Some crazy ideas for 2017

So it’s the end of another year. I’ve spent the last week or so taking stock of my writing career, figuring out what I did in 2016 that worked and what really didn’t.

Writing is a career where you have to periodically reinvent yourself. My goal from the beginning has been to make a living telling stories that I love, and until 2015, I was doing pretty well. I tried out a lot of new things in 2016, but it was still a tough year, so there’s still a lot left to do.

Here are some of the things I tried out in 2016:

• Dropping perma-free for a free-pulsing strategy: This actually worked out fairly well. From a pure numbers point of view, I managed to give out more free books by free pulsing in 2016 than I did with my old perma-free books in 2015.
• Unpublishing my novellas in favor of more novel-length works: This was really stupid. It made my free books less effective, and seriously undermined my earnngs. The goal was to give more prominent placement to my novel-length works, but sales didn’t increase accordingly.
  Moral of the story: so long as a book is selling, don’t unpublish it.
• Submitting short stories to traditional markets: Worked pretty well. I got a handful of semi-pro sales and made a little north of $120. Not a huge boost, but not insubstantial either. And most of those were reprint sales.
• Proactively building my mailing list: Probably the best thing I did all year. Instead of waiting for people to organically sign up, I started using InstaFreebie to get my name out. Now, I have a list that is just shy of 2,700 subscribers. It’s not enough to push a new release up to the top of the charts, but it is enough to noticeably boost sales and reviews.
• Using my mailing list for more than just new releases: I was a bit worried about this at first, but it’s worked out quite well. So long as I’ve got something of value like an author cross-promotion, a free book, or book recommendations, the response has been quite positive.
• Publish more short story singles: The jury’s still out on this one. Short stories definitely arent money-makers, and the response from free-pulsing has been rather tepid, but I have been able to use them effectively as incentives to subscribe to my mailing list. I will probably keep the ones that still sell after six months and unpublish the rest, opting instead to publish them in bundles.

Which brings me to my crazy ideas for 2017:

Release a new title each month

I went through all my WIPs and short story submission logs, and it looks like this is something I can actually do. Right now, the schedule consists of five short story bundles, four short story singles, one novella and two novels. Everything except the novella and two of the short stories are already written.

This would be fantastic. They say that nothing is better for book sales than publishing a new release, so this would really put that to the test.

Release a series in Kindle Unlimited

I’ve made it very clear that I’m against exclusivity, something that the Kindle Unlimited program requires. However, not having any of your books in Kindle Unlimited is also kind of exclusive, just in the opposite direction. Probably the craziest thing I’m considering right now is putting a series in Kindle Unlimited, just to see how it does.

However, unless I can try this with a new series, I probably won’t do it. At first, I considered putting Sons of the Starfarers in KU, but then I realized that this wouldn’t be fair to my non-Amazon readers who are waiting for the last four books.

Then there’s all the reporting anomalies with KU that numerous readers are reporting. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Combine that with the low payouts and the relatively high probability that KU readers won’t try out my non-KU books, and I’m loathe to do this.

But enough readers pester me about it enough, I may give KU a try.

Raise book prices

By far, the biggest mistake I made in 2015 was underpricing my Star Wanderers books. Now, I’m starting to wonder if all my other books are underpriced.

There are a couple of ways to figure this out. One of them is to jack up all my book prices as high as I’m willing to price them (in this case, $9.99), then gradually lower them over the course of several weeks to see where sales reach an equilibrium. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, though, at least for now.

The other way is to run a survey, which is what I’m doing below. There are only two questions. If you could, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Republish all single Star Wanderers novellas

This one goes back to what was probably my biggest mistake in 2016: unpublishing all the individual Star Wanderers novellas. It’s great to have them available in the omnibus editions, but the singles were still selling, and unpublishing them really didn’t accomplish anything useful. So you can expect them to make a comeback soon.

What I will probably do is price all the novellas at $2.99 and the omnibuses at $6.99. I’m also toying with the idea of free-pulsing them all over the course of the next year. But that would be really crazy.

Be a more active blogger

I’ve really neglected this blog, especially over the last few months. I’ve also been really bad about connecting with other bloggers, checking them out, leaving comments, and sending readers their way. So in 2017, I’d really like to be better about that.

That’s just about all for now. I’m not quite sure how many of these ideas I’m going to run with, but if you’ve any thoughts of your own, I’d like to hear them. Thanks!