Authors Electric

There’s a saying isn’t there – about   knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing . But just how valuable is that nothing? I ran a writing science fiction workshop last week on a very wet and windy Saturday in North East Manchester. Now I don't write a lot of SF (far more crime these days), but given that a lot of the event was Dr Who -themed, with people in costumes, mask-making and a few props around, I suspect they booked me because of the Daemons DVD and anthology I was involved with. When I arrived, I was told that the workshop was fully booked and that the places had gone quickly. I was shown to a nice little room on a quiet corridor, I set up the tables, laid out some free books I’d acquired and waited for my delegates to arrive. A very nice chap turned up. An ex-EastEnders script-writer (yes, imposter syndrome started to kick in at this point), closely followed by another writer.  And nothing. We had a chat, liaised with the staff –...

I’ve written much over the years about the pros and cons of offering ebooks for free. I once swore I’d never do it, that I’d sweated blood and wasn’t about to give my efforts away for nothing, that writers should always be paid for their work. And then sales dried up. With a six-book series, FREE seemed the way to generate interest and offer readers a way to see if they liked my books. Try before you buy , in effect. And for a while it worked. For well over a year, I was selling more books by giving one away than I was when they were all at a fixed price. And then sales dried up. To be fair, the past year or so seems to have been hard for a lot of us. Blame the referendum, Brexit, Trump – whatever excuses you can come up with – but sales aren’t what they were eighteen months ago. At all. The traditional authors are squeezed in different ways, and I can’t pretend to understand how it all works in the rarefied strata of the big 6/5/4/whatever, but the indie pecking-order is so...

Hope it's a good one! It falls to me once more (and it comes round scarily quickly) to wish you all a very happy new year, and a good year to come. To celebrate, Authors Electric are not charging you to read this blog… but then we never do. Nor do all the other bloggers I know of. In fact, our online lives, lucky us, are crammed with Free Stuff. Woohoo! Spoiled rotten, we are. Facebook? Free. Wikipedia? Wonga-less. Google? Gratis. Amazon? Amazingly free to publish with and awash with free Kindle books. Youtube? Yes, buckshee as well. And yet, and yet… Something odd happens when people get things for nowt. On the one hand, they start to resent paying for stuff. On the other hand, they have less respect for the free stuff. They take it for granted. An example. When you are holding a poetry reading or a book event, if you sell tickets in advance even if they are just £3, people are more likely to turn up on the night. Give away the tickets, and if it rains, they’ll stay away in dr...

FREE. Something-for-nothing. It’s worth what you pay for it. Cheap-and-cheerful. Race to the bottom. There are lots of opinions about free in the context of free books. Or specifically free ebooks, since free paperbacks don’t make any kind of economic sense; I give away free paperbacks only for review purposes (and very occasionally to friends), since they have a specific unit print cost. But free ebooks cost the author nothing. Except lost revenue, I hear you cry. When I have slaved away over a hot keyboard for many years, why would I want to give away my books for free? How can I make a living, a profit – or just break even – if I’m not earning any money from sales? I used to think the same. More than four years into this self-publishing lark and I was a staunch decrier of free . I’d never given my books away, other than for reviews or as competition prizes or occasional giveaway promotions. I was a firm believer that the readers I wanted to attract were the ones who ...

I hadn’t given away any free ebooks for a year, so I did a 5 day Kindle Select Free Promotion of The Survival of Thomas Ford from 16-20 October. I paid for a Bookbub ad, going out to their Thriller subscription list on 16 October. Luckily, I was able to get my order in during the first month of Bookbub’s new UK-specific listing, which sends the book out to a list of their new UK subscribers when you pay an additional 5 per cent on top of the US Bookbub fee for your genre. In the past, a Bookbub promotion would result in mainly US downloads with not much result in the UK, but I noticed right away that the new UK subscription list resulted in the strongest UK downloads I’d ever had during a free promotion. I also took out a $20 Ereader News Today ad on 17 October; a Dailyfreebooks.co.uk ad at £10 on 18 Oct, along with a Kindle Nation Daily FreeBookHighlighter ad on same day at $30/and a $10 eBookSoda ad on 19 Oct/with a Freebooksy ad on October 20. As previously, ...

For those of us who are self-published authors, flexibility and control over every aspect of our product (the book) is one of the best things ever. Speaking for me, control over pricing, publishing, cover art, and the possibility of changing all of these at a moment’s notice may well prove the reason I’ll never visit the traditional publishing model again. In these past years of self-publishing, we have seen many promotional models come and go as the field expands and develops. A few years ago, the self-published or “indie” authors were few and every new strategy they devised was fresh and successful. When Amanda Hocking published her books, setting the first one at 99c and the rest at slightly higher prices, she changed the publishing world. Her books sold like hot cakes, and a new model was born.  Soon after, 99c wasn’t drawing enough readers, as the market was flooded with 99c books following Hocking’s example. More and more authors saw the benefits of self-publishing new w...