Math, Guns, and Snark: SLHuang's Self-Publishing Thread

JRTroughton said:

I'd just like to say that I wrote a short story inspired by the cover and opening paragraph of Hunting Monsters. It's currently sitting with the full editorial board of a particular magazine.

You're an inspiration... literally!

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Putputt said:

That's such a heart-warming thing to read.

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Oh my god! It IS! JRTroughton, I'm so touched. You'll have to let me know when it's pubbed so I can go read it!

And yuh, slhuang is totes an inspiration, if only because she can kill people with her bare hands.

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*ignores the rest of what Putputt said*

JRTroughton said:

I've seen some lovely comments about your stories, SLHuang. Some fantastic writers enjoying your work, to the point of mentioning you in the same breath as the Hugos? Wonderful.

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Thanks for this, too. Yeah, I've been trying (very unsuccessfully) to ignore that, because I don't want to build up expectations and then be disappointed. But "Hunting Monsters" has made a fair number of best-of lists, and at least 10(!) people have told me they're nominating me for the Campbell on the strengths of my novels, which is a bit of a head trip. *TRIES VERY HARD TO IGNORE*

So, yesterday was promo day!

I checked in the morning and Promo Day did not seem to be boosting me anywhere near Chuck Wendig Day, and I thought, well, Chuck Wendig is sorta the bomb and his audience is also my audience so maybe that makes sense, but then when I came home at night, HOLY SHIT.

I had my first triple-digit sales day yesterday. I SOLD OVER A HUNDRED BOOKS GUYS. IN A DAY. (Now if only I could do that every day . . . and at higher than 99 cents . . . LOL! As I posted on Twitter, I could buy a whole TEN MILKSHAKES with the money. But it's still a nice milestone.)

Anyway, so far during the discount sale my graph has looked like an EKG:



The first spike was Day 1 of the sale. Announced it on Twitter and my blog, and got picked up unasked by BookSCREAM. Given the performance of the other days, I'm guessing BookSCREAM had a lot to do with the spike.

Second spike was my article on Terrible Minds.

Third spike was my heavy promo day. I spent $20 in paid promos, which I made back (ENT and bknights on Fiverr). I also signed up for ScifiFantasyFreak and Ebooklister, which are both free. I tried for the free option on some other "free if we choose you, pay to guarantee" promos but I don't think I got any of them. I ALSO finally sent my mailing list out, which I'd neglected to do, and got some nice tweets about the sale. Oh, and I also announced a sale to Strange Horizons (oh, yeah, I sold a story to Strange Horizons! Yay!) and the announcement got a ridiculous amount of Twitter-love, so that might've pushed some people who were on the fence into buying my work.

Today my Terrible Minds article got republished by New Statesman (EEK), and the link to my book is at the bottom, so hopefully my EKG will start not to be such an even heartbeat. But I can already say three things with reasonable confidence:

* The sale has been a success! Because you have to sell 6 times I'd have to sell ten times the amount of books at 99 cents to receive the same revenue, I'm actually bringing in about what I would have otherwise (it's hard to say -- I still would've had a probably-not-as-big spike from Terrible Minds) eta: actually probably a little less, but LOOK HOW MANY MORE READERS. Who will hopefully come back for book 2. That's totally a win in my book.

* The sale would likely NOT have been a success without promo. The dips in between are not as low as my usual sales, but probably not higher-enough to justify the 1/6 1/10 revenue off each sale.

* I'm definitely going to look into BookSCREAM in the future. I'm not sure which of the promo sites yesterday contributed the most -- data from other SPers suggests ENT and bknights, the two I had heard enough good things about to pay for, and which clearly had decent ROI. It's worth noting that a similar spike would not have made back the cost of more expensive (or additional) promos. The only more expensive one I'll still try for at some point is Bookbub, because they can move ridiculous numbers of books.

Woooooo wheeeee yayyyyyyy

(eta: It's worth noting that the far left node on my graph is not my usual baseline -- it's much higher than normal. I timed the sale with the release of the short story, so that far-left node is the preorders for "Rio Adopts a Puppy" landing. During the sale my normal sales have been higher every day, though not *significantly* higher except on the spike days.)

Thank you so much, everyone. I'm not kidding -- the small successes feel so much bigger with all of you cheering me on!

ElaineA said:

I find the metric of reducing your price to 99 cents interesting. Profit must be pretty slim at that price point, but the significant increase in "books-in-hand" is likely a better sales tool in the long run. As a reader, I value word-of-mouth from friends and blogs I trust above all, so the more books you have out there, the better your word-of-mouth is going to be. Even if you have to reduce your margin in the short-term. It'll be interesting to see if you start to see a steadier up-rise in your graph once this batch of new readers starts spreading the word.

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That's the hope! And also what Bats said:

usuallycountingbats said:

From the point of view of a reader, I am often conned enticed into buying the first book in a series because it is 99p or 65p or whatever it is in UK money, and then I love it enough to buy the others in the series pretty quickly after that. I could name probably more then 10 series I've been caught that way with.

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I'm really, really hoping that the hundreds of people who bought ZSG during the sale come back in a few weeks and buy book 2. That'll REALLY make it worth it -- if I could see a few-hundred-book spike for book 2, that'd put me in the black right there.

Okay, now for the final analysis of the 99c sale! Here's an excerpt of the Amazon graph, as Amazon is where the vast vast vast majority of sales came from:



On the left you see where the sales were. The first slightly-higher node is the preorders for "Rio Adopts a Puppy" hitting. The first spike is the first day of the sale and promotion by BookSCREAM, the second spike is Terrible Minds, the third spike is the paid promos as detailed last post, and the fourth spike is . . . wait for it . . .

. . . a tweet. A tweet! The last day of the sale I tweeted saying it was the last day, and got a ridiculous number of retweets, including by Charlie Stross (!). It was late in the day when I usually don't get many sales, and my graph was about in line with the day before. Then suddenly sale after sale started coming in.

I also tweeted on Day 1 of the sale, and on Chuck Wendig day to tell my new followers about the sale. And I retweeted someone else's tweet about the sale the day I sent my mailing list out, which was also paid promo day. So the four days I got a spike were also the four days I had tweeted about the 99c sale, which I wouldn't think much of because I had a lot of other stuff going on those days, except the final spike the only thing I did was tweet. Which makes me think . . . I should've tweeted a lot more about the sale! Hahahaha!

It's hard to know where the self-promotion line is before you start annoying people, of course. And I do know the other promotion had a significant impact -- I mean, I have fewer total Twitter followers than I sold total books, hurr hurr (of course, retweets go to other people's lists, and in this case they REALLY mattered). But yeah, next time I will try to push myself to do more Twitter action.

The other thing I think I will do next time is run the sale for a much shorter time -- maybe 2-3 days at most, maybe even just one day, and go for that one big spike. I can aim for getting some big promo -- keep applying for Bookbub, for instance, or go for ENT again -- and then just reduce the price for that one day, and do mailing list + Twitter and all that, and have the one big spike. Reason being, I'm not sure the days in between -- when I didn't have "something happening" -- were worth the 99c price. My sales were higher than usual, but as you can see, not a LOT higher.

Lastly: the final node, all the way to the right, is today, which isn't quite over yet, and it looks like it's in line with the non-spiked higher numbers. Which is funny because -- this is the first full day back at full price! Yesterday was when I made the price-change back. So there appears to be at least a little staying power in the numbers. We'll see what happens from here.

The other good news is that January is the first month where my earnings approximately equaled my rent. Which, you know, it was a high month with a new release and all, so it's not nearly as significant as if I were making that every month. And it might drop off fast. But still, a nice milestone.

Putputt said:

YAAAY PENCILFACE!!!!

Thank you for taking the time to do graphs for us too!! It actually helps just seeing the numbers in such a visually-arresting way. Wheeee! YOU ARE TEH FAMOOSE.

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LOL, well, Amazon does the graph for me, I just screenshot it. But I'm glad it's helpful!

Someday I will post with the Y-axis and actual numbers and all. I feel weirdly squirrely talking about exact numbers in public. But someday I will get over the squirreliness tie the squirrels' fluffy tails together and release my whole spreadsheet or something.

Wot wot . . . (why did I suddenly go British there for a second? I have no idea.)

I had a guest post on Jim Hines' blog this past week, and got a huge bump in sales and Twitter followers from it, despite the book being back at full price (!). My Twitter notifications are actually starting to be a little scary: there are people posting pictures of my book in stacks with Real Famous Authors (tm), people I've never interacted with recommending me for the Campbell, people I don't know mentioning my books in the course of random conversations about other things . . .

EEK.

And here's something that made me totally giddy: two people tweeted at me that they'd convinced their library to buy it. *faints* I'M GONNA BE IN LIBRARIES.

Here's another exciting announcement (well, exciting to me): As of now, I've roughly broken even on my writing since I started pursuing it professionally. Now, I'm talking all writing income here -- self-published sales + short story / article sales since March 27 of last year -- against expenses that are entirely for my self-publishing endeavor. So I haven't quite broken even on self-publishing yet, and I'm about to renew my PO box and pay for things for book 3, but it's still a good milestone, and hopefully after a little hovering on the break-even line as I pay for more things but earn more monies, I will start pulling solidly into the profit zone. This took about one year from the time I first published, which is a nice round amount of time.

Meanwhile, book 3 just finished another round of edits, and book 4 is more than halfway written. Yikes!

Thanks guyssssssss!

JRTroughton said:

Not pubbed yet... but sold and on the way to it.

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Woohoo! Many congratulations!!

Interfaced said:

This is a really fantastic thread, thank you for putting all the information and your thoughts down in such a clear and useful manner. Well done on your success so far, long may it continue!

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Thanks for the kind words, Interfaced, and for picking up ZSG. I hope you like it!

If I might ask a question, as I'm intrigued about how you'll respond given the success you're seeing - what do you feel is the biggest mistake that you've made so far? Anything that you wish you could do over?

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Good questions. These are, in my case, sort of separate things -- in that there are things I am conscious are impeding me (in a business sense) but I would not or cannot feasibly change, versus things I would change in retrospect.

Things That Impede Me From a Business Perspective But Which I Would Not or Could Not Change

• Not publishing faster. A lot of financially-successfully self-publishers put a book out every few months. I can't write that fast at the quality I want to release at. But I try not to judge myself on it. (Alternatively, I could have sat on ZSG until I had a few books ready to go, but it's useful for me to push the books out into the world, because only then do I stop wanting to fiddle with them.)
• Not being better at social media, or at least more consistent. I go through periods where I get overwhelmed with the internet and let my Twitter / blogging / what have you go silent for a time. This is not helpful to me, but as an introvert, I'm not sure I can do anything about it -- pushing myself just makes it worse. :-/ So that's another thing I try not to judge myself on. (Also, some SPers are just really GOOD at galvanizing people to buy their books through SM, which I am not, really. I'm good at SM but not savvy, if that makes sense. And I'm not great at running promotional events and the like, which some people are.)
• Publishing under Creative Commons, believe it or not, has turned out to be mixed from a visibility perspective. I've gotten some nice publicity through it, but I've also had some interest from agents/publishers a few times now, and as soon as I mentioned the CC licenses they said, "Hmm, yeah, that's probably a no go. If you write something new, though, we'd love to see it." Which is frustrating! But the CC licensing isn't something I'd change.
• Spending the amount I do on production value. It is probably not the best business decision -- it's not like my books would go out typo-ridden without paying an editor . . . but they wouldn't be as polished. Etc. BUT, for me, publishing is as much about completing a product I'm proud of as it is about making money. Like people who build do-it-yourself things just because -- I wouldn't have regretted the money put in even if I hadn't made it back, because I like building books that I'm proud of. But like with all things, other SPers may have different goals.
• Publishing in the middle of undergoing cancer treatment, which knocked me out of being able to promote as much as I probably should have. But working on my books was really the one thing keeping me sane, so having one good thing going on during that time is something I wouldn't change. And also, I don't think waiting would have done me any favors, really; it was just that I wasn't present in the aftermath of my release as much as I might have been otherwise, which is . . . *shrug*, life.

Things In Retrospect I Wish I'd Done

• Publishing, not faster, but sooner. I could have been more efficient and streamlined with ZSG. In particular, I should have sent to betas a lot sooner than I did, instead of obsessing over every word only to rewrite whole chapters post-beta.
• Getting online / on social media / on AW (<-- IN PARTICULAR) sooner. I started an online presence once I was done with the first draft of ZSG, because I didn't want it to distract. I wish I'd started earlier, in particular because AW and the friends I've met through it have made my writing process so much faster, more pleasant, and more efficient.
• Getting my book up on Apple sooner. I really have no excuse for this. There was a minor snafu I just kinda kept not dealing with and only ended up taking about twenty minutes to fix.
• Writing more short stories sooner and submitting to pro markets at the same time I was self-publishing. This is pretty unique to my situation, but I had a fair number of people tell me they were nominating me for the Campbell Award this year, and I wished I'd had more short stories out for more visibility on that front. Um, that was not entirely a predictable thing, though.
• Run my 99-cent sale for a shorter time (this is detailed above), but I wouldn't have known that until after I did it!

Things I Don't Regret

• Self-publishing. I can absolutely speak to it not being right for everyone, and the way I do it not being right for everyone, but it was right for me and right for this series.
• Creative Commons (yes, it's on both lists).
• Going wide instead of being in Kindle Select. From what I can see, I'd be making vastly more money right now if I'd gone all-Amazon. But I'm predicting that I'll make more money in the long game by going wide (which is why it isn't on the list of things impeding me but that I don't regret). But, I'd be doing it anyway, because I'm ethically against locking my readers into buying from Amazon.
• Sending scary emails to people requesting to promote my books. There have been a few times I've cold-contacted people about promotion -- or sent follow-ups instead of assuming I was rejected -- that were SUPER TERRIFYING but resulted in amazing things.
• Saying yes to things. People have asked me to guest post or write stories or reviews or things that I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to tackle sufficiently, but so far they've all turned out really well.
• Being loud on social media. I am always sincere, but sometimes this includes being angry and/or political. This has gained me a surprising number of awesome fans/followers who liked what I had to say.
• Writing diverse characters.
• Going for high production value.
• Putting out a paperback for book 1, even though it's lagging behind on earning back -- having at least the first paperback out has allowed me to do a few promotional things I wouldn't have otherwise.
• Not reading my reviews. YAY SANITY.

I'll add to this list if I think of more things.

onesecondglance said:

As someone who doesn't "do" ebooks, I certainly don't regret you doing the paperback of ZSG...

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Well that alone makes it worth it.