Storm's Clouds Reviewed in Bookshine and Readbows

It was a thrill to see Storm's Clouds, the second book in the Stormfall Chronicles, reviewed by Steph Warren on Bookshine and Readbows this past weekend. To quote from her review:

"The main characters are well-developed and interesting.  I liked seeing Eirlon’s mischievous streak, Lynette’s naivety and Baxter’s quiet loyalty as I got to know them better; their personal quirks make them seem more real and empathetic.  I also liked that they still have room to develop."

So glad she enjoyed the book.

https://bookshineandreadbows.wordpress.com/2020/07/19/storms-clouds-j-w-golan/

Storm's Gate - Book 3 of the Stormfall Chronicles - Now in Pre-Release

Storm's Gate, Book 3 of the Stormfall Chronicles, is now available in pre-release - with a scheduled release date of 19 Nov 2020. An interim blurb has been released as well:

A world descending into war; a fabled healer who might be their last, best hope; and a princess, locked in a tower, guarded by a dragon.

Lynette sets out with Baxter and Eirlon in search of a healer: the fabled Medicine Man of Horru. It is a desperate gambit to revive the fae king and avert a larger war.

But the route they take will prove perilous. They risk losing everything, even each other, in a world gone mad with the stirrings of war. Armies have gathered on the borders of the Feyfell – lured by legends of fae wealth. With King Elyan poisoned and unconscious, the kingdom is visible, and vulnerable to outside invaders for the first time in centuries. And while the fae nobles debate rules of succession, Princess Elise remains missing.

Will it all be too much for Lynette to bear? Will she survive the loss of what she holds dear – and if she does, will she ever be the same? For who among them would dare descend into the realm of the undead, to retrieve a princess from a dragon-guarded tower?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CNNJBBD

I'm expecting to have the Cover Reveal in September, which is when I'm also expecting to have ARC editions available.

The latest draft for Book 3 is with my beta readers now, and I've also added a couple of scenes to Book 4 - which should complete the current story arc. Looking forward to seeing Book 3 in print.

Fourth Review for Storm's Clouds Appears on Amazon

Also this past week, a fourth review was posted on Amazon for Storm's Clouds - the second book in the Stormfall Chronicles.

Particularly for a relatively new author, every review is appreciated and word-of-mouth is all the more essential.

Review for Book 1 on Bookshine and Readbows

I was excited to see Storm's Herald, the first Book in the Stormfall Chronicles, reviewed by Steph Warren on Bookshine and Readbows this past week. To quote from her review:

"The characters are interesting and have plenty of room to grow and develop as the story progresses.  Lynette and Baxter both confounded my initial impressions of them, by having hidden depths and individual motivations, causing them to occasionally act in unexpected ways.  I particularly liked this character complexity."

So glad she enjoyed the book.
https://bookshineandreadbows.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/storms-herald-j-w-golan/

Indie Author SnapShot: Concluding Remarks

As described when I began this series of posts, a single, one-day snapshot was extracted for Amazon rankings and other key parameters for a cross-section of 24 indie authors in the fantasy genre, spanning 259 books. This data was used to interrogate trends for various metrics - exploring which parameters might influence the sales potential for individual titles.

To recap some of the key conclusions from this exercise:

• Having more books in an author's portfolio was proven to be the most influential factor in the overall success of each new title.
• Releasing books in series similarly increased the through-read and sales potential for each book - above and beyond the effect of having additional books in an author's backlog.
• Covers which feature a human image on the cover lead to better sales - even if the person's face is not visible, or that person's back is facing towards the viewer.
• Romance is its own cross-genre classification, with its own opportunities for sales. If a novel can appeal to its conventions, a Romance-themed plot-line can promise a huge sales boost - but only if that novel fully meets the expectations for this genre.
• Within the fantasy genre, female lead characters are more popular than male lead characters.
• Shelf life means something different for the online, digital age than it did for traditional, brick-and-mortar sales strategies.
• A book needs to be priced to fit its market. Charging more doesn't necessarily lead to more revenue if it deters sales.

There were a number of things which I couldn't directly explore with this data set. No clear conclusions, for example, could be drawn regarding how reviews on Amazon might influence sales. The data set available was just too small or lacked the right information to draw such a conclusion.

Likewise, this data set could not draw any conclusions regarding the impact of advertising campaigns or the relative merit of different promotional tools. There is still much which can be learned from the experience and growth of individual authors who have made a career from their writing.

I will be indexing the results from this one-day snapshot for future ease of reference - sort of my own way of paying-forward all I have gained from my many fellow authors in the community. I hope this snapshot may benefit other indie authors, as the examples of past successful writers have likewise inspired me.

Indie Author SnapShot: A Sweet Spot for eBook Pricing

Among the trends that most indie author/publishers will want to know, is whether there is a sweet spot in terms of the price they should be charging for their eBook.

Anyone who has released a book on Amazon through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) has no doubt seen the price and revenue comparisons that are typically provided - which will usually suggest a preferred target price of $2.99 for most eBooks. Anything lower than $2.99 and the author's share of the revenue drops by a factor of two (per Amazon's policies). Anything higher, and the suggestion will be that higher pricing will produce fewer sales - which will in turn translate into a smaller gross income.

I was curious to see if actual indie author data supported this narrative.

Interrogating the available data, there does appear to be a clear trend towards fewer sales as the price of the eBook increases. This drop-off in sales would appear, on average, to more than counteract the added revenue from higher per-unit pricing. Selling ten books at $5.99 will produce less revenue than selling hundreds at $3.99.

Significantly, however, there does appear to be a "sweet spot" for maximizing eBook revenue - at least among the most successful indie authors in this genre. That "sweet spot" appears to be centered around $3.99.

It is possible that the vast majority of established indie authors were also driven to select this "sweet spot" by other market pressures. It may be difficult to justify the cost of advertising, for example, at anything lower than a $3.99 unit price - not when many online advertising services charge on a cost-per-click basis. The picture may also look different for an author/publisher who has not yet achieved these higher volumes.

There will be other levers, of course, available for maximizing sales volume. As an example, from the sample of authors and books assessed, titles which were available as both eBooks and in paperback saw 53-percent more eBook sales than those titles which were available only in eBook form. Having both a paperback and an eBook appears to add credibility and promote sales, even if eBook sales continue to predominate for most indie authors.

Author/publishers who are still working to establish themselves will need to experiment with what pricing works best for their particular title, at their particular stage in their career. But looking to the future, there are indie authors who have already paved the way, and whose example can provide guidance for what many of us aspire to.

Indie Author SnapShot: Shelf Life in a Digital Age

In traditional publishing, there is a line of thought which suggests that all books have a very limited shelf life. It is well known that most publishers will campaign heavily, push their new releases onto as many bookstore shelves as possible - and then withdraw the less successful titles after a relatively short window of exposure. Some titles will do very well, and others will fade into obscurity.

Much of this pattern is dictated by the limited space available on the shelves of retailers, as well as the cost of maintaining warehouses full of unsold books. Being a traditional publisher isn't just about selling books, it's also about managing inventory.

Today's indie publishing market, however, is different. It is a market made possible largely due to online sales - bypassing the physical storefronts over which the traditional publishers had a near monopoly. Even the paperback market has been reinvented, with the arrival of affordable, print-on-demand capabilities. Just how different this new indie market is becomes apparent once rankings and sales data are interrogated.

Exploring the data extracted from the one-day snapshot of the indie fantasy scene described under earlier posts, a couple of trends become apparent. One, is that while the very top-selling indie titles do appear to have a limited window for peak sales - that window is measured in months not weeks. The top-selling titles will peak in earnings shortly after release, and gradually lose that added earning potential - but will do so over the course of the next two years. Without the limitations of physical shelf space, the marketability of "new" titles becomes much longer.

Moreover, the sales potential for most indie books appears to be fairly consistent in the span between two to five years after release. Unlike a traditional publisher, which will seek to optimize earnings from a sales portfolio spanning many authors, an indie author/publisher will continue to promote their backlog of books for years to come - encouraging read-through across their entire portfolio. The result is a longer "shelf life" for books which in the brick-and-mortar world of book sales might easily have been forgotten.

Taken in total, it should be evident that the indie author scene represents a different business model from traditional publishing. It is a model based on maximizing the long-term earnings of an author's entire suite of books, not merely the short term opportunities afforded by the shelf space of a physical retailer.

Indie Author SnapShot: The Appeal of Romance and the Choice of Main Characters

I was also curious, from my one-day snapshot of book titles, to see what the correlation was between romance in the novel, and the book's sales potential.

I divided the books based upon the contents of their blurb, between those with a clear, romantic love focus, those which left the potential for a romantic storyline, and those with no suggestion of a romantic sub-plot at all.

Not surprisingly, those books with a clear romantic sub-plot described in the blurb out-sold those with no suggestion of a potential romantic storyline by a ratio of 2.9:1.

Those books which left open only the potential for a romantic interest, however, were indistinguishable from those with no hint of a potential romantic storyline - differing by a little more than 1-percent in sales.

Clearly, romance has a broader appeal - beyond the fantasy genre. But to capitalize on that market, the novel has to be clearly aimed at that market, leaving no ambiguity.

There was also a disconnect in the ratio between female and male protagonists - and how well each book sold. Based upon the description in the blurb, 69-percent of the titles surveyed focused on a single female protagonist, rather than a male protagonist or multiple main characters. Those which did focus on a female protagonist, tended to out-sell those which focused on a male or multiple protagonists by a ratio of 2.1:1.

Both of these trends no doubt reflect heavily on the audience which is most likely to purchase novels in this genre.

Indie Author SnapShot: The Power of Cover Images

Among the effects which I was most interested to explore, was the relationship between the cover image of a novel, and sales for that novel.

Grading the individual merit of respective cover designs is a highly subjective process. I therefore had to resign myself to a less complicated approach: dividing book covers between those where the main character is front-facing, those where the main character is back-facing, and those which do not have any human figure on the cover.

Including both the original book titles and the compilations for each series, there were 231 books with front-facing figures, 33 with back-viewed figures, and 26 with no human figures on the cover. Taken in total, the books with a front-facing figure on the cover sold about 5.0 times better, on average, than those with no human figure at all. This was essentially the trend which was expected.

Significantly, however, there was minimal difference between books with a front-facing figure and those with a figure viewed from the back (about 1-percent separated the two populations). The real difference came from having an identifiable person on the cover of the book - whether their face was visible or not.

Indie Author SnapShot: Book Length and Readability

There were a few extraneous pieces of data which I also explored in my one-day snapshot for indie author sales in the fantasy genre, which might bear repeating.

For full length novels (books with 200 pages or more), the length of the book had no apparent bearing on its sales success. Shorter novels or novellas (books with less than 200 pages), on the other hand, did tend to generate fewer sales.

This trend should not be surprising. Novellas are often used as promotional tools by authors and are usually priced accordingly. The market has only so much appetite for shorter works of this kind. With regard to full length novels, traditional publishers have often shied away from publishing longer works because of the added printing costs. For indie authors, most of whom will rely heavily on eBook sales, the printing costs for the paperback are a secondary concern. If the story needs to run a little longer, as fantasy books with their world building often do, there is no reason to shortchange the reader.

An assessment for the effect of readability, or "reading grade level", on sales was performed for a limited number of titles. The readability metric was calculated from a short sample of text, extracted from the first chapter of each title, for the first book in each series. A total of 55 books were evaluated in this fashion. The readability metric was averaged by an online algorithm, using a number of standard readability metrics. Most of these metrics measure sentence length (number of words per sentence), and word length (number of syllables or letters per word) to arrive at a "grade level" score.[1]

On average, book sales tended to peak around a readability grade level rating of 5.5, with a trend towards slightly fewer book sales either above or below this value. To place this trend into context, a similar reading sample from JRR Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring had a readability grade of 9.9, and a sample from Sarah J Maas' Throne of Glass came up with a readability grade of 7.0.

Books with higher reading levels (longer, more complex sentence structures) can obviously do well enough. But authors should consider their audience and invest the necessary time into editing their novels if they want their audience to embrace their work.


References

[1] "Check Readability." StoryToolz, Kydala Publishing, 2016, https://storytoolz.com/readability

Indie Author Snapshot: Why Ratings and Reviews Do or Don't Matter

Every indie author has probably been told that reviews drive book sales. That adding reviews to an Amazon title will prompt prospective buyers to purchase that title, and how Amazon's secret algorithm for where books place among their recommended products takes reviews into account.

I was therefore eager to see if I could find evidence for this trend in the individual book and author sales data which I collected from my one-day snapshot. Information was collected on the number of ratings, number of reviews, and ratings score for each title from both Amazon and Goodreads.

In general, there does appear to be an overall trend between the number of book ratings and book sales - but it's impossible to determine how much the ratings are driving sales and how much they are a product of those sales. The trend between book reviews and book sales was very similar, and there was little meaningful difference in this trend between Amazon and Goodreads - although there were usually more ratings and reviews for each book on Goodreads than on Amazon.

The relationship between the number of ratings and book sales becomes more revealing, however, when plotted as a frequency - taking into account the average number of days between the release of each review. There is a sharp shift in the slope of this trend for books which receive ratings more frequently than once every 15 days.

These trends, however, appear to be driven more by the popularity of the book than they are by the ability of additional reviews and ratings to generate more sales. There is no sharp shift in the sales potential when the book reaches ten reviews, or twenty, or any other arbitrary break-point.

This does not mean that reviews are unimportant. There are many promotional services, for example, which will not accept a book for consideration until it has exceeded some minimum number of reviews - often around ten. And there may very well be an element in Amazon's search algorithm which takes the quantity of reviews into account. But these effects are less pronounced than other influences might be on a book's success - such as the number of books which the author has in their portfolio, or the advertising strategy of the individual author. There is general agreement that reviews are an important component to an author's success. But they are not the only element, and they do not guarantee a novel's performance.

Similarly, there is no clear correlation between the rating of a book, on either Amazon or Goodreads, and the ability of that title to generate sales. Among the books examined, all of which had a rating of greater than 3.6, each book's rating appeared to have minimal effect on whether readers would be willing to purchase that title. In fact, the highest-grossing titles tended to have a slightly lower rating, a reflection of the broader audience which had reviewed and rated each book. As expected, the Goodreads rating was usually (although not always) lower than the Amazon rating. But the rating score still does not directly correlate with sales.

To understand why some books are more successful than others, we will have to look at other contributors.