Jun 9 2014

Bret Michaels, I Hope You Wanted to be a Doctor When You Grew Up……

The hallway was always quiet at this time of the night, the hum of the florescent lighting the only sound breaking the endless silence. In the distance came a sudden, loud explosion, shattering the stillness of the night. Screams could be heard coming closer as muffled gunfire echoed through the halls. The overhead intercom system crackled to life, the static-filled voice tiny in the increasingly loud sounds of fighting. “Paging Dr. Sychak, Dr. Bret Sychak. You are needed in the lab. Bring security backup.”

Writing is fun, no doubt about it. When someone ticks you off, you can always make them into the bad guy in some twisted storyline, kicking their ass six ways from Sunday. And depending on just how messed up your imagination is (in my case, it would be a long stretch with serial killer Ashton Jones BEFORE he grew fangs and a conscience), those who have wronged you can either have a quick demise or a long, drawn-out and very painful time in the story. You get to make up worlds, rules, control everything and everyone in that world (usually, but all us writers know how our characters like to grow minds and opinions of their own and refuse to do what we tell them to do). You get to take readers on the most wondrous adventures, limited only by your own imagination. And for some of us, me included, those imaginations seem absolutely limitless.

There really is nothing like being a writer. For me, the majority of my characters are based in part from someone important in my life. The antagonist Sergeant First Class Steven Hall is a real person who really is a Sergeant First Class in the air force. He was a very dear friend of mine who I forever immortalized in the ongoing BTSR series. Ethereal is the name of a character I made up and used back when I was heavily into online RP games. The LeeLee character that will be introduced in an upcoming book in the series was another one of my RP characters. Her love interest, Akito, is based off of another online friend who also played in the games and is near and dear to my heart. The Vampire Stealth was coined in part after the wonderful Don Henrie. Because my characters are molded after real life people, they seem as real and are as dear to me as the people who inspired them. For me, these characters ARE real, as real as anyone else that I know in my day to day life.

Now I have decided to forever immortalize my mentor, Bret Michaels, into the upcoming novel IMMORTAL SINS, the next book in the BEFORE THE SUN RISES series. I plan to write two different characters into the series, the first one using his birth name and made into a doctor, Dr. Bret Sychak. The second appearance made by Bret Michaels will be in a yet –to-be announced novel. I may even bring him into another novel in the BTSR series before it is all said and done. Bret is an incredible person and has inspired me in so many ways throughout the years that the very least I can do for him is to write him into a book, or maybe even two or three.  And if I’m very VERY lucky, he might one day read all about those characters and all those characters that so many other people in my life have inspired.

Creating characters after those who have inspired me and then writing them into my storylines is my way of paying homage to them. It’s my way of saying “thanks” for all they have done for me directly and indirectly, for all their inspiration. It is a fun thing to do, and I do so hope that no one will ever become angry because of it. For writers, creating characters after real people not only help the characters feel more real, but it allows them to pay a great respect and a big “thank you” to these people in their own way.

So if you find yourself suddenly immortalized in an author’s novel, take a moment to realize that you have been greatly honored by the author, for they are paying you homage in the most sacred and special way that an author can. You touched their lives so greatly that they saw fit to coin a character after you – even if it is one getting his ass kicked six ways from Sunday.

Jun 3 2014

Why I Chose AGAINST Amazon’s KDP Select Program

A recent discussion in an online community through LinkedIn for independently published authors got me to thinking. Sure, I had seen countless SPA’s in my FB feed blast me with advertisements about their books going up for FREE and the aftermath of them proclaiming they gave away X number of free copies. So, I began researching into how to do this for my own titles.

To begin with, many authors swore the only way to get your titles up for free was to have a few hundred of your readers email Amazon and ask them to do a free day. As it turns out, anyone who chooses to enroll their books in the KDP Select program can put their book up for free or do a “countdown deal.” These programs sounded interesting enough. But what is KDP anyway?

KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. The KDP Select program offers two promotional tools, the “free” promotion where you can put your title up for free anywhere from 24 hours to 5 days. The countdown deal allows you to start your work at a lower price, even free, and then gradually increase the price. The countdown deal can last from 1 hour to 7 days.

The only stipulation to be enrolled in KDP is that your work must NOT be available in any format anywhere else. That means no B&N, no LuLu, no Smashwords, etc. In addition, your work must have a regular starting price of $2.99 minimum and must stay at the regular price for 30 days in order for the work to qualify for either a free promotion or a countdown deal. The last stipulation is that each book can only be signed up for one of these promotional deals ONCE every 3 months.

After seeing this apparently work miracles for other SPAs – according to THEIR recollections, that is – I decided to take a chance and enrolled 3 of my novels into the KDP program.

Before my books qualified to start a free or countdown deal promotion, a fellow independently published author started a lovely conversation in one of the groups I joined on LinkedIn. He had basically posted his observances and experience with doing a free day on Amazon. His experience was much like everyone else’s experiences: hundreds of copies given away, ZERO reviews, a plummeting Amazon ranking once the free day was over, and a slow pick up on return to sales for months after the free day.

Here’s a breakdown of my own experiences and those other authors who are openly honest about their experiences.

First, I did not want to give away hundreds of copies. These days readers pop books like PEZ candy, so I knew that the more books I gave away and the more people who knew about it, the less likely I was to attract customers who would become repeat purchasers of my work.

I set one of my most popular, but not most recently released books, to go for a 2 day freebie. The first day I posted about it on my FB page about 4 times. A few readers picked up the link and shared it on their FB pages. On day two, I hit a few FB book promotion groups. I think I only posted in 4, and 2 of those did not actually approve my post until the day AFTER the promotion was off. I think I posted about it 2 or 3 times on my private account.

There were no blogs announcing it except my own, no other authors mentioning it that I saw nor did I have my street team out pimping it. In all I gave away a few hundred books, not bad considering there were just a few token posts on my own FB account and no real coverage of the giveaway days.

Before I get into the breakdown, we have to look at why we run promotions in the first place.

A. Reviews. We hope that the more people who get their hands on our books, the more likely some of them will leave reviews.

B. Repeat customers and more sales in the long run. We hope that by making the books more affordable, we can get them into the hands of more readers. In turn, those readers will become repeat customers, wanting to read additional books that we have published.

The breakdown:

In addition to the few hundred books given away on my free day, I have also donated to several blogs with free ebooks for giveaways. The results have been disastrous across the board.

a. ZERO reviews. After giving away all those hundreds of copies, I have received ZERO reviews from the recipients of these freebies.

Why? Due to the mass influx of SPAs and new books hitting Amazon every day, authors have slashed their prices down to $.99 cents on most books and are constantly giving away novels. This has bottomed out the market, virtually saturating it with so many cheap and free novels on any one day that readers no longer have to purchase books to keep their Kindles loaded with reading material.

Since readers are getting these books for free or nearly free, they no longer equate the books as tangible products with any worth. Because of this, whether they liked it or hated it, they don’t feel the need to leave a review like they do when they spend a substantial amount of money purchasing the product. My experiences have been mirrored by hundreds of other authors in my LinkedIn groups, each reporting virtually ZERO reviews despite giving away hundreds of books.

b. Plummeting Amazon rankings. One thing that I noticed while my book was up for free was a constant update on the book page on Amazon that gave its current rank in not only the free Kindle store, but also its current rank in the category that the book had been listed in. It topped out at #73. Once the free days were over, that ranking on the book page disappeared, giving only the current overall sales ranking of that book.

I also noticed while the promo was going on that while the category ranking was climbing, the overall ranking of ALL my books was steadily dropping in overall sales ranking. In addition, my overall author rankings on Amazon continued to drop during the free promotion.

Once the promotion was over, all of my books’ sales ranking AND my author ranking plummeted. I went from being ranked in the low 100K to nearly 500K. Why? As best as I can tell from reading articles on Amazon and other blogs, the sales ranking on Amazon only takes into account the number of books you are SELLING. So while the individual book that is being downloaded will rise in its individual category, my overall SALES ranking as an author went down. While this is not supposed to happen, and many authors do promotions trying to get their rankings up on Amazon, I noticed the opposite happening. The more books I gave away, the lower my overall sales ranking went down.

c.. No new sales. In the days and weeks after the free promotion, sales plummeted. Readers learn which authors are always running promotions and will usually wait until the author does one of the promotions to get the next book. They figure that the author will eventually do another freebie, so why buy something that will eventually be put up for free? This mentality in readers is why so few are buying books. SPAs are only compounding the problems for authors across the board by constantly doing free promotions. Readers never have to buy, and because of that, all authors are losing out on revenue.

In review, my reasons for pulling my works out of the KDP program are many. While I saw many, many books being downloaded, I have had zero return on this investment gamble. I have had no reviews, my Amazon rankings have plummeted, and my sales during the aftermath have been non-existent.

To be quite blunt, generally speaking, the only readers that a free promotion attracts are those who are always trolling for a free novel. Many authors do giveaways in hopes that it will hook the reader into buying the product. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. Since they have so many free books at their disposal on any given day, readers rarely remember any author’s name. They are simply jumping from book to book to book, reading and then dismissing the author and the work when the next freebie comes along. Because of this market saturation, readers are not getting “hooked” on any one author or series. They are just following the breadcrumbs to the next free book for their Kindle.

In conclusion, I would advise any author who is thinking of joining KDP Select to think about their long term goals and review all of your sales data. Personally, I do not think that the return for giving away so many books is worth the revenue loss. The reasoning behind the promotions seems to be a good one, but when that rationalization proves to no longer be working to the authors’ advantage, it is time to take a long, serious look at the practice and decide if it is worth pursuing. From where I’m standing, if I am not at least getting a few reviews and a few paying customers after the fact, then the point of giving them away in the first place has become moot. It is for this reason that I have pulled my works from the program in favor of pursuing different avenues of promotions.

This does not mean that I will no longer offer promotional discounts or even free books. I have revamped my business plan and have decided to do the promotions through an alternative source outside of Amazon. I can only hope that this new business model will help me build my platform and bring in additional readers that the Amazon promotional tools are not providing.

May 29 2014

FREE for Kindle – 2 Days ONLY – Vindictus, The Dark Lord

VTDL

In celebration of almost cracking the top 100K overall book ranking on Amazon, for TWO DAYS ONLY, my bestselling novella Vindictus, The Dark Lord will be FREE on Kindle, May 29th & May 30th. Don’t miss your chance to finally own the complete story that XNers’ have raved about for years. If you never read the whole story, now is the time to act!

May 10 2014

Bret Michaels, THE RED FANG, and a Totally Rockin’ Gift

Bret Michaels with his autographed copy of THE RED FANG.

Bret Michaels with his autographed copy of THE RED FANG.

Dedication page of THE RED FANG - dedicated to Bret Michaels

Dedication page of THE RED FANG – dedicated to Bret Michaels

Before I start this, I want to make it clear that this article isn’t really about Bret Michaels having a copy of my book. Bret does not endorse me, he is not affiliated with me, and I can’t say he’s a reader of mine, although it is possible he might become one, if I’m super lucky.

I suppose I should start from the beginning, but to do that would be to go back approximately twenty-seven years, back to when a gawky thirteen year old was living in hell on earth in an abusive home, back when she heard salvation on the radio, a voice, his voice, the voice of the man who would forever change the outlook a scared, abused thirteen year old girl would have on life.

I don’t want to rehash the past because it’s too painful, and I have come too far and wrestled with too many personal demons to start dredging up old pains. So instead, let’s just leave it with saying my home life growing up left a lot to be desired. But no matter how hard things got, my saving grace through it all has always been Bret Michaels.

I have often posted about why Bret means so much to me, why he is my mentor. I see in him a kindred spirit, someone who won’t take “no” for an answer and is unphased by rejection. I see my love of music and the creative process mirrored in his eyes, the expression on his face. Because of him, because of his ability and willingness to look adversity straight in the face and say, “I will make it regardless of what you say or do to me,” I too have felt inspired to never waiver in my dreams of becoming a published author. It is through Bret’s courage that I have found my own courage to not only keep writing over the past three decades, but to take that step into the publishing world by creating my own publishing house and becoming a 100% independently published author.

So I know you are all wondering what any of this has to do with this blog article. Let’s fast-forward to January of this year when I came across the Bret Michaels FaceBook Fan Club community. I was already a member of so many groups and communities, but after looking through this one I wanted to be a part of it. So many smiling faces sharing photos of themselves and Bret over the years. It was awesome to behold, so many people who had been touched by Bret much the way that he has touched me over the years.

If anyone has actually read The Red Fang, you know that the book was dedicated to Bret. That’s a photo of the dedication page above. More than anything else, I wanted Bret to know just what he means to me, not only the ‘me’ that has grown up over the years, but the ‘me’ that is a writer, that part of me that can’t stop doing what I love no matter how many rejection letters I get and no matter how many bad reviews I get.

So I took a chance. I posted this photo in the fan club and pretty much confessed my desperation to get my book into Bret’s hands. I work full time, I have 3 kids and a husband, and I write whenever I get a few spare moments. The chances of me actually ever getting to meet Bret, much less be able to give him my book in person, just isn’t likely to happen. So I asked if someone was going to a meet and greet and would be willing to give Bret an autographed copy of my latest novel, the novel I dedicated to him. Would there be anyone out there who would be willing to take a book written by some independently published author, from Mississippi no less, to an uber famous rock star and say, “This book is dedicated to you and the crazy self-published author insists you have a copy”?

That is when I met super cool, totally awesome, I-am-forever-in-her-debt Bret Michaels fan, Connie Saucier-Peck.

Connie, the lucky lady that she is, has been to more meet and greets than I can count. She’s like a Bret Michaels connoisseur. And oh-so-lucky and over-the-moon-happy me, she was willing to use her meet and greet pass, her one shot to speak with Bret, her one time to interact with this man, to actually hand him MY book and tell him he has another crazy author-fan out there who dedicated a book to him. That in itself is absolutely phenomenal. It’s humbling to know that Connie was willing to share her precious seconds with Bret to speak about a no-name author who she met in an online fan club and hand him his autographed copy.

The real kicker is that she not only managed to talk him into taking a photograph holding the book, but that Bret Michaels is the kind of person who was willing to pose for such a photo. She didn’t have to ask, and he didn’t have to agree to it, but damn, when she sent me this photo I started crying, and I was shaking so bad that I had to sit down. There simply are not words to describe how excited, and humbled, and totally awe-struck I was at that moment. I still can hardly believe it. And when she told me that Bret handed over his own personal cellphone to one of the event staff members so he could get a photo of him holding the book as well…I am not ashamed to admit that I might have pissed myself a bit.

As I said, this article isn’t about the fact that Bret Michaels now has a copy of my book, which Bret Michaels might actually, accidently read it, maybe, hopefully, if I’m really, really lucky. What this article is about is the human spirit, those people who come into our lives and help out strangers out of the kindness of their heart. Connie did not have to waste her time taking that book to him, and she certainly didn’t have to get him to pose with it for a photo, and she didn’t have to send me that photo, and Bret didn’t have to agree to take the photo, but out of the kindness of their hearts, they both agreed to help this unknown, struggling author see part of her dream come true.

And from where I’m sitting, those dreams don’t seem so far out of reach.

XOXO

Nicola

May 4 2014

Bad Book Marketing Ideas Continued: Marketing Ploys to Avoid

Our series on bad marketing ploys continues with a look at additional marketing “ideas” that you may have witnessed in your FB feed or seen rearing its disturbing head on blogs and websites. If you are guilty of indulging in any of these promotional gimmicks, be warned. Your readers are on to you, and so are other independently published authors who are tired of getting a bad rap as an unprofessional because of the actions of a few. Read on for an in-depth look into marketing ideas that you are better off not using if you want to be looked upon by readers and other writers as a professional author.

Marketing Ploy #2: Pity Party!
“I’m being bullied by mean people leaving negative reviews on my books instead of all those 5 stars that I KNOW I deserve.”
“I’m disabled and my book sales are my only source of income!”
“My child is disabled and my book sales help offset her doctor bills.”
“I have a health condition and my book sales help offset my hospital costs.”
“Poor me! No one is reading my books!”

With Facebook being all the rage these days, virtually anyone can not only slap up a book onto Amazon for an instant publication, but they can also create a FB account, a community, group, and author page with just a few clicks of a mouse. The next thing you know, you have amassed yourself a few thousand friends who are picking apart everything you say or post. And herein is where authors apparently have a hard time separating their personal lives from their “professional” lives.

As an author, you will want to always present yourself as a professional just like any other. Even if being a writer isn’t your full time job, and it rarely is, you should conduct yourself as if it WERE your full-time, professional career and conduct yourself accordingly. You want to present yourself as a caring, intelligent, and honest person. Your personal life and events are just that, personal. They should not be broadcasted in minute detail over FB, blogs, and pages in an effort to make people feel sorry for you. You want people to buy your books because they are a good read, not because they are being guilted into buying it. Yet, more and more readers are complaining of seeing this growing trend amongst self-published authors and writers in their FB feeds. People are using their sob stories and personal tragedies to sell more books. Readers are getting wee-wee’d off about it, and rightly so.

While it is perfectly fine to post a quick comment about being MIA for a few days due to personal issues, it is NOT okay to use those personal issues to make your readers feel sorry for you or to try to guilt them into buying your book. No one should even have to tell you that it is dishonest and extremely unprofessional, yet I myself have seen authors on my own FB feeds play up their recent job losses, their or their child’s disabilities, their high risk pregnancies, their divorce, and most recently, their declarations of being “bullied” by readers who would dare to leave a low-star review on their books, among other things. Again, such behavior is very unbecoming of an author. If you are going to claim to be a professional writer, then you better start acting like one. Otherwise, you are going to lose readers and authors who do not want to be associated with anyone who uses such trickery into trying to squeeze a few more sales out of their customers.

Marketing Ploy #3: I’m a best seller!
Nothing will make a reader roll their eyes quicker than seeing an unknown indie author proclaiming to be an Amazon “best seller.” Unless your book has hit one of the other roughly six national best sellers list, the use of this title means nothing to a reader other than you are trying to boost sales by bragging about being on a list that doesn’t actually exist.

For those who have not looked into how the Amazon Best Sellers Ranking is calculated, then you might be surprised to learn that Amazon refuses to tell anyone HOW it calculates that list. Experts have speculated that it is a complicated mathematical equation dealing with total number of copies sold by any one author in relation to total number of copies sold on Amazon by all authors across all Amazon stores. Regardless of how it is calculated, the list itself is updated hourly. So even if you actually did manage to hit it once for that one hour, that doesn’t constitute a best seller. It only means that the specific book in question is selling a lot of copies for that specific moment in time. The reality is that unless you hit that list and can stay on it every single hour of the day for 30 days straight, you are not a best seller, you are merely a best seller for an hour.

Let’s look at the math to better understand this. Let’s say that you do hit the list once and you sell 500 copies that day for that one hour but only sell 25,000 copies for the entire year. Now let’s say another author sells only 100 copies a day. They will never hit the Amazon Top 100 Best Selling list with those kinds of numbers, but if they consistently sell 100 copies per day, they will have sold 36,500 copies for the entire year. So as you can see, from a numbers stand point, the author who sold the most copies in a year would clearly have more right to the title of Best Seller. However, since Amazon produces this list based on hourly sales, the title itself is of little marketing value and readers are not using it as a means to determine whether or not they will purchase a book. In all actuality, a lot of readers will purposely NOT buy a book from any author who is claiming to be an Amazon best seller. Why? Because so many self published authors have been using it as a “catch phrase” to entice readers into buying books that ultimately did not live up to either the authors’ claims or the readers’ expectations. To put it bluntly, the book wasn’t nearly as good as all the “hype” drummed up by the author and their street team proclaimed. Because of this, readers are learning the hard way to steer clear of authors who use the phrase “best seller” as a marketing line.

It has often been said that a book should sink or swim on its own merit. That isn’t to say that authors should not promote and advertise their book. However, more and more self published authors are using the insta-publishing now available like it was the wild west, thinking that anything and everything goes when it comes to self-promotion. This is just not the case. To put it plainly, as an author, you should be conducting yourself as if you were representing Random House. Think about that for a moment. If you had just been picked up by Random House, would you be on your FB trying to guilt people into buying your books because of a disability, or because you were getting negative reviews, or because you were recently divorced? The answer would be no, and the reason why you wouldn’t do that is because you would be too worried that the publisher would drop you because you were not acting like a professional writer worthy of being carried by Random House. So before you start laying on the pity party, astroturfing your reviews, and begging people to buy your books, ask yourself if you would want anyone from any of the big publishing houses to see and judge your professionalism according to that post. Chances are, you wouldn’t want them to see you in that light, so why would you want your readers to see you acting so unprofessional as well?