dot.coms. People who aren’t in this for the right reasons and who are wanting to use this as a Gold Rush don’t possess the work ethic and patience that other authors (such as yourself) have honed over many years. These writers looking for the pot of gold will be like sparklers *WHOOOOOOSH…fizzle*.

I think we have created new problems, but we traded those for new advantages (for instance, moth-balled backlists now creating revenue). Every age has a new set of troubles and many of those will work themselves out if we are patient and just keep doing our job. Yet, I cannot count how many times I’ve heard writers say, “I just want to write. I don’t want to TALK to anyone (regarding social media).” Okay, so readers are supposed to part with money they don’t have and time that is even more precious for an author “artist” who can’t be bothered to be a human? We’ll gravitate to authors who take two minutes to connect.

Thank you for such a thoughtful response. Again, I think time will tell and patience, reinvention and connection are key. Also, writers working together, but that’s a WHOLE other post which I will do later. But, in short, I don’t permit spamming on #MyWANA or WANA. I see SO many “writers helping writers” groups and all they do is spam. That’s not team work; it’s self-serving and ineffective. Also, for five years I’ve been nudging writers out of being the All-Writing-All-The-Time-Channel (and they scream like I am the anti-christ). They tweet about writing and blog about writing and Facebook about writing, and insist on doing blog tours on “reader sites (which is maybe 6-8% of the population). But writers (devoted self-professed readers) are a small group when there are billions of people on the planet. It’s also an oversold and worn out group. Who cares if someone only reads one or two books a year if they are OUR books? And there are HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of those people.

THANK YOU!

Kristen

I was published with Avon/Harper Collins for ten years, putting out ten books between 1991-2001 before I burned out and took a decade off to have and raise our daughter. About a year and a half ago, some of my author friends convinced me to bring out my backlist for e-books. I took their advice, revising and rewriting where needed and releasing the books at maybe one title per month until I had nine of my ten previously-published titles all out there and available for e-readers.

My de Montforte brothers series of four tightly-connected books hit the Amazon bestseller lists and has stayed on those lists for about 18 consecutive months now. Every book that I’ve since released has also hit the bestseller lists. I’m grateful for that. But in this 18 months of time, I’ve seen some trends come and go, and some changes come about that as an indie author, I find quite alarming.

About 15 months ago, I decided to make the first book in my 4-book series, THE WILD ONE, free as a “loss leader” into the other three books in the series (all priced at $4.99), and that has worked wonderfully for me. With an average of 200-700 downloads a day for this book, it sells the other three books in the series and the whole series has done well. Occasionally I’ll do a BookBub or an ENT ad for one of my other books outside of this series, and those promotions are usually quite effective, too — when it comes to selling/moving books.

But there is more to selling books than just sales. Don’t most of us who run a promo campaign, dropping a book from, say, $3.99 to $0.99, do so in the hopes of getting a bump in the Amazon algorithm, getting readers to discover our books, and hopefully, adding some more reviews to our book’s page? This tactic has always worked well for me and others of my acquaintance, but about six months ago, most of us realized it was no longer working.

For me, doing a promo six or eight or twelve months ago would usually sell a few hundred books and net a few new reviews on Amazon, and maybe one or two on B&N. But I did a promo for one of my books last month, selling several hundred copies, and that promo has not resulted in one single review. Not one. What does this tell me?

It tells me that readers are grabbing every discounted and free book that they can grab, but that they don’t have the time to read them. It’s all about hoarding. It’s not at all about reading.

So what is the point?

As indie publishers, I feel like we’ve created a monster with free and discounted books. I’m on many lists and discussion boards, and every time I see a wide-eyed newbie going on and on about making her book “Free,” and extolling the benefits of doing so, I cringe. It’s one thing to make your book free if you have other books that this free book is likely to sell. It’s quite another to make your book free when you have little or no backlist because in the end, what does it gain? Sure, you might gain a reader who likes your book, but when that reader goes back to Amazon and sees that you have no other books out, she’s going to move on and quickly forget you. In the meantime, not only did you give away your work, but you added to what I see is a very serious problem that has become pretty much out-of-control over the past six months.

That problem is that we have trained readers to expect to pay nothing for e-books, or 99 cents at most. We’ve trained them to realize that all they have to do is wait, and the book they’ve been eying for $3.99 will soon be on sale for 99 cents. We’ve trained them, with this “boxed set” phenomenon that has long since worn out its welcome and come back to bite us all in the behind, that there’s no reason to pay 99 cents for a single discounted book or $3.99 for a single full-price book when they can get four, six, even twelve books as a “boxed set” for a mere 99 cents. Why on earth should they pay full price for a book when there are so many cheapies to be had?

It’s too late to stuff this proverbial cat back in the bag, and every day, I see more and more authors putting out boxed sets at 99 cents, newbies offering their books for free in order to “gain readers” and people whose e-readers are so full of books that there is no way they can possibly ever read them all. When even promotions don’t really “work” anymore because people can’t keep up with the books they already have, when there is such a surplus of books that nobody can possibly keep up with them all, we have a problem.

And when readers expect these books to all be priced at Free! and 99 cents, we have an even bigger one.

— Danelle Harmon, NYT & USA Today Bestselling Author