I’ve had a couple of comments left in the bowels of the blog of late that lead me to think that I should say more about newsletters than, “You should have one.” Okay, my article on How to Start a Newsletter (and why every author should) covers a little more than that, but there are still questions afoot. So, let me see if I can answer a few questions and comments today. We’ll call this the email-marketing-for-authors FAQ.

My book just came out, and I want to email everyone I know, so that they’ll buy it. Should I?

My answer here is going to depend on who “everyone” you know is. Is it 20 or 30 friends and family members that you email on a regular basis? If so, sure, send them a note in case they’re interested in checking out your book, and you might even ask them to forward the message on to people they know who read in that genre.

If “everyone” you know is everyone you just happen to have an email address for, including the 500 people who work in your building, the 745 Facebook friends that you’ve never talked to, and basically everyone you’ve ever hit reply to in an email over the last five years, then my answer is no, leave these people alone. They don’t have a real relationship with you and probably don’t give a rat’s petootie about your new book. They might regard your random email as spam. Nobody likes to get spam. If you bug them more than once, they may mulishly decide they’ll never try your book (even if they might have been interested by it if they’d chanced upon it on Amazon).

If you want to engage in email marketing (and there are all sorts of benefits of maintaining a mailing list with your fans’ addresses, the main one being that you can send them a note and let them know when you have a new release out), then you need to start a newsletter.

What exactly do you mean by “newsletter”?

A lot of people seem to think I mean blog-rss-subscription-by-email when I say newsletter (i.e. people fill out a field on your blog and your posts are automatically delivered to their inbox). It’s fine to have this on your site, but this isn’t what I mean. There will be times when you want to email fans directly, and your messages might be for their eyes only (hey, they’ve signed up to be in your inner circle, so it makes sense to give them some special insider stuff).

For example, last month when I released my short story, The Assassin’s Curse, I put it up for 99 cents in the various stores, but I sent a Smashwords coupon to my newsletter subscribers, so they could get it for free if they were interested. A lot of people chose to buy it anyway, to support me as an author, but I’ve definitely had emails from people who mention that money is tight and that they appreciate how affordable my ebooks are, so it’s nice to be able to give away freebies or coupons now and then. Of course, I can’t give every book away free, but I figure it’s good karma to be generous when possible. After all, the folks who sign up for your newsletter are going to be some of your biggest fans, the types of people who tell other people that they have to try your books.

But, I digress… Back to the what-is-a-real-newsletter question.

When I talk of newsletters, I’m talking about a separate mailing list where your readers must “opt in” (choose to sign up of their own accord) in order to belong to it. They are agreeing to receive periodic newsletters from you, and they have the option to unsubscribe at any time. Every email you send should have an unsubscribe link at the bottom (if you join Aweber, Mailchimp, or another of the mailing-list services out there, this will automatically be included in your footers).

Anything else (like you signing people up just because they emailed you once or they commented on your blog) isn’t proper web etiquette and may even be illegal (I’m too lazy to go look up the details of the CAN-SPAM Act, but either way you don’t want to do anything that people could construe as harassment or an irritation).

When you make the leap from writer to published author, you also make the leap from artist to entrepreneur. If you’re trying to sell something, you’ll want to obey all of the rules and etiquette that good businesses follow. The last thing you want to do is alienate potential readers by coming across as a spamming pest.

What you can do is, when responding to reader emails, mention that you have a newsletter they might be interested in signing up for and include a link to that page on your site.

Where can I get a newsletter?

I use Aweber, but it’s mainly because I signed up with them years ago, when I ran several mailing lists for my various websites. I’ve been happy with them, but I don’t generally recommend that service to authors, because of the cost. They charge about $55 a quarter, and most authors won’t need all of the bells and whistles that come with the service (such as the ability to host multiple lists, run auto-responders, and a lot of fancy stats analysis such as click tracking). An exception would be if an author was very popular and saw themselves quickly racking up thousands of newsletter subscribers. (The free services I’m going to mention are only free to a point — after one- or two-thousand subscribers, for example, you have to start paying, and at that point they may become more expensive than Aweber).

Free-to-a-certain-point:

• Mailchimp — up to 2,000 contacts
• YMLP — up to 1,000 contacts

I haven’t tried either of these, but I’ve heard from authors who have, and they seem to be happy. The people I know have small lists and haven’t had to worry about going over the subscriber limit yet.

Why I’m sticking with Aweber

Even though Aweber is pricier when you’re starting out (they don’t have a free trial or free-to-a-point option), I expect to break into the thousands of newsletter subscribers before long (I have about 700 now, and I just started plugging the email list in August — I’m also planning a site re-design where the sign-up form will be more prominent). So, I’d end up paying sooner or later anyway.

Another option?

If you pay for your own web hosting, you might have a mailing list software already installed and accessible from your control panel. I’ve heard of WordPress plug-ins that you can use in conjunction with a list based on your own server. I’m not sure what kinds of features you might have with this option, as I’ve never checked into it for myself, but if you’re the techy type (or know someone who is) it may be worth looking into.

After my newsletter is set up, how do I get people to sign up for it?

The big thing is to let your readers know about it. I was slow to do this myself, but my subscriptions picked up when I started mentioning my newsletter at the ends of my ebooks. These days, in my afterword, I usually mention my website, Twitter, and Facebook links, and also that I have a newsletter that people can check out if they want to be notified when I have new releases, contests, giveaways, etc.

Some people want to jump-start their newsletter-subscriber numbers by hosting contests on their blogs, i.e. everyone who signs up for my newsletter will be entered for a chance to win an Amazon gift certificate! I, uh, possibly did that myself.

The problem with that approach, though, is that you get people signing up who aren’t necessarily fans of your work. They’ll just unsubscribe later on.

The only people you really want to sign on are those who have read your stories and want more of your work. As I mentioned, the best way to get those people is by mentioning your newsletter at the end of the book. I know, I know, if you’re only selling a few books a week, this can feel like a tediously slow way to increase one’s fan-base.

My suggestion? Give some short stories away for free (if you have a series of novels out, you might even try giving the first book away for free — you’ve all seen that I’ve had my first Emperor’s Edge book available for free for a couple of months and it’s helped with newsletter sign-ups and sales of subsequent books in the series). You’ll get more people checking out your work that way, and, if they like it, they’ll come to your site and sign up for your list.

Sneaky internet marketers’ tactic to encourage signups:

When I spoke of free ebooks, I meant to get them out there in the Kindle, B&N, iTunes, etc. stores where lots of people will find them, but you can also use free as an incentive to get readers to sign up for your newsletter. If you stumble across some business’s website, you’ll probably be hit with a pop-up box that says something like, “Sign up for our newsletter and get our free ebook on 7 Ways to Melt Away Your Bellyfat Now!” Believe it or not, that stuff works. And you can use the tactic too (sans the annoying pop-up box, please).

Let’s say someone is a fan of your work, and isn’t that big on signing up for newsletters, but they do visit your blog now and then. You could try giving away an exclusive short story, cut scene, or character interview as a way to entice them to sign up. If your freebie isn’t available anywhere else, then they might be a little more tempted to sign up. (Again, this is going to work best with people who are already readers, so do your best to get your work out there in a lot of places where people can try it, maybe for free.) With a mailing list service, you can set up your first email message so that the free tidbit is included in the body of the email; that way people will get it right away and you don’t have to do anything manually.

I have to admit that I haven’t really used that tactic yet myself, but I did do a blog post last month, when I was showing off the cover art for that short story, and I mentioned that I’d be giving away free copies to people on my list. As you might guess, I had quite a few extra signups that week.

Okay, that’s enough for one post (more than enough!). I’ll continue this soon in “Advanced Newsletter Tactics for Authors” so stick around, and let me know if you have any questions you’d like to see covered.

I promised myself I’d spend most of my computer time editing today, so I’m doing a “best of” type post for authors who haven’t been hanging around my blog, reading every single word for long (it’s okay…you didn’t know any better…:D).

The following are some core articles on book promotion:

• How to Start a Newsletter (and why all authors should)
• How to Start a Professional Author Website & Blog
• Social Media Basics for Authors (AKA How Not to Suck at Twitter and Facebook)
• What the Heck is Author Branding and How Do You Do It Anyway?
• The Importance of Keeping in Touch with Fans (and how to find them in the first place)
• High Level vs Low Level Book Promotion Techniques

And a few bonus extras:

• Book Promotion Tips for Hardcore Introverts
• Is Your Website Hurting Your Book Sales?
• How to Use Smashwords Coupons to Promote Your Ebook
• Book Trailers for Promotion, Yay or Nay?
• Creating a Facebook Fan Page for Marketing — One Author’s Experience

If you have any questions or topics you’d like to see covered in future posts, let me know in the comments. Thanks, and happy book promoting!

Have you ever seen authors sell well with their first book and then disappear from the radar with subsequent titles? I’ve seen a lot of that in the e-publishing world over the last year. Independent authors would pop onto the Amazon bestseller charts with a bang and sell thousands of copies a month of their first book or series, but then fizzle into nothingness. When they published new titles, nobody noticed.

Why is that? They failed to turn one-time readers into fans.

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily assume that’s a quality-of-writing issue (after all, something got them to sell in the first place), but you’ll probably agree that, in most cases, it takes you more than one exposure to an author to turn you into a rabid fan who will constantly check back to see if that author has published anything new.

So how do you start the process of turning a one-time reader into a fan? Naturally it helps if you have multiple titles out and the reader can go on to enjoy them all, thus cementing your name in his/her mind. But what if you’re publishing your first book?

You need to make an effort to get readers who enjoy the story to come find you online as soon as they finish. Most e-readers have web capability, so this is more of a possibility today than ever before. With ebooks, you can easily add your website and social media links to the end of the story and encourage the reader to stop by.

That’s not all you have to do though. You need to be doing something on those sites to get the reader to stick around and subscribe to your newsletter or blog feed.

Remember those successful-then-but-not-now authors? When I’ve looked at their online presences (what can I say… I have stalker tendencies), I’ve seen some common threads:

• Though they’ve been publishing for a while, they don’t have a substantial blog built up where they post often. Or they blog about things nobody cares about.
• They don’t have a newsletter (a way to email fans all at once).
• If they’re on Twitter and Facebook at all, they’re just digital billboards, constantly trying to sell you something.
• They may post often in some of the author-centric forums and communities out there, but they don’t seem to be out there where they can interact with their readers (Goodreads is one such place where it’s good to have a presence).

In short, these authors haven’t done anything to turn one-time readers into fans who want to follow their books and connect online.

If you want to have a career, then you need people to keep buying your books. I know, duh, right? But you can’t just assume this will happen. One key truth from the business world is that it’s easier to keep an existing customer than find a new customer. But you have to keep in touch with those customers, periodically reminding them that you exist and that they like doing business with you.

With those thoughts, I bring you…

How to Keep in Touch with Your Readers

Note: Before you start reading my suggestions, I want to point out that everything mentioned below is designed to let you write one message for many people, so you’re keeping in touch without spending hours a day doing it. I’m always happy to answer readers who send email (getting fan mail never gets old!), but I tend to direct folks to my blog, newsletter, and social media pages first, because lots of answers to potential questions are already there, and posting information in these places is the most efficient use of my time.

The newsletter

If you do nothing else I write about here, I suggest starting a newsletter and putting a sign-up form in a prominent position on your site (I have mine on my “book news” page and also in the side bar of each page — honestly, it could be even more prominent, and that’s something I’ll do when I get around to redesigning the site).

Why a newsletter? You can email your subscribers and let everyone know at once when you have a new release out. You can also ask your subscribers for a hand if you ever need it for something special. I wouldn’t do that often, but these folks are most likely going to be some of your most dedicated fans (the types of readers who not only buy your books but tell others to do so as well), and they may be open to helping you out. In return, you can reward them for signing up for your newsletter by giving them coupons or insider information on your books.

The best thing about newsletters is that messages go right to a person’s inbox, so your subscribers are almost guaranteed to see it. The other methods I’m going to list can have their place, but they aren’t quite as special as a newsletter (not only does a letter to your mailing list go right to someone’s inbox, but with some mailing-list services, you can even personalize it with the person’s first name). You won’t find a successful internet marketer in the world who doesn’t have a mailing list.

That said, there are other ways to keep in touch with people too. The newsletter may be king, but you’ll find that some readers prefer other ways of following you, so these methods can be worth pursuing as well.

The blog

I think most authors start a blog, but many fail to update it often (or at all) because they’re not certain what to write about. Others post less than scintillating material, such as positive reviews about the book the visitor has already read. Guys, you hang those reviews on the fridge; you don’t copy and paste them to your blog. You post interesting things to your blog (things that are interesting to other people, not just you).

The way to get blog followers is to inform or entertain. Maybe you can even do both.

I used to say that you should write posts related to your books (i.e. if you write science fiction, then you might review SF books and movies, interview genre authors, or talk about fun science stuff), and I still think that’s a good idea, but I also believe you can keep people interested by writing about less obvious topics as well, so long as your posts have value to people who buy books.

For example, in the beginning, my blog here was all about e-publishing and nothing about fantasy. Oddly enough, I did sell quite a few of my fantasy novels through the site (I use affiliate links so I can track which sales originate from my blog). As I sold more books and actually started having fans stop by who wanted to hear about my upcoming projects, I grew worried that those readers wouldn’t be interested in the e-pub talk, so I tried following my own advice and started blogging about fantasy-related topics. What happened? I started getting less traffic to this site and was selling fewer books!

Now I do a mix of posts. Some are about fantasy and my books (I’ve got a contest going on right now where readers can help me name a character), and some are about e-publishing. Book sales from my blog are back up again.

You just never know what kind of blog posts might work for you, but the important thing is to a) make sure there’s something in it for the reader and b) be passionate about what you’re talking about (maybe that’s part of why I didn’t do as well blogging about fantasy — even though I’ve been a fantasy reader for more than twenty years, I’m more obsessed with e-publishing and book promotion right now, so it’s more fun for me to blog about this stuff).

No matter what you do with the blog, make an effort to get people to subscribe (I need to be better about this myself). You can’t assume that people will remember to check back often, but if they have your blog in their feed aggregator, they’ll see any new headlines you post.

If you pay for web hosting and have your own WordPress blog, there are numerous plug-ins you can get that throw in a tagline, suggesting people subscribe to your feed. If you’re on a freebie blogging site, you can choose a theme where the subscription buttons are prominent.

The Twitter account

I’ve been a fan of Twitter for a long time. Something about only being able to type short messages appeals to me. I can make updates quickly and check on people without spending a lot of time on the site. And (this is what matters) lots of other people like Twitter too. You might find, as I have, that you’ll find readers who follow their favorite authors on Twitter even if they don’t necessarily go into subscribing to blogs or newsletters.

Once you have followers there, they can help you promote your books. Because people can “retweet” your updates, and those RTs can spread far and wide, Twitter can be a great way to drive traffic to your blog or get the word out about freebies (I hardly ever plug something that costs money, as I figure people are there to socialize, not to whip out their credit cards, but I’ll often link to free ebooks or excerpts). I know I’ve gained blog readers and book buyers that way.

Note: if you find yourself overwhelmed as your Twitter followers grow, try sorting people into lists. I’ve been using lists forever, but it only recently occurred to me to start one specifically for “tweeps” who have read my books. I should have been doing that from the beginning, because it’s easy to use a program like Tweetdeck (I prefer this for my iPhone) to watch the conversations on a certain list. Then I can send someone an @ message if they say something that brings a comment to my mind. (I don’t know about you, but I’d be tickled if my favorite authors sent messages to me!)

The Facebook fan page

I wasn’t a huge Facebook fan before I got into publishing, so I was slow to get involved on Facebook, but I’m glad I finally did create an author page there. I have people who comment and “like” my updates there who aren’t newsletter subscribers, don’t follow my blog, and don’t know why on Earth anyone would want to “Twitter.” Facebook is their chosen place to hang out and interact. By being there, I can keep in touch with them. If I wasn’t there, I’d miss out on a certain group of fans (Facebook has hundreds of millions of members!).

By the way, did you know that you can run advertising campaigns on Facebook that only target people who have liked your author page? If you get a lot of fans there, but find they’re not checking back often, a quick advertising campaign would be a way to let all of them know about your latest book or series. (Advertising within Facebook — i.e. sending folks to a tab on your author page instead of off-site — is quite affordable as well.)

I could go on about places to be and ways to keep in touch with your fans, but these are my main ones. Also, this post is getting long, so let me address one last concern:

How do you get people to subscribe/follow you to start with?

If you’re just starting out, this may be what’s on your mind. Of course you want to do a newsletter, blog, social media, etc., but how the heck do you get people to follow you or subscribe to your feeds?

Lots of folks try to do this in a backwards way. They try to build the online presence (i.e. building a platform) first. That can work fantastically if you write non-fiction. But with fiction…the proof is in the pudding, eh? It’s possible to get random readers to follow your blog (especially if you’re writing useful posts), but most people have to read your stories before they can decide whether or not they’re fans.

If you write fiction, you can try to post some stories or do a web serial, but I think the fastest way to find fans in this day and age is to put your stuff out there in ebook form and get it out on Amazon, iTunes, B&N, Smashwords, etc. Those are the huge marketplaces where people already are, where they’re actively looking for new things to read.

I also think you’ll find the rows much easier to hoe if you have at least something available for free (short stories are fine). At the end of that freebie, you can plug your other non-free books, and you can also encourage readers who enjoyed the story to visit your site and subscribe to your blog, newsletter, etc. Remember, not everyone will be into doing each thing (some might follow you on Twitter while others want to subscribe to your newsletter while others want to track you on Facebook), so it’s good to be follow-able in a number of places.

All right, now I know I’ve talked for too long! If you have comments or questions or want to see me cover something in more depth, please let me know below.

A few years ago, I watched a YouTube video from an internet marketing guru (yes, he did try to sell me something at the end) that talked about why Coca-Cola was such a good brand name. Among other things, it had alliteration and rhyme, two elements that help people remember things.

I guess my parents didn’t know that I’d one day be working to brand myself as an author, because they didn’t use alliteration or rhyme when choosing my name. Heck, my first and last names aren’t even easy to spell (as attested by the tons of variations people type into Google to find my site). If I were smart, I might have chosen a pen name that would be easy for people to remember, but I’m stubborn and I like to do things my way.

If you hadn’t already guessed, the topic for today’s post is branding, specifically author branding, because we’re more interested in selling books than syrupy soda beverages, right?

What is a branding anyway?

Wikipedia tells us the American Marketing Association defines a brand as a “Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.” (emphasis mine)

So, basically, it’s about setting yourself up to stand out in a crowded field, right?

As an author, you can brand your name (Stephen King) or your books (The Twilight Series). You might even brand your main character (maybe your parents didn’t give you an easy-to-spell and memorable name, but that’s no reason why you can’t think things through a little better when it comes to your heroes!).

I’ll admit it: I wasn’t thinking of branding or any type of marketing stuff when I wrote my first novels, so you won’t find good examples in my book titles or character names. It is something I’ll think about with the next series.

This is honestly the sort of thing the publisher usually thinks about (did you know authors don’t necessarily get to keep their chosen book titles?), but as indies it’s up to us to do it all.

If you can choose a catchy pen name, series title, or hero name, it might help with branding, but mostly becoming a recognized name in the field seems to be a matter of…

• selling a lot of books
• being around and publishing for a while
• popping up every time your audience turns around

The first two things are tough to influence when you’re starting out, but you can work on number 3.

The secret?

Be everywhere.

Okay, okay, I don’t mean everywhere. We’re not going to run ads on the sides of buses or pay for billboards in the city, but you want to be in as many places as you can where your potential readers hang out.

That sounds time-consuming, but it might be less so than you’d think at first blush. A lot of people equate being everywhere with spending hours on Twitter and Facebook and forums. It is worth it to build a Facebook Fan page and hop on Twitter to interact with folks for a few minutes a day (I’m less enamored with forums, because you’re one little tree amongst a forest there, and threads where you participate quickly get pushed off of the front page), but both sites will probably only be a small part of your branding strategy.

I suggest we put a large portion of our marketing effort into things that we only have to do once, but that can continue to provide benefits (i.e. help with our author brand) down the road. Here are some of the things I’ve done:

• Giving away free ebooks (short stories or novels — something in a series seems to work best) and putting them everywhere you can upload free stuff — For starters, Smashwords, Scribd, Feedbooks, etc. And it’s possible to get free ebooks listed at Barnes & Noble and Amazon too. I did this with my Ice Cracker II short story way back in February, and it was one of the first things that made a real impact on my (at the time laughable) sales.
• Being active on Goodreads — This is a huge reader community, and your future fans are there waiting for you. Yes, you can join the discussion boards and be active that way, but that’s a lot of work. I prefer to do book giveaways (you need to have a paperback copy) and let my ads run there. I first set up an ad campaign for EE and Encrypted back in January (if you read the post, please keep in mind it’s almost a year old — everything from my book covers to my sales numbers have changed a lot since then), and it’s never cost me more than a couple of dollars a day since I made the ads highly targeted. The campaign runs day after day, month after month, without me having to do anything. For giveaways, you get a lot of eyeballs on your book for the price of one paperback plus shipping. I had close to a thousand people sign up for my first giveaway, and I intend to do more soon.
• Being on iTunes with a podiobook (a series is even better) — I’ve written about my adventures in turning The Emperor’s Edge into a Podiobook before, and I know it’s already helped with sales (lots of cool folks have told me they first found my books through iTunes or Podiobooks.com). I’m positive it’ll continue to help into the future, long after all the episodes have been published. Why? Audiobook lovers are readers too, and there’s less competition in the podiobook sphere (because it’s a lot of work to record an audio of your book!). It’s easier to stand out on iTunes and Podiobooks.com than with an ebook on Amazon. If you want to give the first chapter of my book a try (for demonstration purposes, of course), you can listen at Podiobooks or on iTunes.
• Being on Facebook — I already linked to my post about building a fan page, and that’s all I think you need to do here (though you can put time into interacting with others if you enjoy the platform). Why bother? 600 million+ people are on Facebook. Lots of them are readers. Once you have fans, some of them will look for you there. And some of them will “like” you and share your links, thus helping others find you. It doesn’t take long to put up a Facebook page either. Basically, follow their wizard, add some excerpts or links to freebies, and post fun stuff to your wall now and then. Here’s mine for example purposes. Someone’s actually in the process of doing a custom logo and design for me over there, so look for that in the new year.
• Being on Twitter — Twitter is one of those places where your “tweets” will quickly fall off of people’s radars, but it is one more place where you can have a little bio with links to your site and your book page at Amazon. If you network with others, you can build traffic to your blog with Twitter too (through people’s retweets), and it’s a good place to mention your freebies (it’s less good for trying to straight out sell things to folks).
• Guest blogging — A post you write for someone else’s blog can continue to bring traffic to your site for months and years to come, and it exposes you (your brand!) to the readers of that blog. Writing for a high-traffic blog can be particularly helpful. Make sure the post informs (maybe even entertains) and, for the purpose of search engine optimization, contains links back to your site and your freebies. If you don’t have freebies, link to your book pages on Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc. (I really like to send people to my freebies, because there’s no monetary obstacle to keep them from trying me, and, if they enjoy the stories, they can always go onto the non-free books.)
• Being out in the real world — Yeah, I’m a hardcore introvert, and this isn’t my strength, but you can get a lot of mileage out of going to conventions and get-togethers with readers and writers in your genre. It’s on my to-do list. In the meantime, I’m having business cards made, so I can at least hand them out to people I meet in my travels. Robin Sullivan over at Write2Publish has a good  post on how she made up her husband’s (the author) awesome business cards.

There are more places where you can be, but I’ve listed some of the biggies here. One I didn’t mention is YouTube, in part because it’s less of a reader hangout than a people-who-prefer-videos-for-entertainment hangout, but I’ve heard of authors connecting with their fans through regular vblogs (video blogs) posted there. It is possible to reach your target audience and build up a fan base there. Book trailers aren’t the way, but if you can answer questions or otherwise inform people through that medium, you can do well. Maybe I’ll give it a try in the future (because my to-do list isn’t long enough now!).

Remember, it’s best to do things today that can continue to pull in readers down the road, whether you ever touch those projects again or not. If your idea of marketing is spending 15 minutes contributing here, here, here, and over there every day, you’ll get burned out quickly.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions for more places to work on branding, let us know below.

When this blog was only about three months old (and my self-publishing career was even younger), I interviewed science-fiction author Nathan Lowell, a man now making a living off of his ebook income, and a man who got his start releasing his novels as podiobooks. (For those new to the term, podiobooks are audiobooks that come out in installments and are available as free downloads for people’s mp3 players.)

After three years of releasing his novels that way, all entirely for free, Nathan jumped into e-publishing and became an instant bestseller. Why? Thanks to his podiobooks, he’d built up a huge fan base over the years, people who eagerly awaited each new installment in his audio stories. His fans accounted for those initial sales that sent him to the top of the science-fiction bestseller lists on Amazon and elsewhere, and at that point others who had never heard of him before saw his books and gave them a try. He’s been selling dozens (maybe hundreds) of copies a day ever since.

But, if you’ve read the interview, you already know about his story. You’re wondering if it can work for someone else. Someone who starts today, someone who might have done things in the opposite order (ebook releases first and then podiobooks). So, let me tell you how things are going for me.

How my first podiobook is doing

After that interview, I thought the podiobook thing sounded like a great idea, and decided to try it myself. It took me a while to get all the ducks lined up to make it happen. The first few episodes of The Emperor’s Edge Podiobook went live at the end of August. Now, in November, we’re up to Chapter 16 (out of 21 or so).

So far, there have been 25,000+ combined downloads of episodes (that’s a far cry from Nathan’s millions, but remember he got his start years ago and has an entire series of podiobooks out there). For the first month, mine was the #1 podiobook (as far as new subscribers go) in the Podiobooks.com directory, and it still pops into the Top 10 now and then.

About 1,500 people are following along faithfully, downloading the new episodes each week, and more people are finding Chapter 1 each week and just getting started with the book (about 500 new subscribers so far in November). The episodes have been downloaded in more than 60 countries so far (I don’t know about you, but I find it pretty cool to think of people listening to my story in India, Turkey, Japan, Finland, and other places that I’ve never been).

I’ve done a little to promote my podiobook (occasional posts on Twitter and Facebook), but not much. I imagine most of these folks simply came across it because they were surfing around, looking for some new fantasy to listen to.

When I did do my promotional blurbs, I was originally sending people to the Podiobooks page, so they could subscribe any way they wished, but I’m trying to promote its iTunes page now, since the Apple Store gets a lot more daily visitors than Podiobooks.com itself (I’ve had an iPod since the beginning, and I hadn’t even heard of Podiobooks.com before I interviewed Nathan). From what I’ve read, if I can get more subscribers through iTunes and more reviews there, the book will start showing up closer to the top in the Literature section of the podcast directory. (So, if you enjoy listening to fantasy, and want to help a gal out, please subscribe in iTunes and leave a review if you like what you hear!)

Has my podiobook helped me sell books?

I can’t say that my books have made any great leaps up the bestseller charts, but I have had folks let me know that they found me on Podiobooks.com or iTunes and went on to buy the books, not just The Emperor’s Edge but the following novels in the series as well. That’s good enough for me. I’m in this for the long haul, and I know the podiobooks (I’m planning to do my whole series) will be out there for years, inviting new listeners into my characters’ world.

I imagine that for everyone who sends me a note, there are more people who buy the book and don’t say anything about it. But even if people don’t go on to purchase any of the books, there are still benefits to having these folks as fans of the free stuff.

If someone with a couple hundred followers on Twitter posts, “Oh, yay, new chapter of Emperor’s Edge is out,” there’s a chance that one of their followers will say, “Huh, what’s that?” and check it out. That someone might be a kindle addict and go on to buy the ebooks.

And, as I mentioned, just by being subscribers, people help you out in iTunes, because the number of subscribers and reviews both play a role in visibility there. The easier your podiobook is to find over there, the more people will stumble upon it, and since there is a big crossover between book buyers and audiobook listeners, there’s a good chance that some of those people will want to buy copies to have forever.

Why a podiobook can be effective for book promotion and author branding

There are more things to think about than immediate sales. As you guys know, I’m a fan of giving things away for free. You can’t give everything away for free if you want to make a living as an author (or at least recoup your production costs!), but having free stories out there lets people try you out at no risk.

A podiobook, in particular, has some extra perks:

• The serialization aspect lets you create a long-term relationship with listeners – If you read a book in a couple of days or even listen to a book-on-tape over the course of a couple of weeks, it’s not the same as having something new from the author every week. If the story is good, you start to look forward to those new installments, and the book sticks in your head because you’re exposed to it again and again over time. Imagine if an author puts out a whole series with the same characters. You could be listening for years, and those characters could become like real people that you like to hang out with.
• iTunes – I don’t know if you’ve looked lately, but the iTunes store is a pretty popular place, particularly for people who want audio versions of things. Anyone who has sold anything online will tell you that it’s a heck of a lot easier to sell where the people are (eBay, Etsy, Amazon, etc.) than trying to build up your own marketplace (i.e. your site). Day and night, people are browsing iTunes, looking for new things to listen to. And once all the chapters have been published, your podiobook can remain online and in the iTunes store indefinitely; people could stumble across it four years from now and find out about you and your books for the first time.
• Less competition – A lot of work goes into creating an audio version of a book, and there’s a learning curve that many (most?) people aren’t interested in tackling. If you outsource the creation to professionals, you save yourself some of the time and hassle, but the trade-off is that you must pay a significant chunk of money, and that’s a barrier in its own right. These obstacles mean that fewer authors create audiobooks, so there’s less competition out there than there is for ebooks in the Kindle store. Ultimately this means that, if you have a good story and good production quality, it’ll take less marketing effort to get people to find your podiobook.

Cost of producing a podiobook

As those of you who have been following this blog for a while know, I decided to let the folks over at Darkfire Productions handle the creation of my podiobooks because I knew it’d take a lot of time to do it myself, and the quality of the end product wouldn’t likely be as good.

I believe Nathan did it all himself (from what I’ve heard, you can get respectable recording equipment for your computer for a couple hundred dollars). That’s definitely a cheaper way to go, but not everybody is interested in learning the ropes and spending hours recording and editing an entire novel.

If you want to go the route I did and hire someone else, expect to pay $1,000 and up for a novel. If you write 150,000-word epic fantasy novels, it might be more like $2,000-$3,000.

I’m planning to write six books in my Emperor’s Edge series, and I’d like to go on to turn all of them into podiobooks. If costs remain the same, that’ll end up being about $9,000 for me. That’s not an insignificant sum by any measure, but it’ll be stretched out over about three years, and, as I mentioned above, once the audio recordings are done, they can stay out there in iTunes and on Podiobooks.com for years and years. In addition, they will belong to me, so there’s nothing to keep me from creating special CD editions (maybe with some bonus extras) and selling them on my site eventually. I haven’t looked at Audible.com yet to see if it’s possible for an independent author to get one’s audiobooks listed in their marketplace, but that is definitely something I’ll be checking out in the future.

Who should consider creating a podiobook?

Well, are you getting excited at the idea of creating a podiobook? Or are you thinking, “Enh, I’m not sure… It sounds like a lot of work…”

Either way, it’s okay. This isn’t necessarily for everybody, and if you’re already selling lots of books, maybe you don’t need to look into time-consuming (or money-consuming) extras like this.

It’s still early for me, so it’s hard to say for certain, “Yes, I’ll definitely earn back my investment and then some.” I do believe it’ll happen though. I’d be less certain if I was creating one podiobook and didn’t have plans to do any more.

I think the real power here lies in doing a series where people can get more and more connected to your characters (and you!) over time. You’ve also got more work out there for people to stumble across in iTunes or on Podiobooks.com (at Podiobooks.com, they post on the front page whenever new chapters are added, so every time your book is mentioned there, it’s a chance for someone new to see it and decide to check it out).

I also suspect some genres may lend themselves to podiobook fandom more than others. You tend to find a lot of science fiction and fantasy fans geeking out on their computers and knowing where to look for things like podiobooks. If you do westerns or cozy mysteries, your target audience may be less likely to spend time perusing the iTunes store. I’m sure you’d still get some followers, but maybe not as many.

You’ll need to run the numbers for yourself, but, in the end, if this sounds like a fun way to promote your books and your name, I say, go for it.