I signed up for a Stuff Your Kindle event and when I made my book free on Amazon for the event for some reason it didn't stay that way for the dates of the event. The host of the event contacted me to let me know and I was able to immediately fix the problem. But I still missed the 1st and most important day of the event. Because of that, sales didn't reach their potential. However, despite the issues, I still had over 700 orders for Haunted Hunting Camp, my short story. As a result of this, I have almost 3,000 pages read so far, this is giving me my largest royalty check to date. Needless to say, I'm very interested in participating in future Stuff Your Kindle events.
These events are held by a host. You must be invited to participate I'm not sure how I lucked my way into an invitation. But I will protect it like its gold. There will be another event in the winter. Events are not announced until just a couple of weeks before they occur. During the next event I will be making more than one of my books available for free during the event in hopes that it will lead to additional sales of additional books. If you’re ever invited, accept, follow every rule and direction, and enjoy!
I also made a big decision I’ve had a long-held anarchist belief against kindle unlimited. I've decided to put my books on kindle unlimited now. I believe this will increase my sales and it doesn't make sense for someone without many sales to not take advantage of every opportunity for sales. I had a long discussion about this with my daughter and my husband who's basically a marketing genius. It makes the most sense in my circumstances to use Kindle Unlimited to my advantage.
I've also had a very interesting situation come up. I’ve discussed before how it seems like my social media follows have a tendency to surge when I'm not on social media. So, I'm trying to pay attention to that and come up with any explanation that explains those surges in social media. But I do know that my followers have been having large surges. Which are mostly unexplained. I determined that those are because social media platforms are promoting my page or my site.
I believe this happens when you reach a certain number of followers. They start to put you into the algorithm to advertise you to other people who have similar interests as you. Then those people based on the ad and social media platform receive ads about you. My tiktok followers went from barely 250 to over 1,000 in a very short amount of time. It took me forever to get to 100. Then months and months to get to 250. Suddenly I was getting tiktok followers at a rate of 50 a day or more, to a point where it was difficult to keep up with them. Now I have over 1,000 which is great.
I also have over 1,000 Instagram followers and 500 followers on threads. And I have about 1500 on facebook. I don't really have any advice to offer about how to gain followers because I don't really know how I got mine. I will say I have worked hard to engage with others and offer helpful advice. I like and interact on other people's posts, and I do this consistently. So, you should do it too if you would like to gain followers. Because that seems to be what worked for me. I do not spend much time advertising any of my books. I don't know if this is good or bad. But it definitely seems to have gained followers for me. Which I hope will eventually translate into more book sales.
The ARCs for Force Majeure are delivered and have started getting a few reviews. So far, they’ve been very positive. I’m excited about this because I worked very hard on this book for a very long time. I'm really happy to see that people are enjoying it. I hope the positive reviews continue. But you know there's bound to be someone who hates it, so I imagine I'll get some bad ones too. Which is fine as long as they don't break my #1 rule, which is posting spoilers. I don't mind 1-star reviews, but I hate spoilers.
I do have to say I'm quite surprised by all the great reviews for Haunted Hunting Camp. There are definitely people who don’t like it. There are definitely some 2-star reviews, but there's an awful lot of good reviews too. It surprises me because it’s my 1st book and I was very much a beginning writer. it's not as good as it would be if I wrote it now. But the story would still be the same, it would just be improved in the telling.
I was finally able to order my author copies of Force Majeure. I had such a difficult time, I had to speak with KDP customer service multiple times and Amazon customer service. Finally going over all of the requirements, my daughter found that it said the book has to be live even though I know that not be the case. Because I have ordered author copies many times for a book that is not live. I decided to try to see if that would help for short period of time if the paperback was actually live. I planned to immediately put it back to pre-order status after I was able to make my order for my author copies, a huge relief to finally be able to do that. I also calculated my costs for Force Majeure in paperback form, which I will fill in those numbers for you here.
$5.88 print cost
$1.12 shipping to author
$5.53 to ship to customer in USA
$1.00 packing materials
Total Author COST to deliver Force Majeure to a reader= $13.53
List price $17.99
Author net if purchased directly from author $4.46
Author royalty if purchased through Amazon $2.78
I’m finding growing my ARC readers list for Force Majeure is happening organically for my second ARC campaign versus the first ARC campaign for Force of Corruption, which I went into blindly. I offered my original and very first ARC to a lot of strangers. This time around I’ve offered it to a lot of readers who actually posted reviews from my first ARC campaign. This has given me a much better quality of reviewer because I know they already have posted reviews for me in the past. I think it’s important to try to screen reviewers as best you can because it’s a lot of effort and if you send out physical ARCs it’s a lot of expense in addition to the time and it’s not worth it if you get no return on your investment. Which is considerable as illustrated above. I’m really pleased with the readers I have for Force Majeure, and I expect to do much better in the number of reviews I am able to get. So far, I’ve heard from a few readers, and they loved it. Which makes me really happy. I’m looking forward to hearing from all the readers, and hearing what they think.
Also, a family member has read my upcoming book, Origin of Violet and its someone who’s opinion I trust very much, and they were amazed by the improvements in my writing in such a short time. They couldn’t put the book down and said it was fantastic. I’m really happy about this feedback so I’m looking forward to hearing all the results of my upcoming ARC campaign for Origin of Violet and Violent.
I apologize for the weirdness of this blog. Because I’m currently one handed, and with barely one good finger on my working hand, most of this blog was written using talk to text. It doesn’t work very well, and I had to fight hard to put together my thoughts in print and in legible English. I hope to have the use of my surgically repaired hand for my next blog.
Watch for an announcement for the KU release of all my titles. If you want to sign up for an ARC, the forms are on the homepage of my website.
As always, thank you for reading!
https://www.enchantingauthor.com