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Posted on December 1, 2009 by loulocke

Welcome to my Front Parlor, a place where I hope to engage you in some stimulating conversations about my continued journey as an indie author and the joys of writing historical fiction. My Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery and the companion short stories, Dandy Detects and The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, have been selling well, as has the sequel to Maids of Misfortune, Uneasy Spirits, where my protagonists, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, are in for a more ghostly experience. Thanks to all of you for your support.

Do come in, look around, comment, and before you go, please leave a visiting card (url, twitter, fb address, etc) so I can return the courtesy and visit you next time.

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The Victorian San Francisco Palace Hotel: Gone but not Forgotten

Posted on May 24, 2012 by loulocke

The Palace Hotel

One of the difficulties an author faces in writing historical fiction is recapturing the feel of cities in a prior period. In the United States, city landscapes are constantly changing at the whim of urban renewal/development projects that tear down and rebuild buildings in succession, often making it difficult to imagine the city fifty years earlier much less a century before. My series of novels and short stories are set in late 19th century San Francisco, and there are particular problems for picturing this city in this period because the 1906 Earthquake and Fire wiped out a great deal of the physical history of the city, so that even the kind of civic buildings or historical landmarks that other cities have preserved are missing from that city in modern times. In addition, people who have visited San Francisco have a very strong image of the city as it is today.

While there are some buildings from the late 19th century still standing in San Francisco, (see the Haas-Lilienthal House and the famous row of Painted Ladies), they are generally the middle class homes that were being built in the Western Addition. The older center of the city, with its financial and theatre districts, commercial buildings, and grand hotels, was almost entirely demolished, with fire ravaging what the earthquake hadn’t already toppled.

The Palace Hotel, touted when it was constructed for its modern fire and earthquake protections, was no exception. This beautiful hotel, located on the corner Market and New Montgomery Streets and advertised as the largest hotel in the American West, if not the largest hotel in the world, was completely destroyed by the disaster of 1906.

Fortunately, the Palace, completed in 1875, was such an important landmark that there are numerous photographs in existence that document what it looked like before, during, and after the 1906 disaster. Additionally, the hotel was rebuilt on the same block with a similar footprint, and this building is still standing, permitting some sense of what the building would have looked like before 1906. So far I have used the Palace Hotel three times in my work, and I think that, like the Golden Gate Park, this historical place will pop up repeatedly in future work.

The first time I used the Palace Hotel came early on in Maids of Misfortune, my first Victorian mystery set in San Francisco in August of 1879. I had Annie Fuller, my primary female protagonist, walk to her home on O’Farrell Street from the offices Nate Dawson, a local lawyer. While there was a lot of information I needed to convey during this walk, this was a perfect time to weave in some history about the city. I was therefore delighted when I discovered that their route would take them by the Palace Hotel.

Across the street from them rose the mammoth Palace Hotel, and its rows of bay windows glowed golden in the afternoon sun. ‘Ralston’s Folly,’ Beatrice always called it. It was, in its way, magnificent, but people said it had bankrupted Ralston and driven him to suicide four years earlier. Because of this too painful reminder of her own husband’s death, she had so far avoided even entering the carved archway that led to its central court. Looking up at the building’s symmetrical facade, Annie found herself fervently hoping that she could prove that Matthew Voss had not died in a similar fashion, crushed by fortune’s fickleness. Nate caught up with her, and they continued walking side by side in silence.––Maids of Misfortune, Chapter 7

The Palace Hotel was indeed the vision of William Ralston, co-founder of the Bank of California, but he did not live to see its opening. The Bank of California, weakened by the 1873 depression, the dropping value of the Comstock Lode mining stocks, fraud, and Ralston’s over extended debt, collapsed after a run on the bank. In response, the Bank’s Board of Directors ousted Ralston, and the next day he died during his daily swim on the Bay. While the autopsy said his death was due to a stroke, rumors of suicide were very prevalent and would have been very well known to Annie in 1879.

While Annie Fuller, at least as of this writing, has never entered the Palace Hotel, both Nate Dawson and the two elderly dressmakers from Annie’s Boarding house, Miss Minnie and Miss Millie Moffet have.

In the second novel of the series, Uneasy Spirits, Nate Dawson has a meeting in one of its dining rooms, the Gentleman’s Grille, where ladies were not permitted. I was delighted to discover that the week in 1879 when I set this scene former President Grant was visiting the city and was staying at the Palace. The Gentleman’s Grille was one of several restaurants that catered to both the public and hotel guests. In fact, many of the Palace residents made the hotel their permanent homes, drawn there by amenities like the restaurants, elegant parlors, a billiard room and beautifully furnished rooms.

The rooms are expressly arranged for use, either singly or in suits of two or more. Their connections and approaches are such that an individual, family, or a party of any size, can have a suite of any number of rooms, combining the seclusion of the most elegant private residence, with the numberless luxuries of the most perfect hotel. Every outer room has its bay window, while every parlor and guest chamber has its own private toilet, ample clothes closet and fire grate.––“Historical Souvenir of San Francisco, 1887

“It was intended to be the height of luxury and to contain the newest technologies. It had five hydraulic elevators (reputedly the first in the West), electric call buttons in each room, plumbing and private toilets, shared baths every two rooms, closets, telegraph for staff on each floor, a pneumatic tube system throughout the hotel, air-conditioning in each room, and fireplaces and bay windows in each room. Encyclopedia of San Francisco

The dressmakers who I feature in my short story, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, have a client who lives in the Palace Hotel. This gave me a chance to describe what it would feel like for two impoverished elderly women to ride in one of these elevators, glance out into the Grand Court that was overlooked by seven stories of balconies, and look up at the ceiling with its dome of glass.

In short, as an author I get to spend a good deal of my creative life imagining what places were like in the past, and I hope that you might like to spend some time with Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson and the Misses Moffet in my novels and short stories and get to experience San Francisco in the late 19th century.

For the next two days, May 25-26, Uneasy Spirits will be free on Kindle. Try it out and get to spend some time in the gracious Palace Hotel.

Surfing the waves of indie publishing and trying not to care if I fall off

Posted on May 9, 2012 by loulocke

Until recently, the narrative I had constructed about my life was that I was a bit of an under-achiever, generally risk-adverse, and very comfortable in a supporting role in life’s events. I learned early on to work hard enough to fulfill my responsibilities (school, work, family) because then I could do what I longed to do most, which for me has primarily meant reading. I followed that pattern throughout my academic and professional career. My mother (a trained social worker) was successful in getting me to spend time away from my books by pushing me to develop friendships, join in on activities, and accept her ideas about social responsibility, counteracting my natural instincts as a shy loner. Thirty years of standing in front of a classroom as a college professor has helped as well, but I still tend to hide in corners at parties. I was a good teacher, but not a particularly innovative one. I have taken leadership positions––usually out of a sense of duty––and, while I have done well in these roles, I am always delighted to hand over the responsibilities to others when the time came.

The truth is that throughout my life I have been personally cautious (I don’t tend to take physical or emotional risks) and not very ambitious. I avoid competition in any form (in sports, academics, and even board games) and, despite the times I have assumed leadership roles, I continue to be more comfortable as part of group enterprises than as an individual who stands out from the crowd. I even saw my feminism (keeping my own name when I married in 1972, constructing, with my husband, one of the most equalitarian marriages I have ever witnessed, deciding to get a doctorate in the male dominated field of history, and working full-time and raising a child) as simply being part of the sixties generation.

But in the past two years I have unexpectedly found myself on the cutting edge of the ebook revolution and riding the fast-moving wave of self-publishing. While it has been an exhilarating ride; it has also pushed me past my comfort zone as I have had to learn how to take risks, promote myself, and come to terms with personal success. What I am going to examine today is why I have been so willing to move outside of that comfort zone when so many of my friends among the writing community are having such a hard time doing so.

Risk-Taking:

For many writers, one of the key attractions of being traditionally published is that, even if your books don’t end up selling, there is the emotional safety of knowing that industry “experts” (your agent and editor) have deemed your writing as worthy of being published. The alternative (known until very recently as vanity publishing) had the risky penalty of acute embarrassment of people assuming your book was crap because it couldn’t be traditionally published. This fear of embarrassment had indeed kept me tied to the idea of traditional publishing for the 20 years between the first draft and the publication of my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune.

But in 2009, even though self-publishing still suffered under all the old negative stereotypes and indie authors like Konrath had been self-publishing for less than a year, I decided to take a risk and use the new options that KDP, Smashwords, and CreateSpace offered to self-publish. No one I knew personally had done this, and I had no particular reason to think I would have success along the lines of a Konrath, who was really the only example of success I knew about.Nevertheless, I jumped into this new enterprise with uncharacteristic bravado.

I can look back now and see that one of the reasons I could take this step was because I was at a time in my life when I wasn’t emotionally or materially dependent on achieving success as an author. If the book had garnered only negative reviews, I might have had my feelings hurt, and I certainly would have been less likely to write the second book, but it wouldn’t have negated my sense of accomplishments as wife, mother, friend, and professor. I also didn’t have to worry about the effect of failure on anyone but myself. No agent, editor, publicist, or book rep could stand in my way, but neither could any other individual’s career or bottom line be hurt if my book wasn’t a success.

As a result, self-publishing has made me much more of a risk taker. I have ignored advice that one well-meaning agent had given me about using multiple points of view in Maids of Misfortune, and didn’t worry that both of my books are much longer than the normal word-count average for my sub-genre. I have freely experimented with prices, changed my books’ categories, made editorial changes after a book was published, and tried a variety of methods of promoting my books. In short I have innovated to a degree I never have done in my life before. I need no one’s permission to do so, and the only one hurt if my experiments fail is me. Very liberating!

Self-Promotion:

This brings me to another way that self-publishing has pushed me out of my comfort zone. I have become a blatant self-promoter. If you had asked me (or anyone who knew me) before I became an indie author if I would make a good sales person, the answer would be no. I have never been comfortable selling anything, even girl scout cookies or raffle tickets for good causes, much less been able to “sell myself” or anything of mine. While I wrote a blog post about why I distinguish between selling and marketing, the truth is that is I have found an unexpected satisfaction in learning how to promote my books. Once I started getting positive reviews and lovely email messages from readers this became easier. I had proof that my books and short stories were giving people pleasure, so it felt right to make sure that people who might like my work would hear about it.

I also have found that when I look at promotion from the point of view of a life-long student and social scientist, then marketing becomes even more comfortable. I feel proud of myself for being willing and able to master the skills necessary to set up a blog, create an email signature, organize RSS feeds, design a website, and format a book for upload to KDP. When I experiment with a new price point or a free promotion and then analyze the outcome, I am engaged in an intellectual exercise that, to a degree, counteracts even a negative sales result. In my mind, my book hasn’t failed and I haven’t failed; the experiment has failed and I have learned something from it.

Finally I have discovered that promotion has a lot to do with storytelling, a skill I have practiced all of my adult life. To successfully engage college students who were taking my required U.S. history courses, I had to figure out how to narrate the story of the past in a way that was interesting and relevant. When I write my historical blog posts, I am telling the story of Victorian San Francisco, making the information relevant to the people who have read my books and short stories. When I write blogs like this one, I am telling the story of my journey as a self-published author, and I am successful to the degree to which I entertain other authors and made my experience relevant to them.

In short, self-publishing not only helped me become a risk taker, but it also revealed that I possessed previously unknown skills at promotion. But when my promotions resulted in people discovering and buying my books, it also led to a level of financial success that has challenged me in unexpected ways.

Personal Success:

To be blunt, I never expected to make money selling Maids of Misfortune. I wanted to give the book a chance to find an audience and sell enough so that I didn’t feel like it was an expensive hobby. However, since I only invested in a cover, the cost of hosting a website, and some business cards, I wasn’t going to have to sell very many books to achieve that goal. One of the ways I felt I could give back to the growing tribe of indie authors whose advice and support I had depended on was to do what Konrath and other early advocates of self-publishing had done––provide concrete details on where I was selling my books, at what price, using which promotional methods, and reporting on how many sales I was making.

I am aware of how uncomfortable many authors feel about providing this sort of detail, particularly on sales. Many have been trained by traditional publishers to view information about advances, royalty rates, and sales as private and proprietary. And for many, particularly of my own generation, it just feels like bragging when you are doing well. I didn’t worry about this in the beginning because I didn’t sell many copies the first six months I was an indie author. Then, when Maids of Misfortune began to sell a enough so that I was able to retire from my part-time teaching job, my response was sheer joy at my good fortune and a desire to inspire other writers with the news that someone could make a decent amount of money as an indie author, even if you didn’t have prior name recognition, a traditional publishing career, or a huge social media base.

But then came KDP Select. First of all, in my new risk-taking, promoting persona, I didn’t hesitate to join KDP and give Maids of Misfortune a two-day promotion. Even though there wasn’t much data out and many indie authors were very wary of the exclusivity requirement, it just seemed like another grand experiment to me. As a result, my first two promotions came early enough so that my books benefited fully from both post Christmas sales bump and the very favorable Amazon algorithms that were first in place. As a result, my royalties for January, February, and March were higher than any monthly checks I have ever made in my career as a full-time professor. I was dumb-founded, and I shared the information (why I made the decision, what strategies I used, and what the results were) publically with a sense of how unexpected and wonderful it all was.

But then I began to watch other writers try KDP Select and have much less success. For the first time, reporting my sales numbers did feel like bragging, and therefore very uncomfortable. I am still trying to figure out how to handle this. I do believe that reporting my numbers, good and bad, can be useful to other writers, but I need to find a way to do it where it doesn’t feel like boasting.

In addition, I momentarily began to loose my nerve when it came to promotions. My third promotion done at the end of March produced an anemic post promotion sales bump. See this blog and this for speculations on the changes Amazon has made in the algorithms. I began to second-guess my decision to hold off doing another promotion until the end of May; I worried as my sales rankings slipped (both books are currently ranked in the 25-35 range of the historical mystery bestseller list-where they were before the first KDP Select promotion.) Maybe the wild ride was over?

Then my usual sense of perspective kicked in. Where had my sense of adventure gone? Even if the particular wave of success that KDP Select represented had now finished its course, that didn’t meant I couldn’t paddle on out and enjoy myself waiting for the next wave! And if I never sold another book, this wouldn’t be the end of the world.

So, I decided that if I was hitting the limits to the market for Maids of Misfortune as an ebook, why not try to tap into a different audience? I enrolled Maids of Misfortune in the ACX program (Audiobook Creation Exchange) program, and if all goes well I will be selling the audio version by the end of June. I also plan to try out the new Author Services program that Audible is piloting to help authors promote their books. In addition, I have planned another round of free promotions on Amazon, tweaking my strategy a bit to see if I can at least boost the visibility of Uneasy Spirits, the second book in my Victorian San Francisco series, since I know I haven’t saturated the market for that book yet.

In any event, you can count on me to take new risks, try out new forms of promotion, and continued to look out for the next wave of change in the publishing industry because I’m not yet ready to end this wonderful ride.

Boarding House Living in Victorian San Francisco

Posted on April 29, 2012 by loulocke

O’Farrell Street Boarding House

The main protagonist of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series is Annie Fuller, a fictional character who owns a boardinghouse on the south side of the 400 block of O’Farrell Street, between Jones and Taylor. In the small downstairs parlor of this house, she runs a business as a clairvoyant. With much amusement, when I went to check out what this block is like today, I discovered that there was a psychic who was working at 434 O’Farrell, just about where, in my author’s imagination, I had placed Annie’s home.

In the 1870s, O’Farrell street would have been a mixture of older homes and businesses, with a number of homes located above businesses on the first floor. The street itself was named for Jasper O’Farrell, the Irishman who surveyed and lay out the original street plan for the city, creating its unique pattern of streets going up and down the steep hills that exist north Market Street. While the 400 block of O’Farrell was on a slight decline going down towards the four blocks to Market Street, if Annie looked up Taylor from O’Farrell, she would have been looking up the steep incline towards California Street and Nob Hill. After 1873, with the opening of the first cable cars, Nob Hill had become the home of the most wealthy citizens of the city.

San Francisco was known for its boarding house living, with travelers commenting on the number of people who lived in fashionable boardinghouses and hotels. Boardinghouse keeping was also the primary way that married and widowed women contributed to their household income. While the size of boarding houses varied, from my own work on the 1880 U.S census, I found that the average number of boarders that women cared for in their own homes was 5.6. Since single rooms in San Francisco rented for two to eight dollars a month, this represented income of $262 to $537 a year, a very respectable income for that time period. Annie rents out six rooms (although there were 9 boarders in total), which made her a very typical boardinghouse keeper. (By the way, the link up above to boardinghouse keeping was something I wrote years ago for the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia.)

Annie Fuller’s boardinghouse was built in the late 1850s, by her Aunt Agatha and Uncle Timothy, from whom she inherited the home. It is two stories—actually four if you count the attic, which has three usable rooms, and the basement, with the kitchen, laundry and Kathleen’s room. The building is in the Greek Revival style, which was very briefly popular in San Francisco in the 1850s, before the Italianate and Second Empire styles began to dominate. Few of these style homes survived the Earthquake and Fire of 1906, which would have destroyed Annie’s House. Here is a link of a photograph from Jones Street, looking down O’Farrell towards the 400 block of O’Farrell.

Residential houses in the Greek Revival style included a front porch and a pitched roof over the attic, as well as a symmetrical floor plan. In Annie’s boardinghouse, the front door is in center of house, with small parlor and study on left (which has been turned into Madam Sibyl’s domain) a formal parlor and dining room on the right, and stairs going up to a landing then on up to second floor. The usual door to the back of the house (the servants realm) leads to a short passageway, including the back stairs, and a short flight of stairs down to the basement kitchen.

On the second floor on the right-hand side is a suite of two rooms, occupied by the Steins. On the left is Annie’s room, one of the largest in the house, and a bathroom. There are two rooms at the back of the house on that floor, one occupied by Miss Pinehurst, the other shared by the two clerks, Mr. Chapman and Mr.Harvey. In the attic the two spinster seamstresses, Minnie and Millie Moffet, share a room, Barbara Hewitt and her son Jamie share another, and Beatrice O’Rourke, Annie’s cook and housekeeper, has her own room.

As the writer of historical cozy mysteries, Annie Fuller’s boardinghouse offers both a chance to portray what life was like for people who lived in San Francisco in the 1870s and create the small community that characterizes cozy mysteries. The O’Farrell Street boardinghouse, like the small village of the traditional cozy, provides a ready-made group of characters that play the double role of aiding my protagonist as she unravels a mystery and also providing the possibility of new plots for additional works. For example, the teacher Barbara Hewitt and her son James and his dog are introduced in Maids of Misfortune, get to be the center of the plot in the short story Dandy Detects, and play a minor role in my second novel, Uneasy Spirits. They will be even more central to the plot in my third book, Bloody Lessons.

Oberlin, Ohio Rooming House

I suspect that another reason that I created the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse as a key setting in my mysteries had to do with my own history. In my early twenties my husband and I lived in and managed a rooming house (we didn’t provide meals-so it wasn’t a boardinghouse) in the small college town of Oberlin, Ohio. The house was built in the 1800s and was very similar in lay-out to Annie’s house (including bay windows), and I loved the experience of taking care of that house and living in the mini-community that was created by the 8 to 10 people who lived in its rooms.

As a result, every time I return to Annie’s boardinghouse I get to relive, just a little, that tiny bit of my own past. I am curious, have any of you every lived in a boardinghouse? If so, do you identify at all with the Victorian boarding house I have created?

Golden Gate Park in Victorian San Francisco

Posted on April 23, 2012 by loulocke

Dear Reader,

When I started this blog several years ago, I assumed that most of my posts would be about historical topics. After all, I had a doctorate in history, I was winding down a thirty-year career as a college history professor, and the book I was talking about was an historical mystery. What I didn’t expect is that the overwhelming majority of my posts would be on the subject of self-publishing.

While I expect to continue to post pieces about publishing, marketing, and other themes related to being an indie author, I also want to begin to get back to my historical roots.

Currently, the material that I have produced about the historical setting of my fiction has appeared on the page of my website called Victorian San Francisco. However, I intend on adding new material for this page simultaneously while posting it on my blog, in the hope that it will reach more people. I am also going to reuse some of the material I have already added to that page as blog posts, so do forgive me if you have either read this material or are only interested in my insights into publishing. I am looking for some balance on my blog, feeling that I had become a little one-sided in my conversation, never my intent, and something that the Victorians would have looked down on as very boorish.

*****

In my first Victorian San Francisco mystery, Maids of Misfortune, my main protagonists, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, take a ride through Golden Gate Park to get to the Cliff House Inn, located on the western side of the San Francisco Peninsula.

As my series progresses, this won’t be the last carriage ride through this park because the Golden Gate Park was one of the few places close to the center of San Francisco where people could rides horses, take carriage rides, picnic, or even sit on benches and hug, if this newspaper article from August 1881 is at all accurate!

Golden Gate Park was in its infancy in the late 1870s, and it had already been the object a great deal of controversy. First, the innovative plans of the New York Central Park designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, who envisioned a series of small urban parks for the city of hills, were rejected by city leaders in favor of a single western park between the Western Addition and the Pacific ocean. Then, it took a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to establish San Francisco’s right to the acres of sand dunes that would eventually become the park we know today.

Next, there was a division over how best to reclaim the land from the dunes. A proposal to flatten the land was eventually defeated by the plan designed by engineer William Hammond Hall, who chose maintain the natural contours of the land and lay down a series of roads that wound around the dunes, while planting trees and native grasses to anchor the shifting sands. Yet controversy struck again when Hall, the target of political retribution by a local politician, resigned from his Park position and money for further improvements was cut. Nevertheless, the Park continued to flourish, as the trees and other landscaping grew, and the roads and paths continued to attract crowds, particularly on sunny Sundays.

As I wrote this piece I remembered that one of the few times a reviewer has questioned my historical accuracy came over my portrayal of the Golden Gate Park. Writers of historical fiction have to develop a fairly thick skin in this area since readers will sometimes find fault based on their own perceptions of the past, rather than fact. In this case the reviewer wrote near the end of her review of Maids of Misfortune that I presented the Park “…as though it was completed, a feat not fully accomplished until thousands of trees had converted the area into the park as it is known today.”

Since all I had done in Maids of Misfortune was mention the heavy traffic of other carriages on the Park road that Nate and Annie were taking to get to the Cliff House Inn, I never understood where this reviewer got the idea that I thought the Park was completed, unless she believed that in 1879 Golden Gate Park was still a desolate place of sand and not much else. However, there is ample evidence that by that year the basic landscaping of the park had been well established. Over 155,000 trees had been planted, grass and shrubbery covered the hills, and the roads were crowded with vehicles.

Here are two excerpts from newspaper clippings from February 1878, (over a year prior to when Maids of Misfortune took place) from which I drew my descriptions of Annie and Nate’s drive.

“It was a lovely day, and I knew that if I could get a good vantage point I would be treated to an equine panorama, such as no one ever gets anywhere else, outside of Central Park, New York… Meantime the procession of equipages began to fill up. Team after team went by, and the glitter of harness and spirited champing of bits showed that the park drive was a favorite with those who had the means to take their airing as becomes the aristocracy of the Golden Gate.

“Presently we reached the look-out point and sat down. It was a pretty sight–the bright green grass, cut-down so it looked like tapestry–the budding trees, the singing birds, and finally the winding drive studded with its long line of handsome turnouts.” (San Francisco Memoirs, Malcolm E. Barker, 255-258)

While there wasn’t a lot that had been done with the Park besides landscaping and road building by 1879, the Conservatory of Flowers, completed in 1878, would probably have been a favorite destination for a young man who wanted a reason to take a young woman out for a drive.

Conservatory of Flowers today

Greenhouse conservatories were very popular among the wealthy in the late 19th century and the Golden Gate Park’s Conservatory of Flowers, which still exists, started its life as a kit bought by James Lick, a wealthy real estate speculator and philanthropist who died before it could be erected. San Francisco businessmen bought the kit (in huge wooden crates) from his estate and donated the kit to Golden Gate Park.

In the fall of 1879, when my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, takes place, the Conservatory of Flowers, with its glittering panes of glass and white painted wooden arches and domes, was one of the largest conservatories in the Unites States. I had no trouble imaging Nate hiring a carriage from a local livery stable (there was one located just a few blocks from Annie’s O’Farrell Street boarding house) and taking Annie to picnic on the grounds of this imposing edifice. I hope these pictures and additional detail make the scenes featuring the Golden Gate Park from both Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits just that much more real for those of you who read my books, while simultaneously convincing you of my historical accuracy!

Conservatory of Flowers when first built

Why being in the KDP Select is not a bad business decision — For Me.

Posted on April 14, 2012 by loulocke

My two historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, have come to the end of their first 3 months as part of the KDP Select program, and I have decided to re-enroll them. I know that a good number of authors are facing the question to re-enroll or not, (or to enroll at all) so I thought I would discuss why I have come to that decision, particularly in light of the persistent argument made by a number of self-publishing authors that KDP Select is a bad strategy for authors.

Just this week, as I was making the decision to re-enroll my books in the KDP Select Program, I read a post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, where she made the following argument.

“The key to developing an audience is to stop searching for one audience. The key to developing a lot of readers for your books—audiences plural—is to do what musicians do: play a lot of venues.

“Yet writers make all kinds of bad decisions in search of the biggest audience they can get. And writers think of that audience in singular terms. These writers give their books away for free, hoping to hit some bestseller list and gain readers. They only sell in one marketplace because it’s the biggest one in its genre or its category.”

While I disagree with her conclusions, Rusch does pretty accurately describe two of my reasons for enrolling my books in the KDP Select Program. I entered Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits into the KDP Select program and used the free promotion days in the hope that my books would, at the very least, regain their position at the top of the historical mystery category (which they had lost because of a change in that category that increased the number of books from below 100 books to nearly 2000 books). I was also willing to accept the KDP Select requirement that I sell my ebooks exclusively on Amazon because Amazon had proven to be the biggest market for my books.

What I disagree with is Rusch’s characterization of these actions as “bad decisions,” or that they only represent a short-term versus long-term business strategy. First of all, of course joining KDP Select is a short-term strategy–since the contract only lasts 3 months. In addition, the program is new–none of us knows if it will continue, if the tweaks Amazon is making to the formula will make the free promotions less and less effective, or if the pot of money for borrows will continue to be sufficient. And if Amazon asked for exclusive rights for a longer term than 3 months at a time, given these unknowns, I would probably not sign.

However, almost any action an author takes in the midst of the rapid changes within the publishing industry can be characterized as short-term. Putting your ebooks in the Barnes and Noble Nook store, given the effect of the Department of Justice decision on agency pricing, might turn out to be a short-term strategy if this corporation goes under. Concentrating on building relationships with bookstores to get them to carry your print on demand books (a strategy that Rusch’s husband Smith is currently advocating) may be a very short-term strategy if those bookstores go under in the next 2-3 years. Whether or not you can guarantee the long-term effectiveness of a strategy shouldn’t determine whether or not it is a good decision. What does matter to me is whether or not my decision to enroll my books in KDP Select for a short time will further my long-term goals.

Those goals are, coincidentally, ones that Rusch strongly supports. Over and over Rusch, her husband Dean Wesley Smith, and other successful self-published authors have advised that it is important that authors view themselves as engaged in a business (Rusch calls her Thursday posts “The Business Rusch.”) and that part of a long-term effective business strategy for authors is constantly increase their content. In Rusch’s words, “An audience can’t be goosed. The audience must be built. And then it must be nurtured. Audiences aren’t fickle. They’ll return when they see a notice of something new from one of their favorites. But if their favorites cease to produce, the audience will move onto something else.”

My decision to enroll in KDP Select was very much a business decision. The main reason for that decision was my need to make enough money so I would have the time to write my next book. I didn’t believe I would be able to do that if I continued a strategy of having my books in as many e-retail stores as possible, while forgoing the opportunities of the KDP Select promotions.

I first discovered the effectiveness of using free material for promotional purposes to gain an audience when my short story Dandy Detects was free on Kindle Nation Daily in July 2010. This 3-day promotion of the short story had the side effect of pushing my novel, Maids of Misfortune, to the top of the historical mystery category on Kindle. That, in turn, positioned the novel to sell well, particularly during the winter holidays when a whole slew of new Kindle owners were looking for books to read. This first jump in sales (you might say they were “goosed up” in Rusch’s terminology) permitted me to take the financially risky step to retire completely from teaching so I could write full-time. Consequently, in the next nine months I wrote and published a second novel, Uneasy Spirits, satisfying my audience’s demand for a sequel.

While my sales in 2011 had been just enough to replace my teaching salary, most of that income had come in the first 3 months of that year (the post Christmas boom in ebooks). However, even with a second book out, my sales at the end of 2011 were steadily decreasing. This was in part because of the expansion in the historical mystery category and my books drop down the bestseller list, and, I suspect, in part because of the beginning of the KDP Select Promotions. I was facing the real possibility that in 2012 I wouldn’t be making as much money as I did the year before in sales. So, if I wanted to have the time and income to write a third book, I was going to have to figure out a way to increase my income.

Hence the decision to give KDP Select a try. This was a business decision: not a short-term emotional desire to see my book on a best-seller list, but a calculated move to ensure the long-term goal of making enough money so I could produce more work, thereby continuing to build my audience and its loyalty. And it worked. In January, February, and March of 2012, I sold over 20,000 books and made over $40,000 — more than enough to replace my lost part-time teaching salary and ensure another two years of full-time writing during which time I hope to write two more books and additional short stories.

But didn’t my decision to go with KDP Select – which required that I sell my ebooks exclusively on Amazon – mean I had to sacrifice those multiple audiences that Rusch and Smith say are so important? Well, I would beg to differ with the opinion that selling exclusively in the Kindle store only develops one audience. My first free promotions through KDP Select (at the end of December and again in mid-February) were successful, not just in pushing my books back up to the top of the historical mystery category but also in putting them at the top of numerous other categories. In fact, Maids of Misfortune ended up in the top ranks of eleven different categories. As a result, not just the historical mystery audience, but the often very diverse audiences who like mysteries with female sleuths, traditional mysteries, romance, and historical fiction all got a chance to see and buy my books. I didn’t sell over 20,000 books in 3 months to a single historical mystery audience. I tapped into multiple audiences — which is exactly what Rusch is advising.

But I am sure she would argue that it is equally important to cultivate audiences who do not have Kindles or use Kindle apps. Yet I had already tried the strategy that Rusch and Smith are advocating — making my ebooks available in multiple markets. For two years I sold my ebooks in six e-stores in addition to Amazon: Apple, Barnes&Noble, Diesel, Kobo, Sony, and Smashwords. (And I still make my print book available to any bookstore who wants to order it through Amazon.)

Nevertheless, in the those two years, over 90% of my income had come from Kindle sales. Since the most recent data suggests that Amazon holds about 67% (down from 80%) of the ebook market, it is pretty clear that the other booksellers haven’t been doing a very good job of selling my books. The books are the same, the covers are the same, the descriptions are the same, and my social media presence is the same. Yet that potential 30% of the market (or audience) that these non-Amazon bookstores represent are not finding my books. In other words, my books are languishing in some back room, on some back shelf, of these virtual bookstores. In the Amazon store, however, my books are front and center within categories, promoted by email blasts, recommended through “Customers who Bought” lists, and listed on my Author page (along with links to my twitter and blog posts).

This is not to say that there isn’t a way to tap into those other bookstore markets, or that in time those bookstores won’t do a better job of selling my books, if they want to stay competitive. But I needed the income now, to go on writing, not in some future when the other e-retailers learn how to market my books as effectively as Amazon does.

My decision might not be right for every author. If I were Rusch or Smith and had a large number of books, in multiple genres, a smaller return in sales from these multiple markets wouldn’t be a problem, and these other markets would be worth cultivating now. And I applaud the success of an author like Sarah Woodbury, who has effectively followed the strategy of using one book as a loss leader to bump up sales for her other books in multiple ebook stores. But she has nine books, and a smaller return over nine books is still substantial.

My conclusion: the decision to forgo the possibility of increasing your income and reaching new audiences within Amazon with the KDP Select, in order to keep books in multiple ebook stores, might be a good decision for some authors, but not necessarily for all. For authors like myself, who have tried the multiple store strategy and found it wanting, who only have a few books out, and who need the income to keep writing and expanding our content in order to keep building our audience, then KDP Select can be a very good short-term strategy for long-term success.

This brings me to the question of why I decided to re-enroll in the KDP Select program. This wasn’t an easy decision since there is now a lot of evidence that it is becoming more difficult to translate free promotions into higher sales. For example, my last promotion at the end of my first enrollment period was not particularly successful. I put Maids of Misfortune up for free March 30, 2012 and Uneasy Spirits up for free March 30-31. Compared to the previous promotions, the results were not impressive. I had 3900 downloads on the one day Maids was free — compared to 14,400 over two days for the first promotion and 13,000 free downloads in one day for the second promotion. And Uneasy Spirits had fewer downloads than Maids — around 1320, even though it was available for free for two days. Unlike the first two promotions, neither book broke into the top 100 bestseller free ranks, which generally translates into the largest number of downloads—and subsequent sales. During the first week after the promotions Maids did better than it had been doing, but now, in the second week after the promotion, it is actually selling less than it was before. Sales of Uneasy have stayed steady before and after this latest promotion, but not increased.

I suspect that I have saturated the markets for Maids of Misfortune, at least temporarily. If it follows the pattern of last year after the post Christmas bump, it will slowly lose sales every month. Uneasy Spirits, on the other hand, may continue to sell steadily as people who have read and liked the first book in the series buy the second. Even though I have re-enrolled my books, I don’t plan on doing another free promotion until the beginning of summer when my books, which make good summer time reading, might pick up some more sales.

So why re-enroll? Why not step out of the program for a few months, see what the changes in the formula of downloads to sales does to the continuing effectiveness of the free promotions, see whether or not the newest strategy of group promotions of free books work, or just wait until next Christmas when a new round of new Kindles hit the market and re-enroll?

And, why not make my books available again on those other e-bookstore sites in the hope that sales there will compensate for slipping sales on Amazon? The answer is simple. Borrows. I never expected to benefit from the borrowing aspect of the KDP Select Program; few of the indie authors, with our lower price points, did. We expected that the customers who enrolled in the Amazon Prime program would spend their once-a-month free borrows on more highly priced books. But I have found that people have borrowed my inexpensively priced novels and even my very inexpensive short stories. In January through March, I made $4,558 from Amazon Prime customers who borrowed my works. So, even if I don’t do another free promotion, I will come out ahead with my books in KDP Select, as long as I make more than $200 a month from borrows. That is as much as I was averaging in sales from non-Amazon bookstores.

In the next months, because of the sales I have made already as a result of being in KDP Select, and because of my borrows, I won’t have to spend time doing free promotions and I won’t be trying to figure out why people with Nooks don’t buy my books. Instead, I will have more time to write. Because, as Rusch pointed out, if I don’t produce more books, “the audience will move onto something else.” Sounds like a good short-term strategy to reach my long-term goals and not such a bad decision at all.

Simple Steps to a Successful KDP Select Free Promotion

Posted on March 3, 2012 by loulocke

If you have read my previous posts on Amazon’s KDP Select Program, you will already know that I joined this program primarily for the five free promotional days Amazon gives you in exchange for selling your ebook exclusively with them for three months. (You may take these 5 days at any time during the three months.) You will also know that my participation in this program (both through borrows and free promotions) significantly pushed both my historical mystery books up the bestseller ranks in numerous categories, resulting in a substantial increase in my sales.

What you don’t know is what steps I took to ensure these promotional days were as effective as possible. That is what this post is about.

My goal here is not to persuade you to sign your book up for the KDP Program (I still think that McCray’s post on KDP Select is the clearest discussion of who should join), and if you want to learn about the pros and cons, just search in Publetariat and you will get a wide range of view points.

My goal is not to promise if you follow these steps your promotion will be successful. The KDP Select Program has only been around for three months and the information is only just beginning to filter out about authors’ experiences. For example, I know very little about how non-fiction books or literary fiction has succeeded in the program. It is only because I have had success in two of my own promotions that I am daring to offer suggestions. I want to caution you that these tips are based on very limited empirical evidence and on my reading about the promotions of a few others. Therefore, they should be read with caution.

Having covered my butt, here goes.

First Step: Make sure your book is ready to promote:

I will repeat what I have said before many times in my pieces on selling on Amazon: don’t start any kind of promotion until your book is “ready for prime time.” Getting your book on the free list isn’t going to get people to download it, read it, review it favorably, or buy your other books if the cover is amateurish, formatting and editing are sloppy, there isn’t a well-written description, your author central page isn’t complete or the book isn’t in the right browsing categories.

Second Step: Decide which book(s) to promote:

If you have a series where it matters which book is read first, offer the first in the series first. If you look at this from the perspective of readers, this makes sense. Many, if not most, readers like to read series in order. Therefore, if one of the goals of the free promotion is to gain new readers to the series, start them off at the beginning. For me this was Maids of Misfortune. My hope was that putting the first book up for free would encourage people to go on and buy the second. After the first promotion, the increase in sales in the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, demonstrated the efficacy of this strategy.

If you have stand-alone books or series books that can be read easily in any order, the question of which books to start with depends on your goals. For example, you might want to start with your loss leader-the book that is selling the least. Here the goal would be to get people to find that book, give it more positive reviews, and start it on the way to becoming a better selling book. This is why I put up my second book, Uneasy Spirits, for free in my second promotion. I wasn’t content with the bump in sales it was experiencing. It had only been out for four months, hadn’t gotten that many reviews, and was struggling to stay in the top ten of the historical mystery category. Putting it up for promotion in mid February got it up solidly in the top three in historical mysteries.

However, you might want to start with your strongest selling book, the one that you think has the best chance of getting the largest number of downloads and the largest subsequent bump in sales. I initially put up Maids of Misfortune for a second time only six weeks after the first promotion so that for one day both it and Uneasy Spirits would be free together. I did this because I thought that Uneasy would sell better in tandem with the first book in the series, which was probably true since the bulk of the downloads for the book came that first day, not the second when it was free by itself. But what I hadn’t expected is how well Maids would do this second time around–hitting the top 100 best-seller list for three days in a row. If your main goal is making money, you may want to put your best selling book up first and more often!

Third Step: Decide when and for how many days you should do the free promotion:

Remembering that you need to sign up in advance (although I signed up the night before once and the book went up on time), do spend some time thinking about these questions. I chose my first promotion for December 30-31 for two reasons. First, I thought a Friday and a Saturday would get me my largest market because I often find my regular sales go up on these days (weekend reading). Second, these two days came near the end of the Christmas vacation. You know, when the presents are put away, the guests are gone, and you are ready to put up your feet and try out your new Kindle before going back to work or school.

I did my second promotion a month and a half later, again on a Friday and Saturday but this time before the long Presidents’ Day weekend because Monday would be a holiday. Same idea. Holidays mean people read recreationally, and I wanted people to still be on holiday when the books shifted over to paid so that I would get some sales. This worked because Maids of Misfortune, which was only free on Friday, steadily improved its paid ranking on Saturday and Sunday, and by Monday evening had finally hit the top 100 list, where it remained for the next few days.

In short, think about timing. When do your sales usually peak, and what are your lowest sale days? Is there a holiday that you can tie your book promotion into (like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc.)? Play around with this, who knows, maybe a Wednesday or a Thursday would work better for you than a Friday.

In general I would advise you to put a book up for free for no more than 2 days at a time. If your book doesn’t have many sales under its belt, however, it might take three days to get enough downloads to make a difference. Having seen how Maids of Misfortune did on its second free promotion, I suggest trying a 2 day promotion and then, after 6 weeks or so, doing a second one-day promotion to see if you can’t kick it up higher in the rankings the second time around. Remember it is all about visibility. The higher a book goes in both popularity and best-seller rankings after a promotion, the better the sales are going to be. See David Gaughran’s post on KDP Select and Popularity for a good discussion of this.

What I wouldn’t do is use all your 5 days at once, since it is my impression that, no matter how high you go in the paid rankings after a promotion, your rankings will almost certainly begin to slip after a month (if only because you are being bumped down by the latest book coming off a free promotion). If you have used up all your free days at once, you have to wait until you renew your enrollment into the Select Program to do another free promotion of that book, and by then your book may have slipped back to where it was before you started promoting.

I also think that you shouldn’t offer a second free promotion too quickly after a first promotion. I put Uneasy Spirits up for one day, two weeks after its first promotion, as an experiment, and had a very dismal number of downloads (less than 400, compared to the nearly 9000 downloads it got on the first free promotion). There are other possible explanations for why this second free offer didn’t do as well as the first. I didn’t publicize it as widely as I did the first and it was free on a Thursday, not my best selling day. But I think the main reason for its poorer performance was that it was just too soon. I put one of my short stories up for free at the same time and it did much better than the novel –even though people were only getting a 99 cent deal on it — but it hadn’t been free for months.

Fourth Step: Advertise the promotion:

1. Make a list of friends and family you want to notify by email. Make a template of what you want to say along the lines of:

“I have decided to make my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, available on Kindle for free for two days (put in date) to make the book more visible to readers. You could really help me kick off this promotional campaign if you could tell as many people as possible who have Kindles or can download Kindle books to go get their free copy at: (then url.)

Thanks, and I will let you know how well we did when the campaign is over!”

Then I would send this email out just a few days before the promotion starts so that people have a day or so to spread the word, but not too long so that they forget.

2. Find and sign-up for the Facebook pages that promote books and ebooks. These pages change fairly frequently so, in the search bar on your Facebook page, type in words like Cheap ebooks, Kindle, free ebooks, or appropriate genre terms (mystery, science fiction, historical fiction) to find pages that let you post about a book promotion.

3. Check out the blogs and websites that specifically promote ebooks in general, cheap or free ebooks, genre books, and indie authors. Some ask for a fee, others are free. I wouldn’t pay much, if anything, until I had done at least one promotion. You may not need it. Since many of these sites need advance notice, if you are going to do this, start early–one to two weeks in advance.

4. Do some BSP (Blatant Shameless Promotion) on the appropriate pages for the groups you belong to (Good Reads groups, yahoo groups, Kindle Boards, etc,). This works best if you do it the day or two before, since some of the messages on these sites don’t get read right away. Always give the day of the week and the dates of the promotions so that people won’t think the book is still free when the promotion has ended.

DO NOT promote yourself on pages or message boards where this is against the rules; this angers people and wins you no friends or fans.

5. Post something related to your book but something more than just an announcement of the promotion on your blog. See this post that Abigail Padgett did the day her free promotion started on the first of her Bo Bradley mysteries as a good example. This can be another way of getting out the message and peaking people’s interest in the work.

6. During the promotion, tweet or post on your Facebook pages several times, reminding people of the promotion, mentioning how it is going, and thanking everyone for their help. Don’t be afraid to brag if your book is doing really well. I discovered some of the fans who read my messages enjoyed commenting on how much they had liked the book and recommending it to others. Some will thank you for reminding them because now they were going to tell their mother/sister/friend about how to get a free copy the book. Your friends will be gratified by your success and want to know how you did it.

I want to make it clear here that you do not necessarily have to do all of the above to have a successful promotion. For example, for my first promotion I didn’t contact any of the sites listed in #3, and I contacted only a few of them for the second promotion. If your book is already doing fairly well in terms of sales and ranking, and is in a lot of different categories, you may not need to do a lot of work ahead of time. But if you are promoting a book that hasn’t been selling well, or is on one of those large categories like historical fiction or contemporary fiction, with no sub-categories and lots of free books being listed, then advance promotion may be very necessary to get you the initial downloads you need to become visible on the free lists.

Fifth Step: Keep track of some basic data on how the free promotion went.

The day before the promotions, I noted down the ranking of not just the book I was promoting, but also my other titles. I recorded the overall ranking and where it ranked on the one subcategory where it was in the top 100 (for both the best seller list and the popularity list.) Then during the promotion I wrote down these same rankings, plus the rankings in the other categories where the book started showing up about 3 times a day (the morning, mid-day, and at the end of the day.)

With the new dashboard Amazon has set up it is now easy to discover immediately after the promotion ends how many free downloads there were. I continued to write down this data for about a week after the promotion, because it took a while for the books to reach their highest spots on the paid list. Since I always note what my sales are each night I have also been able to watch the way in which the books’ overall sales have continued to be higher than before the promotion, despite later slippage in ranking.

Why do I do this? Probably because my training was in the social sciences and I like analyzing data (I did a computer analysis of working women from the 1880 manuscript census back in the days when you used punch cards to enter the data.) But it also helps me make decisions about staying in the KDP Select or doing other promotions.

So, has this helped? If you have had a successful promotion and have something to add, I would like to hear about it. If you did something like I did (putting up a book too soon) that you feel hurt your promotion, do share, so we all can learn what to avoid. KDP Select and the free promotion is in its infancy and the more we learn from each other, the more we will all be effective in reaching a wider audience with our work.

Why I don’t worry when people read my books for free: No DRM, Free Promotions, and Free Returns

Posted on February 28, 2012 by loulocke

Sometimes it just feels like several strands of conversations in cyberspace all come together to force me to write about certain topics. This happened to me this weekend when I read a post on SheWrites bemoaning Amazon’s liberal return policy for ebooks and then saw this same issue, along with a rehashing benefits of the KDP Select program, being discussed on the Yahoo group site, MurderMustAdvertise. And finally I read a post by Alan Baxter on Publetariat about DRM, entitled “I’m an author, take my stuff for free.” In all three cases, the arguments seemed to revolve around whether or not it is good for authors when people can get their books for free.

So, enough is enough, universe, guess it’s time for me to come out squarely on the side of Free.

When I think about DRM, using free downloads as a promotion, and Amazon’s ebook returns policy, I consider the following:

I look at the issues from the perspective of the reader. If I want to sell books, I should be trying to make the reader happy, not the publisher, not the distributor, and not the blogging pundit.
I consider the issues in the context of my goals as a writer. My goals are, first, to continue to make enough money to replace the salary I lost when I decided to write full time and retire from teaching and, second, to provide both entertainment and some historical education to as wide a market as possible. (Your goals might be fame and fortune, a wonderful review in the New York Review of Books, a nest egg for retirement, a book to give your relatives, etc. and therefore you might come to different conclusions.)

Let’s look first at the issue of DRM. Publishers (and sometimes authors) justify the use of Digital Rights Management technologies to prevent “piracy.” They say that DRM is a positive thing for authors and publishers because it is designed to prevent anyone from getting content for free.

But, if you think about DRM from the point of view of a reader, it is a very negative policy. For readers, buying an ebook with DRM means they can’t share it or lend it to a family member or friend or transfer it from one device to another — all big inconveniences. As a reader, I prefer not to buy books with DRM, so why, as an author, would I want to sell my books with it?

But what about my goal as an author to make money? Well, in that area DRM is a failure as well. Over and over hackers (and actual “pirates” who do want to make money from stolen content) have demonstrated the ability to get around DRM. In addition, the person who goes to the trouble of hacking DRM or seeking out free download sites with pirated books was probably never going to buy my book anyway. There is even anecdotal evidence that when someone likes your book enough after reading it for free, they may be more likely to actually buy it or others you have written. So, as I see it, the “revenue lost to piracy” that publishers and some authors like to proclaim about is a phantom—I was never going to get that revenue anyway; but the revenue I lose when a reader chooses not to buy ebooks in general, or my book specifically, because of the inconveniences of DRM, is real revenue lost.

The impulse behind DRM (not wanting anyone to get your work without paying for it) is very interconnected with the argument that providing your work for free as a promotional tool devalues it and loses you revenue. Once again, if you look at the issue from the perspective of readers, getting free books is good. It is the reason that people go to libraries, the reason that they have embraced the Amazon Prime lending opportunity, (with the borrowing activity increasing from 295,000 borrows in December to 437,000 borrows in January), and the reason that over 27,000 people downloaded my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, in the 3 days I offered it for free.

So how does this help me as an author achieve my goals? You would think I would be grieving over all that lost revenue. But not if you consider why people “borrow” or buy books for free. Research on library borrowing shows that people who borrow books from the library will then go on and buy the book, or other books, by that author. This is also true for people who download free books. This is why people are routinely reporting that their other books show an uptick in sales after a free promotion of one of their books.

In January, after Maids of Misfortune’s free promotion, the average daily sales on US Kindle of the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, nearly tripled. Those folks who downloaded Maids of Misfortune for free are not “freeloaders;” they are my future fans! And they are loyal fans who have given me lots of positive reviews on Amazon and have told me in emails that they are telling all their friends about my books. Some people disapprove of free promotions because, they say, people may download books and not read them. Why should I worry about people that got my book for free and don’t read it? Just like the people who go to the extra trouble to get pirated books, those people weren’t going to buy my books anyway. In neither case does “free” reduce my income.

In addition, as I have reported on my blog about the results of my KDP Select Promotion, my free promotions resulted in much higher sales. In this case, “free” actually increased my income. During the first week after my first promotion, my average daily sales for my two books on US Kindle was slightly over 500 books a day and, even though the sales slipped some after that first week, the average daily sales for the whole month was still 225. After my recent second promotion, the first week average was 692 books sold a day. Compare that to my average of 45 books a day in November, before I did any free promotions. Big change! Big increase in revenue!

The main reason for the increased sales after a free promotion is that the free downloads boosted my books up into bestseller categories. This meant that readers of mainstream mysteries, romance, and historical fiction found them and bought them. Without the free promotion, those readers might never have discovered my books.

This brings me to the latest upset: Amazon’s policy of letting readers return ebooks within 7 days of purchase (there is anecdotal evidence that books are accepted beyond the 7 days.) Amazon is reportedly the only ebook retailer who does this (I know that Barnes and Noble has a no ebook return policy.) The concern that has been expressed in blogs and message boards is that people are buying books, reading them, and then returning them for a refund and that this is happening increasingly. In short, people are complaining that the Amazon returns policy is bad because it lets people get ebooks for free.

Well, by now you can now guess how I feel about this policy. I am all for it. Again, if you look at it from the perspective of the reader, this is a very consumer-friendly policy. (This should be no surprise since its attention to consumer satisfaction has been one of the reasons that Amazon has been so successful in establishing itself as the premier place to buy things.) There are lots of legitimate reasons why someone might want to return a book, particularly in this transitional stage of publishing when many of the bugs of ebook formatting haven’t been worked out yet.

Many ebooks (particularly some traditionally published or public domain titles) are badly formatted, and this won’t always show up in the sample. Sometimes the book doesn’t fit the description — you thought you were getting a cozy mystery and a third of the way in (after the sample) the sex and violence of a horror book shows up. Or maybe you clicked the buy button by mistake or were gifted the book two weeks after you bought the book and it was sitting in your to-read pile, or maybe it turns out the book was just badly written (in your opinion.) Whatever the reason, under Amazon’s policy, you return the book, you get your refund, and you are happy. And as a happy customer you are more likely to buy again and less likely to get angry and give the book a bad review or to swear you are never, ever going to buy an ebook again.

Are there people who are ripping off Amazon and publishers and authors by returning books they have already read? I am sure there are, but I don’t think this is a huge problem. Judging by the Kindle Board discussions, and my own experience, most books have a low rate of return. I seldom have more than 2% returns, although the rate does seem to go up after a free promotion. Last month, coming off of a free promotion of Maids of Misfortune, the rate of return for this book was just under 3%, but Uneasy Spirits, which had not been promoted, had a rate of return less than 1%. I have heard a number of people say that they had seen a book advertised as free, hadn’t noticed that the promotion was over, and then returned the book after realizing that they paid for a download. Others have borrowed a book thinking that they still had a free borrow and, when they discovered the error, returned it. This, not readers ripping off authors, may be the reason for the higher rate of returns.

Is this a growing problem? I don’t know, and I have only heard anecdotal evidence that it is for certain publishers. But if it is part of an organized attempt to rip off Amazon, I have faith they will figure it out and respond. If it isn’t, well then I go back to my earlier argument about DRM, and “free promotions.” The rip-off reader wasn’t going to buy my book anyway, and the satisfied Amazon customer is a potential new customer.

In conclusion, I believe that these three Amazon policies (allowing authors to publish without DRM, allowing authors to offer free promotions and book loans, and Amazon’s liberal return policy) are good for readers and that means these policies are good for me as an author. Is it good for all authors? Well, I think this has a lot to do with where your books sell well, whether or not you are traditionally published and with which publisher, and what your ultimate goals are.

What is bad for authors is when publishers and authors set the price for their ebooks too high, put books in the wrong browsing categories, put up badly-written and formatted product descriptions, refuse to put out the ebook edition at the same time as the print edition, don’t bother to get the ebook formatted correctly, and insist on using DRM.

These actions turn away readers and I can’t help but wonder if these might be the real reasons that some publishers may be finding higher return rates, not Amazon’s return policy.

What do you think?

Free Victorian San Francisco Short Story

Posted on February 12, 2012 by loulocke

My short story, set in 1879 San Francisco, features two elderly dressmakers, Miss Minnie and Miss Millie Moffet, who face a moral dilemma of no small dimensions. They turn for advice to Annie Fuller, a widowed boardinghouse owner who supplements her income as a clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl. For those who have read Locke’s two full-length Victorian San Francisco mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, this is an amusing glimpse into the lives of Annie Fuller’s two most eccentric boarders. For those unfamiliar with Locke’s mysteries and the late nineteenth century world they portray, this is just a taste of things to come.

This short story is now available on Kindle, or through a Kindle Ap, for only 99 cents. Check it out.

KDP Select Free Promotion — Discoverability Experiment: One Month Later and Feeling Fine!

Posted on February 1, 2012 by loulocke

As stated in Part One, my goal in joining the KDP Select program had been simple, to get my two Victorian San Francisco historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits back up to the top of the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. And, as I wrote in Part Two, not only did I achieve this goal, but I also had fantastic success in selling my books immediately after the free promotion was over. In addition, I was now selling a significant number of books in Kindle, UK, and I had started to have a large number of borrows of Maids of Misfortune, all unexpected but delightful consequences of enrolling a book in the KDP Select program.

While not everyone has had the same kind of success using KDP Select, a number of authors have reported large numbers of downloads, followed by better rankings, and increased sales. These suggest that my experience was not a fluke. See David Kazzie’s post “How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved my Book” as one example.

However, there also seem to have been a significant number of authors who have been disappointed with their results. Caroline McCray, one of the most successful KDP Select authors, has done a very thoughtful post on the pros and cons of the program, with a clear description of how factors like the percentage of your sales that are on Amazon and your rank on the best seller lists, can affect how useful using KDP Select might be for you. I can see that I fit her description of those authors who might benefit, since 96% of my income came from Amazon in 2010, and I was already on one of the best seller lists on Amazon and close enough to the top 100 in other lists to mean that an increase in sales would affect my rankings and make my book more visible.

Now that a month has passed, as promised, I am going to report on my numbers and what my strategy for the future is going to be.

My two-day free promotion of my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune was December 30-31, 2011. During those two days the book was downloaded 15, 576 times, and, the first week it went back on sale, the average sales of Maids of Misfortune and my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, combined, was 501 books a day (the price of each book is $2.99.) The second week in January the average number of books sold was 253 a day (and I had stopped thinking that I was going to be in the big leagues with Konrath and company.) The third week the average was 151 a day and the fourth week the average had dropped to 107 books a day. For the whole month, the average number of books sold was 236 a day. (A vast improvement from the 31 books a day for November or 35 books a day average for December that I had been selling.)

And, although my sales steadily dropped after the first week of January, by the end of the month I had, nevertheless, sold a total of 7,323 of books. Seventy-five percent of them were Maids of Misfortune; the rest were sales of Uneasy Spirits. (In December the newer book, Uneasy Spirits, made up 55% of my sales). In addition, 1272 people borrowed one of my books as part of the Amazon Prime Lending option.

I have to take a deep breath here. This month, my income was more than twice what I made in any given month in my entire career as a full professor of history (not being the Newt Gingrich kind of historian — smile.)

Apart from the sales and the money I made this month, which will go a long way to cover the income I lost by retiring to write full time, there is the fact that the free downloads exposed me to so many more readers, which should sustain my sales over the long haul for my subsequent books. I know that people say that those who download books for free may never read the books, but this month I have received 16 more reviews for Maids of Misfortune, 13 of them 5 star reviews, and they were clearly from people who had downloaded the book and read it immediately.

As I hoped, the increased sales in Maids of Misfortune resulted in increased sales for my sequel. Uneasy Spirits sold an average of 20 books a day in both November and December (the book came out in mid October), but the average for January was 48 a day.

So, what are my plans for the future? Since it appears that I am in the midst of a steady, albeit a gentle, slide downwards in sales, I will use at least some of my remaining KDP Select promotion days for Maids of Misfortune in February, if only to see if there will be a similar bump in sales. I confess I am assuming the increase in sales will be less, but it might at least arrest the downward slide.

In addition, I have entered Uneasy Spirits into KDP Select, and I will also do a free promotion of it. As a sequel, (although it can be read as a stand-alone) Uneasy Spirits will probably not do as well as Maids did. But if it only garners me more positive reviews, I will consider the promotion a success. After reading a discussion on the Kindle Boards where readers expressed frustration at downloading a book for free and discovering that they were going to have to buy the first book in the series, I decided that I would put both books up for free for one day and then possibly continue the free promotion for the sequel for a second day.

Who knows if I will have even a tenth of the success of my first promotion? But, whatever happens I will be happy if I gain more readers and more information about how promotions work. For me, half the fun of being an indie is being able to experiment. If something doesn’t work, I change strategies; if it does, I celebrate. And I get back to writing.

M. Louisa Locke

KDP Select Free Promotion: Discoverability Experiment, Part Two

Posted on January 8, 2012 by loulocke

I used KDP Select to offer the Kindle edition of Maids for free for two days, December 30^th and 31^st. When the free promotion ended, Maids of Misfortune was at #1 in the historical mystery bestseller category, and it has stayed there. In addition, Uneasy Spirits, a sequel to Maids, rose to #8 during the promotion of Maids, and by the end of the first week after the promotion, it had risen to #3 in the historical mystery bestseller category.

What I had not expected when I embarked on the experiment was that Maids of Misfortune would also rise to the top ranks in so many other categories. But it did! When Amazon calculates its rankings, it includes the free downloads. So, when the promotion ended, those 14,500 free downloads moved Maids of Misfortune up to the 400s in the overall Paid Kindle store ranking and to the top 5 in popularity in the categories of mystery, and mystery — women sleuth, and historical romance. This made the book very easy to discover by a much wider potential market than ever before. (I published Maids of Misfortune at a time when Amazon let authors choose more than two categories; for sales purposes, this gives it an edge over other books, like Uneasy Spirits, that are in only two categories.)

This greater discoverability immediately translated into increased sales that have kept Maids of Misfortune up in the overall rankings during the week after the promotion ended. Last night, at the end of the first post-promotion week, Maids of Misfortune was #164 in the Paid Kindle Store and, while it has slipped a bit in the other categories, it was still #1 in popularity in historical mysteries, #7 in mystery-women sleuths, and #7 in historical romance. These rankings are high enough to make the book very discoverable — which leads to more sales — which leads to maintaining a high ranking — which leads to more sales.

The sales of Maids of Misfortune since the promotion ended have been fantastic. In November 2011, before the promotion, I sold 376 copies of Maids of Misfortune in all venues combined (Kindle US, other Kindle European stores, CreateSpace, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.) This was an average of 12.5 books a day. In December 2011, before the 2 day free promotion, I sold 433 books, with an average just under 15 books a day. In the week after the promotion ended, Maids of Misfortune sold 3183 books in total at an average of just under 455 books a day. Since I was no longer selling it in Smashwords and Barnes and Noble, these sales were almost entirely in the Kindle Stores.

Another unexpected consequence was the number of books I was now selling in the European Kindle Stores. In the 5 months before the promotion I was averaging 16 copies of Maids of Misfortune a month in these stores (primarily UK and Germany), but in the first week after the promotion I have sold 148 copies—an average of 21 books a day, pushing Maids of Misfortune up to #2 in the historical mystery category in the UK store.

I had hoped that the massive download of Maids of Misfortune during the promotion would eventually translate into a spill-over to Uneasy Spirits. I reasoned that, as people finished the first book, they might decide to buy the sequel. This in turn would lead to a higher ranking that would make it more visible. This has already happened. Before the promotion, in November 2011, Uneasy Spirits (which I published in mid October) sold 341 copies—an average of 11 a day. In December 2011, before the promotion, it sold 531 copies—an average of 18 a day. During the promotion and the week after, Uneasy Spirits sold 414 copies—an average of 46 a day (well over twice the rate of sales.) One result of this is that Uneasy Spirits is now showing up in the top 100 bestselling romantic suspense books, again making it more discoverable.

A final unexpected consequence has been the number of copies of Maids of Misfortune that have been borrowed by Amazon Prime members. When you “enroll” a book in the KDP Select Program, readers who belong to Amazon Prime can “borrow” the book for free for one month. I assumed, because I was a relatively unknown author and because Maids was priced at only $2.99, that few people would borrow it. Why would they when there are other much better known authors whose books cost more to buy? Yet, in the first week since the free promotion, 766 people have borrowed Maids of Misfortune. That means I will get some, I don’t know how much, of the $500,000 Amazon has reserved to compensate KDP authors whose books were borrowed during January. These borrowed books also are included in the calculations that Amazon uses to determine the book’s rank, so they also help maintain its visibility.

Trying to explain the phenomena, I looked more closely at the list of books in the historical mystery category, and I realized that those higher priced books ($8 and above) by better known authors (like the Maisie Dobbes series by Winspear, Gabaldon’s Lord John books, or King’s Russell-Holmes series) are not in the Amazon Prime lending program. Most of the books that are available for borrowing are by indie authors like myself, who can recognize a good promotional tool when we see one and who have control over the decisions we make about our own books. One apparent result of this is that Maids of Misfortune and other indie-authored books are ranked higher than those higher-priced and better-known books in the historical mystery category.

In summary, enrolling Maids of Misfortune in the KDP Select Program turned out to be much more successful experiment than I ever imagined it would be. Not only has it made this book and the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, more visible in the Kindle Store through high rankings in a number of categories, but the rankings have produced a large number of sales.

I don’t know how long this pattern will last, and I can already see a slight slippage in total books sold per day. KDP Select gives authors the opportunity to do promotions like this for a total of five days in a three month period, so I still have three more promotional days that I can use, if necessary. But there is no getting around the fact that in the first week of January 2012, I sold 3,515 books. And that — by any measure — is wonderful news for this indie author.

At the end of January I will post Part III, an analysis of the success of the experiment at the end of a month, but, in the meantime I would like to hear from those of you who have also experimented with the KDP Select program to learn what your experiences have been.