For the past couple of years my fiction book sales have been falling – from 1142 in 2015, down to 983 in 2016, and then 640 last year. I wracked my brain to try and discover the reason why. Were my prices too high? What was I doing wrong?
Then I discovered Blasty.com through D.G Kaye’s blog on WordPress, and realised that there were over 1200 illegal sites where people could download free copies of my books. Blasty gives authors the opportunity to remove their books from these sites, and remove them I did. It took forever, because there were so many ‘blasts’ that needed doing. Every day Blasty emails me with more sites that have cropped up overnight, usually in the region of 4 or 5 per day.
No wonder my sales were dipping!
I’ve also lowered some of my prices but not all of them, and at last I’m seeing an upturn in sales (strangely enough the books which sell the most copies are the higher priced ones). I’ve also removed all my non-fiction books from the vanity press that I originally started out using back in 2009 which was recommended to me by somebody at work when I didn’t know any better. Surprise surprise, I now seem to be selling far more non-fiction books than they ever gave me royalties for. I also ended the contract I had with an independent publisher and now have control of all my books again, apart from a couple of translated books via Babelcube which I will get back in 4 years’ time.
Let’s face it, we Indie authors generally do not make a comfortable living through selling our books and we all have to get by on incomes from other sources, but hey, we need to start off on a level playing field. The only way we can do that (if we’re not lucky enough to be taken up by one of the big 5 publishers) is by having control of our books, pricing them competitively, and keeping on top of illegal download sites. If you visit Blasty you will be appalled at how many illegal sites there are.
I’m also in the process of getting all my books professionally formatted, and moving the paperbacks from CreateSpace over to KDP paperback publishing. I’d rather pay for the formatting as a one-off rather than have to pay a publisher, who will of course be taking their cut out of any royalties I may earn. I’ve had two goes at using small publishers and to be honest, in my opinion it isn’t worth it, so I’m in for the long haul and I’m going to wait for one of the big 5! I’m good at waiting… I’m still waiting to hear from the film company interested in ‘For the Sake of a Child’. Apparently they haven’t started reading it yet…
Have your book sales increased or decreased over the past few years?
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I saw Debby’s article on Blasty and I find the concept so horrible. It is terrible that ordinary people are so dishonest that they would acquire a pirated book. Our world seems to have gone mad with no integrity anywhere.
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Very true, and every day I am informed by Blasty that at least 20 more alerts for my books need checking.
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I’ll be checking out Blasty. Good link. Even though I plan to make all my books free I want people getting them off my site where they’ll see everything else that’s on offer. I’ve also considered professional formatting because EPUB files tend to be problematic using Calibre; I always end up editing the XML code myself. I’ve got Scrivener, but I need to start using it to write the drafts if that formatting function mentioned above is as good as it sounds.
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I really struggle with formatting. It makes me angry!
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Hi Stevie, lol. it was me who wrote about Blasty several times. 🙂 I’ve caught well over 1000 of my books pirated! 😦
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Oh gawd, yes of course it was! I’ll change my blog to include you!
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Lol, no worries Stevie, just reminding you. 🙂 BTW, Blasty has started charging. 😦 They are out of beta. Did you get their notification?
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No, not yet. How much is it now?
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I am not a shill, nor do I get any $ or swag or even a coffee cup. But if you write, Scrivener. Yeah. I may port over to Word a chapter at a time for line item things and dump them back, but when it goes down? Scrivener will export your book however you choose, in the format of your choice. And I mean the format of your choice, the way you want it to look. A couple of five minute YouTubes and you’re on your way. Check it on your phone, tablet, Kindle, PDF…You name it. You have control of fonts, spacing, headers, footers, chapters and it spits out a linked TOC without messing with it. Front matter, author notes, forwards…you can even drop a chapter from your next book or WIP on the tail end. Plus you can see what you’re doing writing all the way. If I had to go back to Word and all that style nonsense and Chapter Headers…No way. On occasion I might knock a scene out in word but it gets dumped across ASAP.
Just my .02. We give enough money away. Why give up real money for something you can get good at in hour?
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For under $40
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Is that a one off payment, or per book or per month? Thanks for the info.
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That’s for the program when it isn’t on sale, Mac or PC. You can hunt down specials on it for $29. It also goes on sale round NANO time, you can download a functional trial for free. Once you get the hang of it you’ll never go back. Index cards for scenes, chapters laid out in line, split screen to see if you’ve already “said that” elsewhere, word search, project search and replace, in place visual text formatting “see it the way you like it” and all the export control you need. I’m crippled without for anything but a chapter draft. And their customer support is 24 to 36 hours or less.
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Thanks Phil.
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Thanks for your comment. Great info.
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Guess I need a copy!
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I need to check out Blasty – although my sales have always been way lower than yours.
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Pingback: How to Avoid Others Getting Rich at your Expense. « Frank Parker's author site
Thanks for linking up, Frank.
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Thanks for the info Stevie.
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You’re welcome.
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Also, may I ask what prompted you to decide on professional formatting?
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To make my books look professional. I can do the spell checks, proof-reading, editing and anything else word-related, but I struggle with the formatting. It all goes tits-up when I do it.
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Thanks for recommending Blasty, I shall be checking this out later today…
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It works!
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Pingback: Book Sales – The Militant Negro™
Thanks for sharing.
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