Free for Five Days Book Promotions!

          With less than a day to go of the free for five days book promotion you get if you're in the KDP Select thingy, Alma Mater and TheBlissBook have between them been downloaded about 350 times. This amazes me. The title of the first one is in Latin and the second one is a comical satire about working in a bog standard high school in Edinburgh while practising Tibetan Buddhism!! No kissing vampires there.

           I thought this might have been affected by the Christmas holidays, but two people joined in the discussion on the Meet Our Authors forum and said they'd had their ebooks downloaded 1500 times using the same five free days thing. So it does seem to get your book out there. It seems people with Kindles can have emails sent to them about free ebooks, and it also seems that there are sites on the web telling you about free ebooks. There are no sites telling you about books for 86p or a dollar in the US, so I've started threads about that.

           I so enjoyed looking up the stats to see the rate at which the books were being downloaded that I've just put all the books into this programme,  a new one every five days till I'd gone through the ten books. This will finish on the day before my birthday, February 7th. I assume after nintey days you'll be able to take your books off the KDP Select scheme, re-enroll them, and start the whole thing again!!

Downloads

1:44 p.m.
             Quite amazed to see that TheBlissBook and Alma Mater have between them been downloaded forty five times this morning!! This is the first day out of the five when they will be free. How odd!!

28th December. 8:18 a.m.
                                       Alma Mater downloads on Amazon. com  - 86
                                       Alma Mater downloads on Amazon.co.uk  - 32

                                       TheBlissBook downloads on Amazon.com - 53
                                       TheBlissBook downloads on Amazon.co.uk - 23
                                   
                                        These books are FREE for another three days!!

Alma Mater if free for five days from Boxing Day!

          I decided last night that I'd make all ten of my kindle books free for five days, but they only let me put two up for free.

         Alma Mater. is about being at Edinburgh University in the early 1970s. There a lot of drug taking and such like going on, and I've been told it's funny in parts. It was the first book I ever tried to write and it took six years of my writing life to complete; twice as long as anything else I've worked on.

         TheBlissBook is also free on Kindle for five days from today. All the other books are still at 86p, or a dollar if you're in America.

TheBlissBook is free for five days!

          The computery literate person who was looking at my bookshelf on Kindle publishing pointed out that there was a actions button that led to promotions. So you get to put a book up for free. I have no idea why that should promote your book, but TheBlissBook should be free for the next five days. And in five days I might free another book. Better to have them read than not, I guess. Free the books! Free the books!

           The other nine are available for 86p anyway, so they're practically free as it is!

Finding stuff on Kindle

          I'd been wondering why I had hardly any sales on Amazon.com and about one a day on Amazon.co.uk. Once I had put tags on the books on Amazon.com (they were on Amazon.co.uk already), I imagined I was selling the odd book in Britain due to plugging them on the discussion threads. This is probably true.

          I think it's probably true because a more computer literate person has been sitting here with me over the last half hour trying to find my books using the tags I'd put on them. They don't show. None of my books show up anywhere. In The Land of The Demon Masters is tagged with Tibetan culture, children's literature, adventure, etc., but when you enter these tags into the search engine at the top of the page, the book doesn't appear at all. We did this with the tags for several of my books and none of them showed up. So I don't think there's any way to find these books!!! How strange! I wonder if anyone knows why this is. I should really find out.

         With real books of course, you'd just have them on the shelves!!!!

Amazon.com versus Amazon.co.uk

          They don't like it on Amazon.com if you start plugging your books on these discussion threads. They don't like it at all! I've only been trying it for a couple of days, but today I got an email from them saying this wasn't allowed and that I should desist, or else they'd ban me from the discussion threads. So that's me told. Actually, it was the politest message you could imagine, probably a better message than I could have written. Eff off was not mentioned once. Since I reckon it was by doing this that I was getting an ebook sold every day, I guess the one copy of The Buddha and The Big Bad Wolf  I shifted will remain the solitary book sold in America for some time.
         
            The folk who overlook the discussion threads on Amazon.co.uk don't seem to object. I guess they haven't gotten round to it yet. Anyway, it takes up far too much of my precious time. I've listened to a few radio plays recently. Twenty years ago I was really successful at that. If you sell one, you get more than 25p as well!!

             A little later.
              I've just enrolled all my books in this Kindle Select thing. I don't really know what it means because I couldn't be bothered reading the terms and conditions, I think they let folk borrow your books for nothing for a while and maybe promote it, or something like that.

Must have sold a book!

          What a nice response I got to a post a stuck on a Buddhist discussion thread on Amazon.com. By the way, some of the folk on the religious discussion threads on Amazon.co.uk should really be telling their psychiatrists about displaying their personality disorders in public places!

          Devin H. Wiesner says:

John that's fantastic that you have such a consistent practice. Do you meditate multiple times a day or do you sit four to six hours all at once? Also, I'm curious, do you set an alarm to go off after a certain amount of time or do you just sit until something inside you determines that it is time to get up?

I just downloaded your book and am looking forward to reading it. One of these days I hope to make a pilgrimage to India and Nepal. Thanks for sharing.

Amazon.com Sales?

          Since the beginning of December, that's in the last eighteen days, I've sold twenty three ebooks, but all of the apart from one at Amazon.fr (vive la France!), have been sold in Britain from Amazon.co.uk.  There have been none at all sold from Amazon.com.
 
          This was and is a bit of a puzzle. The states have about five times the population of Great Britain and you'd think, all things being equal, that if you sold ten ebooks here, you'd sell fifty there. But there's been nothing at all sold there.

          So a few days ago I went onto the Amazon.com site and discovered that none of the tags I'd put on the books were reproduced there. Also there was nothing reproduced from the Author Page I put up. I don't buy ebooks myself, but I imagine tags operate like keywords and folk might look for books under terms like Vampires, Ghosts,  and whatnot. Anyway, I stick in tags for the books and put my photograph and a wee bit of biography into the Author Page.

          My assumption previously was that I was selling ebooks in Britain because I was advertising them on appropriate discussion threads. But it may have been because of the tags. I don't know. It's certainly not because of my name since I'm not known as a writer, not even in this house!

          I doubt if my facebook page makes any impact on sales at all. I only have thirty eight "friends" and the vast majority of them are relatives.

          So I'll keep looking for appropriate discussion threads on Amazon.com and see if it makes any difference.

          This blog is starting to get hits. In each of the last three days, there have been over twenty page views. Of course, I'm not sure what a page view is!!

Smashwords

          I got back onto the Amazon.com discussions threads last night and somebody gave me this tip. It's no use to me just now since I just haven't got the time for all this marketing malarkey, but it might be useful to someone a bit more enthusiastic!

          pjf says:

John, I don't know much about this, but many authors put up new books on smashwords.com for a few days for free. Then Amazon.com matches the free price and they appear on Ereaderiq and various other places that gets you some free visuals of your covers, free pub. And if you're lucky (and the number of free books that day is small), you get listed on the daily free books message from Happy Reader Joyce in these discussion forums. Then if enough people download your book, it gets in the "top 100 free books listing" on the main kindle page. When it goes off free, it may convert (by virtue of its "free" sales") though now it is not a free book into the "top 100 paid ebooks" on Amazons Kindle page and you get listed right next to Stephen King et al. This may drive paid sales for you (or it may not). You probably want to ask about all this on Meet the authors forum (see link about) as I am not an author. they will clue you into all this stuff.

Might make more sense for you to do a few free a day rather than all at once, to keep your name up so more people have a chance to see it over several days.

Amazonian Passwords!

          The Kindle folk are very good and helpful. After you've sent them your problem about not getting into your reports, they send you something back helping you to get a new password, and they give you a link so that you can get onto your reports, etc.

           So you have discovered that the tags you put on your books doesn't automatically go onto all the Amazon sites. This might be why I'm not selling any books in America at all - there's no way anyone can find them. Anyway, I also noticed that the information on the Author's Page doesn't transfer either, so I try to get onto that and it asks for a password. I try my new password. I still can't get in. I try other possible passwords. Zilch. I apply to change the password and that seems to go well, but when I use it, it still won't let me in. I sent a pathetically worded plea for help, and a wee bit later try to get onto my reports to see if I've sold any ebooks today. Now I can't get into my reports. Account blocked.

            There are other sites I should go to in order to put in tags and put something into the Author's Page. Amazon. It, Amazon.Fr, Amazon De, etc. Whenever I do that, the same thing will happen. If I don't do something on these sites, I won't sell any books in those countries.

             I've asked the nice Kindle folk if I can have one username and one password for everything I do with them and Amazon, but I'm sure this is impossible.

             I've been trying to do stuff to promote these ebooks for a few hours today. Trying to show willing. Hmmm? Time to hit the snooze button, I think. If you don't write crime books, or books about kissing vampires, I suspect all this ebook stuff is a bit of a fool's errand anyway. Oh well. ZZzzzzzzz.

           

Amazon.com

          Just because you've bought something from Amazon to get onto discussion threads and do a wee bit of marketing for your ebooks ... well, if you've bought something from Amazon.uk, that, it seems, won't let you onto the discussion threads on Amazon.com. So I've been told to buy something for Amazon.com.

          I've just spent the last three quarters of an hour trying to buy Essentials of Mahamudra by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, the one book I haven't got and would really like to have. The reason why this took me so long is that I don't do well with these computery things! It took me five or six goes before they would accept my address and it's not actually the correct address. They would accept Flat 1, but not flat 3f2, where I actually reside, and they wouldn't let me just give the address with no flat numbers mentioned.

          It's taken me three or four days to work up the courage to do this because I know, just know, that it's probably screwed up my access to Amazon.uk., and to my reports on the Kindle account. That's what happened before. Do you think I should have tried to do this on a different browser? Oh well.

           I'll leave it for a few hours before trying to get onto the discussion threads at Amazon.com because I know, just know, that it's not going to let me on them, and my hair isn't long enough to pull out!!

            Incidentally, just before I got onto the Amazon.com, I checked my emails and found out that Thrangu Rinpoche is in hospital with a stroke. A strange coincidence! He'd be a great loss to Tibetan Buddhism. Get well soon!!!
6:11 p.m.
              I'm now able to get into the discussions on Amazon.com! Hurrah!! They've got Buddhist forums as well, which they don't seem to have on Amazon.uk. Here come Johnnneeee!!!

Readership!

          Marketing, you'd think, would increase your readership. That means the number of people who buy your books. The only marketing I've done for my ten books on Kindle has been to recommend them to folk on the discussion threads on Amazon. But I assumed this wasn't having any effect at all.

          However, I've been checking my account and I've sold about fourteen or fifteen books in the last nine days (since the start of December) and almost all of them were sold in Britain. One book has sold in France, The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf, so vive la belle France! I wondered why only a few have been sold in America, but I've just noticed that it was Amazon UK where I was leaving the messages. If you stick Amazon.com into the browser, you get a completely different page. And the one for the book I've mentioned has a Buddhist forum.

          This has changed my idea of what I was going to write in this post. I was going to say that I'm really out of this writing game at present, and I'm going to concentrate my energies on my meditations, the Great Vajrayana, and if I'd wanted a readership, I'd have started writing books about a one eyed, one legged detective with a slight heroin problem, and a dog called Spot. This is not that I didn't want to be a "success", but I was never poor enough, or had enough time to devote to writing detective books.

          I wanted to write all kinds of different books and  I have written genre fiction. Remote Control is a political thriller. Ursula Mackenzie was my agent at the time and she suggested that I write a political thriller and I managed to finish it only thirty years later! But it is in a genre.

         I have also written two books for children of between ten (actually, whenever you can read!) and fourteen, In The Land of the Demon Masters and Bugtown. And I know these are excellent books for children and young folk because I road tested them on a lot of kids when I was still a school librarian. Stand on me. Twelve year old kids love these books!

         But the books I would really like people to read before any others are The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf and TheBlissBook. Like Are You Boys Cyclists?, nobody but me could have written these books. The style is, I think, mine. But the reason why I'd like folk to read them is because amongst the travelling (the first one is about being in Nepal and India) and education, and writing, and the jokey bits, these books promote meditation. If more folk meditated, more folk would be happier than they would have been. I've been meditating for over twenty five years and that's something I do know.

         These days I've taken a break from writing so I can practise Vajrayana Buddhist meditations, and this takes all your time.

         I was going to write that I'm very grateful to Allan Guthrie for telling me all about marketing, but I really can't be bothered. I'm  not really wanting to become an indie publisher or a professional writer anymore (though I've been writing for over thirty years!) since I don't need the money, and I'm not going to stop telling folk that half my books have been rejected by almost everyone because they have, including by him in his agent capacity, but now that I realise that I got the sales by promoting myself on these discussion threads - for how else could anyone have found them? - I think I might spend a wee while every day harassing folk to buy my Buddhisty books in the America Amazon site. A Buddhist forum! Eat your heart out, you Dharma bums! Here I come!
9:42  p.m.
        This is later! So I goes to the Buddhisty forums on Amazon.com and it is wonderful! There are threads from folk who want to know about meditating, and how to start meditating, and I think I can advertise my give-away-for-bugger-all books to them, and I spend a half an hour writing this huge post about the Buddhisty books and all, and then I try to post it, and ... zippo! It says that you have to buy something first. I assume buying the one book I bought before doesn't count with these folk since I bought it through the UK site, and, anyway, it was a waste of time and effort. I would have had to spend ages and ages buying my own book off the Amazon.com site, as opposed to the Amazon.uk site, and then some other obstacle might occur.
        I think God is telling me that this is intermittent reinforcement, and don't do this. It's clinging and craving, leading to becoming and then ... grief, sorrow, lamentations ... delusions, disappointments and despair, suffering in this life.
       What we need is a young person. I've already signed away 25% to the boy who helped me set up this blog, who claims he has my signature on a napkin, and fifteen percent to the consiglieri, but if someone would like ten percent of what's left .... Dearie me! I have no problem with the quality of the wonderful writings I used to do. But that's it! It's much better to go and meditate in my hut. Realising voidness is all that matters!

Marketing

          Allan Guthrie was telling me all about how to market ebooks the other day. One of his novellas sold 35,000 copies on Kindle so he should know what he's talking about.

           I told him all I did was put comments and product links into the Amazon discussion threads, and he did not seem too impressed with that. Here's some of the advice he gave me.

            1) Don't ever write anything about ever having books rejected by anyone, or anything negative at all. It's maybe like selling cigarettes. You show pictures of happy people on horses in the great outdoors, but don't mention cancer. I've been rejected by every publisher in the world, just about, as has anyone who's tried to get stuff published over decades. But you don't tell anyone that.

            2)  Pretend that your books are new. This might be a bit difficult for me - well, I could lie - since I've put ten books up on Kindle in the past year, and no one writes books that fast. Also, I'd have to change the covers on two of the books since I've used pictures of the original covers. I thought the fact that they'd been published before would be a sign to a prospective buyer that they might have some quality, but this seems not to be so.

            3) He told me of these sites which might be useful. The Writer's Cafe at Kindleboards.com. Then there was the UK Kindle Users Forum, and Mobile Reads.

             4) He also said to get out there and interact with other kindle writers blogs and that it might be a good idea to leave reviews on Amazon of books which are like your own. Also, be alerted by Google Alerts.

              He gave me some very good input, but it would be time consuming, and I don't need the money, and I've taken a break from writing so I could concentrate on my meditations, and if I had a couple of hours a day to spend on the computer I'd rather write than market my ebooks. What I really need is some young person who likes computery things who would do this for me for ten percent off the top!

Networking

Sunday 2:30 p.m.
                           I don't like meeting folk I don't know. I certainly don't like meeting folk when I'm trying to get something off them or convince them of something. As for pitching something to a director or producer ... that was one of the reasons why I was happy to stop writing drama. One time I didn't mind all this networking stuff so much, but I can't say I ever enjoyed it.

                           Once I was personally rather friendly with a publisher here in Edinburgh, but I let the connection slip partly because I didn't think it was cool to be so friendly with a publisher. With me being a writer and whatnot, it didn't seem like a meeting of equals once his publishing business got on the up and up.

                            Anyway, the consiglieri asked me to arrange a meeting with Allan Guthrie. and we'll be seeing him on Tuesday afternoon. Fortunately, I've met Allan before. He seemed to have liked Are You Boys Cyclists? which he said he read twice back to back when he was working in Waterstone's. He's now a writer  - a very good crime writer. I've read THREE of his books which is some kind of a record for me these days. If you like crime books, check him out.- and he's been an agent for ages, but now it turns out he's also a publisher. I just googled him, as you do, and he's started something called Blasted Heath.

                            I have some memory of the consiglieri mentioning this venture, but we were well into our cups by that time. Hmm? I'm starting to get a feeling now that this is a meeting I don't want to be at.

                            The time I had a chat with Allan I told him that I was spending most of my time these days trying to emanate as a deity. This is really what I want to do. It's what deity yoga is all about, one of the meditational exercises you do while practising vajrayana Buddhism.

                             I think after getting a royalty payment of £10:88 after having my ebooks priced at 86p for a month, I should rest on my laurels!

                             Allan Guthrie seemed like a very nice guy and it'll be nice to speak to him again. But I'm not interested in talking to him about making money or anything like that. How totally uncool that would be!