The Google Play Book Store

You’ve made your choice – to go wide or go all in on Amazon. If you’re all in on Amazon, move along, nothing to see here. But if you’ve gone wide, do you have your books in the Google Play Book Store? And if you do, how’s it working for you? I ask this because Google Play has recently become my best “selling” venue.

Please note that I give away my books, which is several orders of magnitude easier than selling books for money. Free, however, does generate enough “sales” numbers that they can be used to compare markets.

I started publishing books in April of 2015 via Smashwords and Amazon. In October of 2018 I got my books into the Google Play Store. I gave away 11 books that first month on Google. The following year Google accounted for about 9% of my sales, rising to 15% in 2020. This year Google started with 137 sales in January, and has continued to grow almost every month since then. Indeed, to date Google sales account for 33.4% of this year’s sales thru September, with Amazon at 42% and Smashwords at 24.5%. For some unknown reason I did really well on Google in September with total sales clocking in at almost three times that of Smashwords and Amazon combined. All in all, Google now accounts for a little more than 10% of my all times sales, though it’s only been part of the mix for half of the time I’ve been selling books.

Of course your books, the number of your titles, and readership will be different from mine, but I think it’s safe to say that if you haven’t listed your books on Google, you may be missing sales.

It used to be that you had to ask Google for an invitation to list your books, but when I googled the procedure for this article, the search took me here; https://play.google.com/books/publish/ where it seems all you have to do is sign up. But seeing that I was already signed into Google, “getting started” just took me to my Google page, so I can’t say for certain what you can expect.

Unlike Smashwords and Amazon, with Google you have to upload your own epub version of your book. If you already format your files as epubs they should be good to go. But if – like me – you don’t, then you’ll need to do it yourself. I use Calibre, a free program, to convert my LibreOffice files to epubs.

I’m no expert in Calibre so I keep it simple. I upload my LibreOffice file to Calibre, and then convert it to a version 3 epub using the default settings with Heuristic processing checked. Be sure to select version 3 when the time comes, as I get error messages when uploading version 2 epubs to Google. Once converted, the epub file ends up in the Calibre folder. From there I upload the epub file to Google. I include the cover when creating the epub in Calibre, even though you’ll still need to upload the cover to Google as a jpeg separately, just like the other stores. And like the other stores you’ll have to fill out all the metadata on the book, author bio if you like, and set the price and territories. Google reports daily sales with a day or two lag. I don’t know how payment works, but I assume that it is similar to the other services as well. Google pay 70% royalties.

It is rare that I can pinpoint a reason for any unanticipated jump in sales, and I can’t explain why Google is doing so well for me this year. I can’t find anything on the Google Play Books store to explain it. All I can say is that people are getting their ebooks from the Google store, and if you don’t have your books there, you may be missing out.

Writing Exercise Results

— Mark Paxson

After a week of words and what amounts to a daily flash fiction writing effort, I’m posting my story below. If you participated, I hope you share your story with us. Drop a link in comments or email us at writinghelp2021@gmail.com.

Facilitation

A Writing Exercise, The Final Day

Hopefully, there are some writers out there who have stuck with this. Here we are the final day. If you post your story, share a link with us in the comments. If you don’t have a blog, but would like to share it here, send us an email.

First day’s word … elimination

Second day’s word … irrepairable

Third day’s word … redundant

Fourth day’s word … kitchen

Fifth day’s word … shocker

Sixth day’s word … facilitate

Today’s word … swan song

A Writing Exercise, Day Two

Here’s the concept, as started on Monday, September 27.

So, the word for the first day was … elimination.

Today’s word is … irrepairable (Or my preferred spelling, irreparable. And yes, bonus points will be awarded for using my spelling.)

A Writing Exercise

— Mark Paxson

Beginning today, I’m going to post a word. Each day for the next week, I’ll post another word. These words are selected more or less randomly.

Your job is to begin a story with today’s word used somewhere in the first few hundred words. And then use the word I post each of the next six days in the same fashion as you continue your story. It’s totally up to you how many words you write each day. It’s totally up to you what genre. Everything is up to you, except for you to use each day’s word in the next chunk of the story.

One final note … use the word I identify or any form of it. Also, once this is done, please share your work. Either on your blog and provide us with the link, or email us at writinghelp2021@gmail.com, and we’ll post your story here.

So … today’s word is … elimination.

Pick a Genre. Any Genre.

— Mark Paxson

I spent a couple of days at Lake Tahoe this weekend. By myself. Which means I spent a lot of time in my head. On the drive home, I started thinking about our last video chat. At one point Lucinda Clarke commented during that chat that she had screwed up by writing in multiple genres. I responded that I had done the same thing.

A few days after that chat, I met a friend for luinch. I took him a copy of my latest book. Until this book, he hadn’t realized I wrote fiction. We had a lengthy discussion about books and writing. At one point, he asked me what genre I write in. There is no easy answer to that for me. My published works can be broken down this way:

Courtroom drama; young adult, coming of age; quirky, all dialogue oddball of a story; a novella that is the opposite of coming of age — a literary take on a life of loneliness and despair; and dozens of short stories that are all over the place.

My works in progress can be broken down this way:

Dystopian — I have three different WIPs that are variations on a dystopian future (one is a sexy space romp, one is a tale of a President who declares martial law and rules for years afterwards, destroying the country, and the third is something I actually can only dream about — a story told in reverse like the movie Memento). Then there are … a baseball novel; a collection of short stories that interconnet to produce a larger story (actually, I think I have two of these on the drawing board); And a few other things I’ve forgotten at the moment.

Genre? I don’t need no stinking genre!

But what I thought about this morning on the drive home was that maybe Lucinda was right. Maybe it’s a mistake to write stories that are all over the place. I got to thinking about people who might read my latest novel (the YA tale) who then would look at my other books, maybe even buy one, and then be disappointed that nothing else I’ve published is YA.

To some extent, I can’t help myself. This is just who I am. As I’ve said during our video chats, part of writing for me is exploring new ways to tell stories and new stories to tell. I simply don’t think I could have stuck with courtroom dramas for every story I wrote. It would be too stifling for me to stick with one genre — even if that novel was my most successful.

If I’m going to create, I want to keep creating. Which means, to me, spreading out into different genres, different voices, different stories. I guess what fascinates me the most about the art of writing is the ability to tell a story that people want to read. It’s not about the genre. It’s about an idea that comes to me and if it interests me, I’m going to pursue it, and see if I can write a story that is compelling enough and good enough that it gets readers’ attention.

But the question for this post is … in search of a reading audience, does that hurt me? As Lucinda suggested during the chat, does switching genres hamper a writer’s ability to attract and grow a consistent and loyal audience.

I think about when I first started blogging and there were all sorts of experts who counseled that a blog should be on a specific topic. Find a niche — whether it be cooking or traveling or writing or politics — and stick to it. That was the best way to grow an audience for a blog. Well, readers of my blog know that I did not follow that advice. Like my stories, my blog is all over the place. It represents everything in the world that fascinates me — music, politics, current events, cooking, gardening, exercise, writing, and whatever moves me on a day that I decide to write a blog post.

Maybe it’s time to write the next chapter of that courtroom drama. 😉 Maybe not. Because here’s the thing. After I finished that novel, I thought of two more books I could write about the main character, because that’s what mattered the most about that story. Not that it was a courtroom drama. No. What mattered was the characters and I had two ideas for more misadventures that would befall good ol’ Jack McGee. But even Jack couldn’t keep me interested and I ditched those two ideas and moved on to other stories, newer characters. (I’m struggling with the same dynamic with my most recent novel.)

So … let me ask again. Writers and readers out there … should a writer stick with a particular genre or two? Or should a writer write whatever the hell he or she wants and take a chance with each new product? What do you do? Stick with one genre? Go all over the place? What’s your motivation — because at the end of the day, that’s the ultimate reason for what each of us do.