On September 23, I finished yutzing around with my Scout entry and uploaded it. The campaign is now underway, ending on October 23. How are things going? I have no idea… But I’m learning a lot. One of the things I’ve learned is to ask for votes everywhere! So please! If you’ve enjoyed this series of blog posts or learned one or two things from it or if you just want to help me put my kids through college (I have TWO of them who are BOTH in college RIGHT NOW!), toss me a vote! I’ll be eternally grateful, and the karma will be awesome. Also, if they choose my book for publication, you’ll get a free copy! And then you can taunt your friends! HA HA! I got this book free and you didn’t!
Ahem.
On to the substantive (I hope) portion of the post.
Entering your book into the Kindle Scout program is pretty straightforward. You have to upload a formatted manuscript in .doc form. (For those who have been paying attention, yes, this means all my research into Scrivener vs. Vellum was useless for this project.) You’ll also have to have a bio, a completed cover, and blurbage for your book. The length limitations for the blurbs are pretty severe—I had a 100-word version of the blurb and still had to trim it. A side note–I paid someone to do my blurbs for me, because I wanted them to be kick-ass. I was pretty happy with the results.
Once you upload, you wait. You’ll get an email letting you know whether your book is accepted into the program. This actually didn’t take very long—I had my approval email within 24 hours. They send you information on your campaign link and tell you when it will go live (you have a few days to prepare).
Every day, you’ll get updated stats on your page views. See below for what this looks like. An interesting note here—the data provides page views, NOT the number of nominations. It also provides info on where your votes are coming from and provides some “also nominated” info. This means books your scouters also nominated. This inspired me to look for “allies,” like Nathan Lowell mentioned in his hella awesome workshop on Amazon at Colorado Gold.
The screencap here shows the first page of my stats for October 11. (Click for a .pdf of the full stats–it’s 2 pages) On page 2, you can see that a little less than half my page views are consistently coming from Kindle Scout directly. The rest are from outside links, and so are the result of my promotional efforts or from other people passing the links around, etc. The big bumps occurred at the beginning, when I posted the link to Facebook and Twitter and also sent out a notification via my reader newsletter. There’s another big bump after my friend Marteeka Karland posted about the book in her reader newsletter, which is about five times the size of mine, subscription-wise. I got another bump when Kate Douglas, another friend and a long-time Kensington author with a good-sized following, posted a link on her author page with some praise for the excerpt (as in, if this isn’t published soon I’m going to HUNT KATRIENA DOWN!!). (We luff Kate :-])
Some other things I did, all of which seemed to have produced small bumps in page views:
Ran a Book-a-Day giveaway at The Romance Studio. This was a drawing for a paperback version of the book, which I’ll send out after Kindle Scout lets me know whether they’re buying the book (they buy only electronic rights, so paperback rights will belong to me either way).
Ran guest blogs on other authors’ blogs. This included a person from the Also Scouted list. I noticed one of the books popping up was one I’d already nominated, so I contacted the author and asked if we could exchange blog posts (an ally! And I’ll probably do this again with another author or two before the campaign ends). She only had a few days left on her campaign, so I made sure her post went up promptly, and she posted mine a day or two later. I also posted a blog at The Romance Studio a few days before the Book-A-Day giveaway.
Ran a Thunderclap. This didn’t pan out—I didn’t get enough backers to activate the campaign. I came close—76 out of 100—but couldn’t quite get it over the line. I’ll probably give Thunderclap its own post later, since I have some Profound Thoughts about the process.
Some things that didn’t happen that I’d hoped would happen:
I didn’t seem to get any pageviews from the Thunderclap recruiting. If you know how Thunderclap works, it’s pretty obvious why this didn’t pan out. There’s no direct link to your book until the campaign goes live (or if there is I didn’t find it). Again, there’s a lot to talk about regarding Thunderclap.
Amazon allows you to add your other books to your campaign page, and I’d hoped this would generate some sales. I figured some people would see the campaign, notice the other books I’d written, and check them out. So far I see no indication that sales of my Kindle self-pub books have spiked at all. On the other hand, I’m noticing that Amazon linked to a lot of out-of-print editions, so that might be my own damn fault for not tweaking the links when I had the chance. On the other hand, Authorgraph tells me a few of my Samhain titles have gone up in the rankings, so…maybe?
The numbers overall are lower than I’d hoped. On the other hand, I’ve spent a good amount of time in Hot and Trending, which doesn’t suck. It appears that the magic number to be featured in that part of the site is about 60 pageviews (you can see these stats on page 2 of the pdf).
As of now, I’m sort of running out of ideas for promotion. However, I have a book I’m consulting, and I’m going to pull ideas from there and execute them over the last stretch of the campaign. The book is called Crowdfunding for Authors by Bethany Carlson, and it’s not actually out yet. I got an ARC copy because I supported the book on Indiegogo. I’d suggest keeping an eye out for it when it does become available, because so far it’s looking like a pretty good resource.
That’s about it for the State of the Scout this month. Next time, I should know whether or not the book has been accepted for publication, and I can report on the beginnings of that process or let you know where to buy the book when I release it myself.
Again, to drop me a vote for Call Me Zhenya, drop by my campaign page!!