Like many new authors, Caroline Peckham‘s first series, a YA fantasy adventure, The Rise of Isaac, didn’t sell as well as she’d hoped. For her second series, she did a lot of market research and switched to a more popular type of YA fantasy, vampires in a contemporary paranormal setting. She also adopted some more effective marketing tactics and had a successful launch last fall. She’s since released a second “V Games” novel and is editing a third, and the series continues to do well, months after the initial launch.
Here are a few of the details that we discussed on the show:
Some of the challenges of marketing young adult fiction as a self-published author.
What made Caroline decide to switch from one type of YA fantasy to another.
Concerns about finding readers when one’s target audience doesn’t have credit cards and doesn’t shop on Amazon.
Why Caroline has had more success targeting adult audiences who happen to enjoy young adult fiction.
Whether vampires are too crowded a niche to get into or there are still opportunities.
How Caroline first found reviewers by seeking out readers in her genre who had reviewed books similar to hers.
Finding reviewers on Goodreads and then moving them over to an easily manageable Facebook group.
Why Caroline makes her ARC reviewer Facebook group public rather than private and lets people who find her through the platform in to get free review copies.
Using the Werble App to create animations that can be used on Facebook to help with promotions.
Pricing a Book 1 at 99 cents or 99p in KU to keep it higher in the rankings and bring in readers for the rest of the full-priced series.
Which social media platforms Caroline uses and why she didn’t do much with Wattpad, despite it being a popular destination for younger readers.
Caroline’s experiments with Facebook advertising and how she found out that the clicks she got weren’t converting that well.
Whether vampire stories seem to do better in the US or the UK.
Sorry, all! We ran into tech issues this week, and unfortunately our interview with Damon from Bookfunnel wasn’t recorded. We are hoping we can reschedule with him. In the meantime, please check out the Bookfunnel blog for lots of tips on giving away/selling exclusive content to your readers.
This week, we talked to LitRPG author Jayden Hunter about this up-and-coming genre. Several debut authors have jumped into the Top 500 overall on Amazon with their launches, and Jayden hit the Top 1000 with his novel Nagant Wars before unpublishing it to revise it and put out a new copy. We asked him about the expectations and tropes of the genre and how one goes about marketing it.
Here are a few more details of what we covered:
What is LitRPG, anyway?
Some of the rules of the genre, such as that you need to make up your own MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game like World of Warcraft) as an integral setting for the story.
How the main character is expected to play the game and progress, as a video game avatar might with experience points and levels.
Some of the tropes of the genre, such as having a main character who has a rough life but who gets to develop into a powerful player in the game.
Mingling the game story with a contemporary or futuristic (often dystopian) setting.
Some common mistakes writers are making when tackling the genre.
When it comes to marketing, focusing on finding one’s readers and connecting with them before worrying about building a platform or a mailing list.
Figuring out how to place a book on Amazon when there’s not a LitRPG category yet (most are currently putting their books under cyberpunk).
Can the audience for LitRPG expand beyond this particular niche? Can gaming-focused novels appeal to science fiction and fantasy readers as a whole?
We talked among ourselves tonight, discussing a lot of the news and tips Jo brought back from Book Expo America. He went to panels on Facebook marketing/reader engagement and talked to the Bookbub people about what it takes to get listed and about some of the best practices. He also picked up some links to cool resources that you may want to check out.
Here’s a run-down of his notes:
Using Facebook to the best effect:
·Facebook will always do its best to decrease the impact of non-paid advertising.
·If you want to get the most bang for your buck, use whatever Facebook’s pet toy is. They will reward you with greater reach for free. Until they don’t.
·Currently their toy is video. A 15-30 second video will get a much bigger push than post with any other media, or no media at all. (Don’t try to link to a video on another platform; you need to upload the video directly to Facebook to get their loving.)
· A site you can use to create videos without a lot of tech savviness is Animoto
·You can put a link at the end of the video, to actually get some use out of it.
·Also, ask questions, because engagement amplifies reach.
·And if you’re going to pursue something pursue shares. They expand your reach by the most.
Book Bub:
·I talked to BookBub and asked for advice on how to make your book more likely to be chosen.
·As expected, there’s a strong emphasis on a good cover and strong reviews.
· The role that price point (and how much of a discount you offer) plays
· Whether being in KDP Select puts you at a disadvantage to books available on a wide variety of platforms.
·The reviews are by are the most important. A book with a great cover and a dozen decent reviews will probably lose to a book with a mediocre cover and fifty great reviews.
·However, even if your book is flawless, with a perfect cover and hundreds of reviews, you might not get picked.
·This is either because they were fully booked for the available period, or because your book is in a genre that has historically gotten poor click through.
·In neither case are you doomed, they CAN still promo your book, but you’ll have to be persistent. New openings occur every day, and there’s always the chance your non-favored genre book will have no suitable competition for a given period.
·They also gave advice on how best to promote your books depending on your goals.
Shooting for a Best Seller:
*Discount the most popular book (if you’ve got one with over 100 reviews, use that).
* Discount to lowest price possible. (99 cents, since free won’t count)
Marketing a Series
* Discount first book.
* Free if possible.
* Discount for three or more days.
*Link to series in back matter.
Products that caught Jo’s interest:
·Note: We aren’t being paid to mention these folks; Jo just thought they were interesting and potentially useful.
Slicebooks is a service that lets you chop your book into chapters for distribution purposes. More useful for nonfiction, because users can create mix and match derivative books by taking an assortment of chapters from different books and share the result.
YaBeam is a service that uses the iBeacon feature of iOS to advertise to people by causing a notification when they walk by a YaBeam beacon. IE stick one at the door of a book store where you are doing a signing to offer passers by a heads-up that you’re in there and a free chapter to entice them.
Think of this as choose your own adventure, or DVD extras for books. It uses the epub 3 enhancements to allow you to link to alternate scenes, fan art, etc that tie in to the current portion of a text. And of course, you can SELL this additional content.
This is an ebook formatting software for Mac that creates BEAUTIFUL template based ebooks in epub 2, epub 3, and mobi. Super user friendly, built in previews, etc. Like Scrivener if it was focused on publishing a book rather than writing it. (Though you can write in it too.)