Aurora 4x
Off Topic => Off Topic => Topic started by: Theodidactus on August 10, 2014, 12:23:35 PM
-
I hope the Aurora community is okay with me creating a thread to plug my new book, which will come out august 21st and 22nd: http://www.theodidactus.com/the-book/
This is the reason I haven't been on lately. It's not science fiction, but it does have a fair bit of science.
-
ads for the book are out and hanging up in baltimore, chicago, lincoln, omaha, new york, taipei, kaohsuing, and shanghai
(http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=7410.0;attach=1451)
(http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=7410.0;attach=1452)
(http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=7410.0;attach=1453)
-
This looks interesting, and I said as much on your site.
-
oh that was you? cool.
The goal is to sell 350 copies. No easy feat, but achievable as well. I've been trying to sell it for more than a year without success, and decided to self publish after a nice man in the publishing industry told me that the market for a book like this is extremely small and not something a publishing company would ever market to.
-
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MXYA0B0
"The author expects you will enjoy this book if...
1) you have risked your life in order to acquire a particular kind of food
2) you have taught children and been taught by children
3) you were jesuit-educated, or at the very least understand what that means
4) you can tell the difference between china and taiwan
5) you tap random bricks on random walls when no one else is looking in the hope of opening a secret passage or gateway to another world
6) you have been in a prolonged augment over the precise definition of a latinate or greciform word
8) you are a devotee of either Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett
9) you cannot %*^&ing stand Richard %)$ing Dawkins and Daniel *!*)$ing Dennett
most importantly
10) you have been alone in a library very late at night, and been very, very afraid."
-
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MXYA0B0
"The author expects you will enjoy this book if...
1) you have risked your life in order to acquire a particular kind of food
2) you have taught children and been taught by children
3) you were jesuit-educated, or at the very least understand what that means
4) you can tell the difference between china and taiwan
5) you tap random bricks on random walls when no one else is looking in the hope of opening a secret passage or gateway to another world
6) you have been in a prolonged augment over the precise definition of a latinate or greciform word
8) you are a devotee of either Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett
9) you cannot %*^&ing stand Richard %)$ing Dawkins and Daniel *!*)$ing Dennett
most importantly
10) you have been alone in a library very late at night, and been very, very afraid."
Ranked #7 For alchemy category on amazon. Well done!
-
the real goal is to displace my father's work, "Bush Pigs", as the #2 spot. If I can do that I will be very happy.
The REAL real goal is to displace the self-help book by Boston Celtics B-baller Kenyon dooling that currently occupies the # 1 spot. Dad's been trying to unseat that one for years. It's a battle to be the most popular dooling, and you can help!
-
I am now the third most sellingest dooling on amazon, behind a basketball star and my father.
(http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=7410.0;attach=1454)
-
#6 in fiction ebooks on alchemy, and I'm right behind kenyon.
-
I did a sweeping survey of the ebook market and figured out why I wasn't selling at maximum volume. I fixed the cover
(http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=7410.0;attach=1457)
(http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=7410.0;attach=1456)
-
LMAO... Now that's Alchemy. I'm sure your readers would like some equivalent exchange with that guy.....
Actually that's inspired by your browsing history, I gotta ask, what are you reading?
-
LMAO... Now that's Alchemy. I'm sure your readers would like some equivalent exchange with that guy.....
Actually that's inspired by your browsing history, I gotta ask, what are you reading?
Before I released this book I studied the self-published ebook market VERY closely. That's why it's so funny, because I looked at hundreds of titles across multiple genres and despite all the "variety" my recommended results page just looks like a wall of beefcake. Really indicitive of the market, which is
1: largely female
2: interested in topics that conventional publishers won't touch
3: taking full advantage of the low-risk environment.
in reality, my book is massively unconventional and does feature at least two of the "strong female protagonists" that are necessary to sell these days...but there's no sexiness.
the real promise of the ebook market (for readers) is that you'll be able to purchase unusual books without a risk of "losing your money" to something terrible because you can impulse buy 3 during your lunchbreak for less than the cost of your lunch. The real nightmare scenario (for authors) is that there will be a future where millions of people self publish for 50 cents a pop and only a handful are even read.
At this point, I am far more concerned about getting attention than money. Reviews should start rolling in in the next few days and ideally I have an interviews sometime next week with a handful of semi-prominent blogs.
-
I've wanted to write and i can see how much opportunity there is now with the ebook market. It's a shame I've always proctastinated and can't really write well :P.
But one of these days I'll finish one nanowrimo, damnit.
-
I've wanted to write and i can see how much opportunity there is now with the ebook market. It's a shame I've always proctastinated and can't really write well :P.
But one of these days I'll finish one nanowrimo, damnit.
Depends on what you mean by "opportunity"
It used to be the case that the big publishers justified the cost of their publications by saying it was an assurance of quality, something to the effect of: "We're a business, we invested 200,000 into paying various professionals to make sure this story is excellent, so we're reasonably sure it's worth $10 of your time, and it won't have glaring spelling or grammar errors either." But recent books have tarnished this reputation somewhat: the divergeant series was rushed to market with known plot holes which no one bothered to fix because publishers wanted to capitalize on its cinematic qualities (basically, they wanted a movie) and wanted to compete with the hunger games during a lull. 50 shades of grey has several serious spelling errors.
My father is a "real" novelist and can talk for hours on how the profession has changed since the 1980s and 1990s. He and I are divided on the nature of whether the big publishers know what they are doing or not....probably because the publishers bought his stuff and would never buy a book like this. So yeah in that sense there is an immense opportunity because it's now possible to do an end run around the publishers and get your own stuff out there. Big publishers are terrified that eventually new authors will just default straight to amazon to publish their first works, but they're not taking many steps to reverse this increasingly certain course of action.
The problem that goes hand in hand with this is there's a coming literary anarchism that makes the old men of the profession very nervous. Not to brag, but this book took me 3-4 years to write and research and involves the complex interplay between the scientific method and religious inspiration, two disciplines that I studied extensively in college and in graduate school (which I paid a lot of money to attend). It also features a story arc set in taiwan, where I lived for 2 years. I paid my meticulous, equally well-educated best friend quite a lot of money to edit it. However, even my wildest projections for the success of the book have it losing to beefcake fanfiction some girl from Kansas city who has never left her parents house hammered out in a month. ...and really, who's to say that my stuff is better than hers?
So what this means is that we're living in a golden age of opportunity provided you're humble/don't take yourself too seriously, and have an alternative means of supporting yourself. For precisely this reason, it doesn't matter anymore whether you can write well, so I wouldn't let it stop you ;D
But to be completely honest, a lot of the science fiction greats couldn't write well either. I just finished a big run through of the old masters of the profession: Doc EE Smith who wrote the "Skylark" novels and pioneered the space opera genre was actually not a very good writer, in my mind. Asimov, while an excellent and very poetic writer of nonfiction, couldn't characterize to save his life so even in his best stories, all the main characters are cardboard cutouts. with sci-fi, it's all about premise.
What i've written is character-driven fiction that is "realistic" up to the point that it isn't. The most common complaint I've gotten so far is that there are "Too many characters' and "too much talking" but I say people need to deal. ::)
-
I have been interviewed twice:
Robbreedwrites:
http://robreedwrites.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/synchronicity-self-publshing-interview-william-dooling/
Marian Martinez:
http://www.marinarosemartinez.com/urban-fantasy-for-the-argumentative-soul-interview-with-william-dooling/
-
last plug: giving a big talk on self-publishing and ebook promotion at my library on october 30th, I will be telling them what worked and didn't work (IE shilling this on twitter, shilling this using google adwords, ect)
If you bought it, post a review!
If you didn't buy it. buy it.
Or don't.
Whatever :P
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MXYA0B0
-
Yay for whatever!
Ok so I'm posting just to show I'm still reading your plugs, also I read one of the interviews, it was mildly enlightening.
-
Forum posts don't work, really.
Best results to worst goes
Facebook (natural)
Twitter (natural)
Academic networks (natural)
dedicated website
goodreads
forums (fora?)
twitter (ads)
facebook (ads)
google adwords (ads)
this broadly confirms what I suspected at the outset but I was shocked to see how BADLY web advertising fails (I've done professional web advertising before, theoretically I should be good at it...but practically speaking it's, I believe, Random if you're not selling a physical product) I cannot trace one sale to google adwords activity at all. and can only trace one sale to twitter.
though someone did just pull one from kindle unlimited in the last half-hour and I have no idea where that one came from...but of course I have no idea how kindle unlimited works and I'm fairly certain no one at amazon does either. At least, calling them hasn't turned up someone that can explain how I get paid via that system
-
I spent some money on facebook ads. Got something like 10k impressions, and zero buys.
-
yeah, that exactly mirrors my experiences thus far.
What I think is especially interesting about this is how closely it tracks the advice more realistic authors like vonnegut gave at workshops, namely, writing is something you do after you successfully do something else. (he started every workshop by writing "What will you do for a JOB" on the board) By far the best results I've got were by saying to colleagues "Oh, incidentally, I wrote a fiction book that portrays issue X, or features a character who has job/belief system Y", and the best online advertising I've done is through organic facebook and twitter followers (IE just saying "Hey everyone, I wrote a book")
So if you want to sell a book, you need to have lots of friends and colleagues and resources.
or to put it another way: if you want to sell a book, you need to be successful.
I used to do advertising using social media, depressing job because unless you're peddling something that's OBVIOUSLY worth buying (IE quality leather handbags) you don't get a noticeable result. Facebook ads in particular are a borderline scam operation. I can think of almost no time to employ them unless you are actually trying to acquire braindead groupies. THe best analysis I've seen was actually from a science series on youtube:
I also did posters with QR-codes, those have had no effect as well, which is odd because the posters are pretty uh...jarring.
-
Actually I wanted to see those QR posters, they seemed interesting when mentioned in one of thsoe interviews.
-
Actually I wanted to see those QR posters, they seemed interesting when mentioned in one of thsoe interviews.
They look exactly like the posters I put earlier on this thread but they have a QR code in the top right or bottom left. Particularly cool effect in the case of the "end of YOUR world" posters because those are designed to look like something printed off by a lunatic in an abandoned church or something.
-
For the next 4 days my book is free to buy (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MXYA0B0) from Amazon.com
Also, for any other self published authors: I found a way to increase my sales by roughly 2,000%
it's depressing, but you can read about it here: http://www.theodidactus.com/selling-synchronicity-i-found-a-way-to-increase-my-ebook-sales-by-2000/
-
For the next 4 days my book is free to buy (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MXYA0B0) from Amazon.com
Also, for any other self published authors: I found a way to increase my sales by roughly 2,000%
it's depressing, but you can read about it here: http://www.theodidactus.com/selling-synchronicity-i-found-a-way-to-increase-my-ebook-sales-by-2000/
Is giving stuff away good for boosting sales?
Edit: I'll read this just as soon as I can work out how to get it onto my iPhone.
-
So this is a bump, also Theodidactus hasn't posted for 10 months. But I'm wondering what the final result of the amazon publishing was. I've noticed your stories are available to download straight from your website now.