Don’t give up. Books have a million lives. It doesn’t matter if no one has read it yet and it has been out a while. It’s always new to the reader encountering it for the first time. And be patient. Success doesn’t happen overnight. Expecting it to will only lead to disappointment.                 –David Gaughran
This is good advice for me to keep in mind as I look at my sales report for November. My marketing reach since launch has gotten to everyone in my immediate circle. Breaking out of that circle is incredibly difficult. My slow sales show that and I’ve learned some things in the past month that I’m going to share now.
The Darkest Winter is published through Amazon. Since the start, I never considered selling the paperback through anyone but Amazon. With their Extended Distribution channel, I thought I’d be covered well enough for any bookstores, libraries, schools to buy the book if they wanted it (and that would be a serious marketing win if I got sales through this channel. I haven’t but knowing that the book is so widely available has been reassuring). For the ebook edition, I planned on keeping it exclusive to Kindle for 3-6 months. That 3 months is getting very close and that brings me to the point of this post.
Amazon’s Extended Distribution is garbage. There is no way to tell if a book has sold through that channel until after it has shipped. Amazon’s printers may not be the one who prints the book for this channel so there is no telling what the quality is. It’s possible that your book won’t be available to the distributors in this channel (like Baker and Taylor) for some unknown glitch that Amazon is “working on.” It’s basically impossible to find out what’s going on with this channel it’s so buried and shady. The royalties are garbage, almost to the point where it isn’t worth selling it.
I found all of this out because last month I organized a deal with the North Haledon Library for their book club. I huge sale for me and the order was placed through Baker and Taylor on Oct. 16th. Three weeks later, nothing had happened. I could not find out why. So I organized to get the book directly from Amazon using my Author Discount. So the books are coming to me next week, I’ll hand them off to the library and I’ll actually make some money in the process. It’s mindboggling stupid how this has worked.
You know what else is crazy? When you dig around the help pages on CreateSpace, there is a line that says this….I’m paraphrasing but this is the message:
ProTip: Don’t use our Extended Distribution feature. Use another company, they are way better at it.
So I’ve deselected that one in my account because it doesn’t do anything. This has led me to do research on other companies and I’m on the fence about getting the paperback available wider. A decent amount of re-setup is necessary and I’m not sure if it’s worth it. For example, if I wanted to get the book onto Barnes and Noble shelves I gotta get an appropriate price barcode and another ISBN barcode on there, and submit all sorts of stuff to B&N and wait 3 months for a yes or no.
Since I know I’m going to expand the reach of the ebook, that’s more in the forefront for me. Get it on Kobo, iBook, Nook, Google Play, etc. That’s going to happen I just need to decide when. Amazon Select (a minimum 90-day commitment) gets the ebook into their Kindle Unlimited and borrowing program which nets money on page reads. I had over 3.000 in September and about 1,000 in October and much less this month so I’m not sure if it’s worth keeping TDW exclusive for another 90 days. The royalties for this service are super weird as it’s based on the month’s allowance (I think September was around $22 million) that is divided up by all page reads. I haven’t seen any royalties from that yet.
So, come January or March, the ebook will be available basically everywhere.
So while this has been frustrating, I’m really close to 100 books sold. That’s awesome, to say the least. 9 fantastic reviews are on Amazon right now and I’d love more. I’m going to think local for now I think. With the success of the NH library sale, I’m going to check around for other book clubs. Plus I’m going to speak to the group at NH so that’ll be fun and a great way to get the word out further. I think this could be the path to greater success.
I gotta get the gears spinning on this and we’ll see what happens.