Reader Question Day #4 – How I Sold 2,142 Ebooks In November

CDP asks:

I noticed the book sales numbers you posted for November and thought they were impressive. I hate to be a pest, but would it be possible for you to elaborate a bit on how you promote your work?

The short answer: I don’t really know what works, and I have absolutely no idea what will happen next.  (Of course, this is not so different than the rest of life.)

The long answer: here’s what I’ve done that I think works. I don’t know whether this would work for you or not, but it’s what I’ve done.

ONE: SWEAT EQUITY

At the beginning of 2011, I had no ebooks, and of this writing, I have 14, and if all goes well, I hope to have two more up by the end of December or the beginning of January. I was only able to do this because I’ve spent the six years since “Demonsouled” came out in print writing unsuccessfully – in fact, long past the point when quitting would have been a good idea. Which meant I had a lot of material I could turn into ebooks very quickly. So I’m cashing in on all the work I already did.

There’s also the fact that if someone likes one of your books, they’re more likely to buy another one…so it really helps to have many other books available.

TWO: TECHNOLOGY TOPICS

I write mostly fantasy. But two of my books, THE $0.99 UBUNTU BEGINNER’S GUIDE, and THE $0.99 WINDOWS COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE, are both nonfictional technical books. Both are strong sellers – the Ubuntu book did 580 copies in November, and the Windows book did 120. (In fact, the Ubuntu book was my best seller, though due to the low price it didn’t make me the most money.) The Ubuntu book has gotten all the way up to #3,300 in the Amazon Kindle store. And I’ve had to do no promotion for the Ubuntu book. Absolutely none. The Ubuntu book was originally an afterthought, assembled from the post popular posts on my “Help Desk Screeds” technology blog, and has consistently been the bestselling of my books.

I suspect selling nonfiction, especially technical nonfiction, is a lot easier than selling fiction, since people actively seek it out in a way they do not for fiction. You might enjoy reading a novel about knights and dragons, but you might absolutely need to know how to set up an SSH server on Ubuntu to save money at work.

So needless to say, I’ll be doing more $0.99 BEGINNER’S GUIDES in 2012.

THREE: GOOD TIMING

The Ubuntu book also benefited from the released of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, the latest version of Ubuntu, at the end of October. Since the Ubuntu book was already up, it enjoyed a big surge in sales from that. Hopefully I can do the same thing when Ubuntu 12.04 comes out in April.

FOUR: MULTIPLE SERIES

Series seem to sell far better than stand-alone fiction books. I have three series up right now – the Demonsouled novels, the Ghosts novels, and The Third Soul sequence of novellas. All of them sell much, much better than my poor orphaned stand-alone novels. So if you have a series of books with the same characters and setting, you’ll probably sell more than with a string of unrelated books.

FIVE: FIRST BOOK FREE

And of my three series, I’ve made the first Demonsouled book and the first Ghosts book free on all platforms, and the first The Third Soul novella free on everything except Amazon. The hope is that if people read the first book and like it, they’ll move on to the second book and buy it.

Which leads direct to the next point…

SIX: INTERNAL HYPERLINKING

The thing about ebooks is that they’re all based off HTML, which means you can have hyperlinks to websites within the book. Now, most of the major ebook retailers won’t let you link to a competitor’s site – Amazon, for instance, won’t let you link to a B&N page within a Kindle book. But you can create a link to your own website…and that page can have links to your book pages on all the major ebook sites.

So at the end of every book, I include the first chapter to the next book in the series, and a hyperlink to the book’s page on my website. (And when I get to the current end of the series, I include a sample chapter and hyperlink to the first free book in another series.) It works, too – my website has been averaging about 1500 to 2000 hits a month, and according to Google Analytics, 75% of that is coming from either the iPad version of Safari or from the Android browser – which means Kindle and Nook devices.

I also make sure to include a complete bibliography, with hyperlinks, in every book.

SEVEN: GOOD WORD OF MOUTH

This is the most important thing. “Word of mouth” bring to mind people talking about books at the office water cooler, but that image is out of date, and not just because every office in America that could afford a water cooler has either gone out of business or been outsourced to China. These days, word of mouth involves people saying nice things about one of your books, whether on their blogs, or on message boards, or (most probably) on reviews on Amazon and B&N and iTunes.

In the Quidditch game of book promotion, word-of-mouth is the Golden Snitch – it overrides all other factors.

-JM