Sunday 15 November 2015

Impersonator - Forager Impersonator Trilogy Book 1


Now Available on Kindle & Paperback for 99c

* A Novel Set in the World of Peter R Stone’s Forager Trilogy *
Cover art by Indie Designz


A century after a global nuclear war, eighteen-year-old Chelsea Thomas has spent her life living in fear of Newhome’s paramilitary Custodians, due to a prohibited rogue ability.

In the past week, her twin brother – a forager – has uncharacteristically ran away from home and work after the mysterious death of a teammate; something has scared her normally unflappable father half to death; and their family is threatened with eviction.

But her brother’s disappearance presents her with a long-sought after opportunity to escape the prison town, since only the foragers – all men – are allowed to leave the town. All she has to do is impersonate her brother long enough to make her escape while foraging out in the ruins.

But she never counted on the kindness of Ryan Hill, a forager new to the team. Nor on barbaric Skel attacking the team the moment she makes her escape. She has to choose between making good on her escape or saving Ryan and the others.

Twenty-two-year-old Ryan Hill made one mistake at his last place of employment, and that earned the wrath of his fellow workmates, and cost him all of his friends.

Alone and dejected, he begins a new job as a forager, expecting more of the same. But then he meets Chelsea, masquerading as her brother Brandon. And though he falls for her ruse, he sees in her a kindred spirit. Could he(she) spark the beginning of a true, genuine friendship that looks past the faults of the other?

* Impersonator is Book One in a new trilogy set in the world of Peter R Stone’s Forager Trilogy. Although the Impersonator Trilogy starts three years before the events in Forager, it is not a prequel. It will catch up to, carry on, and draw to a conclusion the Forager Trilogy storyline.

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Special thanks to Indie Designz for an absolutely stunning book cover.

Wednesday 11 November 2015

Using Kindle Direct Publishing KDP Amazon Marketing Service

Amazon recently made their Amazon Marketing Services available to Kindle Direct Publishing authors. As such, I decided to give it a go on Forager - The Complete Trilogy.

AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) runs a small ad on your book on similarly themed titles. Your book has to compete against titles submitted by other authors, and the authors who have set their Cost Per Click (CPC) highest get the best chance of winning the auction so that their ad shows. I did product-based targeting, putting Forager with similar books such as The Hunger Games, Divergant, and so on.

I initially set a limit of 5c CPC. Received 228 impressions and 1 click, no sales. 10c did just as badly. Then I read that other authors were setting their CPC up to 50c! The problem here is that I also read that it takes from 40 to 150 clicks before you get a sale, and this for a $2.99 Kindle book, which nets 70% profit per sale. If you do the math, at 50c you could pay $20.00 to $149.50 to get one sale. That's not good. Note that 50c is only your maximum bid, you could win the auction at a much lower price.

I eventually ended up setting a CPC lower than 50c, but significantly higher than the original 10c I tried and failed with. To date I have sold 8 copies of Forager - The Complete Trilogy through AMS, with 161,700 impressions, 189 click throughs, costing $50.88. So to get $29.92 sales, with around $20 profit, it has cost me $50.88. The winning CPC rate is around 26c

If I was only interested in profit, I would give up, but I am treating it as advertising. 161,700 impressions is fairly impressive, and the word is slowly getting out about  my book.

Update 17th May '16. I thought that the Kindle Unlimited pages read of my novels were a result of the AMS advertisement. For an experiment, I paused the ad for a few weeks, and then restarted it. There was no difference in the number or pages being read. I have now cancelled the ad.