Marketing for authors: what to expect from click-through and conversion rates

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Andrew

Being presently involved in an advertising campaign for our latest release Lights Over Emerald Creek by Shelley Davidow, I thought I’d check to see how our advertising compares to industry averages for click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CR). Surprisingly, given the poor return we’re getting, it turns out we’re actually achieving average rates in both categories.

Specifically:

CTR = 0.05%, i.e. for every 2000 views of an advertisement, we expect to get 1 person clicking the advertisement to visit our site; and
CR = 2%, i.e. for every 50 people visiting our site we expect to get 1 sale.

And no, the financials don’t necessarily add up. For a series of advertisements designed to be viewed 86,000 times we’re paying $330. That will probably give us 43 click-throughs, and possibly between one and two sales (at $5 each). At the moment we are still working to improve future CTR by focussing our ads in those blogs which give us the best return (the ads are presently being tested across 8 blogs, all with either a focus on YA Fiction, or SF&F). However, we are also using alternatives which have the potential of either increasing the CTR, or reducing the cost, for those with limited budgets.

Continue reading →

Swancon 39 Roundup

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Andrew

Arriving home from Swancon 39 my wife asked me how much Cola and sugar I’d had because of how hyper I was – almost, but not quite, bouncing off the walls hyper. So a week after the con finished I can now look back on it and assess how it worked for me. Particularly as this was the first Swancon that I’d actually been on any panels for.

The Guests

Isobelle-Anne-Sally-Jim, Swancons Guests

L-R: Isobelle Carmody, Anne Bishop, Sally Beasley, and Jim Butcher

Anne Bishop and Jim Butcher were the international guests of honour. Both very nice people, articulate, with very dissimilar writing styles. I hadn’t actually read any of their books, although I had picked up the first in Jim’s ‘Dresden Files’ series when we were in Sydney earlier this year without realising he was the GOH – what can I say, I’m terrible with names. Continue reading →

When submitting to a publisher (2): Keep within the genre

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Andrew

This blog is running a little late due to illness, my apologies. And just a warning that there won’t be a blog next week due to my attendance at [p2p type=”slug” value=”swancon-2014-panels”]SwanCon[/p2p].

Keep within the genre

I’m not sure why a writer would submit a manuscript ‘outside of genre’ to a publisher, but they do. This is despite our website saying we publish speculative fiction, with a focus on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Case in point – knowing this, and in fact already having had a manuscript rejected by us, why would someone email us a detective story? Even going so far as to say in their covering email – “I know this isn’t Science Fiction but Detective stories are similar.” Actually they’re not, particularly for readers of either genre.

My advice, check a publishers website, read a couple of their books, or at least read the samples provided, and try and find someone who is going to be interested in your work before they open it for that important first read.

Hague Central

In a nod to Jerry Pournell’s Chaos Manor articles which he used to write monthly for BYTE (starting in 1979 which is when I must have started reading) I’ve decided to try and give a more personal view at the end of each blog on what we’ve been doing during the week. I suspect it may take a couple of weeks before I get into my swing – but here goes…

I’ve finished the penultimate edit on the sequel to Ruth Fox’s sequel to The City of Silver Light. The cover has also been finalised so hopefully we’ll be in a position to announce a release date for Across the Bridges in the near future. It just needs one more quick read through and then its off to Coreynn, who’s our copy editor, to do the final check on grammar, spelling, and consistency. Its been a long haul, but I still like The City of Silver Light and I think readers of the series will like how Ruth has taken the opportunity to develop some of the character is this sequel.

Still waiting on a response from Overdrive as to whether they will distribute us. I’ve just send a second query off to Overdrive as to how their QA on the five eBooks I sent them is proceeding. So far its taken two months without any sort of update.

Andrew

Lights Over Emerald Creek has appeared in the April edition of the San Francisco Book Review – 4.5 stars

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Andrew

I couldn’t help including the full review – it pretty much sums up the book. And if you want to check a sample of the book, its available here.

Lights Over Emerald Creek
By Shelley Davidow
Hague Publishing, $4.49 US, 195 pages,
Format: eBook
4.5 stars

by Gretchen Wagner

Sixteen-year-old Lucy has been struggling with depression ever since the car accident several months ago, which took her mother’s life and left her paraplegic. But one night she sees something to bring her back to living, something inexplicable: strange glowing balls of light hovering over the creek on her remote Australian ranch. Lucy, an accomplished cellist with perfect pitch, finds the strange lights hum in different tones and leave unusual geometric patterns in the sand on the edge of the creek. Internet research connects her with Jonathan, a young music student in Scotland, who is interested in cymatics, the geometric forms created by sound waves moving through semisolid matter. Jonathan tells Lucy about unusual carvings in the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland which match certain note forms, and about an unexplained hexagonal storm on Saturn’s north pole that baffles scientists but also mimics one of those notes. Lucy’s online relationship with Jonathan develops while she continues her investigations linking these mysteries. But one day her research takes her much farther than she could have imagined, and she disappears. Jonathan, learning of her disappearance, travels to Australia to find her, which he eventually does. Together they learn that Lucy has exceptional powers that she will need to harness to allow the formation of a new world and to protect it from evil forces that want to enslave it before it has a chance to be born. Continue reading →

Getting to know us: what makes Hague Publishing tick.

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Andrew

I’ve just renewed our membership with the Independent Book Publishers’ Association, and was filling in the questionnaire provided, originally posed by Jan Nathan, when I thought it would be worth re-posting. So here it is …

Why did you become a book publisher?

Three years ago I was looking at creating a second career for myself when I retire from the public sector in five years. At the time there weren’t many small publishers focussing on the ebook SF&F market (and to the present in Australia that remains the case). I was NOT aware of how all consuming the whole process was going to be, and if I had been I might not have done it.

What do you enjoy most about publishing?

Working with the author to create a finished eBook that we can both be proud of. Secondly being a patron of the arts. Unlike our authors who aren’t paid an advance, our illustrators are paid upfront for the work they do in designing our covers and the work they produce is simply stunning. I’m actually in the process of getting some of our covers printed onto canvas for framing. Continue reading →

Marketing 101 for authors: Designing a landing page for a book

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Andrew

Over the last two years I’ve been constantly working to improve the landing pages we use to try and convert interest in one of our books into a purchase. The latest iteration of the design is now fully responsive, allowing people to read a sample of the first four chapters of ‘Lights Over Emerald Creek on their smartphone. That said, I’m not actually sure why someone would want to read a book on their smartphone, but they can. More importantly, with the addition of the QR code to our book-business cards I thought it important that when someone did scan the code they were provided with a page they could actually read (see [p2p type=”slug” value=”marketing-101-for-authors-business-cards-for-books”][/p2p]).

But first, back to basics, what is a ‘landing page’?

Continue reading →

Swancon 2014: Panels

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Andrew

Despite having been a long term attendee of Swancon (I was actually at the first one way back in 1976) I’ve never been on a panel. With Hague Publishing now turning three in June I thought it was about time I was, so this year I am. And not just one, but two (nothing like plunging in without a safety net):

Maintaining a useful and meaningful web presence 101 for authors (with Anne Bishop, Jim Butcher, and Isobelle Carmedy) Thursday 20:00
How To Piss Off A Publisher (with Cat Sparks from Agog! Press) Sunday 15:30

A full listing of the draft program is available here.

So – if you’re in Perth over the Easter long-weekend why not drop and join us at Australia’s longest-running science fiction convention, and probably the longest-running in the southern hemisphere (Wikipedia).

Shelley’s book tour for ‘Lights Over Emerald Creek’ kicks off tomorrow

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Andrew

We’re quite excited at our first book tour, which features Shelley Davidow’s Lights Over Emerald Creek. and kicks off on the 11 of March. The tour will run for 20 weeks and features a combination of guest posts, reviews, author interviews, as well as excerpts and book features.

The tour’s first author interview will occur on the 18th, at Mommy Adventures.

As this is our first tour we’re eager to see how successful it is, although I can certainly say that Shelley has done as much as she can to ensure it’s as successful as possible. (Answering 50 questions, and preparing three guest posts for the tour’s organiser OrangeBerry Book Tours while preparing for the start of the new school year is never going to be easy).

The full Schedule follows: Continue reading →

Marketing 101 for authors: business cards for books

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Andrew

In this post I discuss what I have found to be the most effective marketing tool for ebooks – the business card.

[p2p type=”slug” value=”how-people-chose-what-ebook-to-read-part-1″]In a November 2013 blog [/p2p]I discussed a poll conducted by USA TODAY which found that a majority of those surveyed (57%) cited their own opinion of the writer’s previous work as the major factor in creating interest in a particular book for them. Opinions of a relative and friend (“word of mouth”) came in second at 43%. Lower on the list were professional reviewers and other writers (each 17%), the book cover (16%) and Internet opinions by non-professionals (10%).

From this, it would appear that the most effective way of selling a book is for the reader to actually meet the author, allowing them to form a positive view of the author and their work. It is for this reason that authors attend conventions, and it also why authors (or their publishers) take big stacks of paperbacks to conventions that the author is attending, for sale. That’s all very well for authors with a traditional book, but how do you achieve the same for eBook, because by the time the reader has gone home and is sitting at their computer, ready to purchase the book, they may have forgotten the name of the book, or even the author.

Hague Publishing tackles this problem by producing business cards for each book it publishes. Continue reading →