Last year I published four very long essays on my site in a series called “The Key Conditions for Reader Suspense.” The folks at SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) liked them and wanted to reprint them on their site. Of course, as I went through those essays I found things to revise and add. We published the revised essays in a twenty-seven part series. Read those more recent versions here.
Maya has one of the most quirky goat-loving blogs around. I dare you to read just one of her blogs. You can’t do it. You’ll find yourself going back to read another. And another. Anyway, she’s been doing a series called “How Writers Do What They Do” where she interviews authors on the creative process. Mine’s the latest, but there are a lot of other interviews in the series you will want to read. Enjoy!
http://mayalassiter.com/2011/05/how-writers-do-what-they-do-john-brown/
I’ve experienced yet again the miracle of manure, of starting from scratch, and following the zing.
This last week I’ve been rewriting a beginning to a novel. It’s a bit tricky because I can’t just rewrite it without constraint. Such a rewrite would cause massive changes to everything else in the book. In fact, a complete, unfettered rewrite of a beginning might end up requiring a totally different book. But Tor bought the book in hand. Besides, I don’t have time for a total rewrite even if they did want one. So the new beginning had to fit into the rest of the current story.
At three different spots where this beginning needed significant changes I have had to write a pile of cow crap because it’s all I had in me at the time. I knew I couldn’t use those plops when I finished them. But there they were.
The problem was compounded by my reading the recent Time article about Stephenie Meyer and starting to listen to Empire by Card. I have a weakness for comparing myself to others, and this time the comparison yeilded some depressing results.
Then I asked myself what wasn’t working and how I might meet the goals of those scenes a bit better. I followed my heart. But in all three cases I had to stop trying to use the brilliant words I had written originally. Not the cow crap revision, but the original stuff.
I’m not talking about the general prescription that we writers need to “murder our darlings” because the darlings are usually bad writing. I find general prescriptions to be wrong much of the time and that one in particular to make no sense at all.
In this case one of the things I had to jettison was a beginning segment that had compelled 90% of the readers who glanced at it to read more. A beginning page that snagged agents and editors. A beginning page I still loved, even after reading it as many times as I had.
But it just wouldn’t fit, couldn’t fit with the new structure. When I tried to hang onto it, I wrote crap. Which was fine. There was some good stuff in the crap. But I eventually had to trust myself and come up with something else completely.
And while I don’t know if it’s going to suck readers in like the original, I think it’s pretty dang good. Back before Card’s boot camp I would have never made it to this point. I would have given up. But this is just the process for me now. It took some time to learn and trust it. But now I know that while sometimes I can write hot. There’s no reason to despair if I don’t. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I get to the good stuff.
As for Meyer and Card, well, it’s not my goal to be a one-trick pony, now, is it. 🙂
A lot of folks hear I’m going to be published and automatically classify me with J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, or Dan Brown. Heck, I at least ought to be categorized with Joe Schmo who was featured on Oprah.
And why shouldn’t they think that? Those are the authors they see. That’s what it means to them to be published.
For those of us who have actually gotten a peek behind the curtain, we realize it just ain’t so. Those are best-selling authors. See my post on best sellers to understand the quantities that have to move to make a best seller. Those are huge numbers, but very few authors sell that many books.
So what do you need to sell to make a living? Let’s do some math.
Let’s say you want to make $50,000, the median household income in the US at this time. I know, I know, that’s nothing in some places, but if you’re a writer you don’t have to live in San Francisco. So you want to take home $50k after taxes. That means you’ll probably need to make $62,000 before taxes. That’s our goal.
So here are some numbers with conservative royalties.
What authors make on a paperback
8% royalty (authors usually make 8 – 12 % on paperbacks)
15% agent fee
6.8% net royalty rate
To net $50k with only PAPERBACK sales would you need:
$911,765 in sales required in the year
$7.99 per book
114,113 books sold
What authors make on a hardback
10% royalty (it’s common to make 10-15%)
15% agent fee
8.5% net royalty rate
To net $50k with only HARDBACK sales would you need:
$729,412 in sales in the year
$25.00 per book
29,176 books sold
If you have previous books that are still selling, they all count. Make foreign sales, they count. Can produce two books per year, maybe one in a different genre, they count. Of course, this doesn’t factor in discounts and the corresponding reduced royalty rates. Nor does it factor in costs of being in business for yourself, including taxes, insurance, etc. But this is enough to get a rough idea of numbers.
100,000 paperbacks is a BIG number. However, you usually mix and match.
Let’s say you sell 5,000 hardbacks. 5,000 x $25.00 = $125,000. $125,000 x .085 net royalty = $10,625. $62,000 – $10,625 = $51,375 to be made by the paperbacks when they come out the next year. At a 6.8% net royalty rate you have to make $755,515 or sell about 94,558 paperback copies.
Here it is in an easy to read list. Given the hardback sales shown below, you’d have to make up the rest of the $62,000 with the paperback sales on the right.
5,000 HB: 94,558 PB
10,000 HB: 75,002 PB
15,000 HB: 55,446 PB
20,000 HB: 35,890 PB
I know those seem like small numbers compared to the Publisher’s Weekly 2007 numbers I link to above. But most authors don’t sell that many books. Most authors are happy to sell 5,000 hardbacks.
But it’s not all bad news. I looked at a few authors on the PW list comparing hardback and paperback numbers. It seems any given author will sell twice the number of paperbacks that they do hardbacks. So perhaps selling somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 hardbacks is the magic number.
20,000 hardbacks is a lot. But it seems doable for a writer who has been publishing for a few years. It’s not the 700,000 of a James Patterson. But it just might be enough to make, hold your breath, what the average household in America makes in a year.
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?
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.
The Writing Excuses guys have posted another good podcast: this one on world-building a history.
I wanted to add a few comments. You’ll notice that a lot of the blurbs for my novel mention my world-building, so I guess it’s a strength in my writing. However, I don’t write huge world building documents in the pre-draft stage. I do write some history, of course. But I don’t think it would take up more than a few pages. A lot of world-building happens in draft.
It seems to me there are two levels of “history” and a lot of it can be done on-the-fly.
1. There are small hints of CHANGE in places and people.
Dave Wolverton taught me this one. You come upon an orchard in the woods that’s gone wild and is overgrown. It takes two lines to describe it and it gives a strong feel of past. The reader wonders who was there, what happened. Maybe you tell them. Maybe you don’t. You mention that the village Knight used to be fat but is wasting or vice versa. I find I can do these types of things usually on-the-fly as I’m writing. And I don’t need to know much about them. I just ask myself if anything has changed with the location or characters in the current scene.
A few touches of CHANGE throughout the novel give a strong sense of history.
2. There are events, groups, and individuals who impact or impacted your characters and their community in large ways.
There was a war with a neighboring country not five years ago. Your characters have to travel through that land, or maybe half the male population went to war and never came back. Or perhaps your character lost his sister in a drowning he could have prevented. Or he lost her to slavers. Or perhaps there is a secret police (like the Roman couriers) who arrived two years ago.
Again, many of these things can be thought up on the fly as you look for conflict and the stories of a place and community. However, I’ve found that it helps to ask a few key questions in the pre-draft stage to lay some (NEVER ALL) the groundwork.
— What kind of conflicts do these nations and groups have?
— What events have had a large impact on my character and his community? They can be terrible or wonderful events.
— Who in the community are my characters friends and enemies? What’s the history?
— What are the local and regional stories of events (or people) that were eccentric, odd, mysterious, dangerous, or revolutionary?
I never get all my answers up front. But I will get some. And then as I write I just keep in mind that it’s neat to indicate change every once in a while and to briefly bring up stories from the past that relate to the current matter at hand in the present story.
Finally, I really like the idea the Writing Excuses guys brought up of sharing multiple explanations for an event (multiple histories) when it fits and to include more than one cause, although I’m pretty sure the 80/20 rule applies to causation.
Klein (isn’t that a lovely photo with the arch, the girl, and the color? It feels Potterish and is perfect for Klein) is a senior editor at Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. (Levine is the guy who purchased Potter in the US), and the continuity editor for the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter books. A “continuity editor” is responsible for ensuring that the world an author creates remains as consistent as possible through multiple books. A senior editor, on the other hand, finds likely books and acquires them for publication.
Please look at this list of best selling books of all time. Rowling’s success is simply AMAZING. And Klein looks, as an editor, at some reasons why she feels Potter did so well. Of course, there are other factors like the fact that it was a book the whole family could enjoy and the wonder she created with things like quidditch and every flavor beans etc. But the points she makes here are marvelous. Take some time to think about and digest what Klein has to say. For more essays, here’s her website: http://www.cherylklein.com/.
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…and a great series it is too! Wow, I wish I’d read it back in the late 80’s when I made my first pass at writing fiction. 🙂 Much thanks again!
Glad to hear you found it useful.
Great series of articles, John. I too have been collecting info about suspense creation over my long writing career, and just wanted to let you know that I’ve drawn upon several of your points (with acknowledgement, of course) in an article I wrote a little while back on my Books and Writing Blog.
http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/09/41-ways-to-create-and-heighten-suspense_27.html