Month: June 2020

  • Writing a Novel – Epilogue

    Writing a Novel – Epilogue

    Kindle and Paperback Mockup

    This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

    Buy it here on digital or paperback.


    If anyone’s actually read this far, well done! This series of articles was written with a few outcomes in mind; the obvious one being that it might actually help someone else in pursuit of writing and publishing their own novel. I also wanted to use this series to perhaps gain some more exposure for myself, but – and I could have put this in the previous Marketing article – that hasn’t been the case. Of course, this blog will be here for a long while yet and I’m planning on posting it to Medium, so who knows where it will end up. Finally, it has been an enlightening retrospective, with many things I’d forgotten about that I need to remember if I’m going to have any success with writing and releasing a more marketable book in the future.

    It has also been very cathartic, to write it all down and share it. I have considered doing the same for other projects I’ve made in the past, plays and films, but as I said in the last post… writing these articles takes a lot of time and I should probably spend that time doing what I enjoy more… writing stories.

    Where My Book is Up To

    It is exactly one year to the day since A Single Source of Truth was published on Amazon. I didn’t even plan this blog series to end on that date… just a coincidence!

    A Breakdown of the Numbers

    To date, I have sold 137 copies of the book through Amazon, 110 of them being eBooks and 27 of them paperbacks. In royalties, I have made £233.49‬.

    I’ve spent £318.72 on Facebook advertising, which up to now has been split between advertising the 99p deal I started back in January, and the book giveaway for lead generation.

    I’ve spent £90.63 on Amazon advertising, of which I made 23 sales resulting in £33.39 in royalties.

    I spent $50 on the Reedsy Discovery review.

    I have given away 217 free eBooks, only a handful of them coming organically through my website (and I personally know most of those people in some respect). The other 213 came through lead generation Facebook ads.

    My Mailing List

    Since boosting my mailing list with lead generation campaigns, I’ve managed to ‘recruit’ about 250 people. I probably get around 50-80 a month during a week-long Facebook campaign, where I offer my novel for free in return for their email address. If I keep up this strategy, I should have at least 1000 people on my mailing list by the time I actually finish my second novel.

    However, the Mailing List isn’t bulletproof. I would prefer to have gathered more organic “fans”, people who’d read my book, liked it and thought ‘I’ll sign up because I’d be interested in his next book!’… but I don’t think that has happened even once. Most people on the list are Facebook users who randomly saw an advert for a free book, submitted their email and downloaded it. I don’t know whether they read the novel or not. They also don’t know anything about me unless they looked at my website, which I doubt. So, what would their response be to an email from me in a couple of years’ time advertising my next book? That’s probably not the best strategy. From what I’ve heard, it’s better to cultivate a following by sending out a newsletter at least once a month, let those on the mailing list know who you are, what you’re up to etc. A bolt out of the blue, advertising a book, will whiff of salesmanship.

    Then again, I’m still new to mailing lists and I like to try things out myself to see how they work (and more often than not, fail). I’m actually going to send my first newsletter this week, to introduce myself, ask if they read my book, point them to this blog if they’re interested, and mention the script for my play Millionaires Anonymous, that I’m releasing this week.

    Book Giveaway

    My novel was free on my website for about 6 months. Guess how many people downloaded it organically (ie, not seeing it in an Ad)? Four. So, while the incentive is great for lead generation campaigns on Facebook, it’s not too good having it sat idly on a website that has very minimal traffic. So, I’m taking it off the free market. This also means that I can enrol it in Amazon’s KDP Select, allowing subscribers of Kindle Unlimited to read the book for free. I’ll have a better chance of exposure through Amazon’s platform than my own.

    What’s Next?

    The main thing – and it should always be the main thing – is to continue writing. I’m about 2/3s of the way through my new novel, but it probably won’t be in a state I’m happy with until at least next year. As for marketing my current work, I’m just going to keep on trying to grow and build my following, probably through more advertising campaigns as they seem to be the most impactful.

    I’ve just updated my website too, to make it more accessible, flashier etc, so I want to continue with making this site my primary platform. At the moment I have one thing listed in each of the main areas I’m interested in: novels, films, and plays. No doubt I’ll constantly flit between these mediums because it all depends on the story I’m writing, but if you fancy yourself a novelist, and only want to write novels, then I envy you. If you dig one 100ft well, you’ll get more water than the person who digs two 50ft wells. I’m usually digging 20ft wells all over the shop, but I can’t help it, I like the variety.

    Thanks again for reading these articles.

    And if you’d like to know what I’m up to in future, please sign up to my mailing list. I won’t spam (much).

    Stewart

    If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

  • Writing a Novel – Marketing

    Writing a Novel – Marketing

    Kindle and Paperback Mockup

    This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

    Buy it here on digital or paperback.


    It wasn’t until I released my book that I realised generating sales was more difficult than selling table salt to a slug. There is often a conflicting thought process that goes on in the mind of someone ‘artistic’ (for want of a better word). Creating the work, improving your craft, expressing yourself and getting feedback from your audience is what it’s all about. But getting your work into the hands, ears, eyes and minds of an audience? That’s quite a task. ‘Marketing’ just sounds dirty to the artist who’s full of integrity and imagination. Why should we have to “con” people into buying our stuff? Surely it’s good enough that word of mouth will spread and it’ll take off organically… just like how the art itself was created.

    Unfortunately, that’s not the case for most of us. And even now, nearly a year after first publishing my novel, I’m realising more and more the importance of marketing. The depressing thing is, you could write a really shitty book, but if you had the right marketing strategy… you could get it into the hands of way more people than an excellent book with no marketing strategy. It’s not a reflection of the work, it’s just how the world works. The attention of other people is a highly valued commodity these days and there are big businesses out there spending insane amounts of money to compete with each other for that attention. So, how can we, as lowly writers in a team of one, tap into that ecosystem?

    Amazon Itself

    It’s simply not possible to sell a million copies (or even a hundred copies) of a book by uploading it to Amazon and not telling a soul. That’s what marketing is for, and yet I some people do just that. Click ‘publish’ and sit back.

    Amazon’s book database is so vast, with millions upon millions of books, that unless you’ve written something for an extremely niche market (ie. carbon dating antique rocking horses) then it will never be found. The search engine is the first place people go, and the majority of prospective buyers are most likely going to search for keywords like ‘crime thriller’, or ‘romance’… or they’ll know an author they like and search specifically for their stuff.

    Readers might peruse the ‘Customers who viewed this item also viewed‘ section at the bottom of their chosen bestseller page – books that are advertised on those pages – but you can bet that those books will best sellers too, or at least quite highly ranked. Because Amazon’s job is to make money, and I think it’s a fair assessment to say they will make more money linking Lee Child’s books with Ian Rankin’s than they would linking mine.

    The Top 100

    There are many complex algorithms going on behind the scenes of Amazon’s sales system, and no one outside of the organisation is allowed even a peek at their secret sauce (otherwise it would be manipulated for personal gain). The general consensus, however, is that to make an impact on general sales rankings, it’s best to have your book sales spike (ie. lots of sales all at once), but to have that spike last a few days at least. A one-day spike will have some effect, but it’s better for it to last over 3-5 days. This will improve the book’s ranking, which means your book can inch closer and closer towards the ‘surface’ of Amazon’s incomprehensibly big database.

    To put it into perspective, imagine Amazon was a supermarket. The best sellers in all categories would appear on the eye-level shelves in all aisles, with the top-10 of all books being displayed proudly either by the tills or at the end of the aisles where they have promotions. Books that come into the top 100s of various genres, they’d be scattered about the shelves, but people may need to bend a knee or stand on tiptoes to get to them. Every other book is behind closed doors in the supermarket’s vast stock warehouse, and the only way to get to them is to ask a member of staff to go and retrieve that specific book for you… so you better know it by name.

    To give yourself a chance of being bought by a passing shopper, you should aim to get into the top 100 of your genre (ie, Crime, Romance etc). This isn’t direct marketing, it’s passive, but getting your book into the top 100 of a category isn’t very difficult if you have a chunk of money for paid advertising, or you know 100-1000 people who are willing to buy your book within a 3 day period. Once it’s in the top 100 though, it may not stay for very long, because there are hundreds of thousands of other books vying for position, every single second. But while the book is in position, it will get seen by complete strangers. There are, however, a number of psychological steps the consumer must go through in order to click that all-important buy button:

    1. They’ll see your book in the top 100 list
    2. They’ll judge its cover and quality of its rating
    3. They’ll click into your book page
    4. They’ll read your reviews (if you have any)
    5. They’ll read your blurb
    6. They’ll judge the price
    7. They might click buy

    It’s like the Drake equation, which determines how many of the 100 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy are likely to harbour life, with the numbers dramatically decreasing at each stage. That’s why relying on a book just being ‘in existence’ in Amazon’s book store won’t do a thing.

    Reviews

    Social proofing is important. If a book has no ratings, no stars, and no reviews, people are not only less likely to buy it but are unlikely to. The problem with this is it’s chicken and egg type stuff. How can you get reviews and ratings if no one is buying the book? I’ll let you in on a little secret called ‘advance readers’. If you put your book up for pre-order, it will give you time to send proof copies to people in return for reviews. And while reviews can’t be submitted to Amazon until publication day, you can at least have those people lined up, ready to click submit the millisecond the book launches. Amazon sometimes highlights newly released books too, so you’d be best to have at least a few reviews (hopefully all good!) on day one.

    Amazon Reviews

    If you know people who’ve read your book but haven’t left a review, it’s a good idea to mither them to leave one. And keep mithering, but not too much so they cut ties with you altogether. My book has been on Amazon for a year, and I’ve only managed to get 15 reviews so far. That’s hardly going to compete with Game of Thrones 12,000+ reviews, is it?

    External Reviews

    There are lots of book sites run by teams of people who just like to read books and write reviews for them. And they’re popular too. Consuming books isn’t like listening to a song, they take time and dedication to get through and so people really want to know if something will be worth their time (or at least play the odds). And so, they seek out in-depth reviews, not just the couple of sentences we all see on Amazon.

    I tried this. I contacted a number of sites, pitched my book, offering them free copies etc, but I got no response. I probably didn’t make enough of an effort, but I did go down a paid review route. Reedsy, the website I used for my development notes and copy-editing, have a subsite called Reedsy Discovery where you pay $50 and an avid reader on their list is assigned your novel, reads it and publishes a review. While the review was very glowing (here), I didn’t make a single sale from it. This was probably because I didn’t ask people to ‘upvote’ my book on their website, and so it didn’t get mentioned in their weekly newsletter. I’m not a fan of incentivising exposure through competition. I’ve had it before with film festivals where the people with the most votes win, meaning whoever had the biggest online social presence was crowned. That’s not the best reflection of quality, just popularity.

    I’m also slightly sceptical about the review. It’s a tricky thing when it comes to marketing… of course, you want rave reviews so social proofing is strengthened and you’ll sell more copies, but there’s also part of me that only wants to sell books if people genuinely like them. I don’t want to con anyone. For a start, I personally wouldn’t give my book 5 stars, and in my experience, reviews that come from a closed-system (like a film festival or the theatre circuit), are often much more positive and forgiving than from a disassociated member of the public. I feel like those are the real reviews, and anything else is just massaging the ego.

    Paid Advertising

    Amazon Ads

    This wasn’t available in the UK when the book launched, but it is now. It’s a typical ‘pay-per-click’ type system where you have to bid on certain keywords that you want to advertise under. So, for example, if someone searches ‘conspiracy theory’ in Amazon’s search engine, your book may appear as one of the sponsored books near the top of the list, providing you list that keyword as one of your targets, and your bid is high enough to match the general price of it. It can get expensive, especially using more popular keywords or phrases like ‘crime thriller’. One time, I set a daily limit of £10, thinking it might stretch a couple of days. Unfortunately, I had ‘crime thriller’ in my keywords list. 20 minutes later my £10 was gone with hardly any sales. That’s not to say putting all your cash in one basket for a daily spike isn’t a good strategy. I tend to go for more niche keywords these days, and just keep ads ticking over all the time. I may get one or two clicks a week without any sales, but at least it’s out there.

    Facebook Ads

    This is probably my best source of sales. The good thing about Facebook Ads is you can be very specific about who you’re targeting with the book. I can pick people in the UK, aged 25-45. who like reading fiction, like crime thrillers, and have a kindle. The ads system is very sophisticated and you can do a whole lot of campaign testing. I probably sold my most books when I took it down to 99p in January this year and set up a weeklong campaign on Facebook. Now I do a similar campaign once a month, but I focus more on lead generation.

    Lead Generation

    This is a similar style of marketing on Facebook to click-throughs. However, instead of users clicking the ad and ending up at Amazon, they have to fill in some sort of information, typically their email address, in return for some sort of an incentive. In my case, the incentive was my book… for free!

    That may seem a bit of a drastic move, having spent years of my life and thousands of pounds getting it onto Amazon, only to give it away, but there’s a method in my madness. I was never going to turn a profit with this book. The best thing for me to do now is to use it to gain more followers for my second book. And so, in giving it away for free in return for emails, I am attempting to use what a lot of indie authors think of as the holy grail of self-marketing… the mailing list.

    Mailing Lists

    Mailing Lists are deemed to be one of the best ways to market something to another person. It’s direct, one-to-one marketing, and many of the biggest mailing lists in the world contain millions of people. So, if you were the owner of that list, and you’d written a new book, all you have to do is write a succinct email about the new book and a link of where to buy it, click send, and millions of people suddenly have it in their inbox. Like with a lot of this stuff, there are strategies… how to write newsletters (make it personable, not too long), how often to send them out (no more frequent than weekly). There are lots of nice mailing lists tools out there too, such as MailChimp or MailerLite (the one I’m using).

    Build a Platform

    If you want to be an indie author who sells their own work, you should have a platform from where to shout about it. You should also be trying to build a brand.

    Have a Website

    Authors should be easy to find online. Social media sites are one way, but the ideal way is to have one overriding portal to you and your work, where everything gets funnelled through. It’s much easier to maintain one place than several. That’s why I set up stewartmcdonald.net. I want people who like my work to be able to come to the site whenever they want and see what I’m up to and whether I have any new work out. I’ve just recently had this site redesigned to make it a bit more appealing and nicer to show off some of my “products”.

    Facebook Page

    Facebook is another good place to grow a fan base by creating a dedicated page. It felt borderline self-indulgent creating a page called Stewart McDonald, but needs must. I invited everyone on my friends list to like the page (some of who thought it was really self-indulgent, receiving messages saying “Stewart McDonald has invited you to like Stewart McDonald”)… and about 20% of them liked the page. Like the website, I wanted to be able to funnel information through certain channels. I didn’t want my personal Facebook account to be my platform, I wanted my work and personal life to remain separate.

    You need to have a page on Facebook to use Facebook Ads, and what I noticed is that if you have a running ad, and somebody who’s not affiliated to you at all likes it, you can then invite that person to like your page. And each connection, be it a page like on Facebook or an email address, is a prospective future sale.

    Start a Blog

    Yes, part of the motivation to write this blog was to gain some exposure. I also felt like I had a lot to say on this topic, so why not immortalise it. Someone will hopefully find it useful one day. It takes a long time for me to write these articles though, so my recommendation would be to perhaps create shorter posts. Once a week is a decent frequency, but if you have lots to say and want to say it, then, by all means, post more. The more posting you do, the more you can shout about it on social media, the more people will find out who you are and want to stay in touch with you.

    The Neverending Strategy

    Marketing shouldn’t ever really stop. The second it does, you’re forgotten about in a heartbeat. Only those with cast iron brands like Stephen King can get away without a marketing strategy, but they still have them. King could write a new book and just tweet a link to it to his 6 million followers. Many of those will be fans anyway, and he’d simply skyrocket to the bestseller chart.

    Marketing should be focused and strategic. It’ll probably cost money. And unless you’re excellent at social media or marketing yourself, it’s probably best to hire someone or some company to help you. I’m very bad at delegation and seeking out help, but I’m trying to improve. Marketing shouldn’t be dry, it can be fun and treated like coming up with ideas for stories because there are lots of unique tools and techniques still out there waiting to be discovered. It’s very creative.

    Here’s a few other things you could try, some of which appeared in my Launch Day article – and while it’s best to make a big impact on launch, many of the marketing techniques can be introduced at any part of the book’s life:

    • Make a book trailer
    • Send copies to book stores/book clubs
    • Improve your social networking
    • Hire someone to do it for you
    • Get the audio version recorded (lots of people listen to audio books these days).
    • Use book promo sites that, for a price, will do just that (example https://www.indiesunlimited.com/book-promo-sites)
    • Start a podcast. This, like blogging, is a venture with frequent output, keeping your audience connected to you while you’re busy writing your next book.
    • NetGalley – This site sends copies of books to influencers.

    The list goes on and on, really. The important factor with marketing is to try things and see what works. But don’t try them as I tried did… all wishy-washy. Give them a decent go, and you’ll get a much more accurate idea of whether things will work or not.

    Stay tuned next week for the very last article in this series.

    If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

  • Writing a Novel – Launch Day

    Writing a Novel – Launch Day

    Kindle and Paperback Mockup

    This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

    Buy it here on digital or paperback.


    In the publishing world, launch day is like a celebration. The event goes off with a big bang and the book starts flying off the shelves. For me, as a self-published author with barely any effort put into my launch day, it went off with a whimper, and the few that sold were primarily purchased by friends and family. As with all this self-publishing (and traditional publishing come to think of it)… there is a strategy for launching a book.

    What I Did

    These were the following steps I took to launch my book.

    Got the Word Out (For Free)

    Getting the word out can mean different things, depending on the techniques and tools used. I basically told friends and family about the book and sent them the direct link to the page so they could purchase it out of obligation. I also did something I rarely ever did, and that’s posted on Facebook and Twitter, providing a link to the book. Not to the many millions and millions of people who don’t follow me, but to those couple of hundred who do.

    Got the Word Out (Paid)

    When I realised that only a handful of books were going to sell on the day of launch, and the days following, I decided to bite the bullet and pay for some advertising. The launch day is probably the best opportunity for making the biggest splash with a book, so doing everything you can is a must, and because I’d left it too late, I was desperate. I quickly signed up to Facebook Advertising and threw together some ads in Photoshop.

    On average, it was costing me a couple of quid in advertising costs to sell one book. I was out of pocket, but you’ve gotta spend money to make money, right? As I was a bit new to this area, I didn’t go crazy… I might have spent maybe 50-100 pounds in total, which as I’d come to realise, isn’t a lot in the marketing world.

    Kindle Unlimited

    If you dedicate your book exclusively to Amazon for a minimum of 3 months, you can enrol it in Kindle Unlimited. This means anyone who subscribes to the service can download your book for free. You get royalties based on the number of pages read, and Amazon will actually advertise your book at some point on their platform, free of charge. Over the duration, I saw about 3 different reading spikes… once a month, presumably when my book was being highlighted on some ‘New Releases’ page or something. I only left the book on Kindle Unlimited for the standard 3 months, because after that I wanted to branch out and look at listing it on Barnes and Noble’s website, and Google Play, Apple books etc (I still haven’t ventured this far, actually).

    The Launch Day Result

    While there was a small surge of people buying the book initially, especially paperbacks from those who knew me in real life (maybe in case I hit it big time and it’d be worth a few bob), sales soon petered out once the Facebook ads stopped. No one was seeing my book on the Amazon store because it was buried under 3 million others. After a month, I’d sold about 35 books. Word of mouth was hardly going to catch on at an exponential rate, even if those 35 people thought it was the best thing they’d ever read (they didn’t). Suffice to say, launching my book was a damp squib, but I suppose I never really considered the marketing aspect of it when it came to publishing. I never really thought anything was going to happen. I just wanted the book off my plate.

    What I Could (and Should) Have Done

    The Pre-Order

    Hype is your best friend leading up to a publication, and this needs to be generated far in advance of the actual day. Even though Amazon asks you to pick a publish date (and you must stick to that date when it’s within arms reach), you can actually put your book up for pre-order many weeks, if not months before the book is actually launched. This is probably the way to do it. The way I didn’t.

    With a book up for preorder, it lets you build up momentum. Not only does it give you time, but those preorders in advance will go towards your sales figures – all-important statistics that may boost your book up from the slums into the upper echelon where it might actually be seen by someone idly perusing Amazon’s book store. Though be careful, I’ve read lately that for the best push you should get all your pre-orders in within the final week before publication.

    Mailing Lists

    I’ll go into a bit more detail on the importance of mailing lists in the next post, but if someone buys your book and likes it, how can you contact them? Having a link at the front and back of the book to say something like: ‘If you like this book and are interested in the next one, why not sign up for [AUTHOR’S NAME]’s mailing list at www.[AUTHORWEBSITE].co.uk?’

    I did that, but at first, the link was at the end of the book, meaning people had to get through 108,000 words before they found it. Makes sense to have it at the end of the book, but when I wasn’t selling many to begin with, I should have also had it in the front. Another thing is, I should have had more of an incentive to sign up because in my experience the promise of a future book at some speculative point in time isn’t enough. A free something is good. Maybe a short story, or an early chapter of the new book etc.

    Trailer

    We all know YouTube is massive, and a well-made trailer has the possibility to go viral. A book trailer doesn’t have to cost millions of pounds and star Tom Hardy. Usually, they’re quite minimal, but evoke a sense of the book’s style and genre with visuals and music. Excerpts from the book can be included too, either as text or a voice-over (depending on the genre). It just needs to intrigue the viewer enough, and because attention spans are in short supply these days, it’s best to get it done within a minute or two.

    Launch Party

    People do this. They hire a place, a bar, function room… wherever, and throw a get-together to celebrate the launch of the book. Friends and family are welcome, of course, but it’s a good place to invite other authors, agents, publishers… basically anyone with any connection the industry. Get them all into one place, with a stack of your books on a table, some drinks and canapes, and generally build a buzz about the book, but more importantly, about you as a writer. People there may tweet. Articles on the local news site might be posted. Word of mouth may spread. It’s just another way to get your book out into the world while networking and having some fun thrown into the mix.

    Local Bookstores/Clubs

    Why not contact a local bookstore and say, ‘Hey, I’ve written a book that’s out soon… can I put a few out in your shop that week?’ If this coincided with the launch party, even better. There are book clubs too, lots of them. Buying a number of ‘Author Copies’ from Amazon (paperbacks at trade price) and sending them to book clubs might just lead to something. If anything, having a group of complete strangers read your book is an opportunity for unbiased feedback.

    Social Networking

    Successful authors who work the social network scene are, as you’d expect, very sociable on social networks. Posting on Facebook and Twitter after probably a year of radio silence just to promote a book (as I did) isn’t seen as good practice. Writers should get to know one another. You’re advised to join in discussions. Befriend other writers. Share their self-promotional plugs, and in turn, they will share yours. It’s the old saying: ‘A rising tide lifts all ships’. You have to be consistent though. It takes a long while to build rapport and friendships, and it’s not something that you can swoop in and achieve within a couple of weeks before launch day. If you want social media to be a part of your strategy, it’s a long game. Just be careful not to dedicate all of your writing to 140 character bursts.

    Hiring Someone to Launch The Book

    If you have a bit of money to throw at it, you could hire a freelance marketer to do all the stuff above and more. It all depends on how much you’re willing to spend, but as I said, making the biggest bang for the launch is probably the most important milestone of any book, so I reckon, getting it this far… it’s go big or go home.

    Stay tuned next week when I’ll be stepping out into the colourful and dazzling lights of marketing.

    If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

  • Writing a Novel – The Finishing Touches

    Writing a Novel – The Finishing Touches

    Kindle and Paperback Mockup

    This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

    Buy it here on digital or paperback.


    Naively, I thought that once I had my cover designed, and my manuscript all polished to perfection… that’d be everything I needed to get the book uploaded to Amazon and start selling like hotcakes. Unfortunately, as I’d soon find out, there were many other things I had to do. Finicky things that I probably should have paid someone more skilled to do. Instead, as always, I gave it a crack myself.

    Kindle Direct Publishing

    When you sign up for Kindle Direct Publishing at https://kdp.amazon.com you’re given a virtual bookshelf where you create digital versions of your books. Creating a new item in their system is a doddle, and it’s all wizard-driven with forms that ask for pertinent information. The one thing I didn’t realise was that an eBook and a paperback book were treated as two separate entities in their system. You have to create them both individually, and then once they’re published, as long as they have the same title and cover, Amazon’s clever system will automatically link them together.

    The two formats are, obviously, delivered to customers quite differently. The eBook is essentially a digital file that sits on Amazon’s servers. When people buy it, it’s sent automatically to the person’s chosen device(s), such as a Kindle or a phone. The paperback is a physical copy of the book that is printed on demand (ie. when someone buys a copy). Paperbacks are more expensive for the consumer due to manufacturing and shipping costs, but it’s no skin off an author’s nose to sell a paperback version as well as an eBook. It’ll widen their reach for sure, although, due to the costs being so high, they’re unlikely to make more “profit” from the eBook than the paperback.

    The eBook

    Creating an eBook version of a manuscript file (formatted in Microsoft Word) is a lot easier than sorting out a paperback, which I’ll go onto down below. Firstly, while there are quite a few software packages and services available for creating eBooks, Amazon has its own application for doing this. It’s called Kindle Create and was pretty basic when I first used it, but it has since added a lot of new features. Simply put, the app will import the manuscript as a Word document and try to automatically format it. This process probably won’t work perfectly straight out of the gate, but it provides a clean interface to organise your contents page, your chapter headers and any ‘frontmatter’, such as copyright, foreword, introduction etc. Once the book is set up exactly as you want, you click the ‘Publish’ button within the app and it creates a local ‘.kpf’ file.

    This isn’t a readable file, nor is it strictly the eBook file that people load onto their kindles. The .kpf file needs to be uploaded to your bookshelf and it will then be processed by Amazon’s servers. Only the file that is distributed to people’s kindles, phones etc is the readable version of the file (usually an .epub or .mobi). How to get a local copy of your own eBook is quite frustrating, because you can’t just export an epub or mobi file from Kindle Create, nor can you download it for free from your own bookshelf. There are ways, however, such as using a free application called Calibre.

    The Paperback

    The paperback was a whole different beast to the eBook. Firstly, the manuscript that’s uploaded to Amazon requires typesetting – how the text appears in the physical book. The margin measurements have to be very specific and depend on how many pages there are in the book. Amazon has fairly comprehensive instructions for doing this, but I won’t lie, I found it a total pain in the arse.

    Setting the margins creates the ‘gutter’, or the centre of the book where the pages fold. This is done by alternating the margin on every other page, so that the pages on the left have shifted left, and the ones on the right have shifted right, creating a wide space for the gutter in the middle, the size of which is determined by the thickness of the novel. There was also bleed areas and safe zones to contend with because if the text goes too close to the edge of the page, it’s likely to be cut off by the printer.

    The typeset manuscript. Notice the wider margins in the middle of the pages compared to the outer margins?

    It was all very mathematical in the end and unlike the eBook, it was difficult to actually see whether the printed book was going to look okay to the consumer without ordering one. Amazon have their own previewer, that lets you view the book as a virtual copy, but I found it wasn’t as accurate as the physical copy. Amazon actually lets you purchase your own ‘Proof Copies’ for a discounted price, but they still set me back around £7.50 a pop. The main issue I found with this was the book could take up to 10 days to arrive, which meant I’d have to wait to find out if my typesetting worked or if I was completely off the mark. It was a very slow process of trial and error. I think I ended up buying around 6 proof copies in the end.

    The Font of Knowledge

    This was something else I hadn’t thought about. Font! Who thinks about that? Well, it’s important. At first, I had purchased a few proof copies that used Arial, because I figured that was a pretty standard, universal font. Something seemed off about it though in its physical form. It’s only when I looked at other fiction books that I realised they all went with a serif font…. curly, ye olde English style fonts… instead of clean and clear style fonts. It seemed that san-serif (like this font) was reserved for non-fiction, instructional style books. That meant another couple of proof copies were ordered.

    More Cover Design

    The thing I struggled with most, though, was the cover. All the typesetting, messing about with margins and changing the font, changed the length of the book, which made it thicker or thinner, which had an effect on the spine of the novel… and that was part of the cover. That wasn’t the trickiest part. No matter what I tried, the front cover seemed to shift to the right when it was printed out.

    Now, a lot of other people would have ignored that, but I’m a pretty neurotic person… I couldn’t rest until I’d sorted it out. In the end, I actually created two versions of the cover, one for the eBook, and one for the paperback that was shifted ever so slightly to the left, so that when it printed out it was centred. I posted a couple of queries about this to Amazon’s KDP message boards, but their response was that I’d probably done something wrong in the measurements. Maybe I had, who knows. Suffice to say it was a pain to fix, but it’s done now. Here is the final cover design, taking into account the spine.

    The full cover with spine and back blurb, as uploaded to Amazon.

    Once everything was done, the book was ready to publish. The only thing I needed to do was set the price.

    Pricing a Book

    Pricing books is another game that takes time and experience to play. Luckily (or unluckily), I didn’t have any reader expectations or preexisting audience, so I went straight down the middle. EBooks from new authors generally sell for around £2.99. Books that sell between approximately £1.99 and 9.99 allow the author to keep 70% of royalties. Go outside of those prices and the royalty percentage drops to 35%. Of course, the plan starting out isn’t to make money, because unless you get a retweet from JK Rowling or Stephen King, you’re not going to make any. The plan is to get people knowing about you as an author, and hopefully, they’ll buy and like your book, spread the word, and be interested in buying your next book. So, just getting people to buy it regardless of price is important.

    As for the paperback, this was tricky due to the high manufacturing costs. Being a print-on-demand service, the minimum price I could set the paperback was £8.10, which seemed like a strange number, so I set it to £9.99. I didn’t think the paperback would sell as many as the eBook, but it’s always good to have it as alternative option (many people still love to read a physical book).

    Royalties are skewed with paperbacks because of the printing costs. Selling A Single Source of Truth for £9.99 would only mean £1 profit, and yet selling an eBook for £2.99 meant I got about £1.68 profit. Strange, hey? As I said though, it’s not about money at this stage, it’s about exposure, and the focus was primarily on the eBook.

    Scheduling the Book

    Through Amazon’s KDP dashboard, I ensured both my final Kindle and Paperback manuscripts were uploaded along with the covers. I tagged the book with two relevant categories (the limit is two), which determines where the book comes under when people browse Amazon (ie. crime thriller etc), and I put in 7 keywords that are used for when people search (you only get 7). The book was to be ready to buy on the 29th June 2019, but because of delays in Amazon’s review stage, the paperback wasn’t available until a day or two after launch day. So, if you want both to be ready on the same day, make sure everything is sorted and uploaded at least a few days prior!

    Tune in next week when I’ll be discussing the do’s and don’ts of launching a book. Mistakes were made, certainly.

    If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.

  • Writing a Novel – Cover Design

    Writing a Novel – Cover Design

    Kindle and Paperback Mockup

    This post is part of a series of articles about writing my novel, A Single Source of Truth.

    Buy it here on digital or paperback.


    Don’t judge a book by it’s cover!

    And yet, everyone does it. We can’t help it, it’s in our nature, which is why it’s super important to have a stand-out, memorable and professional-looking book cover. If those elements are missing, it doesn’t matter how good the actual book is… very few are actually going to read it. It’s a sad truth, but luckily, it’s very simple to get yourself a professionally designed book cover these days thanks to freelancer websites such as Fiverr, PeoplePerHour, 99Designs etc. These websites work just like Reedsy. You log on, create a job, add your brief (what you’re looking for), and then people contact you with a bid to get the job.

    The ideal book cover might just be one that you, the author, really likes. But there’s also a clever technique to finding an alluring book cover.

    A/B Split Testing

    The concept behind A/B split testing is to get at least two different designs for the book cover, prior to publication. Using an online advertising platform such as Google or Facebook, you create ad campaigns, one containing the first cover, and the second one the other (in fact, many big platforms have an A/B split testing feature already built-in). Each ad should be identical in terms of information, it’s just the cover that is different.

    This can be done even before your book is written, let alone published because it’s not important to have a genuine landing page ready for the clicking user, you simply send them to some random page, like the BBC website if you wanted. The statistics on which ad was clicked, how many times and when are all captured in the advertising platform. The goal with A/B split testing is to pit two different covers against one another. If you had 4 covers designed, you can vary it and build some sort of a league between them.

    Taking into account the ‘reach’ of the ad (the number of people it was shown to), the one with the most clicks at the end of X days/weeks is the winner.

    My Own Design

    I’d like to say that I used a freelancer to design my book cover and that I used A/B testing to find out the best performer. But I didn’t. See, I’m a bit of an amateur Photoshopper and have designed a number of flyers, posters and covers over the years. I actually really like designing posters, and so when it came to getting a cover for my own book, I could have gone the professional route – delegating the work to someone more skilled for a fair price – or I could have done tackled the problem myself. I did the latter.

    I’m probably going to butcher this next section where I want to discuss the concepts of image design, because honestly, despite being quite structured in my methodical approach to writing, when it comes to images I normally just jump in headfirst without any foundation work. In fact, I typically don’t even know what I want or how it will look at first, I just try stuff out, throwing things at a digital wall and seeing what sticks. Almost all of it will be crap.

    I’d first started work on a book cover for back in 2012 when it was still titled ‘DATABASE’, just around the time I was finishing up the first draft. Little did I know it’d be another 7 years before it’d hit the “shelves”. Personally, I think it’s helpful to get an idea for a cover in your head early on. It allows you to really visualise the novel, sat on a bookcase, or as an image listed on Amazon. It makes the thing more concrete.

    Here, click through the slideshow below to get a peek at some very early concepts of the book cover.

    Horrible, right? Okay, I didn’t spend much time on these… I just wanted to have a play with some concepts I had in my head, the main one being the idea of a database. If anyone has ever worked with spreadsheets, you’ll know what I mean when I say database, because a spreadsheet is essentially one. Lots and lots of cells of data. One of the main themes behind the novel is the fact that more information about our lives and the world are being digitised, held in databases; and the data can be manipulated. I wanted to evoke that idea in the novel, so at first, I had a go at creating a kind of ‘grid’ look and feel to it. I also had an idea about pixels, the building blocks of any digital image (including this article you’re reading). Pixels are much like the cells of a database, or ‘bits’… 1s and 0s. It’s either there, or it’s not. It’s either true, or it’s false.

    Once this idea of database cells entered my head, many years before I’d even finished the book, I couldn’t shift it. It’s probably the reason why I decided to design the cover myself with no input from anyone else, nor any marketing strategy. It’s the reason many things in this book happened the way it did… stubborn ideas!

    Elements to the Classic Cover

    The cover of a novel normally consists of three parts. The name of the author, the title of the book, and a short and punchy tag line or phrase that entices the reader. They can also have a quote from a review on the front, usually if a big name like Lee Child has been given a preview copy of the book. Unfortunately, Lee was too late submitting his glowing review of mine for me to include it *cough*.

    The author name and book title are generally the easy parts, as long as you’re not deliberating over a pen-name or the book title. I had toyed with the idea of a pen-name, but I figured that I didn’t want to lead a double life, I just want to be entirely myself, and so all my work will come under the same person. The book title I’d had for a few years (hover over this for why I chose it).. The tag line required a bit more creativity.

    Tag Lines

    Taglines are important to grab the reader. There’s also not a lot of space for them, so they have to be concise. Here is a list of all the ones I came up with:

    • Data is King. If You Believe it.
    • Data is King. Data Can be Altered.
    • Data is Power. 
    • Your Data Can be Altered
    • Data Can be Altered. 
    • The Data Does Not Lie
    • Don’t Believe Everything You See/Hear/Read
    • Don’t Believe Everything
    • Do Not Trust The Data
    • Don’t Believe Anything
    • The Digital Domain Can Be Altered
    • Your Data or Your Life
    • Who Can Tell What’s Real or Not?
    • The Data Never (Sometimes) Lies
    • Data Does Not Lie – The Winner!
    • The Data Doesn’t Lie

    Finding the Final Cover

    As you can see from the test images above, I went through a few designs, but I’d already had my mind set on a kind of cell/pixel style look, washed in a blue hue, with a single red element… an errant object, something that became even more relevant when the book title changed to A Single Source of Truth. The red element would signify the ‘single source of truth’. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2019 when I started to realise the book was going to be actually self-published, and so I would definitely need a cover.

    I couldn’t quite tell you when I thought of the idea of a building, but once it got into my head it wouldn’t leave. A tall building, with lots of windows. The windows would be the cells of the database, and the building would be faceless… mysterious, the reader will have no idea what goes on behind its closed doors. There were a few metaphors in the image that I quite liked, and I didn’t even compare it to the Studio (an organisation that appears in the novel) until much later. It was more the concept of an anonymous building that I liked. And I needed a good photo of a building.

    It had only been a few days prior that a friend of mine, Chris Chapman, had been taking photos of buildings in and around Leeds where he lived and posted them on Facebook. I contacted him and told him about the book and he was up for taking some shots. Within a few days, he came back with a raft of images. Suffice to say, one of them stood out.

    It took a couple of weeks to get the first template of the cover created, then probably another month of tweaking to get it to where I wanted it. It still went down to the wire, and probably a week prior to the book being published in June of 2019, I was still messing with it, widening the font, or tweaking the tag line. It was just like writing… try something, look at it, sleep on it and come back with fresh eyes.

    One thing that helped was to mock-up what it would look like on Amazon alongside all other books on there.

    Early mock-up of how A Single Source of Truth would look on Amazon

    Comparing my book side by side with others allowed me to spot design issues. For example, in the image above, it wasn’t until I saw it on Amazon that I realised the title font didn’t have enough weight to it. There were a few more corrections like that, until I was eventually happy with the final design.

    The final design

    For my next book, I think I’m going to hire someone to design the cover. Not only will it save me a lot of time, but it’s always a great learning experience to share creative ideas with another person.

    Stay tuned next week for when I’ll go through the finishing touches to get the book ready for Amazon.

    If you have any comments or questions, please post them in the box below.