Last year was meant to be the year where I buckled down on book marketing. It didn’t quite work out, but I did complete my epic fantasy series Spectrum Legacy, which means now is the perfect time to do a full series audit on the book series to make sure it’s the most presentable package it can be.
Getting in front of readers is always hard. It’s also normal to have books that don’t sell as well. You’re always going to have something that doesn’t land well, and then you have a few books that do great and are your leaders in profit. But this series suffered from a unique problem: It’s a long epic fantasy series in a world where readers have been burned by incomplete stories and often won’t begin a new story until the series is complete. I understand all too well, because that’s the main reason I prioritized finishing the series over marketing the series.
Now that it’s done, that barrier is removed, so the next step is ensuring the series gains visibility.
It has a few things going for it already. One is that the covers are gorgeous. They were all done by an incredible artist whose work I love, and I know the covers work for catching attention! At my last book signing, a gentleman walked past my table half a dozen times, then came over and said he couldn’t stop staring and knew he needed that book. He didn’t even care what the story was about. He just knew the cover spoke to him, and that’s exactly what I want.
But even though the packaging is excellent, I’ve had a lot of challenges with this series. I’ve always suspected part of the problem is that epic fantasy as a genre isn’t always very friendly to female writers. We see a lot of this with current series being squeezed out of the epic category and exclusively labeled romantasy, but in a derogatory way, as if romantasy isn’t as valid. And if not romantasy, it gets labeled YA, even though the book was clearly meant for a more mature audience.
Back when I was still pursuing traditional publishing with The Snakesblood Saga, I had a female agent tell me that women didn’t write epic fantasy for adult audiences, they wrote YA. It has always bothered me, and I know it’s untrue, but it is true that a lot of comparable titles by female authors have been shoved over into YA categories for this type of book. Since this series does feature characters in their late teens and the content isn’t risque, I can bill it as YA and I might have better luck marketing it that way. It’s a frustrating issue, because the story is modeled after all the adult epic fantasy I’ve read, where a young man who has just come of age is suddenly more than he bargained for. He sets off for the Hero’s Journey and the world changes along with him. If that’s not traditional epic fantasy, then what is?
But anything is worth a try, so categories were the first thing to change. I moved all the books out of the adult categories on Amazon and into the YA section. There aren’t as many subcategories for YA fiction, but they’re nicely organized. I chose epic fantasy and Arthurian fantasy for the first two, because following a mentor’s advice and seeking a legendary sword that can be used to unify kingdoms and save the world is a pretty solid fit for both of those. For the third category, I wasn’t sure if I should go with coming of age or sword and sorcery, because both fit. This series is heavily Legend of Zelda inspired, and as my friend Elaine said, because it leans more toward Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time, it’s definitely got sword and sorcery flavor. Ultimately, I chose to do a combination. Some of the books are in the sword and sorcery category as a chosen category and others are in coming of age, but I also used keywords that would ensure all the books would be found in either of those categories.
Revising the cover copy was the next step for my series audit. While the sales copy I had was okay, the blurb can always be better, and I wanted it to be as tight and impactful as possible. The only blurb I changed was for book one, because the ones that come later in the series matter less. That’s not to say that sales copy doesn’t matter at all for later books, just that spending tons of time obsessing over blurbs for later books isn’t going to make any difference at all if they didn’t enjoy book one.
So again, I got help from my friend Elaine. She suggested some revisions for the blurb I already had, and then I built off her suggestions to finish a new version. It removed anything that didn’t add value to the description, then ended with stronger wording than what I started with. So of course, special thanks to Elaine Canyon for going over all of this with me!
Changing the keywords came next. As I mentioned previously, I used my keywords to help my books appear in other related categories, since you can only choose three, but they can appear in others. Writing “sword and sorcery” and “coming of age” as keywords means there’s a chance they can appear in those category groupings, regardless of the main categories you’ve chosen. Amazon likes it when keywords are given in an order readers might search for, so I kept those terms as phrases in the keyword boxes, then put all my other keywords into an arrangement that got me as close to using all 50 characters in a keyword slot as possible. You get seven keyword slots and it helps to stuff them full, because a line that says legendary sword, magical artifacts, chosen one, and magic will still allow Amazon to pick out those particular phrases, as long as they’re properly grouped.
There are tools available to do keyword research, but I just used a private browser window to visit Amazon and looked for books I thought were similar to mine. From there, I scanned their book descriptions and titles for keywords I thought might fit my book. You can’t use another book’s title as a keyword, but you can look for commonalities to give you ideas. A book titled Dragon Slayer? I have a dragon in my series, let’s use that as a keyword. This book has a magical sword? So does mine. Lastly, I checked my list against what I thought people might actually search for, like “YA epic fantasy with dragons” and built my keyword lists from that.
As the final step, I made sure my pricing was competitive within my genre. I only looked at indie authors for this part of the project. All my ebooks for this series are priced at $4.99, which I think is a great price point, because it’s easy to convince someone to try a new author for an investment of five bucks. Once they’re more established, epic fantasy authors tend to charge more, but there are enough similar titles available at the $5 price point that it’s still right for a series that has not yet gained traction.
Paperbacks skewed a lot higher in price. Both indie and trad pub epic fantasy books were a lot closer to a range of eighteen to twenty five dollars per book, which isn’t a surprise considering how much printing costs have risen in the past few years. All my paperbacks for this series are priced at eighteen dollars, keeping it in line with the rest of the genre. Pricing my books correctly means I won’t look suspiciously low-priced, which might make readers question a book’s quality.
So now this series is fully up to speed, polished and adjusted to fit the current market, and the next step is going to be exploring marketing options. Working with something in YA categories will be new to me, so I’ll have to experiment a bit before I’ll figure out a new rhythm, but this is a solid start that’s made my platform—and my presentation of this series—a lot stronger.