​☕ Weekly Update: Book Club Bliss and the KDP Payment Reality

​​​🍮 Local Author Wins: The Book Club Delivery

So, the delivery was done! I delivered 24 paperback books to the Book and Pudding Club at a lovely dessert restaurant called Amore Dolci here in Peterborough. It was just a quick pop-in to show my face and leave the books.

​It was great to see how excited the group was about receiving a free book, especially from an author they had never heard of before. To my surprise, one of the ladies who was part of the group was a teacher who works at the same school I do!

​That night, I started getting tagged in some great stories from people at the book club with pictures of them and my book. The teacher from my school said it was wonderful of me to drop them off, and people were genuinely happy that someone would think of them. She told me one lady, in particular, was so excited because she had never received a signed copy before, and it had made her evening.

​That is a feeling that makes all the effort worthwhile! I just hope my book goes straight to the top of their TBR list, and more importantly, that they ask about Book 2.

​📈 Marketing Deep Dive: BookFunnel Numbers

BookFunnel has been going great in terms of getting downloads, and it's valuable to understand the data:

• ​Clicks: This is how many people have used your unique link to access the page and view the promotion. I am already at 46 Clicks (my highest before was 46 in a whole month!), which is important because some promotions require a minimum click rate.
• ​Views: This is when someone clicks on your book cover, views the blurb, and decides if they want to download it. I am currently sitting 2nd in the promotion out of 105 books with 53 Book Views.
• ​Claims: This is when someone claims your book and downloads a copy to read. I currently have 35 Claims in just 9 days, which I think is impressive.

​Booksprout, even with the new cover, was a failed experiment. I think the issue is the platform's audience isn't suited to my genre.

If you write romance or fantasy, Booksprout may be your goldmine—you can give away up to 25 ebooks for about £6-£7, which is cheap enough to give it a try.

​The Smashwords end-of-year sale also started on Monday, 8th December. I don't know when the sales figures will come through, but I am hoping this month is a successful one. Right now, it's all about flooding the market and hoping some will stick so those positive reviews start flowing in.

​​📓 The Always FREE Prequel (The Reader Magnet)

​I still haven't finished what I am calling my "Always FREE" book—a prequel about the seven years Hans was in prison, giving the backstory for An Irish Mystery.

​What is a Reader Magnet? It's an enticing tool authors offer—a free story—to engage readers, let them sample the writing, and encourage reviews.

​Why haven't I finished it? Because I think I need more readers and more books out in the series before it's worth offering. Since it's a backstory, I worry it might not be a great reader magnet if it's the first book people read. The idea is to give background to the main characters and explain why and how things ended up the way they did in the first book. I just managed to write another chapter the other day, so the progress continues!

​🛑 The Hard Truth About KDP Advertising Payments

​I still feel that if you are not on Amazon, you will never reach your full potential as an author, simply because they command such a massive market share.

​The problem, which I suspect a lot of debut indie authors agree with, is the huge payment delay on advertising.

​The Reality: You place an advert, and at the end of the month, Amazon takes your money. But the royalties from any books you sell during that month are not paid to you for another 90 days.

• ​What this means: If you are new to the Amazon KDP advertising world, you are going to have to fund your monthly budget three times over before you see a single penny in return.
• ​The Math: If you spend \text{£}2 a day (a good starting point for testing keywords and categories), that's \text{£}60 a month. You will have spent \text{£}180 before Amazon pays you anything, and there's no guarantee you'll sell enough books to break even.

​It's just something to bear in mind.

​Final Wins

​Despite the long learning curve with KDP, I have sold books even with the promos running: 4 ebook sales this month and 5 books in the last 12 days! I am really happy with that progress while I continue to learn all this advertising stuff.

​​📚 What Am I Reading? (Hoping to Dive Back In)

​Last week, I started reading Stone of Fire by J.F. Penn, a book with a fascinating hook: "A power kept secret for 2,000 years."

​Unfortunately, the last seven days have been so wild that I haven't really been able to get into it yet. I'm only about 7% of the way in (thanks to my Google books tracking!), as other things have taken up all my free time.

​Hopefully, by next week’s blog, I will get some quality time to sit down and devour a few more chapters. If it's a book you have already read, please let me know your spoiler-free thoughts! And I promise to share my full review once I've finished it.

​🎁 December Promotions: Grab An Irish Mystery For Free

As I mentioned earlier in this blog, you can get my book for free on both BookFunnel and the Smashwords End of Season Sale. Both promotions run all month long!

​You'll find loads of other great books alongside mine, so you can easily load up your e-reader for the holidays.

• ​BookFunnel Promo: "Free Tickets to Mystery & Adventure!"
  • ​Find my book and 104 others available for free download (totaling 105 books in the promo).
  • ​Link: [https://books.bookfunnel.com/thecountdowntoexcitementstartsnow/rloq3hpfgf]
• ​Smashwords End of Season Sale:
  • ​Smashwords has many free books (including An Irish Mystery for the rest of this month) and books reduced from 25% to 75%.
  • ​Link: [https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1864930]