Stop, Learn, and Find Answers to Your Challenge
By: Don Simkovich
Tags: Life Lessons, Learning, Writing Tips, Writing Life, Marketing

Learning to get un-stuck is on my mind this month — and this week. I’ve found helpful resources that breathed new life into sales for my first crime-thriller novel that was published in August 2016.

Last week, my fiction writing partner and I sold over 70 copies of Tom Stone: A Nitty Gritty Christmas. Sure, it has Christmas in the title but that never helped in past years. In fact, during the past four years we probably had 30 sales total.

This past week and into this week also led to sales and Kindle Unlimited reads of our other four novels, including the one we published most recently Tom Stone: Subterfuge.

I’m going to write a longer article today on what we did right and how we learned to test and sell during December.

Trying to sell our novels on Amazon was incredibly frustrating. But as we finished editing our 5th novel, I was determined that we figure out how to make sales. We had put in too much work and effort for the novel to simply sit on the digital shelves of Amazon or other retailers.

So I made every effort to learn how to launch a book and that meant coming up with a marketing plan. Let me point you to these free and low-cost resources that helped me

David Gaughran’s videos and two of his books, Amazon Decoded and BookBub Ads Expert.

I bought Gaughran’s first book, Let’s Get Digital and the subsequent revision but somehow it didn’t click with me. Not until I was totally determined to make sales.

On Facebook, there’s a wonderful group for authors called 20Books to 50K. The premise is that you can have 20 titles and be on your way to making $ 50,000 a year as an author.

We had four novel titles this year and two short stories and we were on our way to making less than a $ 1,000 per year. Maybe even less than $ 100 per year. But our earnings improved this past week.

I’d read the postings in the group and I’d often get frustrated since nothing seemed to work for us in selling our titles. Nothing. Or so it seemed.

The co-founders of 20Booksto50K, Craig Martele and Michael Anderle, have a slew of videos that you can watch on YouTube, absolutely free. Click here or look up 20Booksto50K Live Events. Make use of the videos if you’re a fiction or non-fiction author.

The content is great for indie authors but also useful if you’re publishing through a small press or if you happen to be with a larger press.

I’ve immersed myself in learning and we gained traction on Amazon for Tom Stone: A Nitty Gritty Christmas after a week of consistent sales. We reached 14,421 in our sales rank — the first time I had a novel break 40,000.

But more importantly, we finally saw similar books in our genre appear in our Also Boughts, a sign that we sold over 50 books total and that Amazon connected our book to other books that are like it.

Yea!

Now, the learning wasn’t cheap as we experimented with BookBub ads, Amazon ads and Facebook ads. We dropped a few hundred dollars easily. However, for our existing list of 5 novels and two short stories I feel confident that we now know how to target our spending, reach 5 to 7 days of consistent sales, and find our way into Amazon’s algorithm. That way, we can see our titles pop up in Amazon’s various recommendation lists and have consistent sales — even if it’s a few sales per day.

In the past, we’ve gone weeks and months with only one or two sales total.

When we publish our 6th novel, which I’d like to have happen in the next five months, then I can see where we’d spend no more than $ 200 on marketing and make a splash.

So if you’re feeling stuck on a business problem or personal issue, there are tremendous resources available. You’ll have to wade through fluff resources and ones that aren’t helpful, but be patient and find those that work.

Then stop fretting, learn and put your learning into practice. Be patient. Find what works and build on the knowledge you gain.

It’s a timeless practice that you can use throughout the year. So go learn and succeed.