land-a-linkin'

Maybe my fellow authors can relate to this. I've become overly obsessive about my book ratings, which by and large I can do nothing about. You advertise and advertise, and maybe people read your books, maybe they don't. Usually they don't. It's like fishing, a thousand views and maybe one person tries your book.

So tonight I'm celebrating because someone somewhere downloaded one of my favorites, Five Second Rule, and its rating went from 2,500,000 to 162,000 immediately. That's what happens - you go from a rating that is relatively stable, going up about 12 grand a week, down to a great rating, well under a million and very hot, but it will not stay there unless people keep downloading it. It will rise maybe 400,000 first week, 300,000 a few weeks, then 200,000 a week, etc., until it comes to its natural level, which now will be a little under 2,500,000. Your permanent benefit is that your stability point is lower and it will now hover at, say, 2,100,000.

Time to celebrate anyway. When it turns over, it becomes time to market that book, because that book now looks hot to people who simply open it up and check it out. A rating of 162,000? This book is hot, for some reason. Someone else is reading it.

so I have nine books of short stories and I'd like to turn them all over on my main marketplace, amazon.com. Sometimes somebody will take one and I fiHownd out later they're in the England market (amazon.uk) and it helps my rating, but only the British rating. That's ok, I don't mind being hot in England, but my obsession hovers around the big one, the .com. I think about it constantly. I think about trying to get the other short story books turned over - two or three of them are still over three million, and could really use a read or two. It's amazing how one person reading your book can give you new life for a few weeks as you have really hot ratings.

The next tricky thing will be to stay under a million for weeks at a time. I have friends who do this but, like me, their paperback ratings often lag way behind. They're not selling the cardboard versions nearly as well as I'm turning over amazon kindleunlimited files and refreshing my kindle ratings. Some of my paperback ratings are in like sixteen million or seventeen million - no wonder nobody will touch them in the review trains! They get the impression nobody buys these things and they're right. But a campaign to improve my paperback ratings, I'm not even sure what it would look like. How do you actually get people to buy paperbacks?

I have twenty eight books, only twenty seven of them in paperback. That's fifty five ratings a week, which I keep track of on Tuesdays, and write down all fifty five and even fifty five "special" ratings too. So for example if my book of stories is hot right now, it might be 533 in "US Short stories" and I write that down. Some people of course get in the top ten and stay there. I'm lucky to get in the top 600 and I'm usually there for about a minute or maybe a few hours if it takes them a few hours to replenish the ratings. By Tuesday a kindle rating of 162,000 will already be at five or six hundred thousand.

But I'll enjoy a week where any of those fifty five ratings are under a million, that'll be good. This Tuesday I have at least two story books that flipped, and a few of them might still be under a million left over from last week, in which maybe four or five flipped, and I actually bought two of my own books. I really love to buy my own books, though I try not to overdo it, because it's so much fun to see those really low ratings even if it's only for a while.

I think Amazon knows how much we authors can get hooked on these things. They also know that when I promote like crazy what I'm doing is putting amazonamazonamazon out there into the stream of consciousness about what books are out there. It's almost like there's no other way to buy and sell books - this the currency in the market.

But tonight it's party time - from 2,500,000 to 162,000 in a single fell swoop - I did it!

Since the idea of book pyramids or review trains worked, they are popping up on various sites. I now monitor three sites. And already they are full of books I've already read. Some of the same people are occupying each site.

In one place, (KU) Reads and Reviews, they have the clever idea of doing books under a hundred, books under three hundred, buoks under five hundred. This is a good idea because basically I don't want to read a 500-page book just in order to get my 80-pager reviewed. But some people of course aren't reading directions. And a lot of them don't really read the whole book anyway - they read enough to review it and then off they go.

One site, Self-publish...is looking for a moderator. I think this is a good position to be in. One gets one's book reviewed a lot. BUT, I don't have time. I want to write. I have a family. I an tied up a lot. I would do this, if I could, though. It seems worthwhile to put yourself in the position of telling people what to review.....review mine, of course!

A final site, Authors..., is settled into a routine of once-a-week, everyone reviews everyone's. It's real nice. It's a community of people who all have read each other's novels. That way, we kind of know each other. We've been there. We know what each of us is peddling. And we get new members occasionally.

I've taken my knocks on these sites. When you put your book up and nobody takes it for a day or two it slaps you in the face. What, you don't want to read my book? The answer is no, that's why I have to get it on this site in the first place. People are not going to just come along and read these things. They have to be cajoled, or rewarded.

I don't know if I mentioned this, but I put Comin' 'Round to Lovin' It on the book pyramid, and it sat there for almost sixteen hours before someone grabbed it. Only a hundred pages, all short stories, seems like it wouldn't be that hard to read and would go rather quicky; in fact, one other time, it did go rather quickly.

But there are forces at work that make people hesitant to grab your book. One is that McD's is just not cool with a wide swath of readers and they aren't going to look much beyond that. The see that it's "about Mc'D's" or "glorifying McD's" and that's all they want to know, pass, and wait a few hours. Sixteen in fact.

The other is that it's poorly covered, at least on its kindle. It has one of those kindle-made covers that people abhor. They abhor them because they've seen too many of them and associate them with unprofessionalism in general. I mean, if you rely on kindle for your cover, that doesn't say very much about your self respect, does it?

To that end I'm rebranding, starting with CRTLI, but hitting them all. Sixteen hours is unacceptable.

 

so I've found this one site where authors put in their book on the promise to read the book above it, and everyone read and reviews each other's work. it's a live site - this stuff happens twenty-four hours, and so I find myself glued to the site hoping some good book will come along - I slip mine in under it - somebody comes under me, and everyone wins.

Everyone wins if everyone does their job, because by reading each other's work, we make each other hot writers whose work has good ratings and is staying competitive in the market. If I keep people reading my books they will read more of the same and I do better overall. So I glue my eyes to this site.

It has its problems: sometimes the only book available is too long, or really not my style, or I have 300 pages to read in ten hours or something, and I can't really do that. A lot of the indie authors are not as careful about things like proofreading, or careful plots, etc. - at least not as careful as I am. Life is short and I don't want to read bad writing, but I'm getting better at discriminating and not ending up with bad stuff in front of me in the first place. But that means I have to stay glued to the site. I have to get the ones I want to read.

I have agreed to help the site authors recruit more writers for the site. If you see the same authors too many times you can't cross reviews or you'll be accused of swapping - you have to do the one above you, while the one below you does you - and that means lots of books are being read all the time and we, collectively, are all hot and well-read authors. My kind of place.

It's become kind of an obsession to see if I can get more people to read (and review) my book, just on general principle, and I've succeeded, or at least I can say that some of my hard work has paid off. People are reading my novel. It's getting good reviews. I'm riding a slight wave of popularity.

And that's the first good news you've seen on this site for quite a while.

Stunning numbers on the blogs tonight - I do the stats every month just to see who's tuning in. It was a less than stellar month actually using them; in fact, I've gotten a little laissez-faire about it, leaving them alone way too much.

But, my main blog, whose usual average is about a thousand a month, got over seven thousand. A sixteen springs blog, lucky to get a hundred and fairly new, got over seven hundred. A Texas blog running at about thirty a month got over eight hundred. What's up with that?

One possibility is that they are coming into the main blog and simply clicking on all their options, as all the good ones are right there, listed in the template. You have seven thousand visitors, some of them are going to go fishing around to see what other blogs connect. In fact if you even have one out of ten fishing around, that could amount for seven hundred extra visitors to several of my other blogs. In fact several had at least seven hundred more than usual.

Another is that they went on the blogger queue. When they do that they get instantly hundreds of visitors. If the main blog went on there for a day or two days or whatever, that could approach the stats I'm looking at.

Of my top ten blogs, all went up. Some got as many as 900 more than usual. The main blog got 6000 more than usual. Out of the second tier, nine out of ten went up. When I say "went up" I mean their rolling average, last three months, better than it was. This blog by the way was the only one in that group that went down. It may be because it's not linked well to others. It's mostly just me rambling.

Which brings me to why I'm here. At least I have something to say about marketing regularly; this is one that I can easily spout on every month. Some months, like last month, I have trouble actually writing on twelve blogs before the end of the month; that's my goal, and I generally succeed, but sometimes not without difficulty. This one has been one to write on, because I'm busy marketing, and I have stuff to say. But it's not clear from the title of the blog what's happening here. And why should anyone want to read my rambling about marketing? Let's just say this one is kind of a dustpan of my thoughts lately.

But thank you, if you've even gotten this far.