Nuts and bolts

I look back at our first publication, the first sequel of the "Solar Wind" series, and I'm actually quite pleased with our progress.

Let's face a few things:  Huge amounts of novels have not yet been moved.  For that, the entry level cost per copy is still far too high.  The best is people buying the books off the website; but accommodating a shop's profit in the equation is not easy, and adding an agent's margin pushes the selling price out of range for normal book lovers.  So the greatest challenge is to find a printer who will go low enough on small volumes.

The second largest challenge is publicity, but I blogged on that before and will be blogging again; not tonight though.

However despite small sales volume the business has grown enough that it now sports quite an enticing little range.  The range is due to be extended once again, in the very near future:

• "Forest Circle Quest" is practically print-ready
• So is "Lupa"
• "Freedom Fighter" is print-ready
• and we are adding a lovely little range of books for young children, hard-cover and fully illustrated, by children's book author Leslie Hyla Winton Noble with his delightful sense of humour, and a very talented young illustrator.

 We are also in the process of creating ebook versions of all our books.  At this point all we can offer is pdf; however pdf is a format that presents on practically all e-readers on the market.  We will move into the other formats as time allows.

The one thing that catches me a bit is overload.  I find that as I haven't stopped doing what I was doing before for bread-and-butter, i.e. running a music studio, I work until late at night, to be up before dawn again the next morning.  This takes its toll, and the item that suffers most is my own writing. I can understand and envy writers who howl, "all I want to do is write".  Like being a full-time mother, being a full-time writer is a profession for a select few privileged souls who don't have to earn a living en route to their first bestseller.

Btw, did you know in South Africa a book counts for a bestseller if it sells 3000 copies here? One needs to raise the bar - nobody can get financially independent on 3000 copies of a book!

That's all for now...

An immensely busy time

Balancing cost-per-copy against international airmail charges is a tango.  So investigations proceed into printing companies in the US who would be able to print, at a reasonable CPC, our music books.  Ditto in the UK, where I've luckily got a synergistic contact. Getting quotes over the public holidays is of course another matter...

We've achieved a lot recently:

• Forest Circle Quest is print-ready and will be placed after the Easter Weekend.  The launch will take place in Durban, seeing that it's Les's book; date still to be finalized.

• Violin Tunes is now in CNA and many different music shops across the country.  Best move ever, meeting the agent.

• Not Another Scale Book! is finally off to America for the author.  I hope he will be as excited holding it in his hands as I was when I first had a paperback copy of the Solar Wind in my hands.

•  Some work is still to be done on LUPA but the focus is narrowing down on it, meaning that we're going to be printing it in the not-too-distant future.

• The Solar Wind 3 - "Freedom Fighter" - is ready for print.  A special hitch here - the printers that give us such beautiful quality on Forest Circle Quest can't bind books as thick as Freedom Fighter; so more binders are being investigated as the most important next step.  It's currently a waiting game, for them to come back with quotes.

No wonder I feel a little worn...
 

Frozen Wave

It is surreal.  I removed the wasp's nest (the cuckoo's egg) from my site and put a stop to the abuse... and the whole stats stopped.  A freak wave, frozen in mid-air.

We shall see the real results over the next few days - if any of that wave of traffic "stuck" in any way to the bookshop or if they were really only using my domain for free.

Over 100% managed to connect to the favicon - how is that possible?

Gone Viral - Part II

No, this is not a new Science Fiction series :). (Yet.)

I blogged "Gone Viral" on the P'kaboo Blog but as this second part relates more to the learning curve than the business, I'm placing it here.

 In February we uploaded a new improved index page. The page clicks grew in a nice, trackable way, a sweet little hyperbolic curve that we were quite chuffed with.

 Then I followed a hint and a hunch and added a "Don't click me, I'm Secret" tag to my favourite free download. Just for fun and because it looked a lot better than "click me, I'm free". And overnight we had our door trampled by Russian browsers (all using Yandex) checking out, I suppose, what was so "secret".

 I find it hilarious that it had to be all the .ru users who suddenly skyrocketed in connection with a supposed "secret". They were all to be disappointed: Not only was the "secret" only a free ebook, but they couldn't even read it (I would presume) because it's an English pdf file. Ergo, not a staggering amount of downloads.

I found this a bit sad as our books are all extremely readable and someone looking to hone their English should pick them as a first choice.

 Nevertheless, I continued tracking our suddenly scary volume. I learnt a bit about Russian internet users.

They prefer Yandex. I haven't yet experimented with Yandex but it looks like a nice enough search engine. It also has an instant translation function, but as far as I can see, only between Russian and English.

 They prefer browsers such as Safari and Opera to our IE and Google Chrome. Suppose they are onto something. Firefox is also quite a favourite.

 I have no idea what search terms they put in; 's all in Russian!

 I found the weirdest referrers. (A referrer is a link leading to a P'kaboo page.) I followed some of the links to sites that looked much like our "Gumtree" etc. And then I found - wait for it - a wasp's nest.

I found it today.  I noticed that our most visited pages all started with "files", a directory I hadn't created.  And except for our home page and one other page, all the pages were in Russian!

I had a look at those pages and found a lovely pirate of a car parts website, having laid its cuckoo's egg into my domain.  Even using my favicon!  Well!

After that it was a matter of simply deleting their pages off my server again.  But now I'll have to be careful that they don't take some or other revenge.

I wish I could reset our page stats to see how much of all that traffic was really generated by our upgraded front page (which I had to move back to the bookshop to save bandwidth) and how much our cuckoo brought us.  Sadly, unsolicited traffic will never turn into qualified traffic - that's like asking a dog to turn into a horse.

It would be nice if you could watch this site with me and check every now and then if you find results when typing "pkaboo.net/files/" into the address bar.  It ought to give a "403 - Verboten" code but if it lands anywhere else, pls let me know.  How did they get in?  How did they override my securities?

We'll keep an "aye" on this.

Bye-bye 2011, welcome 2012

Another year crawling towards its end.  Funny how years start crawling between Christmas and New Year.


Once again I learnt a lot, forgive me if I copy-paste directly from our News Page on P'kaboo.net.  


2011 - A Year of Firsts

It was an interesting year. While in 2010 P'kaboo grew from one to 5 and, right at the end of the year, 7 titles, we did several things for the first time in 2011.

• We launched our first external author.
• We battled our first debtors :-) (and won).
• We published our first republication of a previously published book!
• We published our first American author!
• We found our first distribution agent.
• And our first literary agent, Bookseeker Agency in Scotland.
• We brought out our first ebook.

One could say it was a good year.


Still, it could have been better:  I could have missed fewer deadlines.  This way, Solar Wind 3, "Forest Circle Quest" by LHW Noble, and the American edition of "Not Another Scale Book" by Alan Solomon all stand over for next year.


Once again the lesson was reiterated:  Online marketing is not as effective as direct, live sales.


Getting past the systems that the larger bookshop chains have built in self-defence, is "merely" a matter of presenting the books at a cheaper price to the agents (without agents, no large bookshops!).  In terms of money it would mean larger runs... which is why it isn't easy building a publisher on small runs.  Not easy - but not exactly impossible either!  Personal promotion and sweet reviews in the public media (newspapers, magazines) help.  And the critical importance of having striking cover graphics... people buy with their eyes.


A cover sells a book.
A book sells an author.
And the author sells the sequel.
But in all this, the price must be right.


E-books: (I mean the electronic variety, not the beautiful chain of bookshops that has been of so much help this year, again):


We are experimenting with e-books.  Our first one is a free giveaway, for testing the waters and the systems, then again it is a part of the Solar Wind saga, the first part, imminently readable for people who have about 4 hours on their hands and love excitement.


Download "Donegal Trouble" here.

In fact there are a few free downloads at the following link:


http://www.pkaboo.net/freestuff.html


Have fun.


Happy New Year.  

Web Wow

Iain has been working very hard on the website, and we now sport a guestbook, a mailing list subscription page, are Paypal enabled and also have a proper order form for people not wishing to use Paypal; and he has applied some SEO... our clicks have skyrocketed and are nowhere near slowing down. The growth seems exponential.

That is great - exactly what our books can use!

Learnt another very ouch lesson. Friends or no, first the contract, then the action. Not having a contract can destroy a friendship, and it nearly did. The trust is considerably lessened, on both ends I'd suspect.

And in the same line: Priorities. I spent an inordinately large amount of time on input on a project that isn't mine (and may never be). The priorities are completely wrong.

Result: My priorities and deadlines:

1) Finish editing Solar Wind III so it can go for proofs

Freedom Fighter

2) Finish finishing Prof Alan Solomon's book "Not Another Scale Book" and send for proofs

Not Another Scale Book!

Apart from keeping the income steady and looking after the studio, those two books must be top priority now, not to be sidelined by other projects again until their completion.

Book Promo at an art restaurant and gallery

It seems to me as though we are beginning to gather a core of solid supporters. This is really wonderful. It feels great building up 10 (not 1) books by different authors in a beautiful display along with pretty posters etc; the display looked great but you'll have to for now take my word for it because my camera phone refuses to communicate with my computer (I suspect it's the computer's fault).

18 months back I sat at the Karoo Cafe, at wit's end, waiting for someone - anyone - to show an interest in my newly published novel, "The Mystery of the Solar Wind". Sitting there wondering what I'd done wrong: Hadn't I put up enough posters? Hadn't I notified the newspaper in time (no I hadn't); why was nobody interested? I did make two sales that day; but I didn't regard that as any kind of success.

When they told us this time round that we were not allowed to bring musical instruments, we knew that it would be a quiet event again, more for the people who arrived specifically for us than anyone else to take an interest. And so it has been; however, surprisingly many people arrived specially to come and say hi to us and how is the promotion going. We had a lovely time.

From party to party to party. It's like learning to bake a cake by experiment, having to guess not only the quantities but the actual ingredients (without any prior knowledge about cakes). This time the noise was missing, so anyone not associated with us didn't know there was something going on - especially because of the placement too. The promo on the 30th of April was a lot more successful from a sales angle. But that is regardless; promos will continue to happen.

What is heartening is the growing fen. It's really sweet to see!

Now for a fresh angle on sales.