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!
John,
Thank you for posting about this. I’ve written a response that addresses the issue from what I believe is a different angle, responding to some of the problems that you’ve identified in MacFarlane’s post. I’d like to know what you think: http://www.gregoryashe.com/2014/02/post-binary-gender-and-ethics-of-fiction.html
Best,
Greg
Greg, that was a great response. And I think these two statements you made capture perfectly what I object to.
One of the fundamental principles I follow in my art is that I must have passion for the thing I’m creating. I must care about the characters and situations. I must follow my interests. I CAN’T create unless I do. Not only is there no motive, but the ideas don’t flow! My assumption is that this is the same for most practicing artists.
It seems you too read MacFarlane’s words and came away with the idea that she wants to ignore that. She wants to require artists to create art they don’t care about.
Which means her agenda is actually an attack on the very core of art itself.
What MacFarlane wants is propaganda.
Her crusade for what she thinks is right and good would ultimately suck the life blood from artists and their art. Hers is a world of the new wonder drug that will usher in utopia but turns us all into zombies instead.
Hi John,
Yes, absolutely: propaganda is exactly the right word. One of the major concepts I’ve taken from your blog is zing–the things that make me thrill when I’m writing a story. As an aesthetic principle, that’s the only one that rings true to me. Thanks for your good work and for bringing an important issue into a larger discussion.
On a totally different note, I’m looking forward to reading Curse. I love the cover.
I think that is well put. If you pie-chart and checkmark art according to race and sex you will kill it. Literal pie-charts, percentages and graphs have appeared on SFF blogs and webzines. A constant stream of recommending SFF novels according to the race and gender of the author is constant in MacFarlane’s culture. There are no SFF personages recommending SFF because a white or a man did it. This is a massive straw man reacting against nothing.
John Varley was doing what MacFarlane suggests almost 40 years ago. Why is it anyone’s problem if MacFarlane hasn’t read those or thinks the idea is still cutting edge when it’s been done to the point few even notice it anymore. It’s a question of scholarship, not whether such stories exist. They plainly do and have for a half-century.
The other problem is promoting naked identity advocacy in the same breath one forbids others to do it as a form of exclusion if not bigotry. The idea is that the straight white male is awash in wanting to see himself in media precisely because they are straight, white, and male. The problem there is that there is no sign this is actually true. As one example, the 2/3 black NFL is the No.1 sport in America, not hockey or NASCAR. There is no example of that within MacFarlane’s world, which is not diverse even while it cries for diversity. A natural demographic majority is being confused with identity supremacy, as if the reason Chinese films are Chinese or Arab films Arab is because they constitute some informal analogue to the KKK rather than an accidental and natural cultural expression. In other words MacFarlane has no Mammoth Books of White Men anthologies to push back against. An accidental demo of such an anthology is not the same as purposefully making one. A demo is not identity supremacy.
SFF is white and straight for the same reasons the NBA is 80% black and straight. There is no conspiracy. People like Jim Hines cannot accept the fact that SFF is simply an accidental cultural expression in terms of its demo that may or may not change over time. Looking at too white group photos of SFF convention chairs and hinting “racism” is as dumb as looking at too black group photos in a boxing gym and doing the same.
If you want diversity in novels, write it, but don’t accuse me of bigotry or mandate change, because there will be push back.
James,
I think you raise an interesting point. Is the SFF reading community mostly white and straight? Is the SFF author community mostly white and straight? And what are the interests of those majorities?
I ask the last question because white and straight authors might be interested in writing about folks outside the groups they identify with. They might not. They might be more interested in artificial intelligence. Who knows?
Do we have any actual data that isn’t anecdotal?
I know what I see at the conventions I go to, but I’m going to conventions in Utah. Not a statistically valid sample of total readership across the US (grin). And it would be interesting to see how all the major interests (plots, character types, settings, etc.) compare against each other, not just those focused on sexuality or ethnicity. It might be that SFF writers just don’t care about that topic. It might be that many do, but readers don’t.
Ultimately, if there’s a huge number of authors that are interested in certain types of characters and the dynamics they bring to a cast, then I don’t think anyone is holding them back from writing about those folks. Nor should anyone. Same with readership: if there are readers out there who find those dynamics interesting, then those stories will have demand and find success in the marketplace.
But as you point out, just because an author or reader finds other stuff more interesting that doesn’t mean those folks are by default bad actors. Or unwittingly holding others down.
If you write a great story, and the public loves it, nobody is going to hold you down. Not in today’s world.
I would assume that just as the NFL players have a different demographic from its viewers, so too the SFF authors have a demographic different from that of SFF readers. Wouldn’t it be a great study to see this kind of information?
BTW, the Writing Excuses folks recently announced that they felt their class wasn’t welcoming enough to folks of color.
http://www.writingexcuses.com/2014/01/17/annoucing-the-writing-excusescarl-brandon-scholarship/
Here was the issue they saw and their diagnosis.
I love all of the Writing Excuses folks. I think they’re great. But I wonder about their diagnosis. Who has data on the demographics of the current pool of new USA speculative fiction authors? Are they sure it’s not accurate? And what’s the demographics on the Writing Excuses podcast? This diagnosis seemed odd to me.
I do think it’s great that they want to reach out and attract authors who represent demographics that are different from the SFF majority. We’re always looking for the same but different. And folks with different backgrounds are going to bring new twists on the stories in the genres we love.
But why not just do that? Why not reach out and invite without any mention of quotas? And do these folks really need a scholarship? Or would it be more effective to use the money to broaden the podcast audience to communities they are interested in and let the interest flow naturally?
Their diagnosis doesn’t seem to be backed up by any real data. Then you have Asian folks in the comments wondering why they aren’t included. Folks from Eastern Block countries wondering the same. How inviting is that?
I think their introspection and desires are laudable. I just think that inviting broadly, working to build a broad customer base, and then judging all on their merits is a better way to go.
To me that Writing Excuses program is depraved. As for the SF community, I can vouch for the fact they are human – tell me a good story and I don’t care who’s in it. Larry Niven and John Varley commonly went outside the norm decades ago now. I accepted and even expected it because it was part and parcel of what SF does. As in music, there is no added attraction knowing the artist is gay, black or female. The attraction is artistry. Start pie-charting that and you may as well stick a fork in it. I am completely unaware of the gender and race breakdown of the 1500 song on my iPod. I know it is varied, but that was accidental. I go for the songs. In literature I go where the writing is. People like Jim Hines and Mary Robinette Kowal aren’t doing the SFF community any favors – far from it.
That community jokes about women destroying SF. Women can’t do that, and they can write SF as good as men. To me it’s not even an issue. But in the current climate, when they sarcastically use the world “destroy” on their all-female kickstarters, they’re not thinking where this all leads, so “destroy” is actually a perfect word. I’ve seen enough recommendations by race and gender to know they’ll do the same thing with awards, and if they become editors and publishers, there too. That is “destroy.”
This whole identity fracas needs to be booted out of SF and the ring leaders too. By “booted” I mean ignored, as in their fiction. I don’t care about a person’s politics but this is all just hate speech in the end and I won’t support it. When you think Harry, Bella and Katniss have taken millions of readers from core SFF, you’d think that core would get the message that readers don’t like to called racist, privileged, homophobes. By Hines’ and Kowal’s reckoning, the NHL must be KKK. So what’s the NBA: a black KKK? This is all so terribly stupid. So SFF’s white – so what? Samba is black, shadow puppetry Malay and Arab music is shockingly Arab. So what? Send Hines to the NBA to check it out. Something must be wrong.
I never knew that John Barnes was black. I didn’t care. I didn’t care that Octavia Butler was black. I don’t know what sexual orientation Jim Butcher is and don’t care.
At the same time, when you say, “there is no added attraction knowing the artist is gay, black or female,” I wonder if that’s the case for gays, blacks, or females. I don’t know if you belong to any of those groups. But I wonder.
I wonder because I know that I sometimes am more interested when someone is part of a group I strongly identify with. I think this is just normal. Not something to try to change. I don’t think you can change it. We’re built to be group’ish. So when Mitt Romney ran for president, I think my interest was piqued a bit more because he was a Mormon. I didn’t want to vote for him because of that–I’m opposed to Harry Reid and didn’t like John Huntsman or Orrin Hatch as candidates. But there was extra interest. He was skilled and one of “my people.” I don’t know if I’m explaining it clearly. And his group affiliation certainly didn’t override everything else. But it did add something.
I’m thinking about genres. I think there are some connotations, resonances, or expectations in a name. And some fit with a genre and some are a bit off. If “Veronica Michaels” or “Jenny Flowers” is writing military thrillers for men, it might “sound” wrong. If she’s awesome, it becomes an asset. But I think an initial reaction might be “too girlie.” If you have “Brad Thor” writing sweet romances, I think the resonance of that masculine name might jar with the expectations of that genre.
So I agree with what you have to say about this “pie chart” stuff. I think the NFL example is a good one.
At the same time, I do see these group effects and name expectations/connotations working on me.
I think there’s a big difference between “H.P. Lovebunny” and Con-Or-Bust, The Carl Brandon Society and Writing Excuses rewarding people because they’re not white. What I mostly resent is the idea this must be done because it is a shared racial failure on the part of whites, as if too many whites is always suspect but too many gay, Latino or black groups never is. That’s just a weird attitude to me, and a double standard even a child should see.
Just because some people want to see themselves reflected in media doesn’t mean it is a universal experience. Just because a group is 57.587% this or that doesn’t lessen its authenticity nor does it need to have a quota. Like MacFarlane, if someone wants to see themselves, write it. Why the calls for diversity? Make a movie and populate it with whomever you choose. No one is stopping you.
Diversity is one thing, using the topic as an attack platform is another. When the SFF authors most talking about diversity are saying things on Twitter like “CAN SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE WHITE PEOPLE?!!” and “Cis peeeoooople,” those are defamatory slurs, and they are coming from the heart of the SFF community, and their colleagues are not calling them out.
I think the new politically correct SFF community has this one exactly backwards. They are basically accusing a decades old community that embraces the weird and eccentric as having an aversion to the weird and eccentric. If I wanted to see people like myself I sure as heck wouldn’t like Niven’s Beowulf Schaeffer, Poul Anderson’s Nicholas Van Rijn, Bradbury’s Uncle Einar, Spielberg’s E.T, or in other words, a pantheon of weird cultures, eccentrics and iconoclasts.
To me it’s just laughably stupid to suggest such people are startled by something as prosaic as a black or gay person. SFF fans are the last people on Earth to be xenophobes. In fact SFF almost by definition embraces diversity if not outright strangeness. The fact that whole hard genre was started in male-oriented adventure stories a hundred years ago in a country 90% white has no more meaning to me than Bollywood being majority Hindu. No one did it on purpose and neither needs to be un-did on purpose. No cultural hobby in the world does. Either call to diversify Samba, the NBA, Bollywood, hip-hop, Arab literature, middle-weight boxing, the entire thing world-wide or shut up about it.
A lot of good points.
I’m seeing it this way. It’s like food. You have a town, and all they have are hamburger joints. They like hamburgers. They’re happy with hamburgers. They eat a lot of different types of hamburgers. They’ve been eating hamburgers for decades. One day someone says, you know what, I love Thai food. I want more Thai food. I’m not so interested in hamburgers all the time anymore.
Okay, so what’s the next step?
The pie chart approach says that someone needs to regulate all the burger joints and mandate they need to start offering Thai items.
What? Why? They’re in the business of burgers.
The pie chart approach also leads some to say that if the burger people don’t include Thai items, they must be bad in some way.
What? They’re selling burgers to people who like burgers. So what? If the burger joints want to add different items to their menus, okay. But mandating they cook food they aren’t interested in cooking?
The other approach is to win customers.
Open your Thai restaurant (or invite someone in to open one), and get people to try it. If they like it, they’ll buy it. The town may go crazy for it, and a majority of people start eating Thai. Or maybe the majority continues to eat burgers, but some love some Thai now and then.
This second approach is focused on building a customer base, on try it, you’ll like it. On winning customers.
If you want, you invest in inviting great Thai restaurateurs to open shop. You invest in helping people discover them. Or you invest in training folks to become great Thai restaurateurs.
This is all independent of the burger joints.
I suspect some folks would say, yeah, well, what if there’s a planning & zoning committee in the town, and they are forever putting the kibosh on non-burger restaurants? Or telling them they can sell their stuff, but only in the warehouse out by the dump?
That’s a problem. And that’s happened in the past.
But I can’t see that happening now. I don’t see it at the major publishing houses. It’s certainly not happening in the indie world. Amazon doesn’t care about anything except that your book is formatted correctly. Wait, correction. It does filter some content. But that doesn’t prevent you from going out into cyberspace and putting up your own store to sell those types of stories.
So write something awesome. Get people to try it. Build a customer base. That’s it. There’s nobody who is stopping anyone from doing that. You might find a lot of people like your stuff; you might find only a few do. But you can’t mandate that people like your stuff.
If your goal is to get hard-core burger people to like Thai, then you might not start with a Thai restaurant. You might start, a la Sabido, with burgers, with a bit of something Thai on the side (the C story). Satay maybe.
Am I missing something?
BTW, what the heck is “H.P. Lovebunny”?
I was joking about a kind of a bait and switch you brought up with Jenny Flowers. Who knows what H.P. Lovebunny would get ya. Maybe The Spa of Ulthar.
H.P. Lovebunny. I could see that actually being a great name for a military thriller writer. It’s so against type.
“What are you reading?”
“The latest Lovebunny.”
lol
They would eat it up. I know they would.
We could make up a new sub-genre called “Special Thrill Fiction.” Let author H.P. Lovebunny be your guide to a new world of SF with military hijinx, spies, naked assassin cults and banging planets into one another by fitting them with equatorial engines. Our hero is from a civilization which is nothing more than one giant military bordello for colonizing Aardvark people from the Crab Nebula.