Indie Superstars Storybundle now live

The books in the Indie Superstars Storybundle

Indie Superstars Storybundle

The Indie Superstars Storybundle puts together a number of books from well-known self-published authors. It includes my ISF-Allion novel Juno Rising.

Crystalline Space – Dark Stars Trilogy Book 1 by A.K. DuBoff

“A refreshing approach to the genre. Crystalline Space sets the bar high as the first book in a series. This is a fun read with intriguing world-building and a compelling storyline. I look forward to where the Dark Stars trilogy takes us next.”– Amy J. Murphy, author of the Allies and Enemies series & Dragon Award Finalist

The Circuit – The Complete Saga by Rhett C. Bruno

“Bruno has crafted a complex, multi-dimensional story that combines the best of his genre with age-old truths—and quandaries—about humanity, politics, religion, family, and, yes, love.”– Portland Book Review

Corpsman – Women of the United Federation Marines by Jonathan P. Brazee

“Bravo Zulu (BZ) is the military code for a job well done. And a resounding Bravo Zulu is what Col. Brazee deserves for his latest Women of the Marine Corps books.”– Amazon Review

Juno Rising by Patty Jansen

“I love her characters, settings, plot twists, and the fact that she can switch from writing stories that are ‘pro’ ISF to stories that are ‘pro’ Allion (ISF and Allion being the two protagonists in these stories), and they are both as believable as can be.”– Amazon Review

Horde’s Challenge – Starbarian Saga Book 1 by Robert Jeschonek

“Robert Jeschonek has a flair for fast-paced, pulse-pounding combat scenes.”– William H. Keith, author of the Grey Death Battlemech novels

Red Team Alpha by Jay Allan

“I started reading this book because I have read every other book Mr. Allan has written and love them all. I don’t normally read prequels because they reference information you already know. Well I have to say, this book is great as a stand alone novel as well as a prequel to the Crimson World series. We find out that Mr. Stark is the same devious person he is in the other books, just younger. It kind of reminds me of the Tom Clancy Op Center series just in the future. If you like Tom Clancy, you will absolutely love this book.”– Amazon Review

Apocalypse Paused – Books 1-4 by Michael Todd

“Truly frightening sci-fi a la Michael Crichton. Believable characters, mind bending situations and monstrous creatures. Do not read this before bed, it’s nightmare inducing. Highly recommended!”– Amazon Review

Janissaries by Chris Kennedy

1.”A great start to a mil sci-fi series that I’m looking forward to diving further into. I definitely recommend it.”– Amazon Review

Element-X by B. V. Larson

Wow! This book felt like I was on one of those County fair rides where there is no control. I dislike those rides, but I LOVED this book. What a rush! The action barely let up for one minute, and I was hanging on by the seat of my britches all the way through.– Amazon Review

Exile by Glynn Stewart

“This fast-paced starfaring adventure succeeds with a thrilling mix of space battles and tender emotions.”– Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Exile

Flagship – A Captain’s Crucible Book 1 by Isaac Hooke

“Flagship by Isaac Hooke is a sci-fi novel that really blew me away. This was awesome! So much action, battle scenes, intrigue, suspense, aliens, and a powerful psychic. Love it!”– Amazon Review

Trevalyn Academy by James David Victor

“Well plotted, exciting read!”– Amazon Review

Promotion: Ambassador and free books

I should probably do some pimpage.

Most of my regular pimping goes on to my mailing list, but I guess I can make an exception for a new release.

Book 6 in the Ambassador series comes out on the 14th, and I’m running a special bomb on book 1 of the series. Now if you’re on my list, you get this for free, but if you hate being on mailing lists, you can get it for 99c.

If you’ve already bought it, you can retweet it!

To celebrate the release of Ambassador 6, I've made book 1 99c on all retailers! https://t.co/6VnWulMG53 pic.twitter.com/XwhLT5lh5u

— Patty Jansen (@pattyjansen) March 2, 2017

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or you can Facebook it!

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpatty.jansen%2Fposts%2F10155037641677403%3A0&width=500

Writing: The two traps that will cost you sales

As I prepared to go to the gym this morning, I scrolled through my marketing podcasts to see which one to listen to.

It struck me that they were all one of two varieties.

Type 1:

How to write a novel in 5 days
How to write 24 novels a year
How to write 5000 words while you’re on the loo

Type 2:

If you don’t advertise on Youtube, you’re missing out
If you don’t do all these things on Facebook, you’re killing your sales
You have to have a profile on all these new social media sites

Titles are made up of course, but you can see the trends. The first type is all production. The belief that if you write yourself to death, you will sell better.

The second are all marketing, and subscribe to the belief that you have to do this endless list of stuff (ads, optimise your profiles everywhere, check them every month, be in all the groups, etc. etc.) or your sales will die.

I’m saying: both of these routes are a pretty good way to kill all your momentum.

If you go the production route, but never stop to think whether a book is going to be worth your time writing, and, once you’ve written it, never spend any effort marketing it, you’re leaving a lot of sales on the table.

If you go the highly-strung advertising route and spend hours optimising everything and driving people to your page, your mailing list or whatnot, you lose out big time when people arrive at that page and you don’t actually have a decent arsenal of chunky series with full-price novels that they can buy.

With very few exceptions, successful writers do some of both. Authors who don’t produce regular books but do well usually sell additional things like courses. Authors who don’t advertise rely on an audience they might have built elsewhere.

That said, I’ve seen enough of either type, all-production or all-advertising writers fall on their faces to believe strongly in a combination. Writing and advertising augment each other. If your sale slow down, advertise a bit. If your ads fall flat, write another book.

How to sell 11,000 books in less than 4 weeks

The title might be a little click-baity and just a tad misleading. I can’t tell you how to sell 11,000 books in four weeks, but seeing as that is what I’ve just done, I figured I’d have something to say about it.

My annual sales report for Oct 2015 to Sep 2016 mentions that in those 12 months, I sold 16.6k books. Then in the month of October I sold almost as much in just a single month. The 11k mentioned in the title was just one book. I sold other titles as well. In fact, the very point of selling the 11k books was to sell more different books.

So, what happened?

Well, I finished the Moonfire Trilogy and wanted to do an ad campaign to get more people into the series. I’d made book 1 99c for a while immediately after launch back in June and sold about 700 copies. But then I put the price back up so that I could concentrate on finishing the rest of the series (because refreshing sales dashboards is very distracting).

When that was done, I didn’t want to do another 99c promotion on the same book, but I did have something else. The Moonfire Trilogy is a sequel to the Icefire Trilogy. That series is now about four years old, and while it’s still selling, I felt I could play with it a bit. It also feeds into the Moonfire Trilogy. I spent a bit of time correcting some oopses I’d found, paid for another proofread, because there are always mistakes, always. I tizzed up the covers, and I put one very important line at the very end of the 900-page book: “The Moonfire Trilogy is set in the same world twenty years later. Click here to get the first book”.

Then I did something outrageous: I lowered the price for the entire trilogy to 99c. Then I applied for Bookbub. They said yes.

The ad ran on 8 October.

This happened:

And this:

And this:

I sold 3046 books on that day on Amazon, with another 1500 on other platforms. The Bookbub site gives an estimated number of sales of 2400 copies. I needed to sell 1500 to break even on the cost of the ad.

I was happy. I know from running my own promotions that sets of books always do better than single books, because obviously they’re a better deal.

So I was very happy.

I expected the book to quickly sink into my usual comfort zone: oblivion. This particular book sells a good bit on Kobo, but rarely sells at all on Amazon (people there tend to prefer the individual volumes). I had planned to leave it 99c until this upcoming weekend’s Science Fiction and Fantasy promotion and I hoped to ride a bit on the tail of the promotion. I thought I might sell another few hundred. I sold EIGHT THOUSAND.

The book didn’t sink back down. It stuck to a ranking of around 3000 in the Amazon US store and it’s pretty much still there when I’m writing this. And yesterday, this happened in Amazon UK:

I have NO idea why any of this happened, except to say a huge THANK YOU to all who bought it. It’s been a tad nuts, to be honest.

The ingredients to this success? Bookbub, no doubt, but to do so much better than their estimate? A good deal, lucky timing, and decent-sized community already familiar with your name. I’ve been featured by Bookbub seven times, so readers of Fantasy and SF will have seen my name a few times, and many more readers will have heard about my books from the SF/F promotions. That’s all I can think of.

The book will be featured in the SF/F promotion this week, and I’ve decided to keep it 99c until 21 November. Next week and the week after, a number of SFF promotion buddies will post to their mailing lists about it. It’s truly amazing to have such a great community.

Over 100 books free, all retailers

This totally insane promo is on again this weekend. Over 100 authors are giving their books for free.

Why free?

Because it’s a really good and really sneaky way of getting people to buy the other books in the series.

We’ve been featuring all retailers for a few months now, and that’s been great. The reader membership of the promo’s list is growing so much that I’ve had to shop for a cheaper mailing list provider.

Come along and see what all the fuss is about.

Click here or on the image to go to the promo

The Ebookaroo lives!

Ever since I nicknamed my mailing list “The Beast” I got a lot more people joining. That mailing list is my personal author list, and has information about my books and my writing.

I take part in a lot of giveaways and cross promotions, and those attract another group of readers: people who like promotions.

These are really two groups of people, although there will be some overlap. People who are waiting for the next Ambassador book (it’s coming, I promise!) don’t want to receive all the emails about cross promotions. People who want bargain books don’t want to hear about my 5th book in a series they’ve never heard of.

So, here is the Ebookaroo, a list especially for those who like to hear about author-run promotions and giveaways which may or may not include any of my books. It will definitely include books of a lot of the awesome peeps I’ve met around here.

Click here or on the image to read more.

The astonishing success of the SF/F promotion

Remember I posted this a few days ago? Well, the promotion is now live and we’ve had over 62,000 clicks to book links so far, with almost a day still to go. I’m flabbergasted, and very pleased and astonished.

Why is this model so successful?

Cross-promotions are nothing new, but ironically, I think I stumbled on a fluke by being too lazy to bother with adding a competition with a rafflecopter thingie to it. I mean– the promotion is simple: get books for free or 99c (this alternates each month). It’s a promotion about READERS, not about people who want to win competitions, or who want to win some device.

The premise is crystal clear: get cheap or free books. It’s not about leaving email addresses for authors to use, or about other author-driven goals. It’s about people getting a selection of a lot of books.

It’s also not about everyone doing the same thing. The authors pay nothing, except I ask them to post about the promo in a place where they normally hang out, whether that be Facebook, Twitter, their blog, Google+ or Instagram or wherever. I am normally on Twitter and a little bit on Facebook. I have a Google+ account but never use it. I *think* I have a Reddit account, but I have no idea what the password is. So for me to start posting on Google+ or Reddit would be spammy. It’s not spammy for someone who frequents the place and has friends there.

That is why it works.

There will be some changes coming. Every month, we add a couple of hundred email addresses to the list of people who get the promo mailed to them. We’re about to smash Mailchimp’s free limit of 2000 addresses, and I’m going to have to pony up for the list. I have some ideas for further cross-promo projects that will be cool for readers, help promo authors and help me fund the site.

I’m getting a lot from this, but bucketloads of money is not one of those things 😛

Giant SF/F box set sale this weekend. All 99c.

The text speaks for itself. Click on the image or here to enter.

Giant SF/F box set sale this weekend. All 99c. was originally published on Must Use Bigger Elephants

Over 80 Science Fiction and Fantasy authors, all books 99c. This weekend

The title speaks for itself. Ambassador 1 is in the promo and already reduced. News about book 4 shortly.

Go here to check out the promo

Over 80 Science Fiction and Fantasy authors, all books 99c. This weekend was originally published on Must Use Bigger Elephants

Fifty-two authors you can try for absolutely nothing!

Fifty-two books by fifty-two authors. All are the first in a series, all are free. Click the image to enter.

Fifty-two authors you can try for absolutely nothing! was originally published on Must Use Bigger Elephants