Friday March 7, 2025

Not so short stuff about marketing books!

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1647:

Wednesday and Thursday I got all caught up with my data for 2024. This permitted me to see which promotions I did during the year showed any success in increasing sales of my book. What I found was that the only promotions that clearly made a profit were the periodic Chirp promotions of my audiobooks. The primary reason for this was that the cost of those promotions by Chirp are taken out as a percentage of the royalty earned—so anything I make from these sales, or sell-through to other audio books, is profit.

In contrast, the main methods of promoting ebooks require you to pay upfront. This means you need to sell enough additional books to cover the cost of the promotion before generating any profit. While most of the promotions I did for ebooks this year weren’t very expensive, none produced enough sales to do more than break even and get a few more reviews. This reflects the competitiveness of market; the effect of cheaply produced AI books distorting category rankings right now; and probably the fact that having promoted with my free first in series books with these particular promotion sites multiple times before, I may have saturated the subscriber bases of these newsletters. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t use these to promote in the future, but I should probably wait longer before using them again. This is always a dilemma. If you don’t promote a book, it is virtually invisible, so no new readers will discover it. Even fans of the series might miss when a new book comes out. But if the money you spend on promotions don’t even break even, it ends up eroding your revenue.

On the other hand, one of the key marketing pieces of wisdom that most indie authors swear by is that the best way to market books, especially those in a series, is to publish more stories in the series. Because not only do you have a built-in audience in fans of the series, but often a fan might be reminded that there are other books in the series they haven’t read yet.

It is not a coincidence that in the past five years, my worst years in terms of revenue were 2021and 2024. In both years I had no new books published until the very end of the year, and this severely depressed sales over all.

However, I am hoping that if I can get at least a short story or novella published this spring or early summer, along continuing to try for audiobooks promotions, and the continued sales of the Caelestis series, that 2025 will be a bit better in terms of over-all revenue.

You can see the double effect of a new publication and a well-timed promotion with what happened when I was able to combine the publication of the fifth and final book in the Caelestis series, Where the Glassflowers Grow, with a BookBub featured deal. Where the Glassflowers Grow came out at the end of November, giving me the month of December to do the cost-free marketing of announcing its publication in social media and in my newsletters. This gave me enough reviews to establish the credibility of the book in time for the BookBub featured deal email that went out January 8 for the free first book in the series, Between Mountain and Sea.

I had only one previous Bookbub deal on this book and that was over three years ago (so shouldn’t have saturated the market) plus my hope was that people who had been holding off buying the most recent books until the series arc was finished would see this as a reminder to buy the rest of the books.

So far I have been very pleased with the results. Over 10,000 people got Between Mountain and Seabecause of that promotion, but I have had enough sell-through of the rest of the books to more than pay for the promotion and bring in a substantial profit. The sales of Where the Glassflowers Grew have continued to be very steady, and again with additional reviews and starred ratings, which as an author is lovely confirmation that people are enjoying the series as much as I enjoyed writing it.

And, by the way, this is the perfect time to thank those of you who decided to become paid subscribers to this newsletter, because the $700 I made from you all last year gave me the resources and confidence I needed to pay the hefty cost (over $500) for this recent Bookbub Featured deal, despite the lack of success I had been having with previous promotions.

Hope this wasn’t too boring for you all. But I do think it is useful to sort of pull back the curtain of what being an author in this day and age of on-line promotion of books is like. And why many authors stop trying to write or get published when they don’t take the time to figure out how to best get their books discovered and consequently their books don’t sell, even if they have the backing of traditional publishers.

Ok, time to actually get back to writing (I got two sentences written yesterday, so yay.) But first, I need to get in a walk, now that the sun has finally come out.

We have had a lot of rain the past two days, nearly three inches overall, which has been lovely. My husband got caught in the rain during his first walk yesterday, but he also captured these great photos of a rainbow!

Everything I publish in this newsletter is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for what I am writing by clicking the button below to upgrade to paid, thereby providing me more resources so I can spend more time writing my fiction and less time marketing. In addition, please do click on the heart so I know you’ve been to visit and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments! Thanks!