October 11, 2017

Step 3 to skyrocketing your book sales: Sell every day to everyone

And here comes the third and final (for now) part on skyrocketing your book sales. I’ll do more as I get closer to releasing the Author Book Selling Guide That Will Torture You into Selling More Books or Else (yes, that is the title for now).

Let me rehash the two previous posts here, the first one on selling yourself as a brand, and the second one on learning to sell your books on your own.

1. Brand.

You're selling yourself before you can sell your books. That’s how you start. At first people don’t know who you are. You’ve got to have a brand, some kind of a feeling you evoke in your potential readers for them to buy into the idea of you. I know, easy to say but hard to do.

Don’t fret!

October 3, 2017

Step 2 to skyrocketing your book sales: learn how to SELL your books yourself

by Ksenia Anske

To neatly fold this post into the conversation that we started in the previous post on Skyrocketing your book sales, let me present you with this timely question from Annie Pavese:

Hey Ksenia!

I'm just about to launch my own book (in December) and I'm looking at selling options. I know you sell your books directly off your website, and I've been wanting to do the same, but I wasn't sure exactly how the process works. I've heard if you sell them yourself, you get to keep 100% of the profits, as opposed to letting people go through Amazon and lose a huge cut.

So I'm guessing you just buy up your own books from Amazon (or where ever yours come from) and then resell your stock through your website? Do I have to have a license or anything to resell them? And do you have any wisdom on how to system the process out? I want to be as wise about it as I can from the start. If you could go back and tell your start-up self anything, what advice would you give?

Thank you for this wonderful question, Annie. I'd give myself one word of advice.

LEARN HOW TO SELL YOUR BOOKS YOURSELF.

May 24, 2014

What happens to book sales if your books are FREE

by Ksenia Anske

Let me expand on what I have recently tweeted, and Facebooked, Googled Plussed (is that even a thing?) after a brief interview over the phone with Publishers Weekly that sent my blood boiling. Because. Of course. I mean, who am I? And who is Publishers Weekly? You get the significance. I have to thank Martha Brockenbrough for the referral, so thank you, Martha! They called me to talk about YA books (because ROSEHEAD is sort of YA, isn't it?) and about piracy (because I give my books away for free). And whilst on the phone, they asked me about my numbers. Like, how many books did I sell, since the day I published them? How many free books of mine people have downloaded? Have I make any money? Am I going to make any money? How do I plan to survive? That sort of thing. As much as I hate math, this forced me to go and look at my numbers, and they blew me out of the water. It's nothing like millions, so don't get over-excited here. But it's thousands, and hey, that's like, wow! People have set aside their precious time to read my books? Really? REALLY? Here are the numbers for you, just so you know that even though I give my books away for free, I still sell them too:

March 26, 2014

I give my books away for free. Here are my sales numbers.

by Ksenia Anske

People have been asking me for a while to share my numbers, and I did, in the past, in this post on how donations make me more money than sales, but just last week a fellow writer finally helped me install the Google Analytics code on my site (I'm a techie idiot, unfortunately) and so now I'm actually able to see for the first time how many of my free ebooks people download, and which ones, and all that great stuff. That prompted me to go check out my Amazon downloads, and I nearly peed my pants, because in the last 6 weeks 1,600 my books (SIREN SUICIDES plus BLUE SPARROW) have been downloaded! That is by no means a large number, but it's huge to me, because I'm an unknown entity, and this validated for me the fact that people do really read my books, and that is amazing. So, let me refresh my numbers here for you, and we will go from here, as I'm running out of money in 3 months exactly and plan to do a Kickstarter to raise money. Or else.

I MADE $4K TOTAL SINCE I PUBLISHED MY BOOKS IN AUGUST 2013

That is obviously not enough money to live on. For me to live on, right now I need $2K a month (for kids, primarily; if I lived alone, it would be much less), and I have still enough money to burn through till the end of June.

OF THOSE $4K above $2.3K ARE BOOK SALES, $1.7 ARE DONATIONS

I also made $2K from a consulting gig in 2013 + raised $3K to go see my sick mom in Moscow but it doesn't belong to the book category, so...

March 4, 2014

Giving away and selling your books yourself

by Ksenia Anske

Fellow writer Barry Napier asked me this: "I follow you on Twitter and have been marveling at your influence on other writers. Being a bit influenced myself, your strategy and approach to writing has started to open my eyes. I am seriously considering unpublishing my work from Amazon and placing it on my site... it would become the exclusive place to purchase my work on a Name Your Price basis. My fears, of course, are how people will discover my work without the powerful aide of Amazon. And what about reviews? Things like that... I was wondering if you could perhaps provide some info to help erase these fears and how you are able to manage it all. Ultimately, my goal is to become a full-time writer of my own work. Amazon is SLOWLY getting me there and I have no idea if releasing straight from my site would help in this goal or completely derail it."

Let me start off with this. I do give away my ebooks for free on my site (I'd give away paperbacks too, if they didn't cost me money to print), I do provide people an option to pay for my books, now or later, however much they want, via a donation, BUT, I also have my books onAmazon and a gazillion other sites, like iBooks, Barnes&Noble (via Nook Press), Kobo, Wattpad,Goodreads, Scribd, ReadWave, etc.