A series of experiments in publishing

For July, I am conducting a number of small experiments in publishing. The first experiment involves Twitter. Over the course of the last few months I was tweeting about two or three product links per day in addition to links about writing, publishing, the industry, and other related materials. For the month of July I have not been tweeting product links to my books. Most tweets were for Amazon Kindle books. Amazon is the biggie, and we all want to do well there. But it might be wise to stop chasing that best-seller dream and focus on building a core readership. If one thousand loyal fans bought one $2.99 book per year, that would be $20,000 in revenue. It really is just that simple.

Audience.

I still crack the odd joke and tweet items of interest to my followers, and cross-post on a number of other platforms. With multiple accounts and some duplication, I probably only have three or four thousand unique followers, with friends and followers on all platforms adding up to less than 10,000 overall; e.g. on Facebook I have 1,492 friends.

The rationale is simple. Various sources have suggested that over-promotion is self-defeating and an audience becomes saturated over time. Often the solution is to continually build an audience. But the reach isn’t the only measure. Often there is no measurement of ‘quality’ in terms of an individual audience member. It’s also disproportionate, in that it might take a hundred new followers to generate ten real, qualified page views, and a hundred ‘good’ page views to sell one book. At this rate, it’s not a good idea to start buying followers. We might only make two bucks a book. Name recognition doesn’t take very long, not in any size of audience. That’s taken care of with a few repetitions.

Measuring results.

The way to measure the results of the experiment is very simple: compare July sales to months when we did tweet.

My second experiment involves Smashwords’ July month-long sale. All of my full-length novels are marked down 25 %, but I’m not tweeting or doing any other promotion except blog posts such as this one in particular. Page views are not high on SW for my titles, although I have given away about thirty copies of ‘Core Values,’ which is free on all my sales platforms right now, and it will be for some time to come.

So we’ll see just how we do without promoting a sale on Smashwords.

A third experiment involves the notion that we simply have to write more and publish more and this alone sort of promotes us effectively. I’m not denying it, and I’m not confirming it. What I am doing is trying to see if it works in my own case. That’s because each and every author has a different personality, and a different audience or readership, and a different set of goals both financial and artistic for the work.

Publishing shorts on an experimental basis.

For this experiment, we take stories out of our folder, polish them up, get a free, copyright-free, royalty-free marketing image, an ISBN number, which are free here in Canada, and take some time to make an eye-catching ‘cover’ for it. Then we publish on Lulu, Amazon, Smashwords, and through Smashwords it will ultimately go into all the other distribution channels such as iTunes, B & N, Kobo, Diesel, etc. I’ll worry about Google books another time.

The rationale for this experiment is simple. I see other people, virtually all of whom are using pen-names of one sort or another, and they’re publishing all sorts of shorts on different sales platforms. Yes, Lawrence Block does it too, and everyone knows him. But I cannot and should not compare myself to Lawrence Block for just that reason.

Here is my new short story, 'The Jesus Christ Show,' available from Amazon, Lulu and Smashwords.

Why are we making the experiment?

I would like to know what sort of results unknown (or unidentified) authors are getting. I will publish two or three short stories in the next few weeks. This leads to another experiment: publish on Amazon or any platform at an appropriate time of day.

Method.

Basically, I plan on getting up on Friday morning and publishing a story. On Amazon, it takes about twelve hours to go live. Obviously you need to have everything all ready to go, including pic and blurb and relevant metadata. By anticipating this delay, I might get a story to pop up in horror, or science-fiction, (or whatever category,) during prime time Friday night. It will be interesting to see if this has any effect on the short story in question. Also, will this have any effect on overall sales, surely the only ones that matter to someone with a number of titles?

Shalako Publishing was conceived in February, 2010. It has involved a learning curve from day one, and that learning curve is continuous. You can’t learn anything if there is nothing there to be learned. So what do we do in an absence of facts?

We experiment, and find out for ourselves. And that way, we don’t have take anyone’s word for anything, besides, what might be a good answer for them, might not be such a good answer for us.

We are all different, and so are our needs, our gifts and our aspirations for our work. If you were wondering about the photo above, it relates to active blogging, and it shows our results. Clearly, on this one issue, we are doing something right. Can it be done better? When I come up with a idea, I will try to do just that.

Louis Bertrand Shalako

Comments are always welcome.

For more informative articles on writing and publishing, please visit my blog here: http://shalakopublishing.blogspot.com

Louis is on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/louis-bertrand-shalako/id412091968?mt=11

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/louisbertrandshalako
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Louis-Bertrand-Shalako/e/B005GHIF86

A BOWL OF PLUMS

                                               A BOWL OF PLUMS  
                          Painting by Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, 1728;
                                     Poem by Salvatore Buttaci, 1994


Clarisse was not at the market this morning.
What made me think she would be?                                      
How many mornings have I walked the dog,
battled with him at the leash 
because it was not his usual route,
a neighborhood so unfamiliar as to frighten him?

Like the dog we are all habit's creatures:
we do what we know how, what we've done,
what we expect of ourselves, don't we?
It is when we find ourselves stranded
from our routines, in unfamiliar neighborhoods,
that we become fearful, our neat lives disheveled,
the schedule we follow suddenly failing us.

Clarisse was not at the market again this morning.
Pulling on his leash as if I had unintentionally strayed,
Roi strained his terrier head in the direction of home,
but I ignore him. Instead, I look from merchant to merchant:
the flower stand where you would bring home 
magenta freesias or pink canterbury bells 
so the flowers, you said, would have a good home;

the fish peddler, the wine dealer, the dairyman--
I cannot find Clarisse anywhere.
Still, each morning now for weeks, I return here,
afraid to lose hope, a slave to the old life.
  
One day she disappeared.
I repeat those words like a punish lesson
over and over again.
One day she disappeared.
One day she disappeared.


"I am not happy anymore," she said that morning
in a voice so sad it did not sound her own.
"Who is? I replied, making light of what I saw as light.
"Life's a struggle, isn't it?" I asked.  

Clarisse was not at the market this morning.
Roi is impatient: he has taken now to growling.
She may be gone but he is hungry, anxious to go home
where his food and water dishes will be filled for him
as they are filled every day. 
It is the way Roi expects things to be done.


At the fruit and vegetable stand visions flood my head.
Here where Clarisse and I gave our own names to the
apple, the orange, the potato--we gave them all names!
"A pound of Eves," she'd say for the apples,
"Two pounds of" this and that, which made us laugh
when the old woman asked us to point to what we wanted.

"Can I help you, Monsieur?" she asks me now.
"Yes, I am looking for Clarisse," I say to her.
"Clarisse?" she asks, reaching for the blackberries.
"These, Monsieur?  Clarisse. Let me see," she says,
then with her toothless smile she laughs.
"Of course, of course! These plums. These Clarisse!"
I do not have the heart to walk away
so I pay her for the bag of plums she hands to me.
"And your lady?" she asks. 
"Will she be baking you a plum pie today?"

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