On Writing

  • Indie Thoughts: Tend Your Garden

    ByJohn Brown

    From Joe Konrath.

    Your ebooks function much like a garden.

    One rare occassions, a plant will thrive with little help from you.

    Others may whither and die no matter how much help you give them.

    But the majority need to be constantly tended. Planted, watered, fertilized, weeded, pruned, mulched, replanted, harvested. In other words, lots of work.

    Ebooks aren’t a Mr. Popeill invention where you can set it and forget it. Quite the opposite. You need to pay attention, and keep active, or your garden won’t thrive.

    Everyone experiences slow downs in sales. It’s inevitable, and it seems to be cyclical, but not in any sort of way I’ve been able to prodect. Sales seem to rise and fall for reasons unknown.

    But if you’re doing what you can to make your books discoverable, you have a better shot at sales than those authors who self-publish then self-ignore.

    Here are some tricks to tend to your garden.

    1. Change prices. As an indie, this is one of the biggest advantages you have over the legacy industry. You decide what the customer pays, and this is powerful. Don’t be afraid to weild that power by experimenting with prices, both lower and higher.

    2. Newsletter. There is no excuse why you don’t have a newsletter. People who sign up are actively looking for your titles. Make them aware a new title exists.

    3. Sales. Unlike a change in price, a sale only lasts for a short time. KDP Countdown is what I’m currently using, because it offers 70% royalties when I drop the price. I’ve been pleased with my results.

    4. Advertising. Bookbub and Booksends are the ones I use regularly. If you’ve had success with another company, list it in the comments.

    He names eleven tips. Link to the rest at JA Konrath’s blog.

    This goes back to something Blake Russell said in the myth posts I pointed to a few posts ago. There are some folks who suggest that you can either write the next book or you can promote the current one.

    Folks who suggest it’s either/or leave me scratching my head. Why not do both?

    Applying to BargainBooksy or BookSends takes less than 30 minutes. Sending a review copy out to a decent review site takes about the same amount of time. If I spend just one hour a week on promotion, I can do all three of those things each month plus something else.

    Some folks suggest that promotion doesn’t work when you only have a few books out. And forget about it if you only have one. Promo can’t do anything for you if you only have one book out. At least, not as much as completing the next book can.

    Let me ask a question.

    If I open a McDonalds down some back road where nobody sees it and nobody travels, do we think that releasing a second McDonalds down some other back road where nobody travels is going to increase sales?

    Nobody is going to go down those roads except by accident.

    Is that how McDonalds or Walmart or whatever company you want to name built their vast empire? They did it by accident? How about the diner everyone loves in your town? They hid it at the end of a dirt road, told nobody about it, definitely did not put up a sign (good grief, not a sign), and, shazam!–the customers started rolling in?

    Mcdonalds11

    Some folks say, no, you’re missing the point. The purpose of a promotion is to get people to buy other books in your list at higher prices, so if you don’t have a lot of other books, your promotion can’t do anything for you.

    Using loss-leader or sampling strategies with one book to sell others is certainly a smart thing to do. Because it works. With cheeses at Sam’s Club, with books, with a lot of things. But is that really the only thing you’re trying to do?

    How about building a base of readers who have some degree of loyalty to your brand? You don’t need ten books to start to do that. You don’t need two books. You can start with one.

    I started two series last December—a thriller and an epic fantasy–and (writing gods willing) will be releasing book 2 in the fantasy series this month. Since December I’ve sold close to a thousand in each series. It was easy to see that at least half of my sales, maybe more, came because of some type of promo. I know this because I watched the numbers.

    This means I now have hundreds more folks waiting for book two than I did for book one in both series. I’m going to be releasing book two in both series with a bigger customer base than I would have had without promo. Why would I not want to start at a higher level for each successive book?

    More readers means more word of mouth. Why wouldn’t I want more word of mouth about my books?

    More word of mouth means higher odds that an influencer will hear about, try, like, and then promote my books. In fact, I’m looking at at least double the odds. Somebody remind me: why wouldn’t I want those better odds?

    One of the main keys to this business is to get a big enough customer base so that the word of mouth takes on a life of its own. I am building that base more quickly with promo than without. Why would I want to build that base more slowly?

    Finally, I have twice the money I would have had otherwise to invest in promo and covers and editing etc. Or just go spend on my wonderful wife and girls. Why wouldn’t I want this revenue?

    Traditional publishers have built reader bases for an author one book at a time, often spaced a year apart, for decades. They put money into the promo that works in in-store venues: covers, pre-release reviews and the necessary ARCs, catalogs, a sales team, and co-op visibility in the stores. And while that promo didn’t guarantee anything, it made the odds more likely the book would get readers to sample and build that reader base.

    Why shouldn’t we put money into the promo that increases the odds for online stores?

    What business out there can’t benefit from good promo?

    Of course, the next question is what methods of promo work? There are a many methods that are a waste of money. But not all of them are. I think it’s our job as entrepreneurs to test and find ways that are effective a la The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

    Anyway, Konrath’s advice to not self-ignore, and Blake’s “do both” approach make a lot of sense to me.

  • Indie Thoughts: Russell Blake’s Indie Author Myths

    ByJohn Brown

    This is from Russell Blake, a pseudonym for Craig Osso, a 52-year-old retired home developer who has sold close to 450,000 copies of the 25 books he published in the last 30 months. The man has made over a million bucks at this.

    1) Books Sell Themselves. No, sweetie, they don’t, at all, and never did. That’s why trad pubs spend massively on promotions. Because they know that visibility sells books, not invisible cosmic forces or author brilliance. It’s a highly competitive market with millions of choices, and it’s a retail market, and in retail, visibility is key. Which means constant promotion. Which most authors hate. But it’s reality, so get used to the idea. A companion to this aphorism is the next one…

    2) Just write the next one. Sure, if you want to have two undiscovered gems instead of one. Look, writing the next one’s important, but not if it’s used to justify not promoting the last one, which is often the case. You have to both market the last one AND write the next one. Sorry. You do.

    3) It’s all about luck. Well, perhaps some of it is. Maybe even much of it is. But so’s everything. You drive to the market, and 30 seconds after you pass the intersection some dumbass crashes into the car behind you. Luck. A hundred people start restaurants in town and two do well while the rest fail. Luck. A mugger attacks you after a movie. Luck. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. The book biz is no more or less random and chaotic than life, and yet some folks seem to consistently do better than others. I believe you need to work very hard, prepare, and be persistent, thereby creating some of your own luck. As an example, it’s possible you always wear your seat belt and the other driver didn’t today. In that case, bad luck becomes disastrous due to a simple lack of preparation. Or in the case of the restaurants, perhaps the ones that prospered had owners that worked 18 hour days and were talented chefs, and further, were savvy and inventive about getting people to try their cuisine. Preparation, persistence, hard work combine in that case to drag Lady Luck in their direction. With the mugger, maybe you have pepper spray or spent years on martial arts or have a concealed carry. Your preparation is the mugger’s bad luck.

    Luck may be a factor, but in my experience it’s only one factor, and that perspective of it all being all about luck breeds apathy.

    4) Do everything right and you’ll make it. Huh. If that were so, every book put out by big pubs would do well. The vast majority don’t. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do everything right, unless you want to worsen your already slim odds rather than improving them.

    . . . .

    10) Your muse cannot be forced to dance. Of course it can. If you were a writer on 24 or CSI or SNL you’d be expected to perform every week or you’d be out of a job. Most who work hard enough to get those gigs don’t want to lose ‘em, so they perform. Whether they feel like it or not. Whether they’re particularly inspired or not. The notion that you need to wait for your muse to decide to infuse you with story is fine if your books sell 10 million and you can afford to wait 4 or 5 years between each one. If that’s not you, you need to develop two things: a work ethic, and a system to inspire yourself.

    One technique I use is to ask myself how I can make this book, or this chapter, the best I’ve ever written. You get completely different answers depending upon what questions you ask yourself. “How can I consistently write 5K a day and enjoy it?” will get you a different answer than “How am I ever going to do this?” If you’re stuck, ask better questions.

    . . . .

    12) I’m too busy to read. Who’s got the time? This one kills me. How in the hell do you expect to be a good writer if you don’t read a lot of good books? Intuition? Divine guidance? Magic?

    . . . .

    1[6]) Write a good book and you will make decent money. Or write a lot of good books and you will make decent money. Would that it were so. Reality is that the overwhelming majority of good books, which is to say competently written-and-edited tomes, fail to sell much.

    . . . .

    My message is simple: working very hard and very smart can improve your terrible odds, but that’s all it can do. It’s not a magic pill, nor a recipe for success.

    . . . .

    I can tell you how to operate your writing and publishing company intelligently, but you need to recognize that most well-run publishing companies fail. Just as most well-run any-kind-of-companies fail. Most start-ups don’t last. They go belly up. Even those with the smartest people and shiniest wow products. That’s just how it works. Don’t start a company if you’re uncomfortable with that idea.

    . . . .

    I’m a big proponent of choosing a genre that can support you, which means one that’s popular, and sticking to it (with the caveat that if it doesn’t meet your expectations after a massive, concentrated effort, pay attention to the result you’re getting, and switch to something with better odds). I’m also big on publishing regularly, meaning every three or four months (more often if possible) if you intend to make this your living. I’m huge on pro editing and covers and proofreading. I consider your cover and your blurb essential to success. But those are the basics. Important basics, but still, building blocks.

    They will narrow your long odds because most authors simply don’t do what they should to make themselves successful. Understanding that is an advantage. It means you already know more than 90% of those who will publish on Amazon this year. If you do everything right, that will make you the 10% that has a chance.

    But still, it’s not a lock. By any stretch of the imagination. Get clear on that. In all businesses, this included, you can do everything absolutely, spectacularly right, and go nowhere. Because God hates you. Or because the world’s unfair. Or because you’re not good enough. Or were born under a dark star. Or didn’t get breast fed enough as a child. Pick your reason. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you recognize that in ALL industries, most businesses do not succeed.

    . . . .

    I wish I could tell you how to avoid being that person. I wish there were a formula. What I’ve come up with I share openly: Pick a genre you love and that’s large enough to support you, stick to it, write a lot of seriously good books, focus on improving your grasp of craft each time you sit down to write, make each book your best ever (meaning respect your reader above all else), package and quality control your books like the pros do, market intelligently, and spend massive amounts of time and energy working smarter than everyone else. And above all, be extremely realistic about everything. Some might say, cynical. I’d say pragmatic.

    . . . .

    Can you do this part time and make it? Sure you can. So can someone who starts any business part time. Just recognize that your odds of making it are lower than if you did it full time. Duh. Put in 80 hours a week, you might get better results than 10. Big surprise. Can you put in 10 or 20 and still do well? Sure. Again, anything’s possible. But you have to be unable to grasp basic business concepts if you think your odds will be the same. If they were, nobody would put in the 80. They’d all put in the 10, because their odds are identical.

    . . . .

    What’s my point? That self-publishing is both exciting in its possibilities and daunting in its requirements. And that very few businesses succeed, whether it’s a new shoe shop, or a convenience store, or a restaurant, or a software start-up…or a publishing company. But it’s more possible now to succeed than at any point in the past. I’m living proof.

     

    Link to the rest at Russell Blake’s Author Myths-1, Author Myths-2, and Author Myths -3.

    Blake has some of the most sensible advice I’ve read. If you want more, search for him over on KindleBoards.

  • |

    Indie Thoughts: When an author should self-publish and how that might change

    ByJohn Brown

    From publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

    For a number of reasons, the belief here is that most of the time for most authors who can get a deal with an established and competent house, their best choice is to take it.

    Sounds reasonable, but then we get to the money quotes.

    The strength of the traditional publishers and the traditional deals is directly related to the amount of the market that is served by inventory in stores. When that proportion was “nearly all”, the power allocation was “nearly all” to the traditional publishers.

    ***

    Self-publishing and new-style digital-first publishing can grow more to the extent that the book-in-store share of the market shrinks more. But while that’s happening, the big publishers are also adding to their capabilities: building their databases and understanding of individual consumers (something that all the big houses are doing and which the upstarts seem not to believe is happening, or at least not happening effectively), distributing and marketing with increasing effectiveness in offshore markets, and controlling more and more of the global delivery in all languages of the books in which they invest.

    It will compound the pressure on the alternative players if Amazon continues to grow its global market share for ebooks. The bigger the percentage of the market that can be reached by self-publishers with one stop at Amazon, the less interest they’ll have in picking up smaller chunks of the market with additional deals and the more powerful will be any incentives Amazon cares to offer for making the title exclusive to them.

    Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files, and thanks to Passive Guy for the original link.

    Shatzkin’s discussion of the amount of the market served by inventory in stores is right on. But his “best choice” conclusion doesn’t follow.

    Why?

    Because the question for each author has to be which stores will I be in, what kind of floor space will I have, and how long will I be there? And in many cases the answers to those questions do not compete well with indie options.

    For example, a lot of in-store sales come from the drug store, grocery store, airport, Walmart, Costco type venues. But it’s rare than an author getting an average deal will see the light of day in those places. Those are reserved for bigger sellers. And not very many of those. So unless you’re getting a big deal, you can’t count that floor space.

    Poof. Tens of thousands of venues are now no longer part of the equation.

    So you are now left with whatever number of stores the publisher can get you into at Barnes&Noble (a max of 675 stores), Books-a-Million (max of 200 stores), Hastings (max of 149 stores), non-chain stores,  etc. I think the total number of book stores in the USA is around 10,000 or so. But publishers won’t get you into all of them. Some don’t carry your type of book: they’re used books stores, or kids book stores, or Christian book stores. And even if it’s a store like Barnes&Noble, you probably won’t get into all their stores. So how many stores will you actually be in?

    Next, you have to wonder where you’ll appear in the stores you do get into. Will you be face-out somewhere prominent? Or will you have two copies spine-out in the back? If you’re spine-out, that’s just reduced the value of the floor space publishers offer you yet again.

    Finally, how long will you be there? If you sell your two copies in a store, are you done at that store? Will your books be there longer than 12 weeks? Will they be there even 8 weeks?

    James Patterson can sell millions of books because he has multiple copies in tens of thousands of stores with great display. And he’s usually there for more than just a handful of weeks. If you have two books spine-out in each of 500 stores for eight weeks, how well are you going to do?

    Here’s some math on author revenue and units sold. Is selling 1,000 books with the royalties and contract terms offered really worth it? What about 4,000 books? 7,000? Are you going to be in enough stores with a decent placement to get those numbers?

    If you’re going to be in thousands and thousands of stores with good placement, and the terms of the contract are reasonable, then, good golly, working with a publisher looks great. But if you’ve got a book that’s good enough to make an editor somewhere want to buy rights to it and the publisher is offering to put you spine-out in a little over a thousand stores with all sorts of contract crap, then Shatzkin’s “best choice” is really a poor one. In those situations my money is on going indie.

    EDIT: It seems there are about 12,700 book stores in the USA. But that includes big-box stores, which I think are the Walmarts and Costcos.

  • |

    Indie Thoughts: Publishers know profit, but haven’t tapped best seller lists

    ByJohn Brown

    In The Business Rusch: Generational Divide Kris Rusch points out that the new on-demand and long-tail market for books has changed the duration of the opportunity a book has to be successful, but that it seems the industry still isn’t recognizing this in how they measure success.

    The problems come from the fact that those of us who run things—people in our forties, fifties, and sixties—use metrics that were developed by our parents for their world, that tightly controlled Mad Men world where everyone was expected to be the same, not just in what they wore or bought but in what they listened to or watched or read as well.

    The bestseller list?

    It measures velocity. (A good essay on this topic, “The Meaningless Metrics of Fame,”  came from Mike Briggs, husband of Patricia Briggs, earlier this week. I’ve also dealt with it.)

    Reviews?

    They only want new books, and then only at the time of release.

    Brick and mortar bookstores?

    They only have room for the latest releases, and then only the ones that are the most popular with their customers (whoever those folks might be).

    Books have come late to this fight. Books have been available on demand for only about four years now, in the U.S. In other countries, there’s been even less time.

    And we’re all still fighting over meaningless metrics, to use Mike Briggs’ term, because those metrics only measure things that were important around the water cooler, not things which are important now.

    What’s important now?

    She goes on to say:

    The publishing industry isn’t even talking about new metrics. That idea hasn’t occurred to traditional publishing, and indie (or self) published writers are constantly seeking validation from the old system—trying to figure out ways to game the bestseller lists or to get a fantastic review from somewhere that has old-world prestige . . . But at some point, traditional publishers are going to have to develop new ways to figure out which products sell well and which ones don’t. All of their systems—from sales figures (which measure books shipped not books sold) to bestseller lists to critical acclaim—are based on the old models.

    Kris is a very experienced with publishing, but her last point conflates internal accounting with marketing. Publishers DO know which products sell.

    The primary measure of success in a financial enterprise s not new. It’s been around for 100’s of years. And on demand and long-tail markets don’t change it.

    The measure is how much a product or service contributes in profit to the bottom line. You take revenues, minus expenses, and that’s the contribution that product (a book in this instance) makes to your total profit. Or to covering your fixed costs.

    Booksellers have measured the success of their books with actual or estimated profits for quite some time. Publishers already know which books sell well and which don’t. No accountant in the world is going to report books shipped as the measure of success. And they don’t. The very fact that publishers have a profit and loss statement and show returns on royalty statements demonstrate that. They look very closely at actual and estimated profits. And to they do this by channel, which is reflected in a small way when they break out ebooks on royalty reports. This is all basic accounting.

    Here’s an example. Until Ender’s Game the movie, Ender’s Game the book hadn’t appeared on any best seller list since it was first released. And its release was 30 years ago! Yet over the years Tom Doherty touted its sales numbers many times. Tom knew that book was gold. Of course, he did. Because he doesn’t use best seller lists to tell him what’s selling well. He knows those lists are marketing devices. He has the real data in house. Why would he need a list to tell him anything?

    And Tom isn’t going to use books shipped either. Tor may report those numbers to Publishers Weekly for marketing purposes, but he will always multiply that number by an expected return rate to estimate sales. He wants to do that. Because books shipped is meaningless to the bottom line and everyone knows it, including the auditors.

    Publishers are well aware of the long tail. They see it with books that have been rotated out of the brick and mortar channels but are still selling in the online ones. They report it in their annual statements. They know the online channels work differently from the brick & mortar ones.

    The measure of success is still the same as it ever was—how much profit is this property contributing to our bottom line?

    Marketing, however, is a whole other ball of wax.

    What the long tail and on-demand allow are marketing campaigns that are impossible in the brick & mortar channel. In brick & mortar you have a limited time to advertise (roughly 8-15 weeks). After that period, most books are rotated out of the store. This means that any marketing for those brick & mortar buyers MUST coincide with the period when the books are in the stores.

    But the online channels open up all sorts of other opportunities. You can market forever. And the contribution margin is always positive. The online and POD costs are easily recouped with each sale. (Publishers are well aware of this profit potential; this is why we have so many making grabs for backlists.)

    And I see publishers taking advantage of these new marketing methods. This last week I saw publisher books not currently stocked by brick & mortar retailers on BookBub, BargainBooksy, and Book Sends. And the industry isn’t totally focused on new books for reviews. I just had a large newspaper agree to look at my book that was published four months ago. Still, Rusch is right when she says that the publishers haven’t adapted one of their biggest marketing tools to take advantage of the new opportunities–they haven’t done anything with the best seller lists.

    Amazon has lead the way in creating new ways of marketing books to different types of readers with their best seller lists. These lists create the excitement of discovery.

    But every one else is still reporting weekly sales on the big lists.

    If I were a publisher, I’d be asking USA Today to provide more than just the weekly view of the top 150 books. And USA Today is THE list to watch because their numbers are not based on units shipped to a sample of stores, but actual sales. Here are some lists that readers would be interested in.

    1. Most anticipated this week: based on pre-order totals
    2. Most anticipated this month: based on pre-order totals
    3. Hot new releases: based on weekly numbers
    4. Hot new releases for the month: based on monthly numbers
    5. Books with legs: last 3 months; I know it needs a different name (grin)
    6. Best sellers of the last 12 months: annual total of units sold
    7. Best sellers of the last 18 months: total units
    8. Contenders: for each of the lists above show the next 150 books (I always want to see the next 100 books after the top 100 on Amazon’s lists; why not show readers the top 300?)
    9. Movers: for each of the lists above show those that have the biggest rise in percentage sales and meet some unit minimum (you don’t want to feature books with 2,000% increase because they went from selling 1 unit to 20), even if they don’t break the best seller lists
    10. Genre: allow all of this to be sliced by genre.

    Let the reader select the view they want to see!

    Avid readers will gravitate towards the shorter time periods. Those that read fewer books will gravitate towards the longer periods. Everyone who wants to discover something new will go to the contender and mover lists.

    This is about marketing. Not publishers measuring success.

    And then armed with those numbers guess what the publishers will do? They will go back to the brick & mortar venues and pitch to have some of these same books carried in the stores for the first time (some publisher books are printed digital first) or carried again.

  • Binge read

    ByJohn Brown

    “When you are really and seriously stuck and you hate everything you’ve written, BINGE READ.”

    That’s from super author Maya Lassiter. If you recall, she did a great guest post here on her creative process. I love this technique for getting unstuck. When you binge read (or watch), not only do you see other options that you might take and adapt for your purposes, but those other options also spark whole new ideas.

    I just used this with the battle I’m writing for Curse. I wasn’t to the hate stage; I actually liked what I had. But I didn’t quite know how to get it to where I wanted it to be. So I decided to read some books by one of the masters of historical battle.

    I binge read and listened.

    And enjoyed the heck out of both the reading and the ideas I gleaned for my sequence.

    Binge read.

    It’s an awesome creative technique.