Deep Discount Promotion – Part 3

Just this Sunday I spent about three hours trying to build a lawn mower with nothing but an adjustable wrench and a pair of pliers. It seems our empty-nesting son had “borrowed” my wrenches sometime ago – and I guess he has a different definition to the word “borrowed” than I do.

I got a little red-faced.

Then I walked on over to Wal-Mart and I bought a cheap set of wrenches that would have to do until the “borrowed” set came home. After that the lawn mower went right together. It was a little like watching one of those Autobot Transformers put himself together

So I hauled the lawn mower out onto the lawn and then I proceeded to make my face just a little bit redder trying to pull-start it into life. Finally my wife (whose Dad was a Department of Defense electrician) came out, tightened one cable and the big gassy beast started up with one pull. The lawn mower did as well. Which was right about the time my face discovered a couple of more shades of red.

I didn’t yell at her, you understand. I did not even yell at all – except maybe just a llittle bit inside of my ears where I did a whole lot of yelling at myself.

The truth is – I am so handy that I make Red Green look like an idiot savant.

In hindsight, I am awfully glad that I married a smart wife.

🙂

That is the thing of it, though. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try the pieces just don’t seem to come together.

Just like this promotion.

I thought I had it all figured out.

(mournful Gypsy violin tunes up in the background)

I thought I knew EXACTLY what I was doing.

(Mariachi band joins in with the Gypsy violin)

Yesterday, thanks to the promotional efforts of Booktastik and Book Deals Daily – I sold absolutely ZERO copies of Gypsy Blood.

Nada, nyet, zippo.

The big fat goose egg.

Now I cannot lay all of the blame upon Booktastik and Book Deals Daily. Maybe it was the wrong day. Maybe my cover sucks out loud. Maybe my feet smell funny. Who knows?

This is all research and all a practice run as I try to slowly find my prawny way through these murky indie waters.

I did sell two other e-books – both in the same series – one a 99 cent three story collection Bigfoot welcome mat and the other the 2.99 main course Bigfoot novel – so the day was not a total loss. That is the cool thing about being an indie author. Your books are ALWAYS out there and ALWAYS on sale right across the planet. You can passive income or you can call it reaping the rewards of my creativity or you can call it the by-product of my naive Pollyanna silver-lined-rain-cloud persistence – but however you want to call it – I am satisfied.

It is all cool by me.

That is the one thing that I want all of you writer-types out there to get from this blog entry. Some days are going to rain and some days will sunny up a smile – but either way you have REALLY got to keep on grinning.

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

If you are enjoying this series of Deep Discount Promotion blog entries, then I shamelessly hope that you might feel like picking up a copy of GYPSY BLOOD.  The novel usually sells for $3.99 in e-book format but I have marked the price down to 99 cents until the end of May. It is available through Kindle, Kobo, Nook,Apple,Smashwords, Googleplay and probably a couple of others that are escaping my memory.

Deep Discount Promotion – Part 2

All right – so in my last blog entry I told you folks all about my plans for promoting my novel GYPSY BLOOD from May 24 to May 31.

For starters, I made certain that I had lowered the price from the e-book’ regular $3.99 value down to the promotional 99 cent price tag. I lowered the price a week ago – because certain venues take longer to process price changes. You should ALWAYS make sure that you have that price change all taken care off in advance because there is nothing that says “I-have-no-respect-for-my-readers” like advertising a lower price and then not seeing that it happens that way.

Here are the promotional websites that I have listed GYPSY BLOOD’s price drop upon.

Here is what I have got lined up so far.
bknights – ($15) – May 24
Read Cheaply – (free) – May 24
Booktastik – ($5) – May 25
Book Deals Daily – (free) – May 25
Robin Reads – ($10) – May 26
Sweet Free Books – ($5) – May 27
ContentMo – ($1.99) – May 28

In addition to this promotion I have also hunted up various promotional websites and have listed several of my other 99 cent releases throughout the next few days. I have primarily focused on those websites that offer FREE promotion – just because I am still working on a fairly tight budget.

Some of these websites would include eBookStage and ReadFree.ly.

The idea is to have my e-books popping up more often on promotional websites. At this point in the game promotion is becoming a little bit more important to my strategy. I have got about 40 to 50 e-books out there – so now I just have to get a few more folks to notice them and hopefully buy them.

***

So, what can you do to help make your own promotions run a little smoother.

For starters, you really ought to make certain that before you get to promoting your e-books that you have managed to secure a necessary amount of reviews – on Amazon, on Goodreads, and the like.

One thing that holds me a little bit is a lack of reviews. For example – there are quite a few promotional websites that ask for five or more reviews – and GYPSY BLOOD, right now, only has FOUR reviews. I am hoping that fifth review will eventually show up. I need to sit down one of these days and contact some of the reviewers who have enjoyed and reviewed my previous work and offer them a review copy.

Sometimes, though, even having five or ten favorable reviews doesn’t necessarily help you. I have tried a couple of times to get promotion through a couple of UK promotional websites – but quite a few of them only count the reviews that are ACTUALLY listed upon Amazon.co.uk – and NOT the reviews that are listed on the US-based Amazon.com.

So, I also need to try and pick up a few more UK-based reviewers and make sure that they leave reviews on the UK-based Amazon.co.uk.

This game gets trickier all of the time. There is always a hoop that must be jumped through.

Still – after the end of my first day of dedicated promotion I managed to sell THIRTEEN e-books through Amazon.com yesterday. I realize that a lot of you indie authors are enjoying sales figures of 10 or 20 e-books a day – but I am not regularly hitting that number yet – and I know that an awful lot of you indie author types out there who are reading this likewise share my lack of steady sales. So this blog is DEFINITELY aimed at you indie-author-types out there who are paddling along in the shallow end of the sales pool.

When you keep in mind that I only moved one or two copies a day throughout the month of May UNTIL I hit May 24th, I am certain that you will agree that it is a significant increase in daily sales. Moreover, that lucky thirteen isn’t ONLY copies of GYPSY BLOOD. I also moved copies of my bestselling TATTERDEMON omnibus as well as copies of my short story collections TALES FROM THE TANGLED WOOD, SEA TALES, BIGFOOT TRACKS, OCTOBER TALES and my big old doorstop collection DO-OVERS AND DETOURS – EIGHTEEN EERIE TALES.

I might also mention that two of those books that sold yesterday went for their full price.

So, although the sales figures for GYPSY BLOOD still remain fairly punky – (3 copies yesterday and 1 copy so far today) – I am fairly happy with the results of my promotional efforts so far. Thirteen e-books moved yesterday as compared to one or two copies a day throughout the first 23 days of May marks a significant improvement.

I intend to continue promoting at least one e-book every month on five or six different promotional websites – as well as scattering a handful of promotional advertisements for some of my other e-books. Over the last three months now I have been experimenting with promoting my e-books and I have noticed a significant improvement in the monthly sales figures.

So – based on my research – I believe that actively promoting your e-books is a great strategy for improving your indie author sales figures.

Hope this helps some of you folks.

And I shamelessly hope that some of you might feel like picking up a copy of GYPSY BLOOD.  The novel usually sells for $3.99 in e-book format but I have marked the price down to 99 cents. It is available through Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Apple,Smashwords, Googleplay and probably a couple of others that are escaping my memory.

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Finding the Strength to Keep On Writing – OR – Silencing Your Inner Prune!

Folks who follow this blog know that I frequently hang out at kboards – and if you have ANY sort of interest in indie-publishing you REALLY ought to start to hanging out there as well. There are folks on there that sell a HECK of a lot more e-books than I do – and they are more than happy to pass some of that knowledge onto other writers.

Early back in September a writer started a thread on the kboards Writer’s Cafe saying that she had begun to lose hope and did not know if she had the strength to keep on writing.

Some of you folks might have had a similar experience. Writing – ESPECIALLY independently-published writing – is a constant test of your faith in yourself and your own creative abilities.

So let me tell you what I told her.

I am 56 years old and have been writing for about forty years and I am still trying to figure things out.

Writing isn’t an instantaneous process. You don’t snap your fingers and become a “great” writer. You become a writer by writing a lot of stuff.

There are ALWAYS going to be crap-tacular reviews. There are ALWAYS going to be people who don’t like your stuff.

Look at how many people bought FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY.

I tried hard to read FIFTY SHADES. I tried three times and I could not get past the first couple of pages. It hurt my eyes. They are leaking puss right now just thinking about those first few crap-tacular paragraphs.

But THOUSANDS of people loved that book!

Don’t start figuring that every review is going to be positive – because they are not.

I just released a short novella and had a three day freebie giveaway to try to boost it’s profile. Among other things that promotion netted me eight reviews. Seven of those reviews were glowing. They loved me words. Wanted me to run for President – even though I’m a Canadian.

However one of those eight reviewers didn’t like my book. She peed all over the pages – great big splashing drops of sulphur-reeking e-urine – and she was giggling while she did it. She told me my words stunk so badly that her pet skunk died after sleeping next to her Kindle.

It was bad.

It was very, very bad.

Did I let it get me down?

NO!

Remember, you can’t please everyone.

Sit down, write – and please yourself.

Besides – I wish to the high holy Moose Mountains that I had a book with as many reviews as you’ve got. Obviously you must be touching some of those readers.

We’ve all got that inner prune – that sits there and farts at our creations and tells us we are no stinking good. Remember – that’s just the inner prune that is squeaking at you. Don’t pay it no heed. It won’t ever go away. Life doesn’t work that way. But you just remind yourself that the inner prune is NOT worth listening too.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Tell that inner prune to shut on up and then get back to your writing.

(stepping down from the pulpit)

Now that I am done thumping my chest let me assure you that even writers with as many years experience as I have encounter this gnawing nasty inner prune feeling. I’ll come up short and say to myself – “Vernon, who are you kidding? Your words are crap. You had to tie your keyboard to your ankle and jump off of into the deep end of the Arctic Ocean.”

What it boils down to is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Some old wisdom in a brand new blog entry.

If you want to read the entire kboard thread swing on over here.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

PS: Don’t forget that today is your last chance to pick up a copy of my BIGFOOT TRACKS: A CREEP SQUAD COLLECTION for FREE over at Amazon.

Amazon.com

Or pick up a copy at Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk

If you’ve already picked up a copy I thank you. If you have read it and enjoyed it I could ALWAYS use a good review. And – lastly – please spread the word about this freebie anyway that you can. Tweet it, Facebook it, talk to your cat about it or just scribble the link on your nearest mensroom wall.

Promoting Your Kindle Freebie on a Budget

All right – so my most recent blog entry told all of my blog followers about my latest Kindle freebie promotion.

Now that I have got that whole BUY-MY-BOOK madness out of my system – let me tell you a few of the tricks that I have used to promote this latest Kindle freebie in hopes that you might benefit from my experience.

First off let me tell you that I am on a severely deep-discount promotional budget – which is a long-winded way of telling you that after I pay my bills I don’t have all that much left over to spring for e-book promotions.

I’m not broke – but my wallet is pretty seriously bent.

🙂

So, for starters I tweet about it.

You can follow my tweets if you are REALLY that desperate for cheap entertainment. All jokes aside, you will find a LOT of informative retweets aimed specifically at all of you writer-types out there who are – like me – struggling to make it as an indie e-book writer.

Okay – so once I have tweeted it out I send a few carefully worded tweets to such Kindle freebie Tweet sites as @DigitalBkToday @kindleebooks @Kindlestuff @KindleBookKing @KindleFreeBook @FreeReadFeed @4FreeKindleBook. I also add hashtags such as #kindle and #freebie and #BookBoost.

Some of these twitter pages will retweet your original tweet. Also, if you have established a good relationship with some of your Twitter followers they will likewise retweet.

Now understand that Twitter is not necessarily your most effective tool to promote paid books – however, freebies are a nice and easy and reflex-driven impulse purchase – and a tweet does not take much time at all out of your morning.

Time is ALWAYS at a premium in promotion.

I have also begun posting about this freebie on various Facebook freebie promotional pages. None of this is high-quality promotion, you understand. Twitter and Facebook are the digital equivalent of stapling a photocopied poster of your next big event on a random telephone post – but every little bit of promotion is better than no promotion at all.

A couple of weeks before all of this e-book was scheduled to go freebie I set up several promotional campaigns. I have used bknights in the past and have been very pleased with their Fiverr offers. In fact, when my bkknights Fiverr promotion did NOT do very well, bknights promptly refunded my initial five dollars as a Fiverr credit. There isn’t a lot of promotional websites that offer that sort of service.

So I set up a bknights Fiverr promo for the freebie offer. Last time I used it on Not Just Any Old Ghost Story it helped me move almost 900 free copies which has done wonders for that e-books visibility.

I also reported my freebie offer to Pixel of Ink. They are a LOT fussier about which e-books they choose to promote. They are one of the bigger promotional websites, so they can afford to be picky – and I don’t expect them to pick up BIGFOOT TRACKS and promote it for free – but it only took a couple of minutes to send them my information and it never hurts to try.

Cover all your bets.

I also spent another five dollars on a spot at The Kindle Book Review – (thanks to good buddy, Jeff Bennington, who tipped me off to this service). The Kindle Book Review have always done well for me in the past and I expect good results with this advert – and here it is right here!

I also entered it at Free Book of the Day – which is a free listing for upcoming freebie Kindle promotions. I don’t know how effective this is – but I will knock on any door that I see in hopes of making a few more sales.

I tried Book Basset this time around because I had heard from a few writers I know that they had good results – but that does not go live until tomorrow. That one cost me $7.99.

That’s something I should mention. This is a TWO-DAY freebie offer. My last freebie offer was three days – and I found I gave away the majority of my free e-books on the first two days and the last day was pretty punky. So I have made sure that I have an equal amount of promotions going live tomorrow, as well as today.

I also sent a promotion through eBooks Habit – which will go live tomorrow as well as It’s Write Now.

SO – why do I want to give away all of these e-books?

In a word, visibility. The last big freebie promotion – as mentioned earlier in this blog – has resulted in a few more Kindle sales. In fact, this month is the FIRST month that my Kindle sales have out-stripped my Kobo sales. Each free Steve Vernon e-book that goes out there means one more new reader who might enjoy that read enough to go take a look at my other thirty-odd Kindle e-books.

Each one of those freebies is a teeny-tiny Steve Vernon jumping up and down and saying “BUY MY BOOKS!”

Remember, Kindle Amazon ranking is determined by how well have performed over the last thirty days or so. So any big push will keep your e-books afloat in that vast sea of visibility.

I’ve got a lot more promotions set up for October and a bit of November for my full-length Bigfoot novel BIG HAIRY DEAL and I will tell you all about them in the near future.

I will tell you that BIG HAIRY DEAL is NOT going to be free for quite some time – and that I have managed to get it noticed on several high-quality promotional websites. I’ll tell you all about that in the near future.

Now available for pre-order – a full length novel for a measly 99 cents.

In the meantime, I hope my words have helped you writer-types get a better handle on how to promote your next Kindle freebie.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Bigfoot Tracks – a Creep Squad Collection

I just wanted to tell you folks about a brand new collection of mine that is available today and tomorrow for FREE on Kindle.

I am talking about BIGFOOT TRACKS.

This is a fifty page collection of three short stories introducing some of the characters in the Creep Squad.

What is the Creep Squad?

The Creep Squad is a group consisting of every urban myth, every tall tale and legend and story that you have ever heard of.

I am talking Bigfoot, Paul Bunyan, the Frankenstein monster, Coyote, the Prophet – Tecumseh’s many-storied half-brother – all lead by the Ghost of Sam Steele.

Why don’t you pick up a copy today. It’s my treat. It is on me.

Please help me out and grab a free copy today on Amazon.com.

OR…

For all of you UK readers here’s a link to Amazon.co.uk

I absolutely HATE to muddy up my blog with blatant self-promotional posts like this one – but I am truly a desperate man with a severe lack of staunch moral fiber. Spread the word if you can and help me out.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

My Bigfoot Collection

I promised you folks that I would have more news regarding a second CREEP SQUAD release – and here it is!

I have just launched a sample pack of Creep Squad stories entitle BIGFOOT TRACKS.

Click here to order your Kindle copy today – just 99 cents!

There are three stories in this small collection.

The first story – originally published in Mark Leslie’s Tesseracts 16 – is entitled “Three Thousand Miles of Cold Iron Tears” and involves a battle between the Bigfoot and a Yaksha – a demon that eats tears – and takes place at the driving of the Last Spike of the cross-Canada railway.

The second story – “Ring Rock Riot” – is a meeting of Bigfoot and a Sea Hag and was originally published by Jersey Devil Press.

The third story – “A Couple of Bottles of Watered Down Wine” – is an intervention between a long-forgotten Canadian masked hero who has joined the Creep Squad and a certain lightning-activated monster, sewn together from pieces of long dead men.

The book is available right now on Kindle for a measly 99 cents.

I’ll be looking for some reviews over the next week or so if anyone is interested in receiving a review copy.

Here’s a short excerpt from the first story in the collection.

---

 

THREE THOUSAND MILES OF COLD IRON TEARS

Nothing reeks worse than a sopping wet Sasquatch.

It was mid-November and the sky looked dark enough to hold a grudge against the dirt for a very long time. It had rained down sleet all morning long and I was sogged straight through to the bone. The wind was blowing in hard from the Rockies and I was not happy at all to be standing here in the Eagle Pass, staring at a large shed-encased mural by the side of the Canadian Pacific Railway at a point in the landscape that men called Craigellachie.
I don’t really know who painted the mural but there was a good strength showing in his brushstroke. He had made a sound choice in his colors, as well. The hopeful blue skyline blended nicely with the heavy umber figures. The shed that covered the mural was about nine feet high and it was almost tall enough for me to stand beneath.

Almost.

There was a story in the mural and stories were something that I understood. You see, that is what I am. I was a living story – something that people told around lonely smoking campfires. I was a Sasquatch – a nine foot tall shag carpet with a serious-bad attitude. I was a legend and a rural myth and a totally unsubstantiated rumor. Like I said, just a story – only stories, if told well and often enough, in time grow a life of their own.

I can’t really explain to you how it happens. It’s not as if I came into this world with a user’s guide. All that I can tell you is that the Sasquatch have been told into life since back in the days of the Mesopotomania storytellers who spoke in hushed whispers of the exploits of Enkidu and Gilgamesh – and so long as your people continued to tell stories about random hirsute giants growing up in the wilderness and sometimes being raised by wolves or African great apes, then we will continue to live on in the borderlands that haze and drift warily between the carefully demarcated lines that claim to separate the cold steel facts of reality from the warm pure smoke of your collective imagination.

“So were you there?” I asked.

“I was there,” the ghost of Sam Steele replied.

“I don’t see you in the picture,” I said.

“I was there,” Sam repeated. “Take my word for it.”

“Maybe you weren’t so ugly back then,” I offered. “Maybe I just don’t recognize you.”

“I was there,” Sam Steele’s ghost echoed for the third time. “I just wasn’t in the picture, is all.”

Sam was a story, too. The real Sam Steele had died back in 1919 – after fighting with the Fenians, chasing Louis Riel during the Red River Rebellion, meeting in a sit-down wiki-up with the great Sitting Bull himself, single-handedly taming the Klondike and fighting a half a thousand Boers over in Boerland. Not all of that is true, you understand but the gist of it is. Sam’s actual exploits had grown to near mythic status. He had achieved a kind of sordid low-rent immortality thanks to a multitude of novels and newspaper articles and a movie or two and campfire tales and once even a CBC minute vignette commercial.

Hell, they had even named a mountain after him.

---

 

That is all I have got for you today.

If that intrigued you why don’t you pick up a copy and give it a read.

At the very least leave a comment and let me know how you liked the excerpt.

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Want to read a free Steve Vernon Bigfoot story?

Just raise your hands!

Everybody loves a free story, right?

Then just click on over to THE JERSEY DEVIL PRESS and read their 57th issue today!

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Coming Soon…Canadian Creeps!

Coming later in June…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But not my next release…

Details to follow, next week.

 

yours in storytelling,

 

Steve Vernon

A good day…

Well, it has been a good day.

I just finished the final revision of a short story I had been working on for a while – involving a combination of Sasquatch, Sam Steele, an ancient Chinese Demon, and the building of the cross-Canada railroad as personified by a gigantic oil painting of the driving of the Last Spike in Eagle Pass, BC.

I was writing for a Canadian anthology that I’d been invited in on. It’s a strong solid tale and I’m fairly certain they’ll like it – but it’s always a crap shoot when you send any manuscript out.

I had a lot of fun writing this one, more than I’ve had in a while. Some days writing is a lot like work -but I was really excited about this story. I had been kicking around the idea for the characters involved in this story for some time and I don’t believe that they’re only going to turn up in one short story.

That’s the cool thing about writing short stories. It is very easy to reuse certain characters. For example, my Captain Nothing stories started out with just one tale and then I wound up writing several more until now I have nearly a dozen tales written about that particular masked crimefighter.

As well, I have a homeless shaman wanderer by the name of Easter Noon, who has turned up in about a dozen other stories. Someday I intend to put together a collection of Easter Noon stories as well.

Finally, I want to share some good news with you. I’ve just recieved word that there are two Steve Vernon novels scheduled for release in the next month or two. I can’t give you any details – except to tell you that one of them HAS NEVER BEEN PUBLISHED BEFORE and another has VERY NEARLY NEVER BEEN PUBLISHED BEFORE.

Both of them will be released in the next month or two in trade paperback!

I’m pretty exciited.

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon