Read-through-rate is the key to success when it comes to the quintessential method of making money via self-publishing. So if yours isn’t nailed down tighter than a Kansas cowshed, then, darlin’, you got problems. — And guess what? This is what’s been killing me the last few months, too. RTR stands for read-through-rate, and put simply, is the percentage of people who, after reading a book in your series, will then go on to buy your next one.

Ouch, my head. — I’ve been talking about ad scaling for a while. And I always wondered when the ceiling would appear above my head, and if it ever would. Well, I can tell ya, it did. And there’s no punching through it. Or is there? Maintaining a sub-300% ACOS across your ads is…

Do something different and risk alienating readers? Or do the same old stories, and perpetuate the problem with this genre? — When it comes to writing crime fiction, the basic ingredients are much the same. A healthy dose of troubled hero, a dollop of murder courtesy of a villainous villain, a teaspoon of red herring, a pinch of double bluff, and just a splash of intentional obfuscation. But inside this recipe…

Writing takes time, it takes energy, and both are running low these days. — On February 8th, I posted some stats on my Facebook page: As I put the final full stop on Quiet Wolf, book 5 in the DI Jamie Johansson series, and book 8 overall … this is what the numbers look like. - Since the release of Bare Skin on July…

When we talk about crime fiction, it’s easy to distil it down through a lens of essentialism, that crime is built purely on a platform of man vs. man (in the sense of human-kind, not man), good vs. evil. That the good guys must catch the bad guys and that…

One quick tip to add a few sub-100% ACOS sales to your daily churn. ACOS stands for Advertising Cost Of Sale, and is Amazon’s metric for telling advertisers how much it costs to sell each book. Your ACOS is presented as a percentage figure, and is related to the amount of revenue generated as a result of sales directly from your ads. (Advertising Spend/Sales…

Does a 99p list price drive more sales or does it simply devalue your product? One of the big questions when publishing your first novel on KDP is how to price it. Let’s recap quickly how the 70/30 royalty split works with KDP pricing: Books priced at 99p (or cents) qualify for 30% royalties (30p on average after the delivery charge) Books priced at £1.99…

An outdated recommendation that pulls focus from more important things Building a list is still important, but active list building is harder than ever. In this post, I’m going to cover the reasons it's tough, why your efforts are probably in vain, and how to do this passively while focusing on more valuable marketing tactics. The idea of building a…

Does your launch day affect book success? This is an issue that often comes up. Not usually in the way that it should, but that’s just a matter of framing. People ask me; What’s the best day to launch my book? What they’re usually asking is, “what day gets the most sales?” But this is pretty irrelevant…