Big Bad Bubba Sale!

Big Bad Bubba Sale!

To celebrate the release of Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 – Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem, I’ve put ALL the Bubba collections on sale for a limited time. This is a great opportunity for you to catch up on seasons you missed, or just to jump on the crazy train that is Bubba the Monster Hunter,

Here are some details –

Scattered, Smothered, & Chunked – Bubba Season 1 – $2.99

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grits, Guns, & Glory – Bubba Season 2 – $3.99

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wine, Women, & Song – Bubba Season 3 – $4.99

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And of course, the newest release in the series – Bubba Season 4 can be pre-ordered here for just $2.99 for a very limited time! Get your orders in early, because this price is sure as hell going up!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Updates, Patreon, Anxiety, etc.

Updates, Patreon, Anxiety, etc.

Hey gang, sorry it’s been radio silent around here for a while, but ye olde brain chemistry had been pretty out of whack and I’ve been struggling to get anything accomplished. But today was a good day, and it’s looking like it might be a good week. Or at least a damned interesting one. I’m being vague, I know, but all will be revealed in the fullness of time, I promise.

But let’s give you an update on Patreon, and what I’m looking at doing starting next month. A week or so ago, Patreon announced that they were changing their fee structure to let the creators keep a larger chunk of their pledges. Great, right?

Wrong.

While we, the creators, will see reduced fees under their new structure, we’re seeing that reduction on the backs of you, our patrons. Whereas in the past, all processing fees and stuff was taken out of my chunk of money before it was sent to me each month, now those fees will be tacked on to your pledges before they are sent to me. So if you are a $1/month patron, it’s now going to cost you $1.38 or so each month to support me. Which sucks. Especially for the ten or so of my $1 patrons who support a bunch of other artists. I had one friend tell me that these changes would add $40 to her monthly pledge budget overall. Because even though Patreon is only getting tagged once for processing the credit cards of patrons, they are tacking the service charge on to every pledge. We call that profit. And shitty.

So while I have no plans to leave Patreon, I plan to change the way that I address Patreon.

Starting January 1, everything that is available on the $1 patron tier will also be available here, on this website, one week later. I’ll find a place to stick a tip jar somewhere in the sidebar of the page, so if you want to drop a buck or two in there every once in a while, you can. But I don’t want my patrons feeling screwed in any way, so if supporting me happens at the expense of dropping another creator, please – drop me first. It’s not that I don’t need the money. I do. But I’ve been selling pretty well the past few months, and I have a couple of things in the hopper that may turn out to be legitimate Big Deals, so I can handle losing a few patrons. Also, a couple of my patrons have either increased their pledges to cover the loss of patrons, or they’ve offered to pay for other people’s pledges. So neither of us is going to lose anything in the long run. I’ll still get the same money, and you’ll still be able to get the same content, just with a slight delay.

Now if you want to continue to support my Patreon, at any level, I will still appreciate the hell out of you. I just don’t want people to feel guilty if they drop me, or to feel like they have to choose between supporting me or another creator.

I will also likely be starting up a subscription service over at Gumroad once they get all their bandwidth sorted. They’ve been a touch overwhelmed the last few days as people seek out alternatives to Patreon.

In other news, it’s probably too late to get autographed books delivered for Christmas, but I do still have a few things in my Inventory Reduction Sale if you want to get some signed stuff before the end of the year. Anything I still have after Christmas will be donated to a local shelter for LGBTQ youth.

And you should all watch ABC this Friday at 11AM. Watch carefully, there may something really cool happening. 🙂

Amazing Grace is out there in the world!

Amazing Grace is out there in the world!

As a little “Thank You!” to all of you who read Amazing Grace in its serial form, and offered encouragement as I wrote it, I gave you a little present –

This is the recorded Prologue to the novel, in my own voice, because I enjoy doing this piece at readings and thought y’all might like to hear what it sounds like to me.

You can buy Amazing Grace in your favorite ebook format here – books2read.com/u/4DoRWQ. Print copies are releasing 10/17/17, in softcover and hardcover.

Thanks for helping bring this project to life!

 

JGH

Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

I wrote a couple of posts early in this series about how to build a mailing list with Incentivized and Organic Subscribers, and all that stuff remains true. If you missed them, the first part is here, and the second one is here. This won’t be about the philosophical elements of making a newsletter, this will be about the nuts and bolts, the mechanics, and what I personally do with my mailing lists to monetize them. Some of this is stuff I’ve gleaned from the internet, some of it I’ve come up with on my own, and fair chunk of it is from notes I took in a long conversation with my friend Stuart Jaffe. If you want to read some kickass adventure or supernatural mystery stuff, check him out. And if you sign up for his email list, you’ll get some free shit! Eric Asher is another person I use for a resource on promos and mailing lists, and he’s also got a deal or two running right now.

But how do I deal with my mailing list(s)? Well, that’s been the subject of a lot of thought over the past few days, as I’ve recently relocated my mailing list from Mailchimp to Mailerlite, because for the number of subscribers that I have (currently about 3,600 across four lists) Mailerlite is $20/month, where Mailchimp was $50, and going to $75 when I reach 5K. So that’s not an insignificant savings, especially given what I have in the marketing budget most months, which is frequently dryer lint. By the way, if you click on those links and sign up for Mailerlite, you get a discount and I get a kickback, so if this is helpful, that’s one way to show the love.

As I mentioned, I have four mailing lists, three of which are active, and one I’m just getting moving (slowly) on. The lists are – my newsletter, the Falstaff Books newsletter, and the ARC team for me & Falstaff. Yes, those links are the signup forms for the linked newsletters. Yes, you can get a metric ton of free ebooks just for signing up to all of those email lists and then auto-dropping. I mean, by my rough reckoning, if you signed up for all the lists that I’ve shown you here, you would get six complete novels, two short stories, one sampler anthology, and one anthology. All for free!

But how does it work? How do I get people onto the lists, and how do I deal with the lists once I’ve got them there. Okay, here’s what I do. It’s more than most people, and scale it back to fit your productivity, but remember that I release at least one new product every month, and sometimes more, plus I have a publishing company releasing at least two new books each month, usually more. So I have a lot of shit to notify people about. But here’s the plan.

1) Consistency – I’m a flake, and anyone that has worked with me knows it. I know it, and I also know that I can’t do the things I need to do if I’m flaking out all over the place. So I have an event set up in my calendar to write a newsletter every Wednesday. It’s also when I write these posts, so it kinda just gives me a couple hours in publisher headspace to do this kind of stuff. I do a John Hartness newsletter one week, then a Falstaff newsletter the following week. If for some reason I don’t have anything new coming out that week, the week before, or the week after, I skip a week. That doesn’t happen very often, between appearances, book releases, and audiobook releases, I have something hitting the virtual streets almost every week, so there’s something to talk about. But consistency is critical. If you go too long without sending out a newsletter, people forget about you. And obscurity is our enemy. So I send out a newsletter about every two weeks for each of my major newsletters. The ARC team is a whole different story, and one that I’m still working on. I’ll keep you posted.

2) The Funnel – This is what I learned from Stuart, setting up my automation. I know he didn’t invent the idea. He’s smart, but not that smart. But he was kind enough to take the time to sit down and explain the whole thing to me. So here’s what happens when someone signs up for my email newsletter, and this is another place in which Mailerlite has Mailchimp beat, hands down. This shit was so much easier to set up on Mailerlite that it wasn’t even funny.

Step 1 – Janet signs up for the newsletter. Janet gets a confirmation email with a link in it directing her to confirm that she’s a human and really wanted to sign up for this crap. Once she does that, she is sent to an Instafreebie page. Instafreebie is a website that automates ebook giveaways and integrates them with mailing lists. It lets me do all this without actually having to sit down and send people ebooks. I use it for all my mailing list giveaways. Yes, there is a referral link buried in that link, too, so if you sign up for Instafreebie and upload a book, I get a discount. Just assume that I have put referral links in every link in here, because I probably have. It doesn’t add anything to your cost, and if I am recommending that you sign up for a service, might as well get them to pay me for it, right?

Step 2 – But anyway, Janet goes to Instafreebie and gets her free ebook. Then the automation starts rolling. In a few days, Janet will get a second email, with another Instafreebie link, this one to a different free short story. She doesn’t have to sign up for anything extra, she doesn’t have to get the story. But it’s free, and it’s a story I like, so why not give it away?

Step 3 – Seven days later, Mailerlite runs an if/then sequence. If Janet opened the email, then she gets an email inviting her to join the Falstaff Books email list. This will get her two more free ebooks, plus another set of notifications. If she didn’t open the email, it will resend, to give her a little reminder to become an active fan and read all my shit (and get more free shit!).

Step 4 – Seven days after that, another step runs. If Janet didn’t open the email a second time, she’s removed from the list. I pay per subscriber, and if people aren’t reading the things I’m sending, then I would rather not pay to keep them around. If they are actively interested and just got busy, they can sign up again and get more free shit all over again. If Janet opened the email the second time it sent, she then gets invited to the Falstaff Books email list. To get more free shit. If she opened the Falstaff Books invite, then she gets another email inviting her to join Stuart’s email list and get his shit for free. Because we all like to work together, and a rising tide lifts all boats. So the more books Stuart sells, the more books I will eventually sell, because we’re all about training people to buy indie and small press books, and love us all. So I like pimping my friends.

If Janet didn’t open the Falstaff Books email, then nothing else happens. I don’t refer only moderately active subscribers to other folks, but I don’t boot them, either. If they’ve opened 2/3 of the emails I send, then I definitely want them around.

That’s the way my funnel is currently set up, and it’s constantly evolving. But I want to draw people in as much as I can, and engage them as much as I can. Those are the initial steps to building a list, signup forms, and creating a funnel to suck them into your loving arms forever.

We’re way over the thousand word limit I try to keep these at, but just a quick note – there’s a new Quincy Harker short story coming out soon, and I’m giving away 100 copies on Instafreebie. You don’t have to sign up for shit, just click this link and you can get a free Harker story. Now, you CAN sign up for the email list while you’re there, but it’s not required. There are 80 or so available as of this writing, so go get some free shit!

New Book Bundle for Halloween and More!

New Book Bundle for Halloween and More!

Hey there! Here’s a badass new book bundle that I’m part of along with some awesome writers including Gail Z. Martin, Mario Acevedo, Dean Wesley Smith, Quincy Allen, Jean Rabe, Kelly Harmon, Stuart Jaffe, and Mindy Klasky. It’s on sale wherever ebooks are sold, and also is available on BundleRabbit!

It includes Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1, and eight other great books for as low as $2.99 for the whole set!

Get your bundle today!

Bump in the Night