Final Update (For Awhile)

Alright, I know I have exactly zero followers reading this blog but in the off chance that someone stumbles across this little project tracker sometime in the near future I wanted to make a final statement for a bit.

I've a large number of projects coming my way the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 and my ability to update this blog will likely vanish for several months at the very least.

Our overall thoughts on the Book

We feel pretty good about what we accomplished with Paranormal America. We've created a book. It's something we can hold in our hands and other people can hold in theirs and is available in a couple of formats. My wife was beyond excited to have a book with her name on the cover and it was worth it for her sake alone. It spawned in me the desire to create a publishing company which I've already begun limited advertising for reaching out to new authors. The company is J&M Publishing, LLC.

While we know it is not perfect, we did put in a lot of personal time and energy and we are proud of what we accomplished in such a short time. We'll make updates in the future if we need to do so to fix any mistakes that slipped through.

My wife is excited just to have a book. I'm excited about the process and the ability to create a paperback but I was truly hoping to have greater sales for the sake of the 50 people who contributed. I wanted to give them something back for their time. We'll have to sell about 10 times what we've currently sold to give each of them even enough money to buy a dinner, haha! But if the sales continue at the rate they've been going, we may be able to send everyone who contributed to the book a check for about $20 around Oct. of 2014.

How's the Book Doing?

Since the book was released, we've sold an average of one book a day. We stopped actively promoting the book after the first two or three weeks, so we feel as though it is a reasonable accomplishment in that regard. We've sold enough Paperback books to cover our initial costs for proofs and such and with the regular Kindle sales and "borrows" we've made back the money we spent on the limited advertising we did to begin with early on. We're definitely making a profit at this point, though after we split the money out to the authors we'll not be getting rich any time soon from Paranormal America. :)

The highest "paid" rank we achieved on Amazon was #8 in the "Supernatural" category while we ran the countdown promotion. I was excited to get in the top 10 and I know for certain our next endeavor will reach #1. The key is to hit it fast and hard - lots of interest all at once at a steady drip.

Our Twitter account never really went anywhere. We had maybe 12 followers and I think most of them were random people that had no interest in the book. We didn't have much luck getting many of the authors to follow us and spread the word in that social media circle.

However, our Facebook page did reasonably well - with a total of 480 followers to-date. While it's not the number we hoped to reach - based on the initial concept of each author getting a minimum of 10 friends/family to like the page - it is a decent number of people to be interested in something we created out of thin air.

Final Thought

The main thing we take away from this project is that making money from Kindle books is possible. We can see how you could make a reasonable amount of money as a side income stream. If you are a writer of any level and hope to make money writing, you should definitely check into self-publishing. We're also happy to help you out or publish for you if you don't want to get into the technical side of things - just check out the link to the publishing company above and mention this blog for a big discount. :)

We have many more books we plan to write, beginning with a Children's Book series. Each time I see another copy of Paranormal America has sold, I get even more motivated to create more and more books.

...And the way things are going, we're getting a daily dose of motivation!!

Kindle Countdown Promotion

I'm currently running a Kindle Countdown Promotion and so far the results are looking pretty good. We've sold approximately 16 copies in the first iteration of the sale (at $0.99) and there is still a day left in this phase.

There was zero advertising on the first day because of a travel conflict and we didn't do any advanced promotion. We made one post about 30 hours into the deal on the Facebook page which was only seen by about 70 people. My inkling is that Amazon does something with these promotional items to bring them to the forefront - especially now. I can only imagine how well the sales would be in a stronger category.

A few quick things I'm seeing from this promotion:

1. The way Amazon rates books must be based a lot on how quickly the sales come - as we've hit #10 in the Paid "Supernatural" category with just a few sales in this short frame of time (we actually peaked at #9 for a bit but we're holding between 10-12). The number seems to drop/fluctuate quickly and we've generally been well out of the top 100 in this category prior to this promotion. I'm sure now that the strategies I've read about how to build your book sales based on getting to #1 in a category is fairly accurate; and I think, as these books have mentioned, the key is to simply promote well in advance to get as may sales as you can at once. I bet for most categories simply selling 50-100 copies would easily secure you the #1 spot. How easily you can hold #1 remains to be seen...
2. We've likely overpriced this book quite a bit and I'm fairly certain that once this promotion ends I'll drop the price permanently to $2.99. We may even have to consider a drop all the way to $0.99 but the sales have been so much lower than we had hoped that it would be nice to keep that 70% royalty rate in place.
3. It appears that Amazon will also drop the price of a Paperback that is linked to the same Kindle book by a few dollars. However, though we've seen the price fluctuate, it appears the royalties are locked at the rate they approximate when setting the price. 

More information as the promotion progresses. There are still 4 days remaining.

Edit #1: Update

The promotional countdown was pretty successful! We did limited - and I mean limited - advertising for this deal which was a day late because of travel conflicts. We only mentioned the deal once on our Facebook page but  the total sales from the promotion were 45 units.

We will definitely use this to our advantage more in the future - probably much more beneficial than the previous "FREE" book deal unless you're building an audience for a book series and just want to get a lot of copies spreading around. 

Attempting to gain more interest on a Facebook page

We've had a steady increase in random page "likes" for Paranormal America and we've actually had a fairly steady drip of a purchase or two each day this month with little-to-no promotion on our part. In addition, we've now gained two unsolicited 5-Star reviews for the book and have sold two copies of the paperback.

However, we'd still very much like to get this project a bit more solid and figure out how to sell enough copies to make it worth all the authors' time who sent in a story. To that end, we're trying to come up with some more things we can do to create a more steady flow of traffic and interest to the page and hopefully, the website/Amazon to buy the book.

Today, as a first step I've created 127 (!) images with little facts from across the country about the most haunted locations in America. The idea is that people will find these interesting and dig through them and more importantly, share. I've subtly asked them if they've been to any of these locations and to give their thoughts/findings if so.

My only concern with this idea is that it has nothing to do with the book and might be confusing - but there is only so much we can do with the book information before it's just tedious spamming. I'm trying to build up interesting information to go along side the book.

Here are some examples:

Will update with any noticeable changes in reaction to this first set of images.

Update:

So the response to these images? Practically zero. Had a couple of comments (from authors of the book) and a few likes from those who generally like other things we've done (friends of my wife).

In retrospect, these may not have been entirely clear so I guess next time I'll just need to come up with a better way to present information if it is purely for random knowledge.

There was not a single share, no increased likes to the page, and no discussion generated. This is clearly marked as a FAIL in my book of learning. :)