Category: Indie publishing

My Latest Amazon Book Description & This Week’s #Kindle Countdown Deal

Desiccation_by_Sarah_Potter

Almost six months have passed since my launch into the world of indie publishing with Desiccation. Have I enjoyed the experience? Yes and No. It has been a huge learning curve and there are things I wish I’d known before.

One tip, to those thinking of going down the same route as me, trial and error learning is all very well, but it’s best not to obsess over your Amazon stats on a daily basis if you’re not to give yourself a nervous breakdown. It’s better to focus on something less volatile and more positive, such as the amazing amount of publishing knowledge you’ve accrued along the way that you can apply to your next project and retrospectively to your first novel when you have your second one out there. But more about that over the next few months.

So here’s my latest book description for Desiccation. This is the one I’ll keep (“Phew, at long last,” I hear you all say!).

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Janet Beckett is a science scholarship girl who believes there’s a rational explanation for all paranormal phenomena.
There is, if you happen to meet a know-it-all hippie pixie who lives in a dimensional transcendental toadstool.

Samantha Hamilton-Brown thinks she’s Queen of the Universe and can do as she pleases in her role as new head girl of Toffdene boarding school.
She can, until aliens cut her reign short and screw with the minds of almost every student and teacher in the establishment.

Joe Buckell is leader of a delinquent mod gang and fancies getting his end away with some hoity-toity daughters of the élite.
He does, but not in the way he hopes.

When desiccation threatens, you’ll do anything to survive.

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This week there’s a Kindle Countdown Deal that runs from today until 27th May, with Desiccation for sale on Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US) at the discounted price of £0.99 and $1.43 respectively.

I’m always a bit shy in coming forward, but I’ve got to learn the art of more proactive marketing. What’s the saying, “If you don’t ask you don’t get”? Or “What is there to lose? The worst that can happen is for people to say no”.

So here goes…

  • If you haven’t already read my book, please buy the Kindle version of my book while it’s going cheap. 
  • If you have already read my book and enjoyed it, please tell your friends about my Countdown Deal.
  • Please, everyone, share about my Countdown Deal on social media.

Thank you 🙂

 

April’s Guest Storyteller, Cee Tee Jackson

Cee Tee Jackson

Cee Tee (Colin) Jackson is an ex-bank manager turned professional dog walker from Houston, Scotland.

He’s a bit of a short arse, with a short attention span. No surprise then, that his first book, ‘Damp Dogs & Rabbit Wee’, at just one hundred and eleven pages, is also a little on the short side.

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Sarah says: I’m delighted to welcome Cee Tee as this month’s guest storyteller. Recently, I had the pleasure of reading the book mentioned above, which falls into the category of non-fiction that is at times stranger than fiction! Seriously, I really enjoyed this book, based on his true experiences as a pet professional, and awarded it five stars on Amazon and Goodreads.

Today, Cee Tee is going to regale us with a tale (tails) from his book.

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The Dangers (Extract from ‘Damp Dogs & Rabbit Wee.’)

I was with three dogs, all from the same household: Ozzie, a bouncy, athletic and energetic bearded collie cross; Gem, a lovely-natured little Staffordshire bull terrier; and Sam, a rather overweight, but ultra-sociable Cairn terrier whose short, stumpy legs struggle to keep his belly from trailing the ground.

In a country park, high in the hills that overlook Paisley and Glasgow, we were following our regular route. As normal, I checked each field for sheep and cattle before entering. Except, on this occasion the cattle were not apparent from the entrance and were actually ensconced in an obscured dip, around a bend.

The three dogs were off-lead and slightly ahead of me as they charged through the open ground. Well, Ozzie and Gem, at least – Sam was mooching his way around as usual, searching for scraps of discarded picnic food and leaving his scent-mark on just about every raised tuft of grass that he passed.

I knew something was wrong the instant all three stopped what they were doing and stood still. Gem threw me a look from over her shoulder which I loosely translated as:

“We’ve got a problem …”

Confronting us now, and quickly rising to their feet, were about twenty cows. Worse – they each had their young with them.

I returned Gem’s look, hoping she’d interpret it as:

“Keep calm, and walk slowly towards the woods.”

At least in there, I reckoned, the cattle would have no room to charge us, and if we were seen to be walking away from them, hopefully they’d realise we intended no harm to their calves.

The most vociferous of the herd was by now no more than four metres from me. She was snorting and stamping her front hooves on the ground. The others were becoming more animated and vocal as they circled us. I shot a look towards the wooded area, some fifty metres away.

The alarmed baying of the group in front of us had alerted a splinter-herd, who had been resting-up in the shade of the very same woods.

Gem slowly turned her head towards me, a quizzical look on her face. I think she was saying:

“What now, wise-guy?”

‘What now?’ indeed.

Well, Ozzie, being of nimble foot, had already made himself scarce and scarpered towards the bottom end of the field. Gem, ever so trusting, was still awaiting instruction.

Sam, completely unaware of any possible danger, decided he’d like to make friends with the cattle. This was not helping, at all.

A car stopped on the road that bisects the park, and the driver came to the fence around a hundred metres away. From his vantage point, down the slope from where we were cornered, he could see a gap forming in the herd. He shouted to me and pointed to where we should run.

And run we did – Gem close by my side.

It was, as I’d read in magazine articles, ‘every man and dog for themselves,’ as we, the faithful Gem and myself, raced through the break in formation. Sam, however was still dithering around with his new ‘pals.’

“Come on Sam” I hollered. “BISCUITS!”

That did the trick. His little legs were a blur as he tried to catch up, more afraid of missing out on a treat than the danger of being trampled and kicked to death by an irate cow or two.

We quickly reached the sanctuary of the road, where Ozzie was waiting:

“What kept you?” I could imagine him panting.

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Damp Dogs and Rabbit Wee is available to buy (Kindle and Paperback edition) from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

Cee Tee’s links
Blog
Facebook
Twitter

 

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You can find the links to previous guest storyteller posts at 

 

Indie Publishing: The Start-up Business & Diving into Book Two

Finally, I’ve got my act in order after several months of banging my head against a brick wall and chasing my tail. I’m aware that my lack of organisation has affected how much time I’ve spent interacting with my fellow bloggers, so my apologies for this. My two excuses, if allowed, are post-viral exhaustion combined with the nightmare of book-marketing by the trial and error method.

Waterfall
Tranquillity and Equillibrium

I don’t want to bore you with discussing my health in detail, other than to say that a tablespoonful of liquid magnesium malate and glycinate a day seems to have done the trick re energy, focus, and calm.

Having achieved a comparative state of equilibrium, I’ve spent the last week establishing a regime, in which the time spent on preparing Novel No. 2 outweighs the time spent marketing Novel No. 1. As a result, I’m already a quarter of the way through editing and formatting my children’s crossover fantasy novel, Noah Padgett and the Dog-people.

Note that I’ve said editing and formatting, as this time round I know enough about the technicalities of preparing the Kindle and Create Space versions, to enable me to do both tasks as I go along. I’m working primarily on the paperback version at the moment, while integrating as many as the Kindle features into it as I can using the styles menu on MS Word. More about this in the future, in a separate post.

For those of you who’ve indie published your first book, or are about to do so, you might like to hear what I’ve learned during the three months following publication of Desiccation

  • Marketing on Twitter is possibly a complete waste of time unless you’re already famous.
  • People are overwhelmed by stuff to read and if you don’t grab them in two seconds, you’ve lost them.
  • There are loads of people out there writing how-to books about publishing and marketing. One tip. Check these so-called experts’ own book ratings/sales statistics/reviews before buying.
  • The majority of affordable marketing packages for indie authors are aimed at the US market rather the UK one.
  • As an unknown indie author, it’s much harder to persuade US readers to buy UK novels, than the other way round (except for crime novels/thrillers).
  • English slang and spellings can confuse US readers.
  • When people review your books on Amazon’s UK site, the reviews don’t show up on the US site. But when people review your books on Amazon’s US site, the reviews do show up on the UK site.
  • If you don’t have at least five 5-star reviews on Amazon (US) — never mind how many 5-star reviews you have on Amazon (UK) — you can mostly forget about advertising in the US, which is a catch-22 situation, as this is where UK authors need extra advertising.
  • Goodreads Giveaways offer exposure to new authors and might not result in immediate sales, but 999 people entered my last one and 367 added my book to their shelves with the chance that some of them get around to reading it in the future. That giveaway lasted a fortnight and the winner lived in the US. The latest one is for a month but with fewer people eligible to enter, due to the cost of mailing the prize to some parts of the world.
  • Amazon Giveaways are useless for UK authors as they’re only available on the US site and are over with too quickly.
  • Quirky cross-genre novels are harder to sell than ones that fit into a definite category.
  • You can spend months fiddling with your product description, meta data, categories, and keywords on Amazon and Create Space, but it’s better to get it right in the first place so you can make a killing from Day One when those Amazon algorithms are crawling around your book, eager for action. Warning, they get easily bored.
  • Just because your novel has teenagers in it, doesn’t mean that teenagers are the main buyers.
  • In the short-term, you may not make a profit on your first novel, but you might on the back of your second novel. Thus, you have to look at the first novel as part of your start-up business.
  • Word of mouth, having an established blog, and guest blogging produce the largest amount of sales. Thank you, my darlings, for all your support 🙂

So my lovelies, that’s my experience. What do you all think? Agree, or disagree? Anything to add by way of tips? I’d love to hear from you all…

That Eureka Moment re Book Blurb -v- Physical Assault by Blueberries

A big thank you to everybody who responded to my cry of despair earlier this week in The Nightmare of Writing Your Own Amazon Book Description. You all gave me some excellent feedback, which resulted in me deciding to start from scratch. Although Version 4 was the clear favourite, it still had its flaws, the main one being that it focused more on a secondary character than my main protagonist.

So here is what I’ve come up with…

Perched on the clifftops at Helmstone-by-sea, British boarding school Toffdene exists in splendid isolation, pretending the Swinging Sixties aren’t happening outside its walls.

Janet is a science scholarship girl who believes that all paranormal phenomena have a rational explanation, until she meets a hippie pixie who lives in a dimensional transcendental toadstool.

Something stirs in the dark of the old tunnel leading from the playing fields down to the beach. Soon the teachers and pupils develop a hive mind determined to ensnare Janet in its collective consciousness. The hippie pixie might have cured Janet’s acne with a single kiss, but his claim that he can fix what’s wrong with everyone else by mending an interdimensional rift is quite another matter.

I did have a struggle over deciding whether “Swinging Sixties” is/are singular or plural in the context above. When I threw it open to discussion in a writing group I belong to on Facebook, the majority of people said it was plural. Mister is insistent that it’s singular. Two online grammar-checkers said it was okay with either and one other threw out the singular version.

Blueberries

As for those blueberries, all I can say is one person’s superfruit is another person’s  poison. There was me thinking that book marketing (especially the part about describing my product) was causing me such stress that it was giving me severe palpitations bad enough for me to think my end was nigh. The only time in the day my heart was desisting from gymnastics was first thing in the morning. But half-an-hour after my supposedly healthy breakfast, which included a handful of blueberries, my heart would go haywire. Then I remembered that my pulse had been perfectly even, at around 63 beats per minute, prior to inclusion of the little blue blighters in my morning fruit salad, so I stopped having them and, hey presto, no more palpitations.

Now I’m feeling calm, I’ve decided to run an Amazon giveaway for the next seven days now ended, where one person gets to win has won a paperback copy of Desiccation. Entrants just have to choose a number and hope that it’s the preset winning number that I’ve chosen. Unfortunately, at the moment giveaways are only happening on amazon.com, which means they’re only open to US citizens, so sorry to disappoint my fellow citizens in the UK.

Here’s wishing you all a wonderful week, and watch out for those rampaging blueberries 😉

The Nightmare of Writing Your Own Amazon Book Description

Question: What does an author do when all the advice about writing a book description for Amazon is contradictory?

Answer: She slowly goes mad.

Writer's Insanity#1

I have a big problem. My family is sick of me footling around with the words that might make or break a book sale, quite apart from the possibility that Amazon will get cheesed off with me revising my book description every other day.

Here is some of the advice out there, all of it from proclaimed experts.

  • If you don’t write a description of at least 500 words the search engine algorithms won’t pick it up
  • Use all 4000 characters allocated to you by Amazon
  • Keep it under 150 words
  • You have a few seconds to grab a buyer’s attention, so do it in two sentences
  • Put all of your keywords in the Amazon description for SEO optimisation
  • Putting your keywords in the description serves no purpose and irritates Amazon
  • Add snippets of reviews at the foot of your description
  • Amazon does not allow snippets of reviews in the description

I could give many more examples, but will stop there.

Now I’m going to ask my family of bloggers to imagine they’ve never heard of me and they’re looking to buy a book on Amazon.Desiccation ebook_image

Then I would like them to tell me which of the book descriptions below (if any) would grab them enough to commit to buying a copy of my novel. If you don’t like science fiction and fantasy, you’ll need to imagine that you love this combination of genres, just for the purpose of this exercise.

The numbered examples are in the order they were created, beginning with the one based on the blurb on the back of my book (which I no longer thinks passes muster).

Beneath the last example is a poll for you to complete. Any further feedback much appreciated.

Example 1

Autumn Term 1967, Samantha, the new head girl, intends to reign supreme and exploit every loophole in the system to her advantage. This includes running an illicit nocturnal business in the gymnasium and conducting midnight seances in the library, but she hasn’t bargained on rough London mod, Joe, entering the equation.

Scholarship girl Janet senses a disruption to the natural order, impossible to explain away with science.  Soon, the teachers and pupils start to exhibit multiple personality changes and develop a hive mentality, with Janet the despised outsider.

And now a hippie pixie who claims he’s an expert in repairing dimensions wants Janet’s help to mend what Samantha has broken before it’s too late…

Example 2

St Trinian’s meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Autumn Term 1967, mayhem breaks out at an élite British boarding school on the south coast of England. Samantha, the new head girl, intends to reign supreme and exploit every loophole in the system to her advantage. This includes running an illicit nocturnal business in the gymnasium and conducting midnight seances in the library, but she hasn’t bargained on London mod, Joe, entering the equation. Leader of a gang on probation for petty crimes, Joe has suffered a lifetime of bombardment by malign spirits. Now, thanks to the head girl’s flirtation with the occult, he has become the conduit for something that pales these spirits into insignificance.

Haunted by the mysterious death of the school caretaker the previous term, scholarship girl Janet senses a disruption to the natural order, impossible to explain away with science. When teachers and students start to exhibit multiple personality changes and develop a hive mentality, Janet becomes the despised outsider. Can she trust, as her protector, a hippie pixie who claims he’s an expert in repairing dimensions? And will she muster the courage to help him reverse a catastrophe that could destroy humankind?

Huddled in a corner, watching, loathing, their world lost to them. A human had dragged them here, away from their own kind. Alone, abandoned, drifting in a world in between.

Example 3

When mayhem erupts at a British boarding school, scholarship pupil Janet discovers the narrow dividing line between magic and science. It’s 1967 and the new head girl Samantha intends to play the system for all its worth, but this backfires [on her]* big time after she invites some delinquent mods to a seance and their gang leader causes an interdimensional rift. With bodysnatching aliens on the rampage, the pupils and teachers develop a hive mentality determined to ensnare Janet into its collective consciousness. Can she entrust herself to the protection of a hippie pixie who claims he’s an expert in repairing dimensions, and will she muster the courage to help him reverse a catastrophe that could destroy humankind?

[* I’m not sure if the words “on her” are necessary]

Example 4

Huddled in a corner, watching, loathing, their world lost to them. A human had dragged them here, away from their own kind. Alone, abandoned, drifting in a world in between.

When mayhem erupts at a British boarding school, scholarship pupil Janet discovers the narrow dividing line between magic and science. It’s 1967 and the new head girl, Samantha, intends to play the system for all its worth, but this backfires big time after she invites some delinquent mods to a seance and their gang leader causes an interdimensional rift.

With bodysnatching aliens on the rampage, the pupils and teachers develop a hive mentality determined to ensnare Janet into its collective consciousness. Can she entrust herself to the protection of a hippie pixie who claims he’s an expert in repairing dimensions, and will she muster the courage to help him reverse a catastrophe that could destroy humankind?

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my post and complete this poll 🙂