Guest Blogger: Ian Hocking

A Slow Boat to St Petersburg

As is becoming increasingly clear, the rumours of my retirement from writing have been exaggerated - but at least I was the person doing the exaggerment.

In last May's thrilling episode, which followed a reasonably engaging episode from March, I had published the follow up to my first book, Déjà Vu: A Technothriller, on the Amazon Kindle. The follow up was called Flashback: A Book, You Idiot.

I kid. It's just Flashback. It has a lovely cover from Emma Barnes at Snow Books and some lovely words, most of which were added at the last minute by my editor, Clare Christian.

Your friend and mine, Scott, left me a message at our usual dead drop - behind the third cervical vertebra of the diplodocus in the foyer of the Natural History Museum. In somewhat breathless prose, he asked that I furnish readers with the latest episode in my ebook adventure before they actually explode with curiosity.

It is to this end, readership, that I present the following picture.

I have two books out, Déjà Vu and Flashback. Déjà Vu was first published by the UKA Press in 2005, where it was edited by Aliya Whiteley (now an author with Pan Macmillan). A few years later, I made substantial changes to it and my agent, John Jarrold, tried to find a larger publisher, but no cigar. I bought a stock photo image for the cover and published Déjà Vu myself for the Kindle in March of this year.

I'll give you the following data not to increase the size of my head - which already reminds people of a Thunderbird puppet (bald villain with huge eyebrows) - but to illustrate what potential readers see when looking at my books. Overall, for UK and US reviews, Déjà Vu has 34, 19 of which are five-star, with a mean rating of 4.5 stars. Flashback has 10, with a mean of 4.4 stars. Both books were in the UK Kindle scifi chart top twenty for most of June and the beginning of July.

In the UK, Déjà Vu sold 259 copies in March, 896 in April, 852 in May, 701 in June, and 360 (as of the 15th) in July. In the USA, it sold 61, 42, 59, 34 and 20 in the same months. (I'll leave out the German Kindle store figures for brevity; they sold 50 copies across all months for both books, possibly because of my barbarous treatment of German.)

Flashback, the sequel, has been selling since May. In the UK, it sold 103 copies in May, 311 in June, and 234 in July (as of the 15th).

The total sold for both books is 4,022.

The net royalty calculations are complicated because Déjà Vu sold briefly for £1.71 before I dropped the price to 70p. Likewise, Flashback was going at £2.85 (or so) before coming down to 70p. Incidentally, Amazon arrives at its selling price in a way that is a little mysterious, at least to me. There was a period during June where I'd set the price for Flashback at 70p and yet it was selling for 86p; meanwhile, Déjà Vu, which was also set by me at 70p, was indeed selling at 70p.

Overall, the royalties for Déjà Vu (at 35% per unit) are $72.42 in the US and £730.35 in the UK. Flashback is $80.40 and £517.94. Total income for the US is $152.82 and for the UK £1,248.28.

Note that Flashback's royalties are much higher in comparison to its sales because it was initially selling at £2.85 per unit (at 75% royalty). I brought it down to 70p (at 35%) on the 25th of June because (i) it was selling so few copies that it was falling off the Amazon scifi chart and (ii) it had earned out the cost of the cover and the editing.

Along the way, I've done some advertising. Because I am a very lazy boy (my Rural Science teacher's words, not mine) these adverts are limited to GoodReads.com and KindleBoards.com. Both of these are cheap, cheerful and effective - I've seen temporary increases of 10% or so following a spike in clicks through.

As an aside, I've also been selling the books via Smashwords and iBooks. Virtually zero for each.

So, where do I fall on the internationally-recognised Scale of Smugness? Well, I'm at the Stephen Fry end. I now have 4,032 readers and several of these people want to read the next in the Saskia Brandt series. To that end, I'll be sailing into St Petersburg during August to check out Tsarskoye Selo for book three, The Amber Rooms. If the book were still in a folder on my hard drive, I probably wouldn't bother.

Anything I've not covered here? Ask me in the comments, particularly if you're an author thinking about going the Kindle route.

Comments

[Kat]

I love it when authors post stats like these -- helps all of us to maintain perspective and see what the real numbers are like.

A tip for you: when you include book covers in posts like these (I love the cover for Déjà Vu, btw!) it helps to make the image itself a direct link to your Kindle sales page at Amazon for that book. Right now, it's just an image popup that goes nowhere, and that's a shame. I believe people are time-efficient (aka lazy) and will always click on the biggest thing first, rather than the exact text link.

And a question: have you done anything in particular to get people to write Kindle reviews, like a giveaway contest, for example, or are they all completely organic?

[Ian]

Hi Kat

Thanks for the tip about making the picture clickable - I'm sure Scott's reading :-)

> And a question: have you done anything in particular to get people to write Kindle reviews, like a giveaway contest, for example, or are they all completely organic?

That's a great point, and something I should have mentioned. When a person finishes a book on a Kindle (i.e. pages all the way to the end), the Kindle asks them if they'd like to give the book a star rating. Now, there are two things about this star rating: (1) It is does not get included in the star rating you see on the Kindle store itself; (2) It is really aimed at sending a tweet about the book, usually of the form "I've just finished reading [book title] and gave [number] stars. [hyperlink to book]" - a person needs to have entered their Twitter credentials on the Kindle to do this, however. I set up a saved search in my Twitter client for "Ian Hocking", and whenever someone tweeted that they'd finished Déjà Vu (either using this Kindle-based automatic method) or their own, I would @reply them and introduce myself, asking if they'd do me a favour and post a proper review to the Kindle store. Lots of people did that, and I had some email back and forth with them too, which doesn't hurt - hopefully, they don't see me as a faceless individual but just a person who writes books on his own.

Cheers
Ian

[Philippa Davies]

Thanks Ian - truly useful insights. Am about to start self publishing, with Clare Christian editing too. ( and am also psychologist and author). Just wondered about how easy it was to design your own Kindle cover? Any pitfalls to especially avoid please?

I like your Deja Vu cover a lot, by the way.

[Ian]

HI Philippa

Best of luck - you've already got a very good editor.

Designing the cover for Déjà Vu took me several attempts (if you're brave, look for the first edition on Amazon - it looks awful). The current cover came about because I was fed up with the previous ones, and I'd also thought that the cover (particularly for a new author) is just about the main thing in a person's buying decision. I was very lucky to find a nice image on a stock photo site. I imported it into Keynote and created the cover from there.

However, I'm aware that I was lucky for Déjà Vu, so I hired Emma Barnes of Snowbooks to do the cover for the second book. She did a great job.

Best wishes
Ian

[Maria]

Ian,

Great information, thanks for posting. I find it interesting that UK authors seem to sell better in the UK and US authors in the US (I see lots of posts complaining about how hard it is to break into the "other" market.)

I think you're selling fabulously well--congrats. The first book has been languishing on my TBR pile; I had best hurry up and read it before I'm the last fan who hasn't!

Maria

[Ian]

Hi Maria

Thanks for commenting - I hope you're keeping well.

The difference between the US and the UK is almost certainly the market size and the impact that has on the Amazon chart. Right now, my biggest marketing pal is that chart. I'm not really 'advertising' the book as such - certainly not enough to explain the number of downloads each day - so it must be that prospective go to the science fiction chart, see the nice cover, then the star rating and price, and buy the book(s). I'm not sure how I could ever get noticed in the US Kindle store (I've submitted the books to several places for review, but their leads times are often over a year, so it'll take a while for those to spread any word).

Best wishes
Ian

[Maria]

Ian,

Yes, I agree-- the "he bought, she bought" seems to help along with the various "new releases" and "best in sci/fi" and so on.

I've had trouble getting reader reviews in the UK (not that getting any review is easy). I think it helps to have at least 5 Amazon reviews and a handful elsewhere (goodreads, blogs and the like.) Reviews take a lot of time--especially if no one has ever heard of you! My series is just starting to get reader reviews in the UK and the first book has been out over a year. I was able to send out "ARCs" -- early copies of the last book, so that helped, but again, it was only US reviewers. Some of it is just the networking and where people post!

At any rate, good info and thanks again for sharing.

Maria

[Ian]

I'm surprised you've had trouble in the UK, Maria, it being a smaller market. But I did have one or two early boosts (the book itself had been published traditionally in 2005, so I had 'official' reviews that I could put into the description). Lots of people bought my book after it was mentioned on Ken MacLeod's blog, for instance. [http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2011/03/deja-vu-all-over-again.html]