Tracking Sales Data When Self-Publishing

by @AuthorAmberLin

We have another guest talking about tracking sales today, Amber Lin! I asked her for input, since she does so much self-publishing and would have a different perspective. Take it away, Amber. :-)

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Wheeee, thanks for having me! I’m Amber Lin, and I write sexy romance. This is my first time on Word Whores. (Be gentle, please…)

The topic of the week is tracking numbers. I read the previous posts and there are thoughtful posts about whether to track Amazon ranking and what it means in relation to success, along with practical tips. I wanted to throw in some thoughts from the books I self-published.

Because you get a lot of tracking data when self-publishing! Yay! 

Unless you don’t like tracking data, in which case you are free to ignore… In fact, mostly I do ignore it.

I could take a snapshot of my sales of each book at the end of the day and chart them and know sales trends by day of the week or even time of day. There are self-published authors who do that. But I don’t have that kind of fortitude.

Looking at sales and thinking about sales bleeds into my writing. Then when I think how a scene should go or how a character should act, I’m thinking of how it might impact my bottom line—instead of thinking about how I want the story to go. How it needs to go.

So, each month I just accept direct deposits into my account, and either clap or groan at the amount. Or shrug. This is similar to how I react to checks from my publishers, really.

But every few months I take all that data I’ve been ignoring and build a sandcastle.

First I create a nice level place to work. This used to be an Excel spreadsheet with months and books. Now I use TrackerBox, a desktop software.

Then I add wet sand. The report from Amazon KDP. From Nook Press. From Smashwords. From All Romance. From Kobo. ALL THAT SAND. And I pack it together really tight and form little spires on top. That’s important, the spires.

And when my castle is done I have fancy graphs telling me all kinds of things. Like yeah, it may seem like that one book did the best, and maybe the reviews tell me that, but they’re wrong. Actually this other book sold way better. If I’m wavering between which book to write next, this can help. If I want to decide which book to promote through various means, this can help. 

And trends! What even are trends…

Okay, the sandcastle doesn’t tell me that.

But I can look at the shape of it and feel more confident I know what’s going on. What does a 2,000 sales rank mean to my career? What does $350 on a royalty statement mean? It means very little, as single data points tend to mean very little, as small as a grain of sand.

I need to dust off my hands, stand up, and look at the whole if I want to really understand how I’m doing.

Can any authors with self-published books weigh in on how you handle it? (And again, thanks for having me! You can find out more about me and my books here.)

Amazon Ranking: An Expose!!!

by @CarolynCrane

Our Saturday Word Whore Veronica Scott is under the weather - hope you feel better soon, V! - so Word Whore alum Carolyn Crane is pitching in to share her insightful, meticulous and professionally mature system for tracking sales.

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Hi!! It’s former Word Whore Carolyn here, filling in. The subject this week is one near and dear to my heart. I’m not obsessed! Here, a reprise of an old post from my first book, then updated November 5, 2o12.

It's so rewarding when you look at the way you were, say, two years ago, and see how far you have come!! 

Mind Games, the first in my Disillusionists trilogy, came out in 2010.  OMG, I was obsessed with my Amazon rankings!  You can tell from this old post, below.

The Oddshots blog, where this originally appeared, is sadly now gone. So I'm reprising it here.

The sad state of Carolyn Crane in 2010...

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The Amazon sales ranking: An expose!

Before my book came out, I noticed that many other authors talk about the Amazon ranking, and how on release weeks, they would check it a lot to see where their book was. I was sure I would be different because:

1. I don’t tend to buy books from Amazon, and naturally, I assume most people behave as I do.

2. I’ve always heard those ranking don’t mean all that much. 

3. I’m interested in whether people actually enjoy the book—not sales, or a silly number.

So! Mind Games was released last week, and what did debut author Carolyn Crane do? Check the Amazon rankings!

I started off not doing it much, but since other authors talk about it, I figured if they check it, there must be something to it. Because Carolyn Crane is all about the peer pressure. So I started checking it more and more. Also, maybe nobody knows what it means, but the little number kept changing! Something was happening. Somebody needed to monitor it.

What is the number all about? I did some high level research.

I typed “how do Amazon rankings work” into Google and quickly discovered that the rumors are true: nobody outside Amazon really understands it. (Though some say it becomes more meaningful when you get around 1000, or into the best-seller territory of 100 or lower.) But nobody really knows what it’s based on. Sales are part of it, but there are other factors. What are these other factors you ask?

Nobody knows. Many people work hard to try to figure these other factors out. They write articles with phrases like: “the sales ranking has to be dissected dynamically” and “figures are applied to the algorithm during the calculation.”

Essentially, these people are reverse engineering the rankings, just the way scientists tried to reverse engineer Arnold Schwarzenegger in the time between Terminators #1 & #2. And we know how that ended.

But, back to me. The thing is, these little numbers would change, and it became weirdly entrancing. Once, my number hit the 3,000s! I felt happy! Like the book was doing well! Other times, my number would backslide and I would be a sad bear.

In their FAQs, Amazon is suspiciously vague

Amazon says “the lower the number, the higher the sales” and that the rank “reflects recent and historical sales.” Which, if you sort of think about it, are somewhat contradictory. And why not just put a number that grows every time somebody buys a book? Like a fun little meter that says, hey! Another book was bought! No. Instead, they rank your book against ALL other books on the planet in the most mysterious way possible. As if authors aren’t insecure enough. 

 

Clearly something is going on. It has all the hallmarks of an experiment— something akin to the Dharma Initiative on the TV show LOST! What is the purpose of Amazon’s Dharma Initiative-type ranking? How does it work? I have theories.

Theory #1: It is a sinister ego-crushing experiment

In this scenario, the number is based only vaguely on sales, but mostly on how many times an author checks the number.

As you may or may not know, one of the classic techniques of breaking down a person’s self esteem is to praise them lavishly (You’re 3,200!) and then withdraw that praise (248,560. Loser!) And then, when the author goes crawling back: (Hey! You’re okay! 11,350!). And the more you check it, the more it messes with your head.

Theory #2: The ranking is simply a carrot and stick trick to drive author traffic

Maybe Amazon is simply interested in driving traffic. I mean, isn’t that what big websites ultimately want? Think about it: authors are huge purchasers of books; maybe the ranking number is calibrated to get authors to visit more. In this theory, Amazon creates a believable range upon your release, that is, they “seed” your book the way a sports team might be seeded, and then Amazon’s artificially intelligent system goes to work, learning what sort of fluctuation brings you back, and what sort of fluctuation disheartens you so much, you stop checking for a day, and it modulates until it has you checking at an optimal frequency.

Theory #3: A funny joke for Amazon insiders

What if the number is way more random than anybody imagines? What if, inside Amazon’s headquarters, there is this giant monkey cage, and computer keyboards are positioned around the cage. And the monkeys are like, eeee eee ee! punching the keyboards, and everybody who walks by laughs, because they know that people write articles about the number, and authors check it incessantly, and it’s just monkeys playing! And it’s this thing that boosts employee morale. A joke they are all in on that creates togetherness.

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UPDATE, November 5, 2012:

Oh, how sad to look back at those days when I was so hung up on a number to the  point of weaving paranoid theories about Amazon.  

This kind of behavior appalls me now. It not what being a  true writer, a true artist, is all about! I'm glad I'm over it. 

For example, my cross-genre PNR/spy/suspense romance, MR. REAL, just released this last week, and do I have it as an item on the toolbar? Actually, I don't have it on my toolbar! 

I'll admit to checking  the Mr. Real Amazon page now and then, but it's simple curiosity. A few years has put everything in perspective.

My other pen name, Annika Martin, writer of torrid bank robber erotica, recently got on a bestseller list as part of this 99-cent erotica bestsellers sale. 

Did I freak out? No. A rank is just a number. It means nothing! Artistic quality is what should count.  

Not to boast, but I think these past two years have allowed me to grow as a person, and truly put things in perspective. 

Hey! Thanks for visiting. If this post helps even one other writer see what a waste of time these obsessions with Amazon rank are, or gives them hope they they can change and get over their fixation on a number, I will rest easy tonight. Have a great week, people.

The Most Difficult Part of the Story: Beginning, Middle or End?

The Most Difficult Part of the Story: Beginning, Middle or End?

With our Monday Word-Whore gallivanting around England, we have a special guest for you today.

Lucy A. Snyder has writing chops that span a broad spectrum of genre styles. She is the author of the Jessie Shimmer urban fantasy series, which includes Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and Orchid Carousals. She won a Bram Stoker Award in 2010 for her poetry collection Chimeric Machines, and she won another Stoker earlier this year for her short story “Magdala Amygdala”. Her book Sparks and Shadows won the 2008 Editor's Choice Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Collection, and her humor collection Installing Linux on a Dead Badger was released in 2007.


Hello again! For those of you participating in NaNoWriMo, I hope your projects are going well. It can be tough keeping up a novel-in-a-month pace, particularly if your narrative engine gets stuck in the mud and you have a hard time figuring out how to pull it free.

Which leads me to the question James posed as my topic for this post: what’s the most difficult part of a story? The beginning, middle, or end?

The answer to that question will vary widely depending on the writer and his or her particular fiction project. Most of us start writing a story or novel for a particular reason: we had a compelling nightmare, or we overheard a bit of dialog, or we read saw a story on the news and wondered “What if that had gone differently?” The numbers of things that can inspire a writer are practically endless; ideas are all around us.  But from those germinal ideas, characters or scenes will start forming in our minds, and soon our fingers are on the pen or keyboard and we’re writing.

The problem is, rarely do we have a story come to us fully formed. Bits are usually missing. Important bits.

Do you have an idea for a sympathetic, fun protagonist and an equally fun but rather twisted antagonist, and you know that they start fighting over a stolen relic in an abandoned warehouse, but … you’re not sure what needs to happen after that? Or why? In this situation, your ending might confound you.

Conversely, do you have an idea for a dramatic, epic final battle between the hero and the antagonist … but no idea how they first encountered each other? Or, possibly worse, you know exactly how the two first tangled but they’ve been enemies for decades and they have an immense amount of backstory together … and now you just don’t know where this particular story starts, exactly?  Chances are good the beginning of your story will be a bit of a problem.

But maybe you know exactly how their current conflict began. You know how the fight in the warehouse will go and what will happen in that epic final battle … but all the narrative that has to happen in chapters 3 to 9 is a bit hazy to you, and perhaps you’re even a little bored waiting to get to the good stuff? Your novel’s middle might sag like an undercooked pumpkin pie.

So, all three aspects of a narrative can be difficult … but if you pinned me down and told me I had to choose one, I’d pick the beginning of a story as being the most important challenge a writer has to overcome.

Why? First and foremost, if you don’t find a good point of entry for your story, you might never get it written! When I was a newbie writer in my late teens and early twenties, I would start a story based on a single cool idea, and I’d get a page or two in and completely run out of gas. Dozens of dried-up story sprouts littered my hard drive. It was all a learning experience, of course; the most important thing I learned is that I’m a plotter and not a pantser. I don’t outline, but I do need to let a story roll around in my mind for a while and grow a bit before I try to put it on paper. I need to make myself a narrative map; if something more interesting comes along while I’m writing I’ll happily embrace the new destination, but for me to have no destination in mind at all? My narrative engine will stall out in the driveway.

Furthermore, if you start sending around a manuscript with a solid middle and a fabulous ending but a weak opening, the chances are good that the editor or agent won’t keep reading long enough to discover your story’s strengths. In my experience, you have to grab the reader’s attention right away -- not just in the first page but the first paragraph. Ideally, you should hook the reader with your first sentence.

The kind of story you’re writing will dictate what that first page and first paragraph should look like; for every rule put forth in fiction, you can find a writer who managed to break that rule to wonderful effect.

Having said that, if you’re having trouble with your openings, there are a few things you can try:

• Try to begin at the beginning. This seems obvious, doesn’t it? But often, it isn’t, and figuring it out requires thinking hard about your overall story. What’s the event that sets everything else in motion? That’s a really good place to start your tale.
• If you’re writing a short story, try to start it as close to the climax of your story as you possibly can. This may take some planning. Obviously, you’ll need to have an ending in mind. You can fill in back story later, as needed.
• Avoid starting a story or novel with lots of static description. Unless you write truly beautiful prose, this is hard to pull off well.
• Try to start with an action sequence or some kind of conflict like an argument.
• If your story or novel isn’t action-oriented, start with something unusual or genuinely interesting happening. More than one editor has told me, “If the story starts with an ordinary person doing or talking about something boring, I don’t keep reading.”

And that last point leads to my own advice to myself when I find myself getting stuck in the middle or near the end of a manuscript. I ask myself, “What would be cool or interesting here? What unexpected thing could happen here to mix this up? Given the characters I’ve created and their wants and desires, what interesting, unexpected thing would make the most sense here?” And then I try to make that happen.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful. Keep writing, keep finishing, and get your work out there!

Setting: How Much Is Too Much?

With our Monday Word-Whore gallivanting around England, we have a special guest for you today.

Lucy Snyder has writing chops that spans a broad spectrum of genre styles. She is the author of the urban fantasy Spellbent series including: Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, as well as Orchid Carousals featuring characters from the Spellbent series. She won a Bram Stoker Award in 2010 for her poetry collection Chimeric Machines. Her Sparks and Shadows won the 2008 Editor's Choice Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Collection, and her humor collection  How to Install Linux on a Dead Badger was released in 2007.

Setting: How Much Is Too Much?
by Lucy A. Snyder

Hi everyone! I hope everybody had a fabulous Halloween last week!

Knowing that I think a whole lot about world building, James asked me to guest blog this week and talk a little bit about setting. More specifically, he asked me to talk about when a writer has focused too much on his or her setting.

There’s no cut-and-dried answer to the question of “How much setting is too much?” It depends on the type of story you’re telling. If you’re writing a lean, action-packed thriller set in the present day, all you need are a few vivid strokes and you’re off to the races:

The location was one of those sad old mansions in Bel Air. Ostentatious, but had seen better days. Money is so fickle here in L.A. and a big old house is like an aging mistress with a plastic surgery fetish. It’s more economical to just buy a cheap, flashy new one than keep on renovating the old one. Otherwise, you wind up renting the place out for porn shoots just to break even on the roofing bills.

There was a pair of twisted pomegranate trees guarding the open gate and the ground beneath them was gory with broken crimson fruit that crunched and splattered under the wheels of my little black Mini. Pulling into the wide circular driveway, I kept expecting to spot Norma Desmond burying her pet chimpanzee in the overgrown rose garden. I felt better once I saw Sam’s red ‘84 Corvette with its vanity plates that read HAMRXXX. It was parked near a massive wooden door that looked like it ought to open into a medieval Spanish dungeon. 

– from Money Shot by Christa Faust

Faust’s descriptions are vivid and as compact as the narrator’s Mini. She doesn’t spend time describing the shingles, or the windowpanes; she lets the reader fill in the rest because she knows most all of us have seen plenty of Hollywood mansions in movies or on TV. Instead, she focuses on the pomegranates, and in doing so creates great gruesomely foreboding imagery. Even better, she continues to build the narrator’s character as she describes the seedy world she works in.

But in some stories and novels, the setting is so crucial that it functionally serves as another character in the narrative. It could be a fantasy wonderland, an ancient house full of secrets, an astonishing spaceship, or a grim alien dystopia. In these cases, the reader will want to see the setting unfold before them and spend more time in compelling descriptions of structures and landscapes.

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an, idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
             – from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin spends more words describing a wall than Faust spends describing an entire mansion. But she’s not merely describing the wall, is she? She’s using it to convey the isolated culture the characters live in.

Your setting must above all else serve your story. And if you look at the two examples above, you soon realize that good descriptions of setting keep the story flowing. You don’t just drop everything for the sake of pages of static description; adept writers maintain narrative momentum whether the setting is briefly described or lovingly detailed.

So, what’s too much? Boring is too much. Keep it interesting, and keep it moving.

       For more on Lucy see her website: http://www.sff.net/people/lucy-snyder/

The Sincerest Form of Flattery?

It’s your part-time Whore, Jane Kindred, here, filling in for Allison again. 

This week’s post is going to have to be a short one, because I decided to demonstrate taking imitation too far by damaging my C7 vertebra somehow and compressing a nerve in my spine. And I’ll tell you what: this effing hurts. In addition to the fingers on my left hand being just numb enough to feel like they’re on fire, I can barely stand, walk, sit, or lie down—which, you may notice, doesn’t leave me with a whole lot of options. And so I’m on lots of drugs. Only I’m allergic to all the really helpful ones, so these aren’t doing much.

The point of which is not to gain sympathy, but to explain why this post will be kind of discombobulated and also to say that I really feel for Allison…literally. I can’t imagine how she deals with this on an ongoing basis, and I really hope the surgery gives her the relief she deserves.

But to touch on the actual topic of the week, rather than bring up the same examples others have mentioned already, I want to briefly talk about the disturbing idea I’ve seen touted on occasion that plagiarism is somehow artistic license. There seems to be an appalling laziness and lack of understanding of what art is by certain young writers who’ve been in the news in the past few years around this topic. Growing up in an era of music sampling by other artists—and then outright music stealing (aka “sharing”)—it’s not really surprising that some writers see nothing wrong with lifting whole passages out of someone else’s work and expecting those authors to be flattered by it. After all, like music, books are just out there for the taking, anyway. And writers are supposed to be flattered by that, too. I mean, seriously, what, are we just that greedy that we expect to make a living off our hard work? Shouldn’t we be grateful that someone wants to steal it? The artist is increasingly devalued as the art is devalued, and this kind of thinking is just one of the many causes of devalued art in recent years.

This is a hard calling to have. And many of us do it because it is a calling. We couldn’t stop if we tried. We can’t stop even when it’s causing us physical pain, because the mental and emotional pain of not writing is worse. We have people and worlds in our heads that want out. And when somebody cavalierly snatches something so personal and decides to call it their own—that’s just sort of unfathomable to me.

So when does inspiration or imitation go too far? When it’s neither. It’s certainly possible for two authors to come up with uncannily similar ideas independently of one another. It happens in Hollywood all the time, or so I’m told. But the actual words of a writer are their brushstrokes. They’re individual, and a forgery stands out. Though full-on ideas can also be plagiarized. I know of a couple of writers who have actually had former critique partners take their ideas after they’d been well developed and write their own version with absolutely no qualms about it. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I don’t have any critique partners.

Yikes. I thought I said this week’s post was going to be a short one. Blame it on the meds. They may finally be kicking in.

A Question About Questions

Hello, all! I’m Jane, your part-time Whore, here to fill in for Allison while she rests up. And how convenient for me that my first post gets to be me asking you questions, because I don’t have to worry about whether this post will totally suck. ;)

Or maybe I do. Yeah, I think I will anyway.

At any rate, my question for readers is tangential to Jeffe’s question on Sunday about authors interfering in reviews. It’s really a question about questions. We live in a remarkable age when we have immediate access to the people who write the books we read. But it seems as though the more opportunities for communication there are, the less communicating is actually happening.

One of my favorite authors, Lynn Flewelling, hosted a writing workshop at sea a few years ago. A chance to meet one of my favorite authors, talk about writing, and go on a cruise to the Caribbean? It was a total no-brainer. And one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.

Since then, those of us who cruised together have followed and friended one another across the social media-sphere, and Lynn has been absolutely lovely, chatting and engaging with those of us who attended, and sharing her daily life in 140-word bits, even seeking us out and hanging with us when we happen to attend the same conferences. It feels like we’re friends.

And there are other authors I’ve spoken to on Twitter whom I’ve never met, but who’ve answered me back, which is always a treat. When I was a kid, I dreamed about being able to talk to writers, even fantasized about attending and hosting writer salons. (I know. I’m a dork.)

But something has changed recently in this still-somewhat-new world where readers have immediate access to authors. As with the recent Goodreads brouhaha, there are readers who don’t want to hear from authors at all. Any kind of response by an author (even “thanks for the review”) is met with hostility and mistrust. I’ve heard some bloggers say that if an author comments on a blog post, it shuts down communication because people know the author is reading.

(Wait…don’t leave! I really do have a question!)

Why should the act of communicating shut down communication? (That’s not my question. I’m getting to it.)

Writers are always admonished for getting upset about rejections and bad reviews. “You have to have a thick skin if you’re going to put your words out there in the world for others to read.” Yes. Yes, we do. And readers’ words posted publicly are words, too. An author definitely shouldn’t abuse a reviewer or reader for their opinion or hound them with all the reasons they’re “wrong.” But wouldn’t it be great if you could, I don’t know, just ask an author a question about a book and get an answer without bringing about the Zombie Apocalypse?

Yes, that was my question. I know, I buried the lead. (Or is it lede?) No! Or Yes. Dammit. I hate those kind of answers.

When I come across comments in reviews or on blog posts where readers have questions about my books, I wish I could just pop in and say, “Yes, that character will show up in another book,” or “No, that isn’t the end of that series.” But I know I can’t answer even the most innocuous of questions because of the perception of author intrusion. And that makes me sad, because I love being able to talk to my favorite authors about their characters—and frankly, I love to talk about my characters—and I hate to see this medium that allows us to connect in a way that was never possible before devolving into a battleground where words are only used for spite.

I had a dilemma today about a reader question. Someone tweeted about a bad first impression she’d gotten from one of my books. I debated whether I should respond or not. I didn’t want to be That Author, and I’m not going to argue with readers about how they feel about my books. Every reader is entitled to her opinion and reaction.

But in the end, I decided to reply since I’d been specifically mentioned in the tweet. She may ultimately hate the book and decide her first impression was right, and I can’t do anything about that. But I can do something about the next book. And I want to know how people feel about my writing. I want to have those conversations. Not to rebut every word of a review, but to be accessible to readers. When I was growing up, if I wondered why the writer of a book I’d read went a particular direction, I was pretty much stuck just wondering. (I’m still wondering what happened at the end of most of Phyllis A. Whitney’s books.) But I also don’t want to intrude on the reader’s experience.

So in case you’ve forgotten what the heck I was talking about, like I’m about to, my question is this: Do you want to have conversations with the writers of the books you read? And if so, what kind? If you @ them on Twitter or tag them on Facebook, do you want a response or are you just letting other readers know what you think?