How Do You Feel About Black Friday?

As many of you know, I do a fair number of discounted book promotion events throughout the year. It’s part of a two-year long experiment to figure out if they’re worthwhile for me, especially since I don’t use Facebook, BookBub, or Amazon ads, as of yet.

As the year draws to a close, it seems logical to step things up before 2022 begins and I turn my attention to other projects. So, starting today, and going for only five days, my second Casey Holland mystery, Deadly Accusations, is on sale for $.99 till Nov. 30. This is another BookFunnel event, however, you can order directly through Amazon, Apple, Barns & Noble, Kobo, and Google Play. For those of you who’d like to use BookFunnel (no signup is required for this event), you can find the link HERE.

The banner created by the organizer calls it a Black Friday sale, which I wasn’t expecting, but as I’ve found over recent days, many authors and publishing services are jumping on the Black Friday bandwagon. My inbox is filled with deals from ProWrite, Reedsy, BookBaby, and several others targeting authors looking for images, writing tools, and other techie apps.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about the Black Friday label. While it used to be exciting, I think the varnish has worn off, and I’ve never been much of a shopper anyway.

I’m curious, do you take advantage of Black Friday sales, especially when it comes to books, writing tools, or discounted courses, etc.? Do you think Black Friday holds the same appeal as it did a decade ago, or do you think this sale is more important than ever, not only for authors, but for businesses’ survival? If you don’t take part as an author with books to sell, do you fear missing out on great opportunities? For me, that’s a small yes, as I’m only doing one thing this week. I’ve always had trouble with the think big or go home concept. 😊

Deadly Accusations can also be ordered through the links below:

Amazon booklinker: myBook.to/DeadlyAccusations

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/deadly-accusations-1

Apple books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/deadly-accusations/id1166038139

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deadly-accusations-debra-purdy-kong/1109129841?ean=2940153520209

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=vyEvEAAAQBAJ

Following Up On Book Promotion Sites

Last week’s blog about promotion sites generated few responses and those who did respond weren’t familiar with the sites I listed. However, I did come across something helpful while catching up on the many blogs I subscribe to.

Author and marketing guru David Gaughran posts a lot of helpful and interesting information about marketing that includes ads, Amazon algorithms, and many other things. The day after I posted my blog I came across his piece on the Best Book Promotion Sites, which you can find HERE.

Those who’ve been following my blog for a while know that I’ve already taken part in a BookBub promo back on Dec. 31. In June, I also promoted my books on Bargain Booksy and Book Adrenaline, offering the first book in my series, The Opposite of Dark, at the discounted price of $.99. Results showed a small profit, but nothing significant. Next month, I’m trying the same discount with The Fussy Librarian.

1st in Casey Holland transit mysteries

I’ve chosen not to do three or four promos at a time because I want to track the amount of sales for each event to figure out which are the most financially viable investments. With six books in my Casey Holland series, sales can trickle in for two or three months (longer for BookBub) after an event, which I also want to track.

Meanwhile, a colleague also planned a promotion event in June, offering the first book in her series for free. As with my books, hers are available at sites other than Amazon, however when she asked Amazon to price match the book for free, Amazon declined. That didn’t happen to me back in January, so I’m wondering if this has happened to any of you, or if you’ve heard of this happening to other authors? So far, I’ve had no difficulty asking Amazon to price match books I’ve discounted for $.99 this summer, but who knows what will happen in future?

Ending the Year With a Promo Bang

I’d planned to end the year quietly and work on production for Casey Holland mystery #6, The Blade Man, but then I got inspired to do some tasks (thanks for your tips Jacqui Murray,). I then learned that BookBub will be featuring my first Casey Holland mystery, The Opposite of Dark, for free on December 31^st.

Back on April 3^rd’s blog, I pondered the pros and cons of investing a fair bit of money in their promotion site, and after weighing varying opinions, I decided to submit my book. Colleagues warned me that it’s very difficult to get in and would take a while but to keep trying. So, I applied every month only to face rejection. I stopped in September, as the fall was so busy that I forgot about submitting. I remembered again in early December and was shocked to find that I’d been accepted to be featured on Dec. 31st. I told the BookBub contact person that given that this was the last day of year, it should be interesting, and she responded that BookBub’s stats showed little difference between this or regular days. We’ll see.

I’ve extended the offer for an extra day on either side, to ensure the price change is in place by the 31^st, so again, it’s a matter of waiting to see the results. I probably won’t know if this is a good investment or not for a while. If readers want to buy subsequent books in the series, it likely won’t happen the same day, but possibly throughout the month of January or even further on.

I also finally took the plunge and joined Instagram just before Christmas, and am currently following just a small number of people as I get a feel for the site. Instagram is different than I expected and I’m not sure how to make the most of it yet, but I’ll figure it out. Someone advised me to have a stash of hashtags ready to use, so I’m working on that. Meanwhile, I’m linking this blog to my account, so we’ll see what happens. If you have any great tips, I’d love to know what they are. You can find me HERE. If you send me your link, I’d be happy to follow you!

I think that’s enough busy-ness for the last week of 2019 and into 2020. Oh, and I have another big announcement, but this one will have to wait until the new year!! Meanwhile Happy New Year!

Luck and the Writer

Back in February, I discussed the concept of success, after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Today, I want to focus on the concept of luck.

I read an interesting blog about a month ago by thriller writer Joe Konrath. He writes an excellent blog about the writing biz, and as a hybrid author with a substantial backlist, he has a lot to say about publishing, promoting, and marketing. You can find his blog HERE. He also has an interesting take on why most authors’ marketing plans won’t work. What it comes to, in his view, is luck. But the question then becomes, how does one become luckier?

Some people call luck a matter of preparation meeting opportunity. I don’t disagree. I remember reading an article about a Canadian woman who’d been incredibly lucky at winning contests. She had a room filled with prizes. When asked what made her so lucky, she said it was because she probably entered more contests than most people. In fact, she had turned contest-entering into a full time job.

Yesterday, I came across a similar article about folks who constantly win sweepstake prizes. In fact, there’s a whole group of them who take this so seriously that they’re referred to as sweepers. You can read more about them HERE. I was struck by the comment from one of the frequent contest winners, who stated that luck had nothing to do with her large haul. It was about effort and persistence.

Sometimes luck truly does seem to come out of the blue. Maybe a horrific car crash you managed to avoid by just one minute has nothing to do with persistence and effort. Maybe carrying a four-leaf clover or talisman does help some people, who knows?

Personally, I believe that luck often emerges from a series of decisions, opportunities, and right-time, right-place circumstances. But even that’s not the whole picture. Maybe there’s no rhyme nor reason why someone’s thriller gains fabulous attention and mega sales while an equally well-crafted thriller with a gorgeous cover and an amazing back cover blurb doesn’t. We could speculate that if the “unlucky” author had targeted his market differently or tried a different promotion strategy, then maybe it would have made a difference. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t have. We can drive ourselves crazy wondering over stuff like that.

Joe’s answer to making one’s luck is to keep writing books. He doesn’t discount using ads, blogs, social media, etc, for promotion, but he makes it clear that those efforts won’t guarantee any sales. Writing is the only thing you can really control, he says, and if you keep doing it and getting better at it, you just might get lucky enough to have a bestseller on your hands. For many of us, isn’t that the dream which lets our imaginations run wild, that gets us out of the bed every morning and open to all possibilities?

Staying on Top of the Writing Biz

Writers who are as serious about selling their books as they are about writing them know all too well that one’s writing life quickly becomes a business. Aside from arranging events, blog tours, social media shout-outs, and so on, there’s the actually selling of books and record keeping that accompanies it, or at least it should.

If you’re traditionally published, your publisher will track your sales, but if you’re self-published, well, that’s on you. Keeping track of income and expenses is an important part of the writing biz. Here in Canada, Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) wants to know about every dollar you earn from writing and every dollar you declare as an expense.

Since I’m not an accountant and therefore unqualified to give technical advice, I’m offering only two general tips that come from twenty-five years of selling my books through gift shops, bookstores, craft fairs, and writers’ events.

The first is stay on top of your bookkeeping. If you’re self-publishing multiple titles and selling at numerous events, then it’s important to know which title sold where and for how much. Bookkeeping tasks can mount up fast, especially during the Christmas season, so I find it best to record my sales on a spreadsheet right after every event.

It’s also important to note any expenses you wish to declare for each event. There are a number of online accounting packages like QuickBooks to help you out, but if you only have a couple of titles and know how to use Excel then that will at least keep you from frantically rummaging through shoeboxes of mangled receipts every April.

Here’s where my second piece of advice comes in, and this is probably stating the obvious, but if you’re selling books through your own website and accepting different forms of payment from different countries with different taxation requirements, then consider hiring an accountant. The same advice applies even if you’re not, but are having trouble figuring out what is a legitimate expense and what isn’t.

I’m lucky to have three accountants in my family, but if I didn’t I’d definitely hire one. It might seem pricey, but a professional can help you set up an efficient recordkeeping system and possibly save you thousands of dollars over the long haul.

Even if you have only one book out, it’s still a good idea to keep track of how many copies you sold, when, where, and for how much. These stats alone will help you figure out which events are viable, and if your books are appealing to the right demographic. Trust me, demographics vary from community to community.

When it comes to the business of selling books, there’s a lot to think. Do you need a GST number? Should you form an incorporated business? If those questions make your head spin, I totally get it. If you’re procrastinating with overflowing shoeboxes on a shelf somewhere, you know who to call.

The Tough Financial Road For Writers

I learned a long time ago that when it came to writing and income, I’d be taking more risk than I wanted in trying to earn a living from writing and publishing fiction. When I started getting paid for my published short fiction, the average paycheck was about $100, which meant I’d have to write and publish far more stories than I could possible manage.

After sharing my paltry income experience with a writers’ group back in the early 90’s, one of them loudly announced that she didn’t want to hear it. I learned then that not all writers want the truth about writing income. Since that time, I’ve read of, or even met, writers who wrote fiction as a means of earning needed retirement income. I worried for them. In fact, I worry for anyone who is depending on writing income, especially given the latest stats to come from the Authors Guild 2018 Author Income Survey. In a nutshell, the survey shows that writers’ incomes are dropping significantly. Keep in mind that this is one survey, but I’ve read of similar results from UK, Australian, and the occasional Canadian survey as well.

If you don’t want to know what the Guild report says, then stop reading here. I don’t mind. If you want to read the entire report (it’s interesting), you can find it HERE.

I want to focus on three highlights: 1) the median income for American writers in 2017, was $6,080, down 42% from 2009. 2) book earning incomes fell by 21% to $3,100. 3) on average, self-published authors earned 58% less money than traditionally published authors. A number of reasons are cited for these circumstances. Like many of us, the authors who took part in this survey supplemented their income through teaching, speaking engagements, and writing reviews.

I can certainly attest to the significant decline in ebooks sales for indie authors. In 2008 when I published Fatal Encryption, readers were trying their new e-readers and Kindles, and authors were buying one another’s books and reviewing them regularly, which Amazon eventually frowned upon. I used to sell paper copies on Amazon too until they decided to allow secondhand booksellers to sell my books at a cheaper price. It was either learn from this and adapt, or quit. I’ve chosen to adapt.

After reading the Authors Guild Report, I want to mention two things. One is that most authors (of course there are obvious exceptions) haven’t made a decent living from their work for well over a century. You can find references to what your predecessors have endured going back to Charles Dickens’ time and earlier.

My second point is that the desire—if not urge— to create won’t stop writers from expressing themselves in whatever form they choose, despite low income potential, nor should it. Dream big. A decent income does happen for some authors. It might not be easy and could take years of work, but nothing worthwhile comes easily, but then you already knew that, right?

To Succeed or Not—It’s More Complicated Than I Thought

In an earlier blog, I wrote about the question of success for writers…what it means, how we define it, and I pretty much decided that it’s up to each of us to define our own measures of success. This often involves meeting goals, some that might have little to do with large royalty checks and tons of book sales.

Of course, the reality is that the world beyond our front door will judge us by our income, book sales, awards and prestigious reviews. Whether that matters is up to you, but apart from my own definitions and goals, I find the overall topic of success fascinating. So I was pretty excited to come across a book called Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.

In this book, Gladwell makes it clear that the success achieved by Bill Gates and the Beatles, for example, is not just a matter of talent or IQ, but of cultural background, family and community support, opportunities seized upon (right time, right place) and decisions made. There’s also the matter of the extreme amount of practice put into mastering their skills.

Gladwell cites the famous study which suggested that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieved the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything. This goes for lawyers, rock stars, and writers, I expect.

It makes me wonder how many hours authors put into writing before publishing that first book (traditionally or through self-publishing), and if that practice is a sufficient foundation to reach multiple book publications and huge sales (whatever huge means). I’m just not sure that the 10,000 hour rule is all that straightforward.

For instance, if authors manage to put in 10,000 hours of writing practice before publishing that first book and landing a contract, is it enough experience to help them write the next two books that publishers often expect in quick succession? Will the authors have the mastery to produce the same quality of work that landed them a contract in the first place?

While Gladwell provides some intriguing anecdotes and stories, not all of the answers are there. He discusses the concept of failure as well, through the story of one of the most intelligent men in the world, yet very few people know who he is. It’s an insightful story.

I do think that Gladwell is spot on when he reveals that the super stars portrayed in his book are well aware that they didn’t get there alone. Again, this is also true for writers. If you’re interested in the topic of how success is created in some people and not in others, then I would definitely recommend this book.

2017 Craft Fair Experiences

After participating in several craft fairs this year, my anecdotal observations pretty much confirm the experiences of previous years, which are:

. Print still sells. My books won’t sell nearly as well by sitting on a bookstore shelf with thousands of other titles. Also, some of my customers said that they tried ebooks but didn’t like them. Sure, a few use iPads and Kindles, but people just don’t seem as excited about them as they once did.

. Customers are shocked to learn that the Chapters chain here in Canada collects 55% of every book sold. It’s the main reason I prefer to sell directly to readers, along with the fact that, in the past, my returned books have been damaged.

. The overwhelming majority of young families understandably don’t have time to read. Those pushing strollers rarely stopped by my table to browse unless they were shopping for a mystery fan in their family, which leads to point four.

. Mystery reader demographics haven’t changed in the 20+ years I’ve been selling books. The largest purchasers, and readers, of mysteries are women between forty-five and seventy-five years of age.

. New or would-be writers are still quite confused about whether to self-publish, find an agent, or look for a traditional publisher. I try to give sound advice without going into a long pros and cons list. Mainly, I ask them to think about what they want out of the publishing experience, and to do some research.

Since fees are charged (and they can be quite steep) to acquire a table at craft fairs, and there is often a jurying process, selling at these venues is always a gamble. You never know until the fair is well underway if you’ll earn your money back. As a vendor recently said to me, it’s always a rush when things are going better than expected, but you can’t count on the same results every year. It’s risky to base your expectations on previous year’s successes. So, we’ll see what happens next year because I’ll definitely participate again. I guess it’s the gambler in me.

The Author Question I Can’t Answer

I’ve been subscribing to mystery writer Hope Clark’s newsletter for quite some time. She often has interesting insights about writing and the writing biz. This week’s topic was about things that writers don’t like to talk about in public. Some of those things included, how many books we authors sell, how much money we make, and how much we spend on promotion?

Plenty of authors don’t like answering those questions because we’re judged by our answers and, trust me, authors face enough judgement. But you know, maybe the questions aren’t that important to begin with.

It’s impossible to know how many books we sell through purchased ads, for instance. For those of us who’ve been traditionally published, royalty statements show that our earnings per book fluctuates a fair bit, depending on the discount our publisher gives the vendor. Let me tell you, 15% royalty on a paperback that’s been heavily discounted doesn’t amount to much per book.

To me, the only question that truly matters and that cannot be answered, is how many people have read and liked your book? I’ve sold a lot of copies to libraries here in Canada. I have no idea how many people have borrowed the book, or even liked it.

When I buy copies of my books from my publisher, I’m paid royalties on those books. For income tax, and therefore recordkeeping purposes, they count as sales. I then sell those books at writing events and craft fairs. On the other side of the spectrum, I might sell one book to a customer who shares it with three or four other people. It’s also possible that my customer might never get around to reading my book at all.

Really, the questions aren’t worth fretting over because my ability to put food on the table doesn’t depend on book sales. I know I’m lucky in this respect, and I’m truly grateful that I can afford to focus on what really matters…joy and commitment toward writing the best book I can.