Book Giveaway on Goodreads

I've recently become totally addicted to Goodreads, a book recommendation website that seems to be uncannily good at suggesting stuff I'd like. I'm very impressed with it.

Obviously I listed Red Mercury on there and was really pleased to pick up a few good ratings fairly quickly.

One of the services that Goodreads offers to authors is the facility to do a prize draw giveaway. Goodreads says it picks winners whose tastes match the type of book being given away. Winners are then encouraged, but not required, to write a review. I figured this seemed a simple way to generate a bit of publicity for Red Mercury, so I'm giving it a go.

If you fancy winning one of 10 signed copies of the book in paperback, click the box above, or enter here. I presume you have to sign up for Goodreads in order to enter, but I'd heartily recommend doing so. Good luck!

UPDATE: Over 1,000 people entered to win a copy! That's fantastic. Quite delighted with the exposure the giveaway has generated. Who knows if any of it will translate through to sales? We'll see over the next few weeks. I'm off to post the winners their copies.

Promoting an e-book with KDP Select

I've just finished a three-day promotion of Red Mercury using Amazon's KDP Select. I am genuinely delighted with the results and thought I'd post here about what I did.

If you don't know what KDP Select is, check out this post.

Having scouted around some websites, the general consensus seemed to be that the end of the week was the best time to run a promotion. For my first promo, I settled on 3 days, Thursday-Saturday.

Promotional periods start and finish at midnight US Pacific time, which causes a bit of complication for authors in the UK. I solved this minor issue by not sending out any notification of the promotion starting until I'd actually seen the book priced at free on both the US and UK websites, and whenever I mentioned the offer, I said "free until midnight Saturday" to avoid complicating things.

How did I spread the word?

Facebook
I posted a link to the promotion in my Facebook status, accompanied with this message: "If you've read the book and enjoyed it, maybe you could pass this on to your friends. If you haven't read it yet, now is the perfect time to give it a go..."

Whilst I was keen for people to recommend the book, I was also nervous about upsetting anyone who had bought the book previously. This wasn't an issue thankfully, as most had bought their copies at launch six months before so were relaxed about it now being on promotion.

Many of my lovely Facebook friends shared the link, and even better, added personal recommendations. Another bunch of people had somehow missed that I'd written the book in the first place and went off to download it before sharing the news. I made sure that everyone who shared the link got a "Like" and a thank you. I was genuinely taken aback by how kind my Facebook friends were in terms of sharing.

Twitter
I didn't try to describe the book that much on Twitter - 140 characters just isn't enough to give any meaningful detail. I tweeted "My #steampunk novel 'Red Mercury' is FREE on #Kindle until midnight Saturday - [link]". I figured this was the right balance of info. Two tags that were "search-worthy" in #Steampunk and #Kindle, and FREE in big letters.

The message went out each day of the promotion. I thought once per day was enough, I didn't want to piss off my regular followers as I knew many of them already had the book. This was targeted at people who hadn't already bought the book and would likely stumble on the tweet through searching one of the hashtags.

During the days of the promotion I regularly used Twitter's search function, looking for the book's title. This turned up a number of tweets from people saying they'd just downloaded the book. I made sure I sent a thank you message saying I hoped they would enjoy it. This resulted in a number of nice conversations online and couple of new mutual following relationships.

Flickr
I have a lot of contacts on Flickr through my LEGO building. I figured this might be a good way to build some traffic, particularly in the US where sales have been slower, but my LEGO contact list is stronger. I built a couple of steampunk LEGO creations and posted them on the promotional days with a link to the offer.

Flickr's terms of service forbid linking to commercial pages, but I reckoned it was okay to link to Amazon whilst the book was free. When the promotion finished, I changed the link for one to this blog instead.

During the promotional period over 400 people saw each of the images I posted, and comments indicate at least some of those people downloaded the book.

Summary
Overall, Facebook was by far and away the most effective publicity tool for me for this promotion. However, it is one which I would hesitate to use frequently. My Facebook friends are genuine friends, and I would hate them to feel I was taking advantage of them to sell stuff. Whilst I will definitely run a promotion again, I will seek out other ways to publicise it next time around to ensure I'm not annoying my mates. I'm going to keep another Facebook campaign up my sleeve for pushing Red Mercury's sequel if I ever get it finished.

The Flickr campaign went ok, but maybe not as big as I'd hoped. Definitely worth doing though, especially as it will have generated more awareness in the States.

Whilst Twitter probably didn't reach that many people, it gave me the opportunity for a bit more personal contact with some new readers (and got me talking to a bunch of new interesting folks).

Results
In the three days of the promotion, 200 free copies were downloaded in the States, and nearly 400 in the UK. The book shot up the rankings on both websites, but the UK performance was amazing: Red Mercury hit No2 in Amazon's Science Fiction - Adventure chart, and peaked at No7 in all Science Fiction. In the US it still managed a very respectable No37 in Science Fiction - Adventure.

Now, who knows how this will all translate across once the book goes off-promotion? But I've already got two great new reviews from it in the US, and hopefully a whole bunch of people reading the book which should generate a few more reviews. Key will be if Red Mercury now shows up in more "people who bought this also bought..." lists.

Obviously I'll be keeping an eye on sales and I will update with a post on this in the next couple of weeks.

Free! Free at last! (well... for a bit)

Red Mercury is free this weekend (17th-19th Jan) on the Kindle. Download it here.

This is the first promotion I've run using the KDP Select service at Amazon. I'll let you know how it goes.

To celebrate, and to get a bit more attention for the book in the States, I built some steampunk LEGO and linked to the promotion from my Flickr account. We'll see what that does in terms of driving a little more US traffic.

Here's what I built...

A cute little Soviet Tripod Mech. Quite pleased with the clank this one manages to have, despite it being so small.

EDIT: And here's something I built on Day 2 of the promotion...

I wanna be selected...

I've recently taken Red Mercury off sale at Smashwords. Much as I like the site, and the distribution to other places it gives you, my sales through it have never amounted to more than 5% of what has been shifted through Amazon.

By delisting the book on other channels, it makes Red Mercury eligible for the Amazon KDP Select programme - allowing Prime members to borrow the book, but more importantly, allows me to set up promotional periods when I can make my book free.

With regular sales slowing down now, I'm keen to give the book a bit of a boost with some more promotional support. KDP Select seems just the tool to do it with, so unfortunately the Smashwords listing had to go for the moment.

I will get the first promotional slot set up and let you know how it goes.

So how's it all going then?

Pretty good actually.

I'm very happy with how sales of Red Mercury are going. Whilst I'd obviously have been delighted if it had become a surprise bestseller, I was fairly realistic about the prospects of that happening! It's ticking along quietly but nicely, probably shifting an average of a copy a day now since the initial rush died off.

90% of my sales are still coming through Amazon, with about a quarter of those being actual print copies through Createspace. This was a real surprise to me. I assumed I would hardly sell any of the print version, and really only set it up so I could get one myself. Beyond the copies sold, I think the availability of the paperback also makes the e-book a more attractive proposition in price terms, and a couple of friends actually said to me that they only thought it was a "proper book" once it became available in print. So it probably does something for the book's credibility too.

I would heartily recommend any first-time writers set up their book for Createspace as well as for Kindle etc. It's relatively simple and whilst I love my e-reader, nothing beats the joy at having an actual physical copy of your own book in your grubby little paws!

I've been delighted with the reviews Red Mercury has received on Amazon in the UK. You can read them here, if you're interested - a whole bunch of 5-stars and a couple of 4-stars. The best bit about it all? Only two of the reviews are from mates, and even those were from folks who I have no doubt are blunt enough (no disrespect intended) to have told me if they thought the book was rubbish!

One small frustration is that UK reviews don't appear on Amazon in the US. A real shame, as the book is yet to really get much traction in the States. To date, only 5% of my sales are from outside the UK. I've got a couple of ideas to get a bit more attention over there - I might try leveraging some of my LEGO contacts! We'll see.

Words and Pictures

I love Wordle and couldn't resist putting Red Mercury through it for a bit of fun.

As expected, the character names, or substitutes like "General" or "Major" etc, provide a chunk of the words in the book. However, I was interested in getting an idea of any other words that were coming up a lot, and thought this visual map might be useful to highlight any weaknesses in my vocabulary.

Wordle lets you click on a word and remove it from the analysis, so I went through and took out all the names, their substitutes, and the place names.

This was really interesting for me. Looking at this makes me think I need to broaden my writing vocabulary in the areas of character movement, and also around them looking at stuff. I think my characters might spend a lot of time "turning their head" towards things, and "moving towards" things! One to watch for the future.

I enjoyed fiddling around with Wordle, and I love the images that resulted. I might turn one into a print for the house with my first massive royalty payment. Hmmm. Perhaps an A4 printout in a cheap frame might be more appropriate.

Top 5 signs of bad writing...

When I had finished my first draft of Red Mercury I wanted a bit of advice before I started trying to review and edit it. I read a whole heap of blog posts and websites on this - all really useful.

I thought I'd gather together the 5 hints and tips I found most useful. It was terrifying when I went through my first draft and found how often I'd fallen foul of these classic first-time writer pitfalls...

1 - 'Useless words'
Many words can be cut from a sentence without affecting its meaning. Classic examples are "just" and "that". I was amazed at how often the word "that" is utterly superfluous. I'd recommend doing a search of your manuscript for both these terms and challenge each and every instance. Using "that" was a particular crime of mine - I found 200 instances where I'd used it in my 40,000 word manuscript. I kept two of them.
Other examples of this are phrases like "he thought to himself". Well of course he did. He isn't going to think it to someone else (unless the novel is set in a world of telepaths). "He thought" will do just fine.

2 - Strong verbs beat adverbs, every time
"Crept" is much better than "moved quietly". "Trudged" is much better than "walked slowly".
I had been aware when I started writing that "adverbs were bad" and I tried to avoid them, but a whole bunch of them snuck in when I wasn't paying attention.
I did a search of my manuscript on "ly" and it popped them all up, one after the other, in an embarrassing but useful stream of signposts to chunks of flabby writing. I deleted almost all the adverbs I found and the manuscript was much improved as a result.

3 - Use 'Said'
Another crime I committed was to use a lot of dialogue carriers other than "said". I think I was worried that "said" was a bit boring, so I used things like "he whispered", "he shouted" etc.
Although these aren't as bad as having adverbs describe speech (see above), they're pretty bad. Maybe once in a hundred pages it's okay, but I learned my lesson when I was reviewing - stick with "said". If the speaker's tone isn't clear from the dialogue itself, rewrite the dialogue.

4 - Head-hopping
My first draft of Red Mercury had the point-of-view flipping backwards and forwards between characters with nearly every line! This isn't something I'd thought about at all while writing, but on reviewing the text it became a major distraction, and made the writing difficult to follow in places with the viewpoint character apparently thinking about things they couldn't possible know.
Big recommendation here is to start your writing aware of the perils of head-hopping. Keep the point-of-view in each scene in one person's head throughout. Starting like this will make editing much easier. The hardest part of the reviewing and rewriting of my second draft was getting rid of the head-hopping.

5 - Cut the backstory
I had a whole heap of backstory in the first draft of the book. From reviewing it myself, and from the comments of my beta-readers, it became clear to me that whilst I needed to know this stuff, the reader didn't.
My elaborate alternate history of the United States and secession of Florida was an example of this - all the reader needed to know was that Florida isn't part of the Union in this world and the two nations have an uneasy relationship. And this was something that readers could deduce from bits of dialogue and the attitudes of the characters, they definitely didn't need the page and a half of explanation I'd put in the first draft.

Hopefully those 5 pointers will help any other first-time writers out there. They certainly helped me improve the later drafts of Red Mercury. I recently re-read the first version of it again and cringed the whole way through. Whilst I make no claims that the finished publication is any kind of high literature, it's a hell of a lot better than  the first draft was!

Useful links
Here are some of the sites I visited in my quest to get some advice:

i09 - good writing advice, with a particular focus on science fiction

Mette Ivie Harrison - a good list of things to watch out for

A great Guardian article - with some lovely tips from Elmore Leonard

Rich! Rich beyond my wildest dreams!

Well, not really. But that was never what it was about.

My monetary ambition with Red Mercury was always secondary to getting the story out and shared. Whenever people asked if I was going to make any money, I said that my ambition was to be able to go out once for dinner on the proceeds - even if it was just me, and even if it was just to McDonalds.

Well, mission accomplished.

Red Mercury has been on sale for a fortnight now and it has sold 40 copies across the different distribution channels. I am frankly delighted at this and would like to thank each and every person who's decided to download it. At the pricing and royalty levels I've set, that means I've made about £8 in total. Ker-Ching! It's Big Mac time.

90% of the sales are through Amazon, and the rest through Smashwords. However, the book has only just been cleared to go into Smashwords' "Premium Catalog" - where most sales volume will come from with them. I'm hoping I'll see some more sales through Smashwords as the book becomes available in places like the Apple bookstore.

I've just used ClearSpace to set up print availability. I've ordered a copy of it myself and am really looking forward to see how it looks on paper.

Most excitingly of all, I just got my first review on Amazon - 5 Stars. That's magic! And it wasn't even a family member or anything!

Publish! (And hopefully don't be damned)

Well, it's done. Red Mercury has been released into the wild.

I will post in a couple of days about the fun (or otherwise) of formatting a book for final publication on Kindle, and then re-formatting it for publication in other formats for other e-readers. Overall, simpler than I expected, but it still took me a whole afternoon and evening.

However, forget all that. I am totally stoked with excitement because Red Mercury is out and for sale on Amazon - in the US, UK and Europe. And it's also available in other formats at Smashwords.com

If you think you might fancy a good old-fashioned adventure story in the grand tradition of The Guns of Navarone, but with an added dash of steam-driven sci-fi then please check it out.

It's getting a little drafty...

Right, got feedback from 2 of my 3 Beta readers. The good news - they generally liked Red Mercury. One of them described it as "the kind of thrilling, pulpy yarn that I really enjoy". I was quite delighted, and more than a little relieved, at the positive reception the book got from these guys.

The other good news is that both of them had some really good feedback on how to improve the book further. I was pleased they could do that, as I would have suspected that praise unaccompanied by suggestions for improvement would have been fairly hollow.

I'm now at the tail end of my third draft of the story, taking on board their feedback and trying to address some of the points they raised.

Here are some of the pointers they gave me (not including the ones that would be plot-spoilers, obviously)...

• Visuals - Both Beta readers said that the book needed more visual description, especially of locations and characters. I suppose there's little point in setting your story in a fantastical steampunk world if you don't describe it to the reader every now and again. Now, I wanted to avoid any "stop to describe a face" moments and so cut a lot of this out of previous drafts in the interests of pace. I've gone back and spiced up the visual elements hopefully without slowing things down too much or being clunky about it.

• Villain Earlier - Again, both the guys said that the villain needed to show up earlier in the story. They felt it could do with a Bond-style "false showdown" with the main villain or his henchman early in the plot. An actual encounter has proved difficult to stage, but I've tried to introduce the idea of the villain as a malign presence hanging over the earlier stages of the story. Our heroes don't get to actually meet the villain, but he's hopefully lurking there in the back of the reader's mind. We'll see how that works.

• Characterisation - Some of the minor characters need a little more fleshing out, especially those who go on to affect the plot. I've gone back in and done what I can around this, particularly for the main supporting characters.

• Naming - One of the Beta Boys questioned the main character's name. Was it intentionally bland? Hmmm. I had hoped the name would lend him the air of an everyman called upon to do extraordinary things. But "bland" was definitely not what I was aiming for! I'm struggling a bit with this one. I'd grown quite fond of this guy, name and all, so changing it feels wrong. I'll experiment a bit more and see if anything else comes up that sounds right to me.

Overall, really useful feedback that will undoubtedly make Red Mercury a better read. One more Beta reader to come back with his thoughts and then it'll be final draft and publishing time. Eek!