Authors, Writers, Publishers, and Book Readers

The Experiment Worked!

I uploaded my first novel last September to Smashwords and Amazon. By late November I had uploaded the rest of my novels and short stories for a total of over ten titles. I promoted this through my Twitter account (over 1300 followers), my Facebook profile (3000 friends) and my indie publisher Facebook profile (3100 friends), along with my blog (hundreds of views per week) and author interviews, etc.

After five months I was selling around 40 titles a month. That’s it. So I started wondering what was wrong. Was it the covers? The blurbs? The samples? Or maybe it was my name? Then I realized, and no disrespect here, most of my social media efforts were directed at other writers.

So I took my titles down, leaving just a few up. And you know what? No one asked where my books went. No one inquired at the end of January what was happening. I had a couple writers ask why I had reduced my Internet presence, but that was it.

Here’s what I did: I re-uploaded my books with new covers done by my wife Brenda (an amazing talent), new blurbs, and a new author name. That’s right, I used a pen-name, a pseudonym. The results were fantastic. Here’s the breakdown;

As Daryl Sedore, over 5 months I sold just over 200 books.

With the pseudonym in 6 weeks I’ve sold almost 350 books as of the date of this post.

That is an increase of 150 books in 30% of the time. The odds are staggering and the potential immense.

This is part of what I have to reveal as described in my last post. The other half will be revealed during the first week of May as promised, but I did want to come out early and announce that I am published under a pseudonym.

Here are the books and their links;

“Dark Visions” by Jonas Saul (Previously titled “The Precog” or “Paranormal Precognitions”)

“The Warning” by Jonas Saul (This book is Part 2 of the Dark Visions trilogy. It was never published before)

“Suicide Notes” by Jonas Saul (A collection of eight short stories. Four were previously published under Daryl Sedore)

My pseudonym, as you can see, is Jonas Saul.

The numbers speak for themselves. I will only be writing as Jonas Saul from here on in.

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Comment by scribbler on April 22, 2011 at 8:06am: Daryl, that's really interesting! So are you convinced it was the name that made all the difference or do you give the new covers and blurbs much credit too? It would be great to see the old covers and blurbs vs. the new ones to see how different they are for the sake of comparison.

I have a question though. Don't you need to declare that in some way if you reupload the same book under another name? I'm just thinking that if I'd bought it already under the first name, and then bought it again, not realizing it was the same book because of the pseudonym and the different cover and blurb, I'd not be happy. I'm curious if Amazon or Smashwords has any kind of rule in place regarding that. Many congratulations on your successful experiment! :)

Comment by Jonas Saul on April 22, 2011 at 7:51pm: Scribbler,

About where the credit should lie, I'm unclear. I do feel the covers are more professional. The blurbs, in my opinion, are miles ahead. I read over one hundred blurbs from Publisher's Weekly and Traditional Houses to get a feel for how they talk about books I've read and books I haven't. Then I wrote my blurb in that vein. I do feel the name change also helped as Jonas Saul has an author sound to it more than my own name does.

Regarding the re-uploaded titles: As far as I know there is no policy in place. Keep in mind the motivation behind this change...I hadn't sold many books under my own name. So little in fact that the odds of someone having bought "Paranormal Precognitions" and then finding Jonas' book "Dark Visions" (which is the same book entirely) were quite slim.

But alas, if they did, Amazon offers returns for e-books. I have yet to get one Dark Visions returned.

Thanks for these great questions and for leaving a comment.

Have a fabulous weekend!

Daryl Sedore

AKA Jonas Saul