indie thoughts

  • Is Amazon’s game totalitarianism?

    ByJohn Brown

    nazi_flagAmazatzi?

    Franklin Foer and Scott Turow recently made comments which suggest Amazon is in the process of ushering in a totalitarian book economy.

    Is Bezos, as Hitler was in the 1930s, biding his time, playing a long game, one that will lull the masses into a false sense of bookish security? Are we appeasing him, letting him take over the continent bit by bit? Is the blitzkrieg less than a decade away?

    If you listened to a recent Intelligence2 debate, you would have heard Foer-Turow claim that, yes, that’s exactly where we are headed. On the other side of the debate were Joe Konrath and Matthew Yglesais, arguing that Amazon is the reader’s friend.

    Konrath and Yglesais made some good points. But they left the central Foer-Turow argument standing like a citadel. It was left standing because much of what they had to say, as good as it was, frittered around the edges or went off into beer land.

    But the Foer-Turow argument is not a citadel. It’s a house of crackers.

    Here’s why: publishers, authors, readers, and entrepreneurs all have brains. And somehow, in their threat assessment, Foer-Turow forgot that.

    How could they forget something so fundamental?

    Well, their argument went like this.

    1. Amazon right now provides an amazing service that’s far and above anything any other bookseller currently provides. They have made more books more accessible to more readers than anyone else ever in history. Readers, of course, love this. But this is a bad thing.
    2. It’s bad because Amazon is becoming a monopoly–it already has 41% of all new book and 67% of all e-book sales, and in many divisions of those markets it has even more.
    3. If Amazon were an enlightened ruler like Aslan, okay. But Amazon is a business, and as a business it only cares about its profits. And the way to make profits is buy low and sell high. So when Amazon finishes consolidating its hold on the market, it will force publishers and authors to take less of the pie.
    4. In fact, Foer-Turow claim Amazon wants to not just reduce the share of the pie publishers get, it wants to kill off the publishers and take their share of the book pie completely. In addition to being very poor manners, this is bad for three other reasons.
    5. First, authors of non-fiction books that take a long time to research will never be able to get the money they need to do that research. Publishers are the only ones who can give them that money, which they do in the form of an advance.
    6. Second, few authors of fiction will be able to afford good editing, marketing, and book design, and so the many voices that could have been heard will be stifled, or never rise out of the crap to their true potential.
    7. Third, and this is the nefarious Nazi part, if Amazon is the only place you see books, they can control which books you see, which means they will exert enormous control over our culture because they will be able to suppress some books, and therefore the ideas in those books, and promote others. Foer-Turow claim Amazon has already done this.
    8. Finally, because it’s a business and has a goal of profit, when Amazon covers the land, it will probably eventually charge readers more. In fact, it may charge them a lot more. It can’t avoid it; it’s a business.

    So Amazon is taking over more and more book territory. When it’s taken over enough territory to be unassailable, it will then proceed to ruin our culture because its model of book selling will suppress quality non-fiction and fiction alike. And then it will gouge readers.

    Sounds depressing.

    Sounds like Orwell’s 1984 or global warming.

    The only problem is that there is a big honking flaw in all of that.

    Like BIG and HONKING.

    And I’m not talking about the issues like the idea that publisher advances are the only way non-fiction writers can be funded, or that publishers are the only way the vast majority of fiction writers can obtain quality book covers, marketing, and editing. Or that one internet site has the power to put a choke hold on ideas.

    No, it’s about something else.

    You need to know I’m not an Amazon groupie. Nor am I a hater of publishers. I am a businessman. I’m looking for good partners. And I recently wrote a post pointing out that it’s delusional for authors to think Amazon is their BFF with pinky rings. They are just, at the moment, a great indie partner. But their interests and mine are not perfectly aligned. Our love is definitely not written in the stars.

    So I’m not here to stand up for Amazon. I’m here to say that the scenario Foer-Turow paint is fantasy.

    Why?

    Because they’ve set up a chess board and assumed that Amazon is the only player.

    Monopoly

    How does a monopoly stay a monopoly?

    The government either legislates it. Or the company maintains their position by force. Or they own something that nobody else can get. Or the barriers to entering that market are so high nobody can get in to play. In all these scenarios, if people want the goods, they are forced to interact with the monopolies.

    But has the government given Amazon a legal monopoly?

    Um, nope. No charters here to be the only fur trappers in the West.

    Does Amazon have an army of thugs who are going to beat people up and make them join Amazon Prime?

    No. Well, maybe that’s what the drones are for, but they haven’t rolled them out yet.

    Do they own something nobody else can get, like a piece of land? Are they sitting on the world’s largest reserves of cheap book oil?

    Nope. They’ve got a great website and excellent logistics. But websites really aren’t that hard. And if we’re talking ebooks, you don’t need logistics.

    What about the barriers to entry?

    The big advantage Amazon has is that they usually have the lowest book prices around, the biggest selection (you can find almost any book you want there in any format it’s available in), and are incredibly convenient, providing samples, reviews, recommendations, and easy checkout. And they have the crowds.

    It’s hard to get crowds. It’s hard to get all that content. It’s hard to beat their prices. Those are some dang good barriers that keep new guys out.

    And Foer-Turow figured that’s all set. In stone.

    Human Beings

    But what happens if publishers have brains and are actually headed up by, like, real humans who aren’t just going to roll over and play dead? What would such folks do should Amazon keep killing off more and more of them and stealing their pie?

    Amazon doesn’t own the rights to their books. As soon as any contract ends, publishers could simply say, we’re done. Our books will no longer appear in your store. If you’re faced with extinction or something else, what do humans normally do?

    Amazon’s advantage is being the everything store. You can find every book imaginable there. So what happens when shoppers go there and can’t find the most popular books of our time? How long do they stick with Amazon when the shelves are empty? Anyone think about why Amazon kept selling Hachette books even when they were having contract disputes?

    What happens if indie authors have brains and are real humans who aren’t going to roll over and play dead either? What would such folks do should Amazon keep squeezing more and more profits out of them? Could such folks pull their books (like many bestselling indies have from Kindle Unlimited), form a co-op, and create their own site?

    What if everyone was talking about this awesome book that was all the rage, but it wasn’t stocked by Amazon? It was stocked on the indie site, and Apple, and all the others. How would that affect shoppers?

    What happens if there are real human entrepreneurs out there or real humans leading other businesses, and they were all wanting to make a buck, and they see Amazon charging readers a ton and swimming in easy dollars? What happens when they see those tempting profits?

    Do you think they might offer disgruntled publishers and authors better terms? Do you think they might give better deals to price-gouged readers?

    So is Amazon going to kill publishers? Only if the humans have left the building.

    Will they kill authors? Only if authors let them.

    Will they gouge readers? Not when other folks see there’s money to be made by undercutting them.

    Amazon is playing in a global market with the likes of Alibaba, Google, Apple, Walmart, etc. Amazon is playing in an internet economy where college students can come up with an idea and become billionaires. Equally important, Amazon owns nothing that somebody else can’t recreate. They have no legal monopoly. They have no army of thugs. What they have is a lot of content, a well-known URL, logistics for the hard copies, and good prices.

    But what they do not have is a marketplace where everyone else involved is absent a brain.

  • Indie thoughts: being realistic

    ByJohn Brown

    I know a lot of authors who are trying indie publishing. Some are doing fabulously well. Most are not. I’ve talked to a lot of folks wanting to indie publish. Very often they have stars in their eyes, even though the vast majority of books don’t sell well. But does that mean indie publishing is a pipe dream?

    Here’ is a perspective I agree with from Hugh Howey.

    The fact that self-publishing provides better chances doesn’t mean great chances. The fact that self-publishing can be less frustrating than the query-go-round and the delays inherent with traditional publishing doesn’t mean that self-publishing is frustration-free.

    Read more on Howey’s site. And here’s another by Dylan Hearn. With the Hearn post, I don’t know where he’s getting the “average book sells 100 copies” data. I don’t think that’s accurate. But his intent is to tell authors to have modest expectations, and I think having modest, realistic expectations is the most helpful way to approach this.

     

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    My First Year as an Indie Author

    ByJohn Brown

    On November 24th last year, a little over 13 months ago, I released my first indie title—Servant: The Dark God Book 1. That release was the official rise from the sideways swamp crash I had with Tor Books.

    BTW, sideways swamp crashes in publishing, which can be caused by all sorts of reasons, are not uncommon. Most writers will take a hit or three in their career. That’s just part of the writing business. The question is what happens after the swamp crash?

    In my case, I got to work. And, boy, was it a lot of work.

    The results have been positive. It was not a phoenixian rise from ashes to glory; it was more like a damp crew patching the ship in the jungle with whatever they had at hand and then launching with nothing but a few birds making any noise. We are by no means past the many perils and obstacles on the path–right now a solid hit from just about anything could knock us out of the sky.

    But we are airborne.

    We are flying.

    And by that I mean the business is delighting readers and generating income.

    I’ll probably hit close to 23,000 paid sales since that launch. The large majority of them were for Bad Penny. To give you some perspective, a single title will make the official Publishers Weekly bestsellers lists (of traditionally published authors) hardback and paperback categories when the title has sold around 100,000 copies in the year. The top dogs report sales of a few million.

    It’s clear the John D. Brown crew has got a ways to go.

    But we don’t have to reach that lofty level to be viable. It would be awesome. At the same time, it’s helpful to be realistic. There are somewhere between 300-400 titles on the adult hardback and paperback list combined. The same on the children’s lists. So I estimate there are around 700 traditionally published books, fiction and non-fiction, that sell at those bestseller levels. That’s out of the millions of trade titles available on Amazon.

    The good news is that the majority of writers making a living don’t appear there. The fact is that you don’t have to sell 100,000+ copies of a single title in a year to make a living. In the indie world, you can do just fine with what Russell Blake calls base hits and doubles.

    So are we making a living?

    Those sales have generated enough net profit to purchase us a nice used vehicle and a few other things. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (as my neighbor Mike Carr used to say), but making $10-20k can’t replace the day job. Not even close. Still, it’s a beginning.

    Will our crew make it?

    Can they survive the ferocious flying monkeys?

    Stay tuned.

    In the meantime, I want to summarize a few things I’ve learned about indie publishing and give a few shout-outs.

    First, I want to thank all the readers who decided to give one of my books a shot. From the reviews and sales, it appears the majority found just what they were looking for (and there was much rejoicing).

    Second, a big thanks goes to Larry Correia. Not only is he generous and enthusiastic, but his audience is as well. The Monster Hunter Nation made a definite difference for me this year.

    I want to thank LL Muir and Diane Darcy, two romance writers who have been incredibly generous in sharing their indie insights and support.

    Devon Dorrity and Dixon Leavitt spent hours, HOURS, of their time helping me with covers. I can’t thank them enough.

    I also need to thank the Codex Writers. There’s a small group of us indies there, and they’ve all be very helpful in sharing insights about what’s worked for them and what hasn’t.

    I’ve found other resources helpful as well. The Passive Voice kept me current on the industry. Russell Blake’s blogs gave me a clear-eyed opinion of what it takes to succeed. The Calibre ebook editor has saved me many times. And Anne-Marie Concepcion’s online course on using InDesign to publish ebooks was a very good introduction, as were Dean Wesley Smith’s online courses on interior and cover formatting.  I list other resources I found useful in my Resources for Indie Writers post.

    Okay, so what have I learned?

    1. Nothing happens without visibility

    This is retail. If your product is not somewhere that people can see it, they won’t buy it.

    I was in Wal-Mart the other day. My sister calls it the Evil Empire, but she’s a Tarzjay snob. I myself am a value shopper. I want what I want, and I want to pay as little for it as possible. At the same time, I’m not going to go out of my way to get it because searching around costs time and money. So if I’m looking for something in Wal-Mart and I don’t see it on the shelves, guess what? I buy something similar that will do the job.

    Wal-Mart used to stock Marzetti’s Ranch Dip. The best vegetable dip EVAR. But then sometime this year, they stopped stocking it.

    Why?! Why do they stop stocking stuff the moment I find it?!

    (Hey, maybe that’s why they’re the Evil Empire . . .)

    I mourned for a few seconds. And then I purchased the Lighthouse dip. It’s good. If they put Marzetti’s back on the shelves, I’ll switch back immediately. But the point is that if it’s not in front of my eyeballs when I go shopping, I ain’t gonna buy it.

    And I’m finding retail is the same with ebooks as it is with everything else. You can have the best product in the world, but you aren’t going anywhere with it until you are visible to your buyers.

    2. There are a couple of ways that I was able to make my stuff visible

    The way to make my stuff visible was not by publishing on Amazon, Nook, and the rest.

    Publishing means nothing.

    Think about it. There are, right now, 3,079,561 books in the Kindle bookstore.

    Yes, three million!

    If those were physical books, and we lined them up spine-out like we do on a bookshelf, and we assumed the spines average about an inch in width, they would make a line 48.6 miles long.

    For us Utahans, that’s a line of books that stretches from the Mormon temple in downtown Salt Lake City, past Provo, and ends in Springville! (Look up your own local distances to get an idea.)

    That’s the kind of visibility you get by publishing your book, which is nada.

    So if getting it in the store that’s 50 miles long didn’t help, what did?

    Getting on a bestseller list.

    I sold thousands of copies of Bad Penny on Nook when I was on the Nook’s top 100 list. I rose to #3, in the entire Nook store, then hung out around #50 for about a month. And when that burst of sales that made me #3 fell out of the algorithm (30 days later), I fell off the list. My sales dropped like a stone. Not to nothing. But they were a fraction of what they had been.

    How did I get that #3 slot to begin with? The same way I rose to #30 for a few hours in the Kindle store, then slowly dropped to the 1,200s for a few days. I got it by placing an ad with the king of book advertising services, aka BookBub.

    How did I get onto BookBub? Here’s their requirements and tips. Please note that the reviews of Bad Penny were part of what made the book appealing to BookBub.

    How did I get reviews? By using other ad services to make my book visible and getting mentions on blogs like Larry Correia’s and a few others. And by following recommendations in the book Let’s Get Visible and Your First 1,000 Copies and the suggestions of others who are selling well. And that’s a key thing too–looking to see what folks who are selling well are doing, not those who aren’t.

    Of course, readers also liked the books enough create word of mouth. And I can track some of my sales spikes to specific posts or people. The ultimate goal is to have so much word of mouth that everyone’s talking about you. But until that time, I ain’t going to rely on word of mouth alone.

    Why not?

    Because I’d like to increase my odds of success. I’d like to accelerate them. And thinking that word of mouth alone is going to do that flies in the face of everything I’ve learned about retail. Read what I had to say about books and lemonade and tending your garden for more. Consistent efforts with methods that actually have some track record of success seem to have helped a great deal.

    BTW, Bad Penny is currently in the top 10 of three of Amazon’s thriller lists. I guaran-dang-tee you that being on those lists is a big factor in me selling somewhere around 60 copies a day. I saw that with Nook. Being visible starts a virtuous cycle–more people give you a try; if they like the book, they spread the word, which leads to more sales, which keeps you visible, which prompts more new readers to give you a try. Yeah, you’ve got to be good. But you’ve got to be visible first.

    3. In most cases, books in a specific genre are substitutes

    When readers purchase a book, they are looking for a certain type of experience. And my book’s experience isn’t so singular that readers can’t get something roughly similar from another book.

    I love Lee Child. But Robert Crais provides an experience that’s basically inside the same ballpark. So does Nelson Demille and a whole host of others, including me.

    If Lee Child stops writing or slows down his production to one book every four years, I’m not going to stop reading thrillers. There are plenty of other authors that give me the general adrenaline, surprise, action experience I’m looking for. I’ll be sad, but there are a lot of good authors out there. And I’m sure a few will become my new Lee Child.

    Of course, we aren’t all exactly the same. I provide a noticeably different tale than Lee Child does even though we’re in the same Lone-Ranger-vigilante-justice action genre. And so, if I produce the best tale I can, I will find some readers will come to prefer me to Child because I line up more with their tastes than he does.

    In addition to continue to work on visibility and craft, this means I’ve got to up my production. I’m going to try for 2.5 brand new books in 2015. That’s nothing for some folks. But that’s a good stretch goal for me.

    4. There is no one sure-fire way to success

    Even though visibility and studying your craft helps, nobody I know who is doing well has a replicable step-by-step program that guarantees success. There are some activities that seem to make the odds better, but there is no guarantee.

    For example, from what I wrote above about BookBub, you’d think that’s the brass ring. Nope. I know other authors who have run promos with them and didn’t have near the success Bad Penny did.

    Russell Blake’s advice on this seems to square best with my experience. See the links to his blogs here to see what I’m talking about.

    5. Figuring out how to make a living with this has a lot in common with Lean Startup principles

    The basic concept behind lean startup is that when you’re in a market without a lot of info on what works, the company that wins is the one that learns what works the fastest. And you do that by conducting experiments.

    You experiment to see if you’re offering any value to the intended audience. You experiment to see if you’re promo methods are actually feeding your engine of growth. You experiment to see if your audience really is big enough.

    The experimental approach taught in the lean startup stuff has freed me from a lot of anxiety. Success or failure is not about me personally. It’s about my techniques. It’s about my craft and business skills. It’s about me learning how to learn quicker.

    I’m approaching my thriller and epic fantasy properties as experiments. I’m approaching various visibility methods as experiments. My current state of craft is an experiment. If what I’m doing with my current properties doesn’t work, I can pivot and experiment with something new.

    The question is whether I can learn what works–to find an opportunity to add value and provide that value–before I run out of runway.

    If you’re interested in these ideas, let me recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, which explains the general principles, and Running Lean: Iterate From Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Mayura, which shows you how to start to implement them. These two books have changed how I approach the writing business.

    Bottom Line

    The bottom line is that I love developing stories and sharing them with readers.

    I knew this already, of course. But having the ship up and flying again made it hit home in a big way. I enjoy the process of developing a story. I love the research, the story generation, the surprises that come along the way. And I love the emails I get and the discussions I have with readers who have read my books and enjoyed the heck out of them.

    So that’s the big summary.

    Year two stands before us. Let’s hope John D. Brown and company can learn and produce at higher levels than we ever have before.

    Have a wonderful 2015!

    Edit 1/14/2015: Here’s John Ellsworth, another indie author, with a similar tale. Although I’m jealous of his seven books in a year. I need to get cracking!

  • Indie Thoughts: Authors, We Are Not Amazon

    ByJohn Brown

    Sometimes I think some of us indies get this weird attachment syndrome and start thinking we’re Amazon.

    Joe Konrath recently hosted a blog-conversation with Lee Child about the whole Amazon vs. traditional publishers thing. The Passive Voice had an active discussion about it as well.  Kudos to Lee Child for yet again showing up and injecting a new perspective into the conversation. It can indeed become something of an echo chamber in the main indie blogs, which I love, but which nevertheless do still tend to sometimes echo. Having someone with his experience come engage and share his two cents was helpful.

    One thing his comments reiterated to me is that neither Amazon nor the publishers are in this as the author’s let’s-get-pinky-rings BFF.

    I’m not going to carry an ounce of water for Amazon in their fight with Hachette. I’m not going to carry an ounce for the trad publishers either.

    I think it’s helpful for all of us to try to understand the truth about the business, and spread that to other authors, but that’s very different from this knee-jerk Defender of Amazon thing that goes on, which seems so very much like Republicans and Democrats turning a blind eye to their own candidates and fixating a hyper-critical one the others.

    Case in point: here’s a link to a description of Amazon’s Gazelle Project.

    Why do indie authors care? Because we’re Amazon vendors as well.

    Look, I love what Amazon has enabled me to do. I love that Nook and Apple are helping enable it as well. But was this Gazelle Project a good thing? A bad thing? If we stand by and cheer Amazon in such tactics, are we essentially standing by and cheering as Germany takes Austria, France, and Poland? Or are we like England cheering the USA coming in with their troops and bombers?

    I’m NOT a traditional publisher. And I’m NOT Amazon, or any other retailer. Even when I contract with them. None of us are. I sometimes wonder if some of us have gotten a bit confused about this.

    Konrath says don’t worry about the tiger (Amazon) when a wolf (traditional publishers) is gnawing on your leg. But if you’re an indie writer, you have no wolf gnawing on your leg. That’s someone else’s problem. But we are indeed in bed with the tiger.

    Why haven’t we seen more posts about the Gazelle Project on the big indie blogs? Lee Child, darling of the traditional publishers, has to point me in its direction? Why haven’t we been more curious about this tiger’s behavior?

    Let’s make hay while the sun shines. The tiger seems to be fairly decent right now. He’s not perfect. For example, eBay strangely enough only charges 15% to sell via their site while Amazon charges 30%. But let’s not forget that as decent as he is, he’s still a tiger. And he’s probably not like those poor guys being made to do tricks by Ringling Brothers.

    Ringling_brothers_over_the_top_tiger

  • Indie Thoughts: How much does it cost to publish a book independently?

    ByJohn Brown

    Is The Guardian right?

    Does it really cost $6,000 to publish a book independently?

    Is that the price to become Hemmingway these days?

    Lots of commenters at The Passive Voice said the numbers were rubbish. Far too high. They said this was yet another thinly-veiled bit of  flimflam The Guardian cooked up to depress indies and send aspiring authors into the arms of the zombie traditionalists.

    I actually thought the piece was good.

    Why?

    Because I like numbers. I did get a Master’s degree in accounting, after all.

    But is it just that numbers are sexy?

    It’s true the shape of the number 3 can be glorious. 9 is a stunner as well. But the slopes and curves of these digits is not why I like them. Numbers, even if they’re bad numbers, allow you to start thinking about costs. They allow you to question whether they could be reduced. Or whether you’re getting any bang for your buck in a certain category. Heck, numbers allow you to discover whether you’re allocating way too much in one area and far too little in another.

    I thought The Guardian did a great job breaking the costs out into categories and starting an examination. The question is: are the categories and amounts political fictions or real?

    Comparing My Numbers

    One way numbers do all the things I mentioned above is by letting you do comparisons. So I figured I’d compare The Guardian’s numbers with a set of my own. I’ve published four books independently. How do my costs stack up?

    Here are the costs for the latest.

    Cover: $500

    • $500 for illustration
    • $0 for cover design (I have a friend who is so incredibly generous with his time)
    • Cover for some genres can cost less. Some folks do it themselves. Most of those do-it-yourself covers look awful.
    • The zombie traditionalists can sometimes spend a few thousand. And when they do it right, they get some amazing, AMAZING, work.
    • Verdict: The Guardian’s number seems reasonable, but I’m thinking the range is a few hundred up to a few thousand for something that doesn’t give the average reader worms.

    Editing: $0

    • My wife, former technical writer, current language arts teacher, is my editor. There are some other folks I’ve tapped as well.
    • If I didn’t have her, I’d need someone. My experience is that if you yourself are not an editor, and you try to do this, you’re going to end up with a poorly edited book. Even with her experience, we’re still finding it hard, and are working to get the process down. We might outsource this in the future.
    • I’ve gotten reasonable quotes, and they’re all around $600-900. And that’s just for a copy edit. You want other kind of editing, you’re going to pay more.
    • Verdict: The Guardian’s number is high, but not if you tap into a bunch of pros for multiple edits.

    Formatting for POD and ebook: $120

    • I do the interiors myself, so the labor is free. If I had to pay, it could run anywhere from $100-$300 or more.
    • I pay a subscription fee for InDesign. If I release two books a year, it comes out to roughly $120/book.
    • I spent $300 taking a class on basic interior design principles. But that was just the beginning. I must have spent 50-70 hours, maybe more, last October and November, banging my head against the wall as I learned this. Luckily, all that thrashing about didn’t result in any medical bills. I’ve had to spend maybe 10-20 more since then learning advanced techniques and keeping the basics fresh.
    • Verdict: The Guardian didn’t even include this.

    ISBN: $0

    • I owe my friend; without him, this would definitely be a cost. I’m such a free loader.
    • Verdict: The Guardian’s number is good.

    Copyright Registration: $55

    • $20 bucks to mail 2 copies to the Copyright Registration Office
    • $35 processing fee
    • Yes, you do want to do this. For detail on why, see The Copyright Handbook by Stephen Fishman.
    • Verdict: Another miss

    Print-on-demand fees: $0

    • I go with CreateSpace instead of Lightning Source
    • Verdict: Another miss

    Notice what’s NOT up there that was in The Guardian article: reviews and review copies.

    Why don’t I include them?

    First, I would never pay for a Kirkus review. I wouldn’t because it appears such reviews mean little to readers. They don’t seem to generate much notice or desire to sample. Here’s what readers report matter to them. Such pre-publication reviews DO matter to store and library book buyers. But, as an indie, I’m not focusing on those channels.  Those channels are in the hands of the zombie traditionalists.

    What about review copies?

    You don’t need them to publish. All this review business is marketing. And you don’t need marketing to publish.

    So what are my totals? I’ve included The Guardian numbers so you can see the differences.

    Category My Costs Guardian Estimates
    Cover $500 $750
    Editing and proofing $0 $4,000
    Ebook and POD Formatting $100 ?
    ISBN $0 $125
    Copyright Registration $55 ?
    POD setup fees $0 ?
    Reviews – $825
    Review Copies – $300
    TOTAL $655 $6,000

    Whoa! The Guardian estimated a cost that’s ten times what it costs me. But I don’t think that’s a sign of some plot. If I’d paid an editor and cover designer and formatter and didn’t mooch my ISBNs, that could have added as much as $1,000-$2,000 to my total. I have friends who have paid more.

    Furthermore, that’s just for the ebook and hard copy. Depending on if you publish an audio edition and how you do it, you could spend another $2,000-$3,000.

    What does this tell you? It tells me that the reporter made a good start, but needed to do a bit more digging. It also tells me there’s a huge variability in the costs depending on the skills you and your friends possess. It also shows that this is a business. I doesn’t cost a gazillion dollars to publish. It’s not like the $200,000-500,000 you need to start some food franchises, but you’d better be prepared to fork over some cash and/or a lot of hard work.

    In fact, when you consider that last point of sweat equity, the $655 is completely misleading because it does not capture the hours I spent, at least 20-60, doing my part of the cover, editing, and formatting. Nor the time spent by my wife or friends. There’s a huge opportunity cost there.

    What’s the value of what I could have done with that time?

    It’s for dang sure not reflected in the $655.

    Marketing

    I didn’t include marketing in those costs above because marketing is its own beast. You can publish and do zero marketing. You can publish and do gobs. And just as with the publishing costs, marketing costs will vary based on what you can do in-house and what your situation is. It costs JK Rowling nothing to get covered in  every news outlet in the land. She sneezes, and we get a report about her. You and I are probably going to have to work harder to get noticed.

    There are all sorts of marketing costs. Whatever those costs, marketing has a job to do. It’s got to pay for itself. It’s got to help pay for the cost of publishing. And it’s got to help me meet my goal of winning new readers and compensating me for my time.

    There are lots of cost categories depending on what you decide to do:

    • Hard copies you sell at events
    • Travel and lodging required to attend events
    • Hard copies and postage for reviewers
    • Time writing blog posts
    • Promotions with folks like BookBub and BookSends
    • Giveaways
    • Etc.

    The bottom line is that I think it’s good to separate these costs from publishing so you can measure their effectiveness against sales. Marketing is about revenue generation. These costs really have nothing to do with producing a book.

    Books and Lemonade

    I’m going to go off an a tangent here for a second. Some folks suggest that indie authors shouldn’t do much marketing. Especially if they only have one or two books out.

    I find no evidence to support the idea that just writing the next book is all you need to do for readers to hear about you and beat a path to your door. It’s true you’ve got to write the next book. You must get new product out the door. Hey, I learned that when book 2 from the publisher fell into a black hole. But that doesn’t mean marketing and promotion are inappropriate,  wrong-headed, or a waste of time or money.

    Let me ask you a question.

    Let’s say Juanito is a no-name in the lemonade business. He’s just starting from scratch with dreams of becoming a big time lemonader. Who thinks it’s a good idea for him to open a lemonade stand in his back yard? Or better yet, in a closet in his basement? And when folks suggest that the stand might get more business if he lets the neighbors know about it or puts the stand in a place with a lot of foot traffic, who says, no, that’s a waste of time and money–the key to selling more lemonade is whipping more batches up in the kitchen?

    In retail, you must get folks to notice your product and then persuade them to try it. Now, maybe you’ve got something going that’s generating all the notice and sampling you can handle.  Maybe you lucked out.

    What percentage of indies are in that situation? Raise your hands, please.

    What? We’re not all inundated with hordes of readers? We’re not  all swimming in gold? Imagine that.

    The fact is that it’s tough to get notice. It’s tough to get people to try. But there are some things we can do to increase our odds. Selling books is a retail business. Retail lives and dies by visibility. Yeah, you need word of mouth. But you need to be noticed and sampled in large enough amounts to keep that word of mouth going.

    What would you rather have? 100,000 people all over the country in many social networks (I’m not talking about Facebook) noticing and sampling and talking about your product, or would you rather have five?

    In the brick and mortar world, there are lots of ways to get visibility without doing much TV or internet advertising. Ways to get notice include things as simple as signage and a store’s location. For example, you get a ton of eyeballs just situating your restaurant in the parking lot of a big destination shopping mall. You get eyeballs putting a sign on top of a 100 foot pole next to the freeway exit saying “Gas & Eats.” Online retailers get noticed in other ways.

    Without blathering on about that (this was a post on publishing costs), let me just say that until customers begin to line up and start throwing hundred dollar bills at me, it appears I’m going to have to do what every other retail business has done for hundreds of years–get my lemonade stand out of the basement and into the park with lots of thirsty kids and moms.

    EDIT 8/30/2014

    While a number of folks are assuming the article was written as part of some vast conspiracy to undermine indie authors, David Gaughran posted some criticism in the article’s comment section that actually make sense.

    DavidGaughran

    The reason I’m so annoyed by the inaccuracies in this article is that this kind of misinformation is creates an information gap which allows shady operators to flourish.

    Vanity press operators thrive because inexperienced authors think that self-publishing is either difficult or expensive. It’s neither of those things, and articles like this only serve to reinforce this false notion. That’s why I think this piece is irresponsible as well as inaccurate.

    Companies like Author Solutions specifically target the most inexperience authors, the ones who know least about self-publishing and the industry in general, the ones who have fallen under the spell of various myths (like that self-publishing costs $6,000).

    As a commenter said below, saying self-publishing costs $6,000 is like saying houses cost $10m. You can spend that much, but you don’t need to.

    It costs me less than a third of that to publish a book, and I use a Big 5 cover designer as well as an editor with over ten years experience working for traditional publishers. Anyone can look at my books and immediately see that they are produced to professional standards.

    You don’t even have to spend as much as I do to get a quality product. If authors are on a tighter budget, they can purchase a pre-made cover design. There are some wonderful pre-mades out there for as little as $40. You will have to invest a fair bit of time combing through the sites to find something suitable, but if you are on a shoestring budget it’s an option.

    Same goes for content editing/developmental editing. All manuscripts will need a thorough copy edit, but you can get by without a specific content edit with successive round of beta readers. Again, this will require a time investment – writers usually trade beta reads of each other’s work. But if you’re on a tighter budget, it’s another way you can save money.

    This is why this piece is so off. Even going the “deluxe” route shouldn’t cost more than $2,000. And if you don’t have $2,000, there are plenty of options where you can achieve a quality product, spending far less, if you are willing to put in a little time.

    There are ways you can save money in other areas too. It’s a waste of money for an author (especially a new author) to buy a NetGalley membership for themselves. Authors can (and do) form collectives to buy a membership between them – often spending just $20 per person. I got a NetGalley spot for a month, for free, by bartering with another author. (I didn’t think it was quite worth $20, by the way, let alone $400).

    If you need reviews, there are much better and cheaper ways. Submitting to book bloggers costs nothing (we usually send e-book copies or PDFs, rather than hard copies). Doing an e-book giveaway on LibraryThing costs nothing. Giving out electronic ARCs in advance of your release costs nothing. And all of these are much more effective than giving any kind of money to Kirkus, let alone $425.

    But I guess it doesn’t matter how many experienced self-publishers (and editors who work with same) tell you that your figures are off, or that you don’t need ISBNs to self-publish, you are going to stick to your guns.