The following 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. Enjoy.

The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage:
A Victorian San Francisco Story

 M. Louisa Locke
Copyright 2012 Mary Louisa Locke

Millie felt a warm glow of pleasure as her older sister, Minnie, sailed up to the front desk at the Palace, San Francisco’s newest and grandest hotel, and announced, “Miss Minerva and Miss Millicent Moffet, for their appointment with Mrs. Andrew Roberts.”

The desk clerk snapped his fingers at one of the bellmen, who came running over. He bowed and took the large brown-paper parcel from Minnie and her own carpetbag of sewing materials, before leading the way to the nearest elevator. This device, the only one that Millie had ever ridden in, was an imposing wood-paneled room that miraculously ascended up to the fifth floor, with just the slightest hiss and jerk when they reached their destination. Even though they had been coming to work for Mrs. Roberts for nearly a year, riding in this odd conveyance never got old for Millie. Neither did the respectful treatment by the staff. As the bellman guided them solicitously down the corridor to Mrs. Roberts’s suite, his dark skin and soft southern accent made her nostalgic for her Natchez home. She and her sister hadn’t been back in the twenty-five years since they and their younger brother were swept up in the golden rush to San Francisco in the early eighteen-fifties.

While her sister continued a stream of questions designed to elicit every detail of the bellman’s history, Millie stepped over to the balcony railing that ran around all four sides of the Grand Court of the Palace Hotel. Noticing how motes of dust drifted in the soft shafts of light slanting down from the glass domed ceiling three stories above, she looked up at the seventh floor, which housed the Conservatory. She hadn’t seen so many marble columns and Greek statues since the doors of polite Natchez society had been slammed in her family’s face when her father went bankrupt. She suddenly remembered the gown she’d made for the cotillion where her engagement was to be announced. It was made of light blue striped satin and had the large puffed sleeves that were so fashionable back then. The engagement, like the cotillion, had never happened for her. So long ago. I wonder if Percy ever regrets…?

“Millicent!” Minnie’s sharp voice interrupted her melancholy reverie.

Millie obediently returned to stand next to the door to the Roberts’s suite of rooms. The door opened and Juliette, Mrs. Roberts’s maid, ushered them in. Juliette was wearing a severely tailored dark blue dress with starched white apron, collar and cuffs, and a white lace cap that the Moffets had made. Millie was particularly proud of the cap, made precisely to Mrs. Roberts’s specifications. Her sister had designed the dress itself, and Mrs. Roberts had confided to them one afternoon during a fitting that she believed that the only reason Juliette stayed in her employ was because of how well she looked in her uniform.

She’d said, with her engaging laugh, “She hates living in the hotel, our suite is such a long way from the basement where the maids are housed, and Juliette says the matron in charge of the servant dormitory is worse than a prison guard. Of course I can’t help but wonder what she knows about prison guards.”

Mrs. Roberts, formerly Jewell Darling, a favorite of the vaudeville circuit, was now married to the respected and wealthy Mr. Andrew Roberts, a partner in the Union Ironworks who was at least thirty years her senior. Minnie disapproved of her, but Millie found her lively sense of humor refreshing. Of course she didn’t tell Minnie that.

Juliette dismissed the bellman as soon as she had relieved him of his burdens and followed Millie and her sister into the large, elegantly appointed room that served the Roberts as their parlor. Mrs. Roberts, as usual, hadn’t emerged from the adjoining bedroom, so Minnie switched the flow of her conversation to the maid, while carefully unwrapping the parcel and laying the three long pieces of a burnt orange satin fabric out on the table to the left of the fireplace.

Millie silently went over to the brocade-covered armchair where the maid had deposited her carpetbag and pulled out the red pincushion, making sure that there was a threaded needle stuck into the cushion before strapping it onto her left wrist. She laid out the spool of thread and the slender, sharp scissors on the table, close at hand.

The maid, who had been putting another log on the fire, broke into Minnie’s description of how the weather reminded her of Fall in Natchez to ask her if they were ready. Minnie nodded, and Juliette knocked lightly on the door to the bedroom and then went in.

“I hope she is willing to stand still long enough for us to get the waist fitted properly,” Minnie said, sighing.

Millie smiled. Every Wednesday morning they were scheduled to spend an hour at Mrs. Roberts’s hotel suite for a dress fitting, and almost every Wednesday they were dismissed after only twenty minutes, the lady professing that she couldn’t remain stationary a single minute more.

“Juliette, serve Miss Minnie and Miss Millie their tea, then you can go.” Mrs. Roberts, a tall, raven-haired beauty swept into the parlor. “I will probably have a little rest after they leave, so you don’t need to return until four.”

Juliette bobbed a curtsy and went over to a burgundy-velvet covered table located near the door to pour out two cups of tea. She also removed a thick linen napkin revealing a plate piled high with slices of ham, Swiss cheese, and soft rolls.

Millie smiled again since she knew that even the tea would remain untouched by either her or her sister as long as they were handling the delicate satin material, but she did appreciate the gesture. Thank goodness for the excellent breakfast served at Mrs. Fuller’s boarding house or I might be tempted to break Minnie’s “no food when working” rule.

Mrs. Roberts went over to the table and began to caress the semi-finished sections of skirt lying there. “Oh my, that satin is heavenly, the color is just as I imagined. And those pleats!”

Minnie launched into the story of the difficulties in getting the thread dyed to match the shade of the satin while Mrs. Roberts took off the pale lilac wrapper she wore and handed it to Millie. Her sister had designed this dressing gown last summer for Mrs. Roberts, and Millie had spent every night for a month sewing on the delicate strips of lace that ran down the front of it. She saw that the seam at the neck was torn and several of the tiny ivory buttons were loose. Mrs. Roberts was hard on her clothes.

Minnie would say it was because she hadn’t been brought up as a lady. She certainly wasn’t as shy as some of their customers were about standing around in her underthings. Today she only had on a single petticoat in addition to her chemise and drawers, probably because the dress they were fitting was in the new long cuirass style that went smoothly over the waist and hips. However, the fact that Mrs. Roberts wasn’t wearing her corset was going to make it hard to measure the skirt accurately, which was their task today.

Minnie went over and pulled the sturdy footstool over to the fireplace, and Mrs. Roberts went and stood on it. Minnie took the front panel, the one with all the pleats, and held it up to Mrs. Roberts, inside out, while Millie securely pinned the side panels to it at the at the waist. Mrs. Roberts obligingly held the sides of the skirt up while she and her sister tacked on the back panel. While basting the waistband to the skirt, Minnie chattered about the twisted scarf drapery that they were going to fasten to the back of the outfit. Meanwhile, Millie swiftly pinned the four panels together, seams side out. They had made the skirt go straight down from the hips, only beginning a very slight flare at the knees, so that Mrs. Roberts could actually walk in the outfit when it was completed.

Working so closely to her scantily clothed client, Millie couldn’t help but notice the musky scent that rose from Mrs. Roberts’s warm skin. She wondered if men liked that sort of animal smell. In her youth she had folded her clothing in lavender, but she had never before considered whether her fiancé would have preferred something stronger. Ladies just didn’t think in those terms fifty years ago. Then, as Minnie would point out, Mrs. Roberts was no lady.

“Miss Minnie, I thought that you were going to trim the ends of the skirt with the cashmere you are using on the bodice?” Mrs. Roberts asked.

Her sister stopped in the midst of her description of the new princess style walking dress she was making for another customer and responded, “Yes, Mrs. Roberts, you are quite correct. Millicent is going to mark where the flounce will attach to the inside of the skirt, and then I will know how deep to make the triangles we talked about. As I always say, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ I really believe the finished skirt will be very fetching, once I have added the cashmere. That was an excellent idea on your part; there won’t be another one like it this season. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if it catches on, and we have requests for it in the future. I promise not to….”

Millie heard the sound of the outer door to the adjoining bedroom open and then close and she looked up at the clock on the mantle. They had come at noon, and it was now nearly twenty-five past the hour. She quickly knelt down to fold and pin the bottom of the skirt up, automatically calculating how much extra material would be needed to ensure that when Mrs. Roberts was wearing her shoes with their three-inch heels there wouldn’t be a whisper of space between the end of the dress and the floor. As their client began to fidget, her sister made a valiant effort to buy Millie a little more time by asking Mrs. Roberts a question about the play they knew she had planned to attend last Saturday.

It was of no use. Mrs. Roberts had evidently heard the door as well and she said sharply, “Do unpin me! You’ve surely gotten what you need. We can finish fitting the skirt next week.”

Millie rose and quickly repositioned the pins along one of the seams so that the skirt was now open at the side, permitting Mrs. Roberts to extricate herself. Once she hadn’t moved quickly enough and Mrs. Roberts had pulled two pieces of material apart in her impatience, damaging the material irreparably. As her sister would say, ‘haste makes waste!’

“Oh dear, I had hoped you would have time to partake of the lunch I had brought up for you. You didn’t even drink your tea,” Mrs. Roberts said, her good humor restored now that she was free.  She stretched and pretended to yawn, saying, “I just don’t know what has come over me, I am suddenly so fatigued. You will excuse me, won’t you? I must insist that you gather up your things and go. I really must retire.”

Mrs. Roberts pulled on the lilac-colored wrapper, not even taking time to button it up, and stood next to the door leading to the hotel hallway.

The habitual smile her sister wore flickered out, and as Minnie hurriedly folded up the skirt, she said, so softly that Millie barely made out the words, “Once again, new dress, new admirer. I wonder who she has gotten into her clutches this time?”

 ####

Millie felt sorry for Mrs. Porter, who was obviously finding it difficult to stand while Minnie took her measurements. She knew it was a breach of good manners even to allude to Mrs. Porter’s pregnancy, but she had a strong desire to ask the poor young woman if she was carrying twins. Fortunately, her habit of never saying anything in front of other people protected her from this social solecism.

“Oomph, I am so sorry, Miss Minnie, I know I’m not making this easier on you, but I really must sit again,” the young woman sighed and lowered herself into the straight-backed chair next to the tea table.

Millie’s sister replied, “Oh my dear Mrs. Porter, that is quite all right. My sister will freshen up your cup of tea if you would like. Are you sure you don’t want to pull that chair nearer to the fire. The fog hasn’t burned off yet, and the air feels so cold. Of course it is not nearly as dangerous as the damp mists of the Mississippi that Miss Millicent and I experienced growing up in Natchez.”

Mrs. Porter shook her head and distractedly flapped her hands in front of her cheeks, where angry red splotches had replaced the soft rose color that usually lent a particular sweetness to this young woman’s face. “Oh my, no, I am so hot. Please Miss Millie, could you pour me a glass of water? I’m parched.”

Millie started towards the table under the front window that held the tea tray and a pitcher of water, noticing several long orange threads lying on the floor, bright against the dark brown of the carpet. She bent over, picked them up, and began to twist them around her index finger, thinking to herself of the old adage, another of her sister’s favorites, Waste Not, Want Not. She then saw several more of the orange threads, leading like so many breadcrumbs to the door to the bedroom. As she picked these up she felt a growing unease.

It was unlikely that the threads had come from either her sister or herself because this morning, as they always did, they had brushed each other down and checked the soles of their shoes before leaving their attic rooms. This was one of Minnie’s rules. They were never to risk bringing the flotsam and jetsam of their craft into the homes of their clients. “We must be neat as a new pin,” she would say. They also tried to make sure that they left behind no bits of thread or cloth, but the orange thread suddenly put her in mind of the way they had been hustled out of Mrs. Roberts’s hotel suite two days earlier.

Unbidden, Millie had a vision of Mrs. Roberts, her cotton chemise and petticoat catching the small loose threads from the unfinished seams and hem of the skirt they had been working on. But how could these threads have made it across town to the Porter’s home in the Western Addition?

“Mrs. Porter,” Millie blurted out, “do you know a Mrs. Andrew Roberts?”

Lydia Porter stopped fanning herself for a moment and stared at Millie, who felt the old familiar menagerie of panic: the tiny bird that fluttered in her chest, the coils of the snake that squeezed her throat closed and hissed in her ears, and the shaggy brown bear that loomed over her, cutting out the light. She stood still, willing herself not to faint, and slowly the comforting sounds of her sister’s voice chattering on about the benefits of drinking water with lemon penetrated her consciousness and released her from the paralyzing fear. Millie took a deep breath and walked unsteadily over to her sister, who looked questioningly at her. She wordlessly gave her the little pile of orange thread she had accumulated, and then she went and got poor Mrs. Porter her glass of water.

####

Mrs. Annie Fuller looked across at her two elderly boarders, Miss Minnie and Miss Millie Moffet, and wondered if she would ever learn why they had asked her to join them after dinner. She had been glad to oblige since she didn’t have any clients scheduled for this evening (a widow, she supplemented the income from her boarding house giving business and domestic advice as the clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl), and she had a deep affection and respect for these two spinster seamstresses who seemed to embrace life with such good cheer.

However, Miss Minnie, the elder, had been speaking for nearly five minutes about the Christmas tree her family had when she was fifteen and her sister Millie was eleven, and Annie doubted very much if that had been the point of their invitation to join them in the formal front parlor of the boarding house. While Annie rather enjoyed imagining these two women as girls, stringing popped corn and dried cranberries around a fifteen-foot fir-tree, her time this evening was limited. She had promised Nate Dawson, the local lawyer who was courting her, that she would be free if he stopped by, and he would not appreciate finding her chaperoned by Miss Minnie and Miss Millie since he had the unreasonable belief that they disapproved of him.

Annie repressed a grin. Miss Minnie did have the habit of talking about the particular charms of the young men of Natchez in the first decades of the century, when Nate was around. He said that this was proof they felt he wasn’t good enough for Annie. She thought that it was more likely that he simply reminded them of the gentlemen of their youth because he was clean shaven, which had been the fashion back then, and because he treated them with such kind politeness.

“… and that was the Christmas when our older brother brought us back those china dolls from his trip to New Orleans. Don’t you remember Millicent? And Jasper hid yours in the privy! Jasper was only seven at the time, but he was always getting into trouble. Mrs. Fuller, you remember, Jasper was our baby brother, and we were so used to taking care of him that we came all the way out west, just to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble out here. Of course…”

Annie saw Miss Millie place her hand on her older sister’s arm, and the flow of reminiscences faltered. She found herself holding her breath, waiting to see if Miss Millie would say something. The two women sitting in front of her, in their identical black silk dresses, were physically so alike they could be twins. They were both tiny, with ramrod straight postures, white hair parted neatly in the center and swept back under identical lace caps, and merry light blue eyes. Miss Minnie seemed to walk a little more stiffly than her younger sister, and the effects of a lifetime of needlework (slight reddening around her eyes and swollen knuckles) were more prominent in her as well. But one didn’t need to look that closely to determine which of the two women was which, because the difference was unmistakable. The elder, Miss Minnie, never stopped talking, and the younger, Miss Millie, never said a word. Ever. The only reason Annie knew that she could speak is that Kathleen, her maid, had heard them talking to each other up in their attic workroom. Annie had always wondered if Miss Minnie spoke so much because her sister didn’t, or if Miss Millie had given up trying to speak around her extremely loquacious older sister.

Annie saw Miss Minnie look quickly at her younger sister, and then she began to speak again. “Mrs. Fuller, Millicent has reminded me that Miss Kathleen mentioned that your nice young man, Mr. Dawson, was stopping by this evening, and we wouldn’t want to inconvenience you. Of course, back when I was young, it was considered a lady’s prerogative to keep a gentleman waiting.”

Annie took advantage of the brief pause that followed this last statement, and she said, “Please Miss Minnie, do tell me how I might be of service to you and your sister. Do you need anything to make your rooms more comfortable? Mrs. O’Rourke had mentioned that you could use an additional lamp in your work room, now that the days are growing so short.”

“Oh, Mrs. Fuller, no, we are quite comfortable. No one could be more obliging. No, it is your advice we need. ‘A trouble shared is a trouble halved’ I always say. We are quite out of our depth, you see. But we feel we must do something. It is our moral responsibility. But sister and I don’t quite agree on how to proceed. Millicent suggested that you might be able to help. Because of Madam Sibyl. She pointed out that you get paid to give advice as Madam Sibyl, and that you might actually have run across a similar problem. We would be willing to pay…”

“Oh, please Miss Minnie, there is no need. If I can be of help to you, it is my pleasure. If you could just tell me what the problem is, exactly!” Annie broke in, appalled that these two, hard-working women would feel the need to spend a single penny for her help.

Miss Minnie again looked at her sister, as if expecting her to speak, but Miss Millie remained mute, so she resumed. “You see Mrs. Fuller, it concerns two of our clients. One, a young woman, I shall call her Mrs. P, has been married less than a year, and she is expecting a child next month. We believe that her husband has taken up with another of our clients. I shall call her Mrs. J. This second client, a former actress, is married to a much older man, to whom, I am sorry to say, she is frequently unfaithful. I believe that it is our duty tell the first woman that her husband has violated their wedding vows, but my sister says that this would be too unkind, that there must be another way.”

Annie, thoroughly surprised, said the first thing that came to her mind. “Miss Minnie, are you sure of your facts? I mean, could you be mistaken? I would hate to counsel any action if you didn’t have firm proof that there has been any wrong-doing.” She pushed away the absurd thought that these very respectable older women had actually stumbled in on an adulterous couple in flagrante delicto, as it were.

“Mrs. Fuller, I understand your concern. I can assure you that we have found no other explanation for what we have found,” Miss Minnie said firmly. “This Thursday morning we were visiting the first woman, Mrs. P, making adjustments to several of her garments to accommodate the last month leading up to her confinement. My sister discovered some thread on the floor of the upstairs sitting room, near the bedroom door, that could only have come from a dress we are making for the other client. When Millicent showed me the thread, I instantly understood her concern, so I asked the young woman if she had ever had an occasion to meet Mrs. J, and she had not. However, she mentioned that her husband had met her for the first time two weeks ago at a dinner party.”

Annie replied, “If I understand you correctly, you believe that the thread had been tracked into the house by the pregnant woman’s husband? My dear Miss Minnie, couldn’t it have been from one of the young woman’s dresses, or perhaps the husband may have simply picked up the thread at the dinner party? Although I suppose that it is odd that it would not have been tidied up by a servant sometime in those two weeks.”

“Oh, Mrs. Fuller, it couldn’t have come from our young mother-to-be. Good heavens, she would never wear that shade, not with her complexion. Anyway, the thread perfectly matched the thread we had specially dyed to match the material for Mrs. J’s dress. In addition, this past Wednesday was the first day we took the material to Mrs. J’s hotel suite, just the day before we found it at Mrs. P’s house. We have a standing appointment on Wednesdays with Mrs. J, since there is usually some sewing that needs to be done, even if we are not actually working on an outfit. But this Wednesday we had the first fitting of a new dress she had commissioned. The bits of thread, I am afraid, got all over our client in the fitting, and someone came into the adjoining room while we were there so she hurried us off before we could clean it up. The only possible explanation is that the person who entered that room was Mr. P, and that he immediately came into such close proximity to Mrs. J that the thread was conveyed to him. He must have then shed the thread in his own sitting room when he returned that evening.”

Annie wondered why the older woman was so sure that there wasn’t any other explanation for the thread’s mysterious trip from one home to the other and she said, “I still don’t see why you see this as proof of his infidelity. Even if he was the person who came into the room, perhaps there is an innocent explanation. Couldn’t he have dropped by to see her husband, and, in the midst of his visit, brushed up against her skirts?”

Miss Minnie tittered, which quite shocked Annie. Then the older woman said, “Well, he certainly brushed up against something, but it wasn’t her skirts. When we left, she wasn’t wearing much beyond her chemise and drawers, and, you see, he wouldn’t have been the first gentleman we have heard surreptitiously enter our client’s bedroom in the middle of the day when her husband was away.”

“Oh, my,” replied Annie, quite taken aback by the older woman’s blunt statement.

Miss Minnie again looked over at her sister, who gave her an encouraging smile. “The sad truth is that we have known for some time that our client uses her dress-fitting appointments as an excuse to dismiss her maid for the afternoon so that she can entertain her gentleman friends without detection. My sister has been of the opinion that when she gets a new admirer she commissions a new outfit, and when she tires of them, she often cancels her appointment with us. She commissioned this newest outfit right after the dinner party where she met our Mr. P. When we realized that her new admirer must be our other client’s young husband, well, you can imagine our distress.”

Annie was speechless. Until now she had thought of these two elderly ladies as complete innocents, delicately reared in the South, living a narrow sheltered life taking care of their bachelor brother until they were forced to support themselves upon his death. She was quickly revising that image.

As if she had read her mind, Miss Minnie said, “Oh, Mrs. Fuller, I am sorry if I have shocked you. My sister and I have supported ourselves with our sewing for well over half a century, and you would be amazed at what a dressmaker learns about the families she sews for. We are often the first to know when a child has been conceived, when there is an illness, when there are financial problems, and, unfortunately, when there are difficulties in a marriage. My sister and I long ago decided that if we were unwilling to work for families where there were moral transgressions we would starve. And we have prided ourselves in our discretion.” Miss Minnie looked directly at Annie.

“This is why we have come to you for advice. We are afraid that the natural distance that comes between a husband and wife as the woman comes close to the time of her confinement, when she is thinking of little more than the coming child, may have made an essentially good man vulnerable to the lures of a very beautiful and charming woman. My sister and I agree that something should be done, but we disagree over what we should do.”

Annie nodded, thinking about a number of the women who had come to Madam Sibyl with similar stories. But what could these two women do that wouldn’t simply make things worse? She certainly didn’t want to advise anything that would damage their livelihood. But giving advice was what she did daily as Madam Sibyl so she started with what she felt they shouldn’t do.

“Miss Minnie, I am afraid that I must agree with your sister. Telling your young client, particularly now as she nears the birth of her child, would not only be cruel, but it could actually endanger her health and that of the baby.”

Annie had personal experience with the devastating effects an emotional upheaval could have on a woman’s pregnancy, but she pushed this thought away and continued, “There is the chance he may not have consummated the affair yet, but once his wife learns that he has even been tempted to stray this could permanently ruin their future together. Have the young couple known each other long?”

Miss Minnie said, “From what our young client has said, they have known each other since childhood, and they are both no more than their early twenties. In my experience, a woman will find comfort in marrying a man she has known for most of her life. For a man, this may produce a negative impression, that he has been too quickly confined into the strict boundaries of married life. As they say, ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure.’”

Annie noticed that Miss Millie stirred at her sister’s words and smiled sadly. Again, she felt that she was seeing unsuspected depths in these two women. Nodding, Annie then asked another question. “Do you think that letting your other client know that this young man has a young wife at home might stir her conscience at all? Could she be persuaded to break off the liaison herself?”

Miss Minnie shook her head emphatically. “I am quite sure she already knows the particulars, and I can not see her forgoing her own pleasure. She plays the lady, all charm and sweetness, but there is an underlying selfishness that betrays her. She acts as if the world owes her. My sister who, I confess, has a softer heart than mine, thinks that something that happened in her past might explain this attitude.”

Annie then said, “Well, it seems to me that there are then only two possible paths for you to take. One is to say nothing, hoping that the young husband will come to his senses on his own and break off the liaison before it irrevocably destroys his marriage. The second path would be to speak to the young man himself, who, if your judgment of his essential goodness is correct, will find the idea that someone else is aware of his transgressions enough to cause him to do the right thing.”

Miss Minnie said, “Oh, dear, Mrs. Fuller, we could never speak directly to the young man. Goodness, how could we? A lady should never mention such things to a member of the opposite sex, not even to their male relatives. Oh my, no, that simply is impossible.”

Annie was bemused by Miss Minnie’s sudden switch back to wide-eyed innocent, and she started to apologize for upsetting her so, when the younger sister leaned over to Miss Minnie and again placed her hand on her arm and gave her a speaking look.

Miss Minnie nodded and then said, as if her sister has actually spoken to her, “My sister wondered if you thought it might help if we could find a way to indicate indirectly to the young man that we worked for Mrs. J. It might make him realize how easy it would be for his indiscretions to be discovered.

Annie smiled and said, “It is possible that this might work, if you can figure out how to do this discreetly.”

Miss Minnie looked over at her sister and then back to Annie, smiled, and said, “I’m sure Millicent will come up with a plan. She always does.”

####

“Dear Mrs. Porter, we are so grateful you were able to accommodate our request to see you at seven. A terrible imposition, I know, so early in the morning. But one of our other clients has rather an emergency, and she needs our services at nine. We did want to get these outfits to you for their final fittings. I can assure you, you will be much more comfortable in the navy cashmere now that we have taken out the seams again.

“Oh Miss Minnie,” said Lydia Porter, “no need to apologize. I don’t sleep at all well of late; I just can’t get comfortable. I was glad to have you come this early. At least I had something to anticipate with pleasure; I get so bored with myself. I am sure my husband… Oh, listen to me complain. I am sure the cashmere is fine, you have done such a clever job adapting them to my changing state. Although at this point there is no hiding my condition so I won’t be out in public very much. I suppose it will be good to have the navy for church. Thank heavens the high bustle isn’t in fashion this year. You wouldn’t know whether I was coming or going!” The young woman’s laughter wobbled into a teary smile.

Miss Minnie patted her shoulder consolingly and said in her most cheerful tones, “Sister Millicent, come see how beautiful our Mrs. Porter looks with the pink lace you put around the collar of the dressing gown.” She gently moved the young woman so she could see herself in the mirror over the mantle. She was wearing a wrapper the Moffets had made for her of deep rose satin, overlaid by pale pink lace, whose front and back panels fell smoothly from a high yoke to the floor, like a feminine version of a minister’s vestments.

“My dear, you look lovely. Doesn’t she Millicent? I do declare it is a shame that only your husband is going to see you in it. Oh, my, I hope we haven’t disturbed him by coming at this early hour. My dear papa just hated when his morning routine was interrupted. Don’t you remember Millicent? How he would huff and puff so. Has your  husband left for work already?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. I believe he must have gone down to breakfast before I…I am sure he will come to say goodbye before he leaves.”

Millie noticed the hesitation in Mrs. Porter’s voice and felt quite a sharp stab of anger at the young man. She did hope that they would be able to show him the error of his ways. Just because her long ago fiancé, Percival, had proven himself unworthy of her esteem, abandoning her when she lost her fortune, didn’t mean that Minnie was correct to say that all men were as frail.

As if summoned by his wife’s words, the door to the sitting room opened and Mr. Porter walked in. He was a tall, wide-shouldered young man, whose glossy black hair was swept back from his forehead revealing clear gray eyes. He had a well-trimmed mustache and beard, stylishly long side-burns, and the clear complexion of youth. Certainly handsome enough to attract Mrs. Roberts’s fancy.

He looked slightly startled not to find his wife alone and said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were engaged. Hello Miss Minnie and Miss Millie. I hope you are well.”

Millie noted that he wasn’t able to look at his wife, and he continued to stand near the door as if to make a quick exit.

Her sister said, “Mr. Porter, how wonderful to see you. You have become quite a stranger, never here when we come. The other day when we were fitting your mother for a day gown she told us she had scolded your father for keeping you at the office so long, neglecting your family. I quite agreed with her. My mother always said about a young married couple that it was important that they start out cherishing each other because, “Well begun is half done.’”

At this point Millie judged it time to interrupt her sister by handing her a folded white handkerchief.

Minnie took the handkerchief and walked rapidly over to Mr. Porter, saying, “Oh this is fortuitous. Somehow last week this handkerchief made it into our sewing bag. Millicent has reminded me that we are trying to find its rightful owner. The embroidered initials are so intricate; we were having difficulty determining what they are. I think the initials are R. T. P, and I said to myself, surely this must belong to Mr. Richard Porter, remembering that your middle name is Thomas. Was I right, is this yours?” Minnie then thrust the square of linen under the young man’s nose, pointing to the initials.

Mr. Porter glanced obligingly down to where Minnie pointed, and then he reared back as if he had just seen a poisonous spider hiding in the folds of white linen. He stuttered out, “No, that’s not mine. I am afraid you are wrong, it belongs to someone else.”

Minnie pulled the handkerchief up close to her eyes, as if she had grown suddenly nearsighted, and she said, “Oh, dear, are you sure? Well, you know Millicent said that she thought I had mistaken the first and last initials. Could that first letter be an A instead of an R? What do you think, Mr. Porter?”

Minnie again thrust the offending square in the young man’s face as he again backed away.  Looking closely at it again, she said, “Dear me, if Millicent is correct, and now I see that the initial for the last name must be an R, and the first initial is an A, this must belong to Mr. Andrew Roberts. I do believe his middle name is also Thomas. Mr. Roberts, the owner of the Union Iron Works? It was my understanding that Mr. Robert’s company supplies most of the iron pieces for the carriages you make in your father’s factory, so surely you must have met him.”

When Mr. Porter made an inarticulate sound, Minnie continued, saying, “And have you made the acquaintance of his charming wife? Such an interesting past. Mr. Roberts just dotes on his lovely wife, nothing but the best for her. Yes, I do believe we must have picked this handkerchief up when we were at their suite at the Palace Hotel last Wednesday. We are there every Wednesday, rain or shine, working on something or another for Mrs. Roberts, one of our best customers. I do believe that new dresses, like new people, are a kind of hobby with her. Although she quickly loses interest, lets one enthusiasm go when she picks up another. Well, well, you have been so helpful, Mr. Porter, we will certainly return this handkerchief to its proper owner. I always say, ‘a stitch in time saves nine.’ Isn’t that right, Mr. Porter?”

With a look that Millie could only characterize as knowing, her sister nodded to Mr. Porter and moved back to hover around Mrs. Porter, who was looking confused by the interchange. Mr. Porter didn’t look confused; he looked stunned, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. He then glanced her way, and Millie shook her head gently and gave him a sad smile. She saw a blush stain his cheeks.

He said gruffly, “Miss Minnie, Miss Millie, your servant. My dear, I must be off. Have a good day,” and then he bowed sharply and left the room.

####

Millie sighed as she looked at Lydia Porter, radiant with happiness, holding her newborn son in her arms. Young master Augustus, named after his grandfather, looked smug. Thinking perhaps of his grandfather’s carriage business that he would no doubt inherit at some future date, carriages being one of the products that would continue to be built for as long as people needed to be conveyed from one place to another. Mr. Porter stood behind his wife’s chair, his hand resting on her shoulder, his grey eyes wary as her sister Minnie approached.

They had come to deliver a new dress for Mrs. Porter to wear at the christening. They had designed the bodice so that it would not require tight corseting, yet would still hide the fact that Mrs. Porter had not yet returned to her previous tiny waist.

“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Porter, we are so pleased to see you all looking in such good health,” Millie’s sister said, moving up to the young mother to take a closer look at the child. “What a big boy he is. Oh, my, I do believe he is going to have his mother’s lovely brown eyes. And his wee little hands. So cunning. We were honored that you asked us to attend the christening, and if you would accept this gown and cap we have made for the occasion, we would be truly grateful.”

Minnie turned to Millie, who walked over to the couple, unwrapping tissue to reveal the white cotton gown, covered with Ayrshire lace and delicately embroidered flowers, which they had been working on in their spare moments for most of Mrs. Porter’s confinement. Minnie picked up and handed the mother a small white embroidered cap that Millie had made to go with the christening gown. “Mrs. Porter, I know how you appreciate my sister’s needlework. See how she has worked the young man’s initials in amongst the flowers so cleverly.”

Mrs. Porter beamed and then said, “Miss Minnie and Miss Millie, you shouldn’t have. Such exquisite work! I will treasure this, and I can assure you that every child I have will get their chance to wear it. Look, Richard, she has worked his initials into the cap, right there among the flowers.”

Millie was glad to see the fond look on Richard Porter’s face when his wife mentioned future children and the polite way he examined the cap that looked so tiny in his large hands. He returned the cap to his wife and indicated that she and her sister move a little away from his wife, who was busy trying the cap on the Master Augustus, who managed to look even more self-satisfied.

“Miss Minnie and Millie,” Mr. Porter said, taking an envelope out of the inner pocket of his suit coat, “I just wanted to settle our accounts today. You will notice that there is a little extra; my token of appreciation for all the support you have given my wife during these last difficult months. I know that she sorely felt the lack of company at the end of her confinement, and your visits cheered her up so. The last time I saw you, I was struck by your suggestion that I spend more time with my wife. I wanted to assure you that I took your words to heart and that I have changed my ways.”

With a graceful bow he handed the envelope over to Minnie, who smiled up at him and said, “That is excellent. You know I gave Mr. Andrew Roberts a bit of a scold as well when I returned his missing handkerchief. I was pleased to hear he was planning to take his charming wife on an extended European tour. We spinsters are used to fending for ourselves, but you gentlemen must be careful of your wives. Heavens, no need to chatter on about all of this. As I always say, “The least said, the soonest mended.”

The End

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

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.

In this blog I have frequently posted about these issues, the importance of branding, the possibilities of blog tours, and the use of tags and categories, all describing what I have learned about how to sell books as an indie author. The bottom line of all those posts has been about how an author can get potential readers to discover their books, when they don’t have the same opportunities available to traditionally published authors (publishing house book reps, catalogs, big name reviewers, organized books tours, shelf space in book stores, etc.).

Today I am going to look into the newest tool that Amazon has given indie authors — the free promotion through KDP Select.

Some background. The pros and cons of offering a book for free has been the matter of a debate that has ranged between the argument that offering books for free devalues literature to the contrasting belief that an author should offer their books for free as a matter of philosophical principle.

What I am talking about here, though, is offering books for free as a short-term promotional strategy.

Very good arguments have been made that offering free copies of a book is a way of getting your book noticed, getting people to read it and decide they want to buy your other books, and — my particular obsession – using it as a way to improve your rank in the Amazon browsing categories so that is was more likely to be discovered by readers.

However, until recently, if you published your book through the Kindle Direct Platform (KDP) and wanted to get the 70% royalty, you had to sell your book at a price between $2.99 and $9.99. You could decide to sell the book at a lower price, (reverting to 35% royalty rate), but you could not set a price of $0.

The only way, as an indie author, you could do this was to set your price to $0 on other sites (e.g., Smashwords and its affiliates, your own website), and if Amazon’s bots found it, they would discount your price to $0 (and of course you would stop getting any royalties.) Authors did do this, but it has a big down-side: you have no control over when or how long your book will be available for free on Amazon. It could take months for the Amazon bots to reduce your Amazon price (it took a year for Amazon to lower the price of my short story), and when you want to end the free promotion it might take weeks or months for the Amazon price to go back to normal. This means this is not a useful strategy to use for a targeted promotion — for the launch of a new book for example.

Then came the Kindle Owners Lending Library Program (“KDP Select”). When first instituted, it was very limited. It was only available to traditional publishers and it only gave readers who were members of Amazon Prime the opportunity to “borrow” one book a month for free. (Amazon Prime is a subscription service that gives members other benefits such as free shipping, free downloads of games and videos for the Kindle Fire, etc.). There was a good deal of controversy over whether or not publishers had agreed to allow their books to be borrowed for free, what if any compensation authors would get, and, again, whether offering books for free was a good thing.

However, the breakthrough for indie authors came on December 8, 2011 when Amazon offered authors who publish through KDP the opportunity to participate in KDP Select. There were caveats. They had to sign up for a three-month commitment and stop selling their enrolled books through any other venue. The carrot? Those authors who signed up would get a share of a pot of money and they would get five free promotional days in the three-month period. This was and is controversial — particularly the exclusivity required — and it left unanswered questions about how the pot of money would be divided up and whether the bulk of the money would go to just a few big names in indie publishing. What interested me, however, was the free promotional days.

Last Christmas the sales of my one historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, were fantastic, and I sold 4600 books on Kindle in December and January, and another 1400 in February. This Christmas I had a second book, Uneasy Spirits, available. It had been selling well since I published it in October. I put my short story into Kindle Select as a harmless experiment, but decided to delay putting either of my novels into the program until I saw how well they sold during the days after Christmas on both Kindle and Barnes and Noble.

Something unexpected happened the week before Christmas, however. The historical mystery category on Kindle, which had been artificially small because of a glitch in the KDP program (I had been posting about this for nearly a year and a half), expanded from having only around 81 books to suddenly having over 1600 (I assume the glitch was finally fixed.) Almost overnight, both of my historical mysteries, which had been hovering in the top five best selling books in this category, slipped down in ranking to the teens and twenties. The top ranks were filled with books that had been traditionally published, had been out longer than mine, or were classics. (I did find it amusing that someone — probably a publishing house techie — had put such classics as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Conon Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books, and Dorothy Sayers’ Cloud of Witness in this category.)

In addition, during the week after Christmas, a number of other authors began to report that their post-Christmas sales were not living up to their expectations compared to last year. The greater number of ebooks available (estimates are that the number of ebooks doubled in the last year), the greater numbers of ebooks offered at 99 cents, and new patterns of consumption by the newest Kindle owners, were all offered as reasons for this. The best discussion I have read so far on this subject has come in Kristine Rusch’s post, “The Holiday Surprise.”

To make a long story short, it seemed clear to me that, although the market for ebooks had increased considerably with all the ereaders sold for Christmas, I was facing a great deal more competition for those new consumers.  I needed to do something to make my book stand out so it was easier to discover.

So, when I got back home after visiting my family for the holidays, I put my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, into the KDP Select program and then created a two-day promotion for it by making it available for free on December 30 and 31. I hoped that this would make Maids more visible and that there would be an echo effect that would send Uneasy Spirits up the ranks so it would also become easier to discover. Finally, I hoped that, after the promotion was over, both books would stay highly ranked (at least in the top ten) in the historical mystery category long enough to generate a greater number of sales than they had been generating. In my experience, a high rank can beget better sales, which in turn will sustain the high rank.

I tweeted and announced the promotion on Facebook and Goodreads and on a few lists and forums on the day before the promotion and then on the two days of the free offer. (I only have about 500 Facebook and Twitter followers — not great, but not terrible.) And I crossed my fingers.

The day before I started my free promotion, both Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits were bouncing around in the 10,000 to 15,000 rank in the overall Kindle Store. While I know that some authors would kill for those rankings, I was used to being around 4,000 to 5,000. Both books were also bouncing between 18-24 in the historical mystery category. I was selling about 15 of each title a day.

At the end of the first day of free promotion, 6500 people had downloaded Maids of Misfortune, it was #67 on the Kindle store free book list, #1 on the free historical mystery list, and #1 on the free women’s sleuth mystery list. And Uneasy Spirits had risen to #12 on the historical mystery bestseller list, selling 26 copies that day.

At the end of the second day, over 14,000 people had downloaded Maids of Misfortune, it was #35 on the Kindle free book list, still number #1 on the historical mystery and women’s sleuth lists, and even #3 on the free mystery list. Uneasy Spirits had risen to the #8 position on the historical mystery bestseller list, and had sold 54 copies that day.

I clearly had reached my goal of making Maids of Misfortune more visible! The morning after the promotion ended, Uneasy Spirits still was in the #8 spot and Maids of Misfortune was in the #3 position. Clearly it was now easier for readers to discover both books with these high rankings. I am not the only author to report this sort of success, see this post and comments on the Passive Voice.

What remains to be seen is how long this bump in visibility will last, what kind of sales it will produce, and — if there is an increase in sales — how much will it be and how long will it last?

I will report on the results in Part Two of this post. So stay tuned.

Apart from the marketing angle, I couldn’t be more thrilled personally by the success of this free promotion. As anyone who has read my posts (for example my last one assessing my second year as an indie author) knows, I was already quite pleased by the fact that I had sold 15,000 copies of Maids of Misfortune in the two years the book has been out. Now, the number of people who have the book has doubled.

Do I mind they didn’t pay for it? Not a whit. Even if the sales I hope for down the road don’t materialize, for me it has never been strictly about the money. When I wrote as a 17 year old in my high school yearbook that I wanted to do with my future is “write happy books” (I know, I know, not a particularly felicitous turn of phrase!) I meant that I wanted to write books that gave readers the kind of enjoyment that authors like Georgette Heyer gave me, (Laurie King calls it frivolous fiction, and I love that phrase). Being an indie author has given me the opportunity to do just that. And today, Amazon’s KDP Select just gave me the opportunity to tickle the fancy of a whole lot more people. How grand and what a wonderful way to start the New Year!

]]> http://mlouisalocke.com/2012/01/02/kdp-select-free-promotion-discoverability-experiment-part-one/feed/ 10 loulocke http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/12/21/my-second-year-as-an-indie-author-even-sweeter-success/ http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/12/21/my-second-year-as-an-indie-author-even-sweeter-success/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:01:28 +0000 loulocke http://mlouisalocke.com/?p=796 Continue reading →]]> In December 2010, a year after I had self-published my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I wrote a piece evaluating my experience in my first year as an indie author. This December it seemed fitting to see how my second year as an indie author compared to the first.

First the Numbers:

Last December, I wrote that “…there is every reason for me to think that I will do even better next year than I did this year with Maids of Misfortune…” and I was entirely right.

In my first year as a self-published author (December 2009-November 2010), I sold 2693 books, most of them $2.99 ebooks, and I made slightly more than $5000.  In my second year (December 2010-November 2011) I sold an additional 12,245 copies of Maids of Misfortune and 943 copies of my second book, Uneasy Spirits, which came out mid October. This means I sold a total of 13,188 books (again most as ebooks) and made over $25,000, before taxes.

From everything I have read on other authors’ posts and on the Kindle forums and boards, my success has been duplicated or surpassed by a significant number of indie authors this past year.

What do I expect to happen next year?

Earlier this year I began to wonder if there would be a natural saturation point for Maids of Misfortune, (all the people who would be interested in a cozy mystery set in 1879 San Francisco would have already bought the book), and if the trend of more sales each month that I saw in 2010 would be reversed in 2011.

I think that the answer to this is a qualified yes. My sales of Maids have steadily fallen since the peak I achieved last Dec-Jan-Feb (when I averaged 2000 books sold a month). For example, I sold only 376 Maids this November.  This decline in sales may also reflect both the shift to 99 cent pricing in ebooks in 2011 and the increased number of new and backlist books that traditional publishers and self-publishers put into ebook format. The competition in my niche has increased and many of these books were priced lower than my $2.99 price point. (I experimented for a month with putting the book at 99 cents, but the increase in sales didn’t justify the loss in revenue).

However, I do expect the sale of Maids will go up again, at least temporarily, as millions of new Kindle owners start downloading books Christmas morning. In fact, already this month I have seen a slight uptick in the average number of Maids of Misfortune I am selling per day (people who couldn’t wait for Christmas?).

In addition, I now have 2 books on sale. While I don’t know if all the people who read Maids will go on to read the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, nor do I know how many people will be interested in reading Uneasy Spirits as a stand alone, having the second book has certainly boosted my overall sales.  In September, before Uneasy was out, I sold a total of 589 books. Then, in November, when Uneasy had been out a full month, I sold a total of 957 books (31 books a day).

So, with Amazon reporting Kindle sales of a million a week this month and two books on the market, I have every expectation that next year my sales will equal, if not surpass, this year’s sales.

Total Job Satisfaction:

Being an indie author is not all about sales (or even about the control you have over your own fate). This past year I experienced some significant but indirect by-products of being a self-published author that have given me a good deal of personal satisfaction.

First, I was able to become a full-time writer. In 2010, I was still teaching part-time and learning how to market and I was only able to write a short story, Dandy Detects. In 2011, I determined I was making enough money so I could retire completely from my teaching position. Consequently I had the time write and publish the sequel, Uneasy Spirits. Since it had taken me 20 years from first draft to publication to get out my first book, being able to complete an entire book in less than a year was enormously satisfying.

Second, I began to pass on my knowledge to other aspiring indie authors. In 2010 I was mostly learning from others, reading their how-to books, reading their blogs, and trying out their tips. In 2011 I began to notice my blog posts were getting more comments and were being linked to more often. I was asked to do guest posts. I began to offer advice and guidance to authors who were either just starting out or trying to adapt to the new opportunities of ebook and self-publishing. This January I am presenting at the SDSU Writers Conference, where I will be one of two “professionals” (among nearly 40 agents and editors) talking about self-publishing and selling ebooks. In April I will be the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Southern California Writers Association. While not every person I have helped this year has achieved as many sales as I have, some have, and others have actually begun to surpass me. As a life long teacher, I have found helping out other authors to be almost as satisfying as writing and selling my own books.

Third, I have become part of community of authors. While my participation in various online groups like MurderMustAdvertise, CrimeThruTime, and All Mystery News introduced me to a number of authors, it has been my membership in the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative (HFAC) that has been most rewarding. The HFAC, formed at the end of 2010 by a group of historical fiction authors who came together to market their ebooks, invited me to join in the Fall of 2010. During 2011, I have served on the HFAC Board of Directors, and, in this capacity, I have participated in the recruitment of other members, the building of a sophisticated website, and the testing of strategies for marketing both the website and other members’ books. Along the way I have learned new technical skills and developed new marketing ideas, but, more importantly, I have met a wonderful group of writers.

One of the reasons I had been hesitant to retire from my job as a college professor was my fear of losing the sense of community I had with my colleagues: people I served on committees with, talked with casually in the hallways, people who over twenty years had become my friends. But membership in the HFAC has fulfilled my need for community, both through shared endeavors and frequent internet conversations. And, as a result, many of these members have become my friends. Friends I have never seen face-to-face, friends who live in the four corners of the globe, but friends who share my love of history and writing.

In Conclusion:

My second year as an indie author, whether measured in books sold, words written, help and advice given, or friendships made, has been more successful than I would have ever dreamed possible.  And once again, I have every expectation that next year will be even better.

Wishing you all a Happy Holiday!

M. Louisa Locke

]]> http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/12/21/my-second-year-as-an-indie-author-even-sweeter-success/feed/ 5 loulocke http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/12/10/my-alternative-to-blog-tours-two-week-vacations/ http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/12/10/my-alternative-to-blog-tours-two-week-vacations/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 21:55:07 +0000 loulocke http://mlouisalocke.com/?p=791 Continue reading →]]> One of the reasons I was hesitant go the traditional route in publishing was the horror stories I had heard about book tours, from my friends who were published authors and from authors’ blogs. (You know, the headaches of organizing tours, the long car rides, bad hotels, bad food, and hard-to-find venues, and the embarrassing book signings where no one shows up or those who show don’t buy any books.)

However, when I decided to self-publish, which meant that my books would be sold primarily as ebooks, on line, I discovered that a new method of marketing had emerged, called the Virtual Book Tour, or the Blog Tour. I first read about this in an informative piece on Publetariat in 2009 called What’s A Book Blog Tour?  In the past few years, doing a blog tour when you launch your book has become almost as de rigueur for an indie author as the old-fashioned book tour for the traditionally published.

The typical blog tour seems to be about 30 days, with authors signing up to guest post on a different blog each day. Some variations include swapping posts, or getting a whole group of bloggers to agree to post on each other’s blogs during that month. This can be a complex enterprise and there are now companies that will organize blog tours for authors, just as there are companies that organize the real book tours. It tickled me to discover that the well-respected book marketer, Dana Lynn Smith, just launched her new book, Virtual Book Tour Magic, with a Virtual Book Tour.

Yet, when I launched my first historical novel, Maids of Misfortune, I didn’t do a blog tour. The truth is, my first ever blog post, Why I Decided to Self-Publish: The Long and Winding Road, came 2 weeks after the publication of the book, so I was in no position to start doing guest posts on other blogs. I told myself I would do one for the launch of the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, which came out October 9, 2011.

I am now confessing that, despite my good intentions, I didn’t even try to organize a blog tour for the launch of this book. I was too busy getting the book out early enough so it would have a chance to garner enough reviews and sales to push it up the rankings in the historical mystery category on Amazon before the Christmas holidays when all the new little Kindles will be under the tree. Of course, the fact that I am a very slow blogger, seldom writing more than two posts a month, may have had something to do with my decision (smile.)

For a nano second I felt like a failure, until I realized I had inadvertently signed up for an alternative to the classic blog tour. Instead of a whirl-wind trip through the blogosphere, I had planned to do a series of very pleasant two-week vacations where I got to hang out on three separate blogs.

My first visit in mid November was to a delightful blog that the historical mystery author Susanne Alleyn has set up where she interviews the fictional sleuths in historical mysteries. In my case this resulted in an “Interview with Mrs. Annie Fuller, Boarding House Keeper and Clairvoyant,” which was great fun to do. I got to give away a few books, make new friends, and even introduce a few of my friends to this blog.

My second visit came two weeks later, when I visited author Jenny Milchman’s blog, Suspense Your Disbelief, to tell about my “Made it Moment.” Here I was asked, as a guest, to tell about some seminal turning points in my journey in self-publishing. As readers of my own blog will tell you, I just love to talk about this subject. What was most rewarding was the number of people who dropped by to comment on my story, and I had such a good time that I plan on visiting again soon.

Finally, I am currently on another two week vacation, this time to Suzanne Adair’s blog, where I was able to slip into my history professor persona and talk about “Women and 19^th Century Spiritualism,” as part of Adair’s Relevant History Series. During this visit I get to talk about Victoria Woodhull, a real-life 19^th Century celebrity who ran for the U. S. presidency, as well as reveal why I chose to give my fictional protagonist the job of clairvoyant. Again, this visit has been a very pleasant one, where I am getting to meet new people, so do come and hang out with me awhile.

What does this all mean? For me, a slow blogger, this experience has revealed an alternative to the more hectic, difficult to organize, blog tour. I am not a good traveler in the real world. I don’t like trips where you have too many stops, where you are in a new place every day. I like to go somewhere and stay for awhile. I guess that works better for me in the virtual world as well.

Does it sell as many books? Probably not. But I have discovered that for me to be successful in marketing I must be doing something I enjoy, and, despite my failure to do a traditional blog tour, my new book Uneasy Spirits is selling well. It is consistently one of the top five best-selling historical mysteries in the Kindle store, and in the past few days it has started showing up in the top 20 bestselling historical mysteries on Amazon.

So, what about the rest of you? How do you like doing blog tours? How successful have they been for you? Have you discovered alternatives that work better?

I would love to know.

]]> http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/12/10/my-alternative-to-blog-tours-two-week-vacations/feed/ 4 loulocke http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/11/24/on-my-journey-in-self-publishing-my-gratitude-for-the-kindness-of-strangers/ http://mlouisalocke.com/2011/11/24/on-my-journey-in-self-publishing-my-gratitude-for-the-kindness-of-strangers/#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:35:21 +0000 loulocke http://mlouisalocke.com/?p=777 Continue reading →]]> J.A. Konrath has often repeated the list of what you need to become a successful self-published author: “Write good books, with good descriptions, good formatting, and good cover art, sell them cheap, and keep at it until you get lucky.” I would also add, however, you need the kindness of strangers.

I have a lifetime of experience of being supported by people I know, whose friendship, sympathy, advice, and encouragement has sustained me in my life and work. However, in the past two years that I have been involved in self-publishing, I have been overwhelmed by the way previously unknown strangers have helped me, and today I wanted to give thanks to them.

First there were the bloggers. When I started on the journey to self-publishing, my writer friends were still firmly enmeshed in traditional publishing. That was their experience, and most of them thought that was their future.  This meant that I had to turn to strangers, bloggers I had never heard of before, like Morris Rosenthal’s with his How to Publish A Book, Jane Friedman’s There Are No Rules, Mick Rooney’s POD, Self-Publishing, and Independent Publishing, Joanne Penn’s Creative Penn, Henry Baum’s Self-Publishing Review, and J.A. Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. I know how difficult it is to write consistently, clearly, and frequently about a subject that is so complicated, varied, controversial, and changeable. Yet these bloggers were doing exactly this when I started to look into self-publishing in 2009. It was these bloggers that convinced me that there were other options besides traditional or “vanity publishing.” These were the bloggers who gave me the confidence to choose self-publishing and the information I needed to become successful, and I thank them.

However, among their ranks there were bloggers who reached out and directly helped me in ways I can never repay. When April Hamilton made me a regular contributor to her wonderful and comprehensive site Publetariat this provided a platform for my ideas that I would have never have reached on my own, helping me build a following.

Joel Friedlander is another blogger who has gone out of his way to promote my blog, featuring my posts on his blog the Book Designer and tweeting about them. Whenever my back posts get a spike in hits, I can often count on Joel to have been the one who has caused this.

Next came Steven Windwalker, the champion of all things Kindle, who responded to some of my comments on Kindle Nation Daily with the offer to publish a Kindle Short (this was in the days before this cost anything), which then sent my first book, Maids of Misfortune, rocketing up the Kindle historical mystery best-seller list, where it remained for nearly a year, greatly facilitating that book’s success. I would like to specifically thank these three.

I know that on the surface the examples above might not seem like kindness, but just people making good social media connections for their own benefit. Yet what has struck me consistently about these and other members of the self-publishing community is that they seem genuinely interested in both sharing information with and promoting other self-published authors. I am a very small fish (in terms of length of time in self-publishing, books published, and breadth of my social media following) in a vast ocean, yet I have never been made to feel that way. Instead, I have been made to feel welcome, and the kindness of these strangers has been a large part of the reason I have enjoyed the process of self-publishing so much.

Then there are the writers. I have a writers group, who long ago stopped being strangers and became friends. But the group I am talking about is the growing number of writers who I have come to know in the past two years of self-publishing. I mean the strangers who I have never met face-to-face, who live scattered around the globe, who I may have encountered only briefly when they comment on my blog or participate in the same thread of discussion as I do on a list or blog. They have made me feel a part of a community of writers.

In particular I would like to mention my fellow members of the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative. This group of historical fiction authors who came together in 2010 to promote their ebooks has given me so much in the past year of my membership. These are men and women I had never met before, and they have edited, read, and reviewed my books, shared their knowledge of marketing, and spent enormous amounts of time working on building the membership and creating a wonderful website. In the process a number of them have moved from strangers to friends. For this I give special thanks.

Finally there are the readers. Strangers who write unsolicited thoughtful reviews on places like Amazon or Goodreads, write me emails telling me how much they enjoyed my work, and comment on my facebook page. Small acts of kindnesses that are more precious to me as a beginning writer than all the sales. Some of these people even offered to be beta readers for my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, giving me wise advice, close edits, and the confidence to get the book out before Christmas. Without every stranger who was willing to take chance on buying a book by an unknown author, I would have no success, and I thank them all.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

 M. Louisa Locke

Jane and Mark Kalmes have done a lovely Podcast Review of Maids of Misfortune and then followed up with an Podcast Interview with me that discusses the writing of this book and my experiences with self-publishing.

The review can be heard at http://www.indiebookpodcast.com/2011/11/02/mystery-maids-of-misfortune/

The interview comes in the second half of a  podcast found at  http://www.indiebookpodcast.com/2011/11/14/thriller-this-is-life/

Hope you find these podcasts of interest.

M. Louisa

For the purpose of this post I am focusing on ebooks on Amazon, in part because that is where I have the most experience, but also because Amazon is definitely ahead of the other ebook stores in its sophisticated approaches to helping readers find books. My understanding of these issues is based on my experience as a self-published author using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Finally, as with much of the publishing process, there is still a lot of conflicting information about how Amazon categories, keywords, and tags work, so some of what I say is more of an educated guess than documented fact.

First some definitions:

Categories: When a book is uploaded into KDP, an author (and, I assume, a traditional publisher) has the opportunity to choose two categories. It used to be that Amazon allowed you to choose five categories, which is why some books have more Kindle Store categories listed at the bottom of their product page. When you, as author, choose a category for your book, you are actually choosing a browsing-path for readers. That browsing-path/category consists of a hierarchy of sub-categories and your book is available for readers to discover under each of the parts of that hierarchy. For example, in the case of my most recent book, Uneasy Spirits, one of the two browsing-path/categories I chose was:

Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical 

If you browse for Uneasy Spirits in the Kindle store, you will find it in under all four parts of the hierarchy:

Fiction
Fiction–Mystery&Thriller
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical  

Note that each time a reader goes one step further down the hierarchical browsing-path, there are fewer books to browse. For example, as I write this, here are the numbers of books in each of these four areas:

Fiction [324,671]
Fiction–Mystery&Thriller [43,629]
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery [9,700]
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical   [73]

By carefully choosing my category, I make it much more likely that a reader will find my book, since the pool of books is smaller with each step down the path.

The “categories” Amazon offers when you upload your book to KDP are apparently BISAC categories, a book industry standard for subject headings.  What is confusing is that the “browsing path” that Amazon generates from your choice is not always the same as the BISAC category you chose. Amazon apparently converts the BISAC categories that you pick into the Amazon browsing-path categories and subcategories that show up in the Kindle store — and the two are not always the same.

To make matters more confusing and frustrating, this conversion process does not always work accurately. You can read more about this on my blog post, “Working Amazon” and on Suzanne Adair’s blog post, which provides a hilarious description of the trouble she had with getting her wonderful new Revolutionary War thriller, Regulated for Murder, in the right category. (Suzanne is a fellow HFAC author.) To complicate issues further, the browsing categories for books and ebooks are not identical, and Amazon creates browsing categories like “newly released” and “best sellers” and “editors’ pick” — some of which are separate from the browsing-path/categories and some of which are available as additional qualifiers to the browsing-paths. Are you lost yet?

Keywords: When you publish your book with KDP, you can choose seven “key-words” in addition to the two categories. These are really key phrases since they can be more than one word. For example I used terms like “Victorian Mystery” and “cozy mystery.” These “key-words” are apparently used by Amazon in its own search engine — along with words in your title and subtitle and product description. This may seem very straightforward, until you get to the next definition—tags.

Tags: These are another kind of key-word or key phrase. They are listed on a book’s product page under the heading “Tag this product” and were designed by Amazon to help customers describe and find products using key words called “tags.” Readers can add tags to a product page and can indicate that an existing tag is useful. It used to be that the “key-words” that authors chose at the time of uploading a book to KDP were automatically displayed as “tags” on the book’s product page, but this evidently no longer happens. Of course, after publication, an author can add tags to a product page just like readers can.

There is contradictory information about how Amazon uses “tags” and “key-words” in its own main search engine, but I believe that “key-words” that the author has assigned to a book are searchable in Kindle store, the but “tags” are not.  For example, I did not add the word “clairvoyant” as a “key-word” when I uploaded my book Maids of Misfortune to KDP, but it has been added by customers as a tag on the Maids product page. So, if I go to the Kindle bookstore on the Kindle device (or the main search box on the Amazon website) and search for “clairvoyant,” Maids of Misfortune does not show up in the 100 books that are listed in the search result. So, apparently, Amazon does not include the customer-created “tags” in its Kindle bookstore search (available on the Kindle device) or in the standard search box on the Amazon website.

“Tags” are available for a different kind of searching, though. The “tags” themselves are clickable links. Readers can click on any “Tag” on a product page and find other books that have the same “tag.”  For example, if, on the Maids of Misfortune product page, I click on the tag “clairvoyant” (which 19 people checked as useful), the result is 152 books, including Maids of Misfortune. Also, in the “Tag” section of the product page there is a special search box labeled “Search Products Tagged with.”  By entering terms in that special search box, you are searching only “tags.”  Searching “clairvoyant” using the special tag search box finds those same 152 books. Note that “tags” are typed in by users so you will see misspelled tags!

Why Should an Author Care?

Categories, keywords, and tags can be used to help readers find your books, and these are methods that are generally not available to authors of print books that are sold in brick and mortar stores. As authors of ebooks, we need to learn how readers find books in estores like the Kindle store and use the tools that are available to us to maximize our sales.

When you sell a book to a traditional publisher, who then distributes that book to bookstores, you, as author, really don’t have much to say about how readers find your books. You hope that the bookstores will shelve your book on the right shelf (and that they have separate shelves for your genre) and you hope your publisher can convince the seller (or pay them) to put your book in special places like “newly released” tables, or “best seller” tables, or under “staff recommendations.” Beyond that, there isn’t much authors can do besides cultivating booksellers at conventions and through book signings, hoping this will convince them to feature their books — a time-consuming and expensive proposition. (Although I know one author who always turned their books and books of their friends so that the full cover showed whenever they found them in a bookstore!)

However, self-published authors, by their choice of categories, keywords, and tags, can increase the chances that a reader will find their books in an ebook store. I am going to discuss two strategies an author can use to achieve that end.

The first strategy is to choose a category (browsing path) that ends up with a small number of books at the end of the path.

For example, I could have chosen as one of my two categories, the browsing path of Fiction—Historical Fiction for my newest historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, which is most certainly a work of historical fiction. However, this would have placed this book in a final pool of over 15,000 books in the Kindle store. Maybe some day I will be such a successful author that I can compete in a pool of that size, but right now as an indie author without a big promotional campaign behind me it would be easy for me to get lost in that pool. Few people are going to scroll down through hundreds if not thousands of books to find mine.

So, I chose to place both of my books, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits in the Fiction—Mystery&Thrillers—Mystery—Historical category/browsing-path. Not only does this more accurately define the sub-genre of these two books, but there are fewer than 100 books in this subcategory. It took me six months to reach the top ten books in that subcategory with my first book, Maids of Misfortune, but once I did, my sales went up exponentially. In May 2010, I sold 55 copies of Maids in Kindle and in August, after the book hit the top 10 in this category, I sold 249.

I did a fair number of things to help Maids of Misfortune achieve that top ten status (price changes, reviews, short story, etc.) but I could have done all those things and it still wouldn’t have gotten me into the top 10 in the category of Historical Fiction—it is just too big a pool of books. With the publication of Uneasy Spirits, I had the benefit of now being a better known author, with an already existing fan base, which explains why it took only 24 hours for this book to hit the top ten in the historical mystery subcategory. Even so, as an independent author without a whole publicity machine behind me, I still would not have achieved this within the “Historical Fiction” category.

This strategy (getting your book into the smallest possible pool of books) is also why I chose to put Uneasy Spirits into the browsing path Fiction—Romance—Romantic Suspense (4,800), rather than into the Historical Fiction (15,000 books) or the Historical Romance (8,800 books) subcategories. Again, this was in part because this subcategory accurately describes the book, but also because the pool of books in this subcategory is smaller than in these other two. This is also why, when I had 5 choices of categories when I uploaded Maids of Misfortune, I chose History—United States—state and local—west as one browsing path. I not only figured that people looking for books about the western US would be interested in my book, based as it was on solid historical research, but this was also a pool of less than 500 books, and Maids of Misfortune has been at the top of this list for most of the last year.

The second strategy is to use key-words and tags that will help users find my book in a small pool of potential books.

Let’s take the example of a work of historical fiction that is not a mystery and that, therefore, doesn’t have a lot of options apart from being placed in the historical fiction category with those 15,000 other books in the Kindle store. Here the application of key-words (or tags for people who are doing a tag search) is the appropriate strategy for narrowing the pool to a reasonable level, giving your book a better chance to compete. For example, when I was giving advice to a fellow HFAC author, Elisabeth Storrs, who has written a well-reviewed work of historical fiction, The Wedding Shroud, which has not yet found the readership that it deserves, I investigated what key words she could use.

I discovered that a user who is browsing in the historical fiction subcategory and looking for books about Rome will narrow that list from 15,000 books to 221 books if they put in the search term “Rome.” If they search for “Ancient Rome” they will find a list of just 88 books. And, if they searched for “Early Rome” while browsing in the historical fiction subcategory, they would find just two books.

My recommendation was that she use “Rome” and “Ancient Rome” for two of her seven “key-words” because readers using this browse-then-search strategy would be more likely to find her book in these smaller lists of books that match. This would enable her to compete more successfully in an otherwise broad category. And, of course, these terms more accurately describe the historical fiction she has written!

However, I did not recommend the use of “Early Rome” (although it equally described the period of the book) because it produced such a small pool of books that readers probably wouldn’t return to that search. The other two key-words bring up enough books to make them search terms that readers would be likely to use the next time they were ready to look for a new book.

These two strategies can boost your sales in two additional ways.

First, they will help you get on an Amazon “Top 100 Best Seller List.” Second, they will help ensure that people who find your book will have found books similar to yours — and that improves the chances of your book showing up on the Amazon “Customers who bought this book also bought” recommendation system.

The best-seller lists: Amazon has a computer algorithm that updates the “best-seller lists” in each category and subcategory every hour. While secret, the algorithm evidently takes into consideration “all-time sales, as well as recent sales that are weighted more heavily than older sales…” according to an Amazon spokesperson quoted in this article. Needless to say, no matter how good your sales are in a given hour, or day, your chances of getting into a top 100 best-sellers list and staying there are pretty slim if you are competing against 15,000 other books.

If, however, you are in a group like Horror-Dark Fantasy (227 books), or Science Fiction—Series (169 books), or Fantasy—Authurian (27 books), or Mystery—Historical (73 books), your chances of being ranked in the top 100 in these categories increases (or becomes 100%). Since many customers start their searches for book in the best-seller lists, this heightens your visibility and cachet and increases your sales, which in turn helps you stay on and move up the best seller lists. The increase in sales may, in time, help your book rise in the other categories or key-word searches where your book is listed. Very briefly after Christmas of last year, when my sales were high (700 books in the 3 days after December 25), I actually made the top 100 of the category Mystery—Women sleuths (6,222 books). Heady days!

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: Amazon uses an algorithm that identifies other books that people who have bought your book have bought. You have to have a certain number of sales for this to kick in (Uneasy Spirits had enough Kindle sales so this section appeared within a day—my print edition came out a week later and has had fewer sales, so its product page does not yet have this feature.) In addition, it appears that for a book to appear in this list, a certain number of your customers must have bought the book. For example, nearly 15,000 people have bought Maids of Misfortune, yet there are only 100 books that show up in the “Customers Who Bought” list, and I know that those 15,000 people bought more than 100 books altogether. It also appears that there might be some other limitations; I haven’t seen more than 100 “also-bought” books listed, even for popular books like Amanda Hocking’s ebooks.

You’ll want to do more than just sell enough books to trigger this feature, however. You’ll want to make sure that the books that show up are similar to your book – and you can do that by using the right categories, key-words, and tags. For example, I could certainly have put my books into the category of Romance—Historical, but then the books that would show up in this “Customer who Bought” list would be dominated by books that tend to put the romance before the history and have explicit sexual themes. While there is nothing wrong with these books, a customer who bought my book, based on the expectation it would be like these historical romances, might be very disappointed by the rather chaste nature of my protagonists’ relationship.

Since my books are in the Mystery—Historical category, it is not surprising that the list of books in the “Customer who Bought” feature is filled with historical fiction (usually in the Victorian era) and mysteries. This adds to the chance that the customer who is checking out my book will think, “Hey, I read those books and liked them, I will probably like this one.” And if they buy my book, there is less chance they will be disappointed —  thinking, “Where was the sex?” — and give my book a bad review. And finally, it will also mean that my book will show up on “customers who bought” lists for books that are in my sub-genre. You can imagine how pleased I was when I discovered that Maids of Misfortune had started showing up on a “customers who bought” list for Victoria Thompson’s Gaslight Mystery Series! That meant my book was being seen by exactly the readership I want to attract.

In Summary:

As an author, you need to carefully choose categories and key-words when you publish and add your own “tags” after publishing. You need to take into consideration not only what best describes your books but also what will maximize the chances that a reader who is browsing through the Kindle store will find your books. You also want to make sure that readers who find your book are the ones who would be most likely to buy it and enjoy it. Careful uses of categories and key-words and tags can also increase your chance of getting on one of the best-seller lists and showing up on one of the “Customers who bought” lists, which in turn will help boost your sales. Carelessness in using these strategies can condemn even the best work to the backwaters of the Kindle store —  undiscovered, unbought, and unread — and that would be a shame.

“The feast of All Saints, which was ushered in Friday evening by the old-fashioned games of ‘All Hallows’ E’en, was yesterday celebrated in the Catholic and Episcopal Churches.” San Francisco Chronicle, 1879

 “It’s barmbrack cake. Beatrice has baked a ring in it, and tradition has it that the girl who gets the slice with the ring will marry within the year.” Annie Fuller, Uneasy Spirits.

The first quote above is from a real person, who was reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle about real events. The second quote is by Annie Fuller, a fictional person and my protagonist, from my newly published historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, which is set in 1879 San Francisco. As we approach Halloween, 2011, I thought it would be fitting to discuss how I used factual data from the past to provide historical context for a work of fiction.

As I was plotting Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I knew that I wanted the story to start only a few months after the first book ended, which was the last week of August, 1879. I also knew the basic plot was going to revolve around Annie Fuller trying to expose the shenanigans of a trance medium who claimed to commune with the spirits of the dead. So, placing the action of Uneasy Spirits around October 31 and the celebration of Halloween seemed a fairly obvious choice.

I got a calendar for October 1879 (one of the wonders of the internet is being able to find this sort of thing so easily), made a list of the main scenes I had outlined for the book, and then decided to make Halloween (which was a Friday that year) the day when several of the semi-climatic scenes in the story occurred. I then literally counted back from October 31, and determined that the opening scenes of the book should happen about 3 weeks from this date. In the final version of the book, the first chapter opens on October 11.

But then I was faced with a real problem. Despite being a professional historian and having written a dissertation that focused primarily on women who worked in San Francisco in 1880, I had no clue how people in 1879 San Francisco would have celebrated Halloween. Did they trick or treat? Wear costumes? Have Jack o Lanterns? I had some vague idea that young boys in small towns went around tipping over outhouses on this night in “earlier days,” but beyond that, I didn’t even know if anyone would actually celebrate this night at all, much less how, in a larger city like San Francisco.

A little research was in order. The first clue came with the mention in the San Francisco Chronicle of “old-fashioned games of All Hallows’ E’en.” I now knew to look for what someone in 1879 would consider “old fashioned games,” which led me to several internet sites that reported on Halloween, including an article in Harpers Magazine for 1886. In addition there were a good number of contemporary articles detailing the history of this holiday.

All these articles agreed that, while Halloween’s roots can be traced back to a number of ancient cultures and religious beliefs, in the 19^th century it was the Celtic peoples, particularly the Irish, who had the strongest influence on the development of Halloween as a night of celebration. It was the Irish who seemed responsible for turning October 31 into a night of fun and games, and Irish immigrants brought their traditions with them to America, profoundly influencing how this country celebrated this holiday.

I couldn’t have been more pleased with this information because the Irish were an enormously important ethnic group in San Francisco in 1879. They not only made up a substantial percentage of the working class of the city, they also were represented among some of the economic and political leaders of San Francisco (men like James Flood and William O’Brian, the Silver Kings, and Frank McCoppin, a former mayor.)

Not coincidentally, two of the most important people in Annie Fuller’s life are her cook, Beatrice O’Rourke, and her maid-of-all-work, Kathleen Hennessey, both Irish. Once I knew about the prominence of parties as the way to celebrate Halloween in the late 19^th century, it was easy to decide that Annie Fuller would host a party at the boarding house she owned, with Beatrice and Kathleen inviting their friends and family. A perfect setting for one of the main climatic scenes of the book.

And what fun that party was to write. There were indeed jack-o’lanterns at that time (in Ireland the tradition was to use turnips!), and I was able to work a pumpkin into the plot in what I thought was an unusual way. In addition, there were games like “snap the apple,” dancing, and special foods, like the barmbrack cake, which was one of several elements of Halloween activities that revolved around trying to foretell the romantic futures of participants.

I now had a way to provide a new and different setting in which my characters could interact. The detail I had gleaned from my research would make my portrayal of the past more authentic. And finally I was able to leaven what could have been a series of very “heavy” scenes with a light, humorous scene, which is one of my goals as a writer. And I learned something, which was much fun for me as I hope it is for the reader.

Oh, and click here to find a recipe for that barmbrack cake, in case you want to make it for Halloween! 

Sources:

Lynne Olver, Halloween and Day of the Dead Food Traditions, 2005   http://www.foodtimeline.org/halloween.html

Bridget Haggerty, An Irish Halloween Part 1 and 2
 http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/acalend/Halloween1.html

William Sharp, “Halloween: A Threefold Chronicle,” Harper’s Magazine, Vol 73, 1886
http://bit.ly/newKG3 

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