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| Get My Little Pet Dragon |
Back in October, I had a major breakthrough.
Although I'd been writing for years, I'd never finished anything. I'm a bit of
a prankster at heart, so once I get a wild idea in my head, I go for it. The
result was a comedy that was a bit on the naughty side. For the first time
ever, I completed something from start to finish, and put it up for sale on
Amazon and Barnes & Noble. When I got my first sale, I was hooked. This is
what I wanted to do from now on.
Although the project was fun, I wanted to move
on to more “serious” work. Around this time, I came across an
inspirational thread from a guy who had just made $1,000 in one day by selling
e-books. He called himself throwaway_writer, and was being criticized for
being a fake. (I’ve met him, BTW, and he’s the real deal).
The more I read, the more his story checked
out. Was it indeed possible to make a living by writing? And better yet, a very
good living? I had to find out.
Immediately I got to work. If he could do it,
why couldn't I? I had been studying prolific authors for many years, from Nora
Roberts to Georges Simenon to Ryoki Inoue. If I simply implemented a trickle of
their discipline and organization, I could find success, too. So I took my best
short story at the time, added a couple thousand words, paired it with my most
popular inspirational blog posts, and put it up for sale in 5 days.
Although Literary
Dynamite wasn't a big success, I'm extremely proud of it. It also
reinforced that I could start and finish projects in a timely fashion. Suddenly
I found myself embodying the principles that I’d so deeply admired: working
hard, abandoning inertia, trusting your instincts, and most of all, giving everything.
When my rewrite of The Sweetest Stalk stalled,
I decided to try my hand at a children's book, which I'd recently procured the artwork
for. It launched on Thanksgiving, and to my surprise, did better than anything
else I'd written at the time. Although it seemed like there were just as many
pictures as words, I absolutely loved putting it together.
So I wrote another. And another. And another.
Suddenly I'd written four in all, and
remembered back to something throwaway_writer had said: once you have multiple
works, put them into compilations! I did just that, creating Four
Fantastic Bedtime Stories for Children 3-6, which includes My
Little Pet Dragon, My
Crazy Pet Frog, A
Little Book About You and Pigtastic.
Even though I was seeing a trickle of steady
sales (a couple a day), something was missing. Such as…(cough, cough)…my
promotion, or lack thereof. It was at this time that I discovered KDP Select. For
your exclusivity, Amazon gives you 5 promotional days and pays you each time
your work is borrowed. I really didn't like the idea of giving my work away for
free, but when my friend S.J.
Wright wrote about the benefits of free promotion, I decided to give it a
try.
I started by submitting exactly one title to KDP Select. It was
my experimental children’s book A
Little Book About You. Since I was experimenting anyways, why the heck not?
What did I have to lose?
I scheduled my free promotion to hit on
Christmas Eve, and grumbled when Barnes & Noble dragged their feet in
publishing the Nook version of Pigtastic.
When the promotion finally took place, I was stunned. In the first day, I moved
over 200 copies in the U.S. alone and a few additional units in the
international stores. I was sitting in the 1200s in terms of rankings, the
highest I'd ever seen, paid or otherwise. The next day I had no idea what to
expect, and when I gave away an additional 800 copies, my jaw about hit the
floor. A thousand people had downloaded my work. Unbelievable!
When all was said and done, I’d given away
3,200+ copies in just 5 days. "Well, that was great publicity," I
told myself, and didn't expect anything else to come of it.
Boy was I wrong! Immediately afterwards, sales
rolled in. Now we're not talking about mega sales here, but when you go from
selling one to two copies a day to ten to twenty, it really gets your
attention.
To recap, over the past three months I'd gone
from making $10 to $20 to $200. And KDP Select was directly responsible for at
least half of the sales, the other half, friends and family. "There's
really something to this free promotion nutwittery!" I mumbled to myself.
When Barnes & Noble finally got around to
publishing Pigtastic
a week later, missing the Christmas holiday entirely, I decided to get even and
throw all of my titles into Select.
Again, what did I have to lose?
The next few promotions had limited success.
The Spanish versions of A
Little Book About You and My
Little Pet Dragon did well, but failed to muster any more than 300 copies
each. As for the English language version of Pigtastic,
I gave away a little over 2,000 copies, the disappointing result mistakenly
attributed to the end of the holiday rush. (Pigtastic
turned out to be a steady seller, not a bestseller.)
As the month wore on, and my royalties crossed
$200 in the first couple weeks, I decided to do something unprecedented: make
my premiere title My
Little Pet Dragon free, starting on my birthday and running it for the full
five days.
Now I've heard people swear up and down about
the wisdom of saving free promotional days, and it does make sense if you know
exactly what you've got. The problem is, you don't. The only way to hit a home run
is to put everything into it. Sure, I strike out a lot, but I get 5 free
promotional days every 90 days, so it's worth the risk. (Keep in mind that it’s
a lot easier to say this when you have a full time job to fall back on.)
In all honestly, I had no idea what to expect
from the free promotion of My
Little Pet Dragon. If I could beat the 3,200 copies that I did in December,
I'd be happy. So you can imagine my surprise when I gave away 6,000 on the first
day. I was in the Top 100 before midnight, all with a cute little children’s book
that I’d put together to teach my son how to say the word "dragon."
But the good times didn't stop there. I gave
away another 10,000 the following day, and pushed my way all the way to the
cusp of the Top 10 late Friday. I was #2 in Children's Ebooks, but couldn't get
past two titles, which I cannot remember for the life of me.
Now it's funny how exciting these things are
when you don't understand what’s going on. On Saturday, the titles that had
been giving me problems magically disappeared, springing me into the #1 slot in
children's ebooks, and helping me crack the Top 10.
How did this happen?
In the eyes of many, I screwed up. You never
run a free promotion on Saturday and Sunday. That's where you make all your
money. Right?
By that logic, many people drop off on Saturday
to take advantage of sales. But that also means there's weaker competition on the
weekend, making it easier to climb the charts. Also, more people are available
to download your free book.
It's like missing the forest to see the trees.
There will be many more weekends to cash in. What you need is visibility, and
of course, to be recommended on behalf of Amazon. The more free giveaways you
have, the more likely you will be recommended.
So by the end of Saturday, I cracked the Top 5.
And by early Sunday, I was sitting at #2. That's right, #2 out of EVERYTHING in
the Free Kindle Store! How had I done this, and more importantly, what was this
quirky title called Hamster Habitat that was entrenched before me? It turned
out Hamster Habitat was an interactive game, but lumped in with the other ebooks.
Try as I might, I could not claim the title of the #1 free e-book, even though
the other was clearly a game.
But I'd proved my point. I made it straight to
the top by taking risks. And by giving away 56,000 copies of my free children's
book.
When My
Little Pet Dragon came off free promotion, it not only cracked the Top 100
paid (for a few days), but it also began pushing my entire catalog. I'd just
gotten A
Pocketful of Dinosaurs and Ninja
Robot Repairmen out the door, so my timing was perfect. Suddenly everything
was moving. The tail was long, sparking sales through the rest of January and clear
through February.
January wound up netting me around $5,500. When
I topped $6,000 in February, I realized that it was time to change occupations.
I could no longer keep my mind on my full time job anyways, so it was not a
matter of if, but when.
But a funny thing happened on my way to success.
After quitting my job at the end of March, I found myself completely exhausted
and run down. What I needed was a break. Over the next few months, I enjoyed my
mini-vacation, continuing to run my free promotions, but doing very little
writing. My
Crazy Pet Frog wound up doing big numbers in April, giving away 43,000+
copies, and spurring sales that lasted through May.
Of course, we all know what happened in May,
right? At least self-published authors do. Amazon changed their algorithms,
making it more difficult to get higher rankings, which ultimately leads to
sales. Free promotions also seem to be adversely affected. Suddenly my free
giveaways were getting to the edge of the Top 100 and dying. One after another,
it was very depressing. Borrows also became much more difficult to come by.
June turned out to be disastrous. I went from
making $3,600 in May to $1,600 in June, a drop of over 50%. Certainly it didn't
help that I wasn't producing content like I did before, nor taking my new
profession more seriously. Heck, I couldn't even bother to write these blog
posts to chart my journey, which I'd promise to do from day one.
With any new endeavor, there's an adjustment
period, but there also comes a point where you see yourself for what you are.
I'd gotten lazy, allowing myself to get distracted by whatever came up. When I
realized that I might be in trouble, I did what most people do. Like a coward,
I hit the job market, electing to work during the day and write in the evening (even
though I wasn't doing much writing in the first place) while I waited out the
summer downturn. Again, I wasn't addressing the real problem at hand.
Now I really have to hand it to The Huffington
Post/AOL, where I interviewed in late June. Our interview was supposed to run a
couple hours, but turned into a 5-hour marathon. I got pounded from every conceivable
angle, technical question after technical question. They grilled me on my
experience, like any good employer would. With my recent self-publishing
experience still fresh in my head, I missed plenty of questions. I wasn't
adequately prepared. I felt stupid. Worthless. As if I'd made up everything on
my resume. Never had I hit a lower point in my life, and when I left their
offices, I knew that I wouldn't be stepping through those doors again.
There's a name for this. It's called adversity.
Mentally I'd checked out long ago. This was my new profession, what I'd fought
40 years for. Was I really willing to jump back into a miserable and
unfulfilling day job? No, it turned out.
The most important thing in handling adversity
is how you react. All the sudden everything was crystal clear: I would need to
work my way through this. Success has nothing to do with summer downturns or
algorithms. The readers are there; I simply wasn't doing the work. I bought
into my own hype, and took far too much time off. The only way to turn things
around is by producing. It was time for some new blood.
In the past 3 weeks, I've produced 14 titles.
Two of them are on free promotion today. I told myself that I wouldn't write this
post until I’d turned things around and published at least a dozen new works.
Now that My
Little Pet Dragon has cracked the Top 50 again, I can now breath a sigh of
relief (for the moment, anyways), and say that I'm well on my way towards
building the life that I'd always dreamed of.
Currently I have 52 published works up, and
I've got a ton of new products on the way. My goal is to arrive at Christmas
with over 100 products. I'm wary of taking too much time off, and have a
personal goal of publishing a new work every 1-3 days. A few times I've
published a new work within 24 hours, but only if it was ready. Remember, garbage
begets garbage.
So what does all of that have to do with today?
Today feels like the first time that I’m making good on my promise. I will get
over the hump, regardless to what Amazon does to their system, but not by
giving up on my writing. As long as I maintain my discipline, and keep putting
out quality work, everything will be all right.
Today is a new day, the first of a new journey.
Now that I've straightened myself out, it's time to obtain what I'm really
after: to be one of the most successful indie authors today.
Most likely it will take more than 100 days.
Who knows? Follow me as I document my experiences and shoot for the stars.
Scott Gordon
Children's Book Author
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