‘As the mayor’s skin turned to seed, he pleaded, one last time. The pigeon shaman ignored his cries. The flock arrived. Hungry.’
The pigeon shaman, the avian avenger, taking out her fury on the poor fella for his anti-pigeon measures. She’s also taking her Fears to both a Threadless and Etsy store near you!
As she’s a new release, and I adore her, you can message me below or email me at fears@gmx.co.uk to get her A4 print for just £8 + P&P. Offer ends Saturday, June 9th.
You may also know that Seeking Hydras cover has returned to my Etsy store this week.
And do you know what? As I’m using up my entire year’s marketing quota in just one post, I’m also going to link to the book this image came from. Seeking Hydra.
Seeking Hydra is available on Amazon for £4.99 for an ebook or £12 in print. And gosh darn it, does it have a sexy cover. Feel free to judge.
As I mentioned yesterday, Grey Moons last story was published on the Little Fears website this week. Along with Capricorns final page. A letter to the illustrator.
I’m afraid I lack good photos of the book. Both my copies were sent up to Scotland a year ago where I was meant to follow two to three months later. A year later… Life aye? Still, it looks like my two years bad luck run with the flat may be coming to an end. Some progress has been made on the sale. If it happens in June I’ll be homeless for a few months until I’m able to buy a new house. So darned happy today.
Capricorns horror stories were about the best thing I did early on in the Little Fears life. By establishing horror and weird fiction alongside the humour, I gave myself a huge amount of flexibility in what I can draw and write here. I love telling Little Fears groaners, but if that’s all this website was, I think it would be a bit poorer.
The horror shorts came about from a deep love of the old British horror and sci-fi radio shows along with theTwilight Zones and Outer Limits.
Capricorns horror shorts are available as an ebook and a paperback. I’d usually say something piffy about sniffing books, but in this case, I’d sniff with caution. You don’t know if she’s going to reach off the cover and drag you into one of her horrors within.
Fancy the risk? Well OK, I did warn you. She’s available on Amazon from the links below.
My good friend Joseph from WikiPoem recently asked about getting a tattoo of Capricorn. Brave man! I’ve never heard of a tattoo dragging its bearer into the pits of horror, but it sure sounds possible!
Finally, if you have a custom request for an illustration, doodle or fear you have seen here, just let me know in comments. Another good friend from WordPress, Eric of Dogtown (who I feel like I’ve known forever!), put in a request the other day. I’m quite happy to offer reprints of older illustrations.
Little Fears sales posts are like a British bus service. Nothing for ages, then two come along at once…
Well, I finished publishing two books on this site this week. My most recent humorous book, Grey Moon, was one of them.
Over the last three months, my three leading ladies, Fuen, Yuffie and Reala have made their way through 84 tales of ornithology, penguins, rum, love and splinters.
For a book I totally failed to promote on release, it’s received some great reviews over time. On Amazon and Good Reads, it sits at 4.5 out of 5 stars. For a more in-depth review, my good friend Richard has gone into detail in his review of Grey Moon this week.
It’s been an enjoyable story to tell and nice having an all-female cast. That was never intended as a social or political statement, but it’s been lovely hearing from folk who took it as a positive representation of women and LBGT in fiction.
If you’d like to grab a copy of Grey Moon, you can hit the links below. The paperback’s pretty darned sexy and smells lovely. It would make a great present for someone who enjoys sniffing new paperbacks. And reading. It’d be good for some who likes reading too.
A wee post about my experience here. I figure I’ve done some experimenting now, so allow me to pass on some experience.
Earning as a blogger, writer or artist is hard darned work. Look at how many blogs and websites litter the internet and then count how many famous bloggers you know who’ve made it big. How many fingers and or toes did you count? So for most of us, the best we can hope for is getting by. Maybe reach a minimum wage. To me, that’s not depressing. It just shows that I need to do more than a website to earn a living. Such as selling prints at local markets (more on alternative earning later).
You all know what I sell by now. Art prints on Etsy. Art prints and Tees on Threadless. Books on Amazon.
The Beginning
Back in the early days of the blog when I first started selling I had a signature in my posts like this:
I quite liked that. It was subtle. I had maybe a 1%-2% per view click rate. That’s pretty high. I’d say there was a 1% rate of purchase from that though. Ouch, right? That’s not good when you’re only making £1 a sale.
The Middle Bit
At some point, I switched over to a series of icons at the bottom of each post.
They looked a bit more visually appealing and fitted nicely at the bottom of the posts. They looked awful in WordPress reader though. They enjoyed a 2%-3% views to click rate and had about 6% sales from that 2%-3%. By this my point my blog was over 20,000 subscribers and it was turning into £100 a month or more.
The Recent Bit
I removed everything from the bottom of my posts and left the links at the top of my screen the only links to my wares. The click-through plummeted and died a death. I’m into the less than 1% view to click through here.
What happened? Well, most of my readership on site is WordPress bloggers. Most bloggers use WordPress reader to view websites. So advertising in sidebars, header banners or menus is never going to be seen, let alone clicked. If the adverts aren’t in the post, WordPress bloggers will never click them.
Sales links in blog posts hurt Google ranks
It really does. Google isn’t stupid. If you include the same links in every post you make, Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines assume you’re an advert/bot farm website. They then actively push you down the search rankings. So what can you do?
An experiment follows with my recent books. Grey Moon and Seeking Hydra. When I released Hydra, I posted here daily about it being free for five days to readers. Asking people, please leave me a review. Hundreds of copies were taken for free. 10-20 copies paid for. Then I had a roll for a month or two where I sold one or two a day. It picked up 20 Amazon reviews (UK, USA and other) and did OK on Good Reads.
Contrast that with Grey Moon. I posted about it twice before and twice during the first five days of it being free. I gave away maybe 50 copies. Sold 8 copies. Then it died a death immediately after. I think I’ve sold 5 copies since. It has four reviews on Amazon.com and 3 on Amazon.co.uk. For all the effort I put into Grey Moon, it tanked.
To follow that up, when I advertise a new Threadless tee, I get the most sales off the post I make about it. The has been shown with Walker and Terror-Dactyl.
So, yes, sales posts do work and are needed, even with freebies. The drawback? If you do a sales post every day, you’re gonna piss your readers off. The flip side of that is that when I have mentioned sales posts here before, the response is always “if you don’t tell us about your products, we don’t know they exist.”
Two more Fears Fears…
I have two other problems I need to address myself with sales. First, I don’t push products past the initial release. Like seriously, I launch a product, then never mention it again. What the crap?
My other issue is that I’m a terrible artist. I write awful. My spelling and grammar are poor. How can I possibly ask people to give me money for my rubbish?… What did you say? Imposter syndrome? Me? Well, I don’t think so mis…. Oh… Crap… Yes, you may be right…
I need to address both of those points, don’t I?
What will I do?
I will be giving more focus to other platforms and not be spending all my time on WordPress. Bluntly, there’s only so much marketing you can do on a blog. Post too many sales posts and you’ll annoy everyone, yourself included. Twitter and Instagram have a bit more leeway there. Even Tumblr you can post more frequently than WordPress. I’ve said I was going to spread myself out more a thousand times and I never do. Now, after my six-month long house sale has fallen through, I need the income. I need to sell. Twitter and Instagram, here I come. Though don’t talk to me about Facebook…
I will also try and do a weekly sales post on the blog. An entire post a week dedicated to something I am selling. Maybe explain or show the process of what I did to create the product. It doesn’t have to be all sell, sell, sell right? But it needs to be something. Posts dedicated to products work.
The Alternative
The other thing to do is find alternative incomes in the real world. I adore the internet in all its messy, troll-filled, poorly spelt and grammarededy ways. But I’ve always felt I need real-world incomes too.
A market stall with my art prints on for example. This time I want to take books with me too. I recall seeing Emily with a pile of self-published books behind her sofa. A quick search only shows cats on her sofa, but imagine that sofa with a pile of books behind it. That’s what I need to do. Get a small print run of the Little Fears books and take them with me to a craft market along with my art prints. You get the idea.
What do you do?
Ooo, look at that. Ending a post on a question. How very professional blogger of me. So how do you feel about marketing on a WordPress blog? Have you tried different methods? Let me know in comments.
OK, so, it looks like the sale of my house falls through after four months. ShitBuggerBumFart. I wasn’t prepared for my run of bad luck to continue into 2018. No worries. I’m now plotting out where the Fears, work, finances and I go or the next six to twelve months.
On the upside for the Fears fans, a series of plans that I had been delaying will now be crashing into effect this next couple of weeks. We have a Threadless free shipping sale. Digital rewards for my Patrons. The Little Fears studio, in which I offer design work. Including logos, book covers, website banners and anything else the Fears can help with. A new shop on this site where you can purchase my canvas paper Little Fears art prints. More Skillshare classes and of course, the release of the next Little Fears presents book, Grey Moon.
Hold your horses before you dash off to Amazon. As always, with the release of a new book, I will be giving the ebook away free for five days. The free ebook is intended for Little Fears followers and subscribers, a thank you for the continued support you all give me. You ladies, gents and those in-between are fecking awesome. Grey Moon is officially released, and free on Amazon, from Friday the 9th of February. I will post links to the Grey Moon ebook on the day.
One of my main complaints with Kindle Direct Publishing vs Createspace was that you couldn’t order proof copies to check over from KDP. Proofs are essential. Not only do I need to see the way the images come out in print, but reading a paperback version of my tales always helps me pull up the odd mistakes I miss on the screen. What I usually do is create and release a paperback book without saying anything. Order a copy. Once I get the ‘your order has been dispatched’ email, I unpublish the book until I am ready for a proper release.
My editor has just finished going over the next book. On to Amazon and KDP, I go, and as I get to the last page, I see this.
Ahhh, do you see it? Down the bottom. Beta proof copies. Yes, yes and yes. I am a happy Fear. I click to request a copy.
Submit proof request. Now, there are a couple of caveats here. First being, you pay the print price. For me £5.47. Something I need to double check there as it goes. My earnings from a £12 book are £1.73. You can see that in the screenshot above this. I can’t recall why my earnings are so low compared to the print cost. I need to go double check where the rest of the money’s going.
The price doesn’t include post and packaging. In the UK we don’t get free delivery options on less than £10 of an order. The post and packaging for this bring the price to £9 as opposed to £12 for a proper copy of my book. That’s a tad frustrating. I know in the USA shipping costs are a lot cheaper. But if you’re writing a novel, surely the P&P is going to make this discount rather small?
One other thing to bear in mind. With Createspace, I believe the proof copies of the book have no barcode or ISBN. They also have not for resale written unobtrusively on the back of the book. That suits me as I’m a visual person and my books look lovely, I need to take photos of them.
Aren’t they sexy books? Yeah, I need to take sexy photos of my sexy books to sell them.
In addition to that, I take the original copies I order with me when I need to show them off somewhere. The odd spelling mistake makes no difference to me when it’s a display book on a market stall. But you still need them to look darned sexy sitting there, being all fearful.
But, from the page above, a snippet of text.
Proofs are different from regular copies. They have a “Not for Resale” watermark on the cover and a unique barcode but no ISBN.
Huh, what? Can’t be too bad right? Something small and unobtrusive like Createsp…
WHOA! Seriously? Damn! That isn’t going to look sexy in any photo or sitting on display. Nope. Nope, nope, nope.
I get it, I do. Amazon is selling you a book at a lower price. They don’t want you reselling an unchecked copy of the book. But feck that. It costs me £9 instead of £12, and I can’t use it to promote my book at all. So then I have to pay £12 again for a copy after the release before I can even take a photo of it? That makes no sense. I want the pictures before I release the book so I can tease it and promote it. That’s backwards in every way.
Damn you Amazon KDP! So close, yet so far! I’m back to a quiet release and order before releasing the book properly at a later date.
If you think my books are sexy and want to put a couple of quid my way for all the info, you can purchase the print and ebooks I have released so far from the link below.
Is that a book? Is it free for 1.5 more days? Is it awesome? Is that another cushion… Yes… Yes, it is…
Also, my book is still free, but as the title suggests, only for 1.5 more days. Head on over to Amazon and buy it for $0.00 and you can download it to any PC, tablet, iPad and Kindle ereader.
If you grab a copy and enjoy, please do leave me a review. It helps me so much! If you leave me a review, let me know in comments and I’ll give you and your own website a shout out during the week.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking holy heck does this man have a lot of soft furnishings. Well yes. Yes, I doodley do!
Also, my book is still free, but as the title suggests, only for 2.5 more days. Head on over to Amazon and buy it for $0.00 and you can download it to any PC, tablet, iPad and Kindle ereader.
If you grab a copy and enjoy, please do leave me a review. It helps me so much! If you leave me a review, let me know in comments and I’ll give you and your own website a shout out during the week.
Little Fears Presents: Seeking Hydra. The fourth book in the Little Fears Presents series. The ebook will be free this week. Head on over to Amazon and buy it for $0.00 and you can download it to any PC, tablet, iPad and Kindle ereader.
If you grab a copy and enjoy, please do leave me a review. It helps me so much! If you leave me a review, let me know in comments and I’ll give you and your own website a shout out during the week.
Fancy a synopsis?
If anything is going to save the Little Fears from awful punch lines, it is not Hydra having an existential crisis. In Seeking Hydra, Great British groaners are the order of the day as the assembled Little Fears make their way through 90 tales of lemon trees, kinky behaviour, confused doors and mystical road hogs. Boxers seek a joke; Beat finds his pop; Sprite sees a Russian president; Lucy shoots a clay pigeon; Emu’s tossed out of a club. Written and posted with scruffy illustrations daily on LittleFears.co.uk, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) chronicle the continuing adventures of the Little Fears. With only a sense of whimsy and a deep love of old British comedy, Seeking Hydra will make you groan, cry and laugh until a bit of wee comes out, in a truly original, unoriginal, work of art and fiction.
Here we go. Little Fears Presents: Seeking Hydra. The fourth book in the Little Fears Presents series. The ebook will be free this week. Head on over to Amazon and buy it for $0.00 and you can download it to any PC, tablet, iPad and Kindle ereader.
If you grab a copy and enjoy, please do leave me a review. It helps me so much! If you leave me a review, let me know in comments and I’ll give you and your own website a shout out during the week.
Fancy a synopsis?
If anything is going to save the Little Fears from awful punch lines, it is not Hydra having an existential crisis. In Seeking Hydra, Great British groaners are the order of the day as the assembled Little Fears make their way through 90 tales of lemon trees, kinky behaviour, confused doors and mystical road hogs. Boxers seek a joke; Beat finds his pop; Sprite sees a Russian president; Lucy shoots a clay pigeon; Emu’s tossed out of a club. Written and posted with scruffy illustrations daily on LittleFears.co.uk, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) chronicle the continuing adventures of the Little Fears. With only a sense of whimsy and a deep love of old British comedy, Seeking Hydra will make you groan, cry and laugh until a bit of wee comes out, in a truly original, unoriginal, work of art and fiction.
Little Fears 