Amazon

Reality Check: Salon’s "My Amazon bestseller made me nothing"

One prominent story making the rounds right now is how an author with an Amazon bestseller only made $12,000 off it. In fact, on Salon, the article’s headline is “My Amazon bestseller made me no money.” The takeaway seems to be that there’s no money in writing. As the author Patrick Wensink writes, “There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession.”

The actual details are a bit scant, but apparently the novel hit #6 on Amazon, selling about 4000 copies. I’m not sure what timespan that’s over–he says it was high on the bestseller list for a week, but it’s possible that 4000 figure is for sales across that month (July 2012), or maybe even all last year. Knowing the actual timespan would help break things down, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot; whatever the case, the bulk of those sales came over that bestselling week.

So let’s contextualize things.

First off, for a book to reach #6 in the Kindle store, it’s got to sell something like 4000 copies in a day. So I assume he’s talking about paperback sales. With this information, let’s rephrase what happened.

He made $12,000. In one week. With one book. Just on Amazon. Just for sales of his paperback.

Now, it’s possible this was for combined print and Kindle sales–details aren’t provided–but if his print version was what hit #6 on the bestseller list, his Kindle sales can’t have been much. May not make intuitive sense, but sales of one version do not guarantee sales of all versions. For instance, two of my books have so far sold a combined 2000 Kindle copies on Amazon this month. Their Amazon print sales? 0. So I don’t know exactly how many of his 4000 sales were for the print version–could be 3000, could be 3900–but anyway, it doesn’t much matter.

Because, again, he made $12,000 in one week for one book on one store on sales that were mostly of one format.

Put another way, if this book had maintained that rank for a year, its Amazon-only, mostly-print royalties to the author would be over $600,000.

In fairness, it’s really, really hard for any book to cling to the #6 rank for an entire year. That’s Harry Potter, Hunger Games, 50 Shades territory. Only one book in thousands has that kind of staying power. But this is just another way to think about what that $12,000 means.

For more context, more than 50% of Amazon’s book sales are for Kindle. If the book had been able to reach as many Kindle readers as paperback readers, its week of sales would have meant more like $20-24,000 in royalties. I’m not sure what percentage of print sales Amazon commands, but the consensus is it’s got about 60% of the ebook market. If you want to give Amazon the extremely generous figure of 50% of total book sales, and you look at what this book would have earned if it had sold equally well in all other outlets, those royalties would be in the $40,000 – 50,000 range.

A decent year’s salary, for a week of sales, on a single book.

Again, this is just a thought experiment. And a manipulative one. The reality is that only those huge bestsellers tend to do well in every market and format. I think most books that sell okay look much more like Wensink’s book–sales are limited mostly to one market and format. Just because the potential’s there doesn’t mean you can reach it.

But the apparent takeaway of this Salon article is that writing is such a poor way to make a living that even writing a bestseller is no guarantee of a year’s living wage, let alone a career. I don’t disagree that it’s very difficult to make a living at this. The Taleist survey of self-publishing–which was almost certainly skewed in favor of successes–showed that 50% of indie authors made less than $500 a year. Meanwhile, the Salon article mentions an advance for a traditionally-published book being just $5000, which is pretty common these days. Not exactly enough to live on.

But I think there are some bigger takeaways here: that unless you’re Harper Lee, you can’t make a career out of a single book. That seems to be a persistent myth among writers. One that sets a lot of us up for disappointment. One that leads us to believe the numbers never work out no matter how many books we write. I think that myth needs to die.

I also think this says something about what it means to be a “bestseller”–specifically, not much. “#6 on Amazon” sounds amazing, but let’s reframe things again. To sell 4000 copies a year on the Kindle side (which I’m much more familiar with than print), you don’t need to come anywhere near #6. All you need to do is maintain a steady rank of #10,000.

Not nearly as easy as it may sound, especially with a single book, but “#10,000” sounds pathetic compared to “A top ten Amazon bestseller.” Few books–six, as it turns out–are #6 or better at any given moment. Impossible odds. Making #10,000, though? That sounds like it could be achievable.

And that, I think, is the real takeaway here. One way to frame Wensink’s story is “Wow, he was a bestseller on the biggest bookstore in the world–and he didn’t even make minimum wage.”

I hear it, and I think, “Wow, this guy made twelve thousand dollars in a single week with a single book. I’ll probably never be able to put up numbers like that–but to make a career, I don’t have to.”

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Self-Publishing Podcast #45: The Death of Free Books?

The changes in Amazon’s affiliate program had many of us worried that it would become much harder for authors to run successful free book promotions. On the day the changes went into effect, I joined the Self-Publishing Podcast to discuss these changes and what they might mean.

A week later, it appears that the reports of the death of free books have been greatly exaggerated, with most major free sites deciding to take a hit to their own income rather than to shake up their core model. Even so, I think it’s a useful conversation exploring how to use free, how to move beyond free, and the dangers of relying on tactics that are so situational. Even if the big sites don’t make any more major changes–and it’s still very early in the game–it’s good to be reminded how reliant we are on them for successful free promotions.

And as usual, I had a blast. Hope you enjoy.

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A Quick Way to Calculate Amazon Sales from Rank

Want to know how many sales a given Amazon Kindle rank represents? Here’s a quick and dirty formula:

100,000/rank # = sales per day

In other words, if a book’s rank is #100, then 100,000/100 = 1000 sales/day. If a book’s rank is #1000, then 100,000/1000 = 100 sales/day. At #100,000, then 100,000/100,000 = 1/day.

The formula breaks down at the extremes. It probably overestimates the sales of the top 100 books by a little, and the #1 book in a given day probably sells much more like 10,000/day than 100K, although as ever, at the top, it varies tremendously. And at #1,000,000, that’s not a book that sells 1 copy/10 days. We’re talking about a book that might not have sold more than 1 copy ever, or at least within the last 6 months.

Overall, though, it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. It’s probably a little conservative–tack on 10-20%, and you’re probably closer to the truth for most ranks–and it also depends on factors like velocity of sales in the last 0-48 hours, so books that have recently been boosted by a sale may be +/- 50% of the sales numbers or more. Also, a book that has hung out at a certain rank for a while needs fewer sales to maintain that ranking long-term.

Treat it as a guideline, though, and it’s pretty close to the truth. Does that mean you could extrapolate it to estimate how many ebooks Amazon sells per day? Yes. You totally could.

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Amazon is About to Throttle Free Books

Very early this morning, Amazon posted the following changes to their Affiliate program, effective March 1st:

“In addition, notwithstanding the advertising fee rates described on this page or anything to the contrary contained in this Operating Agreement, if we determine you are primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks (i.e., eBooks for which the customer purchase price is $0.00), YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:

(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and

(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.”

Here’s my reading of this: if you’re a bargain ebook site that gets at least 20,000 free book downloads a month, and at least 20% of your total orders aren’t paid books, then you don’t earn any affiliate money that month. If you think I’m misinterpreting, please chime in.

So. Major sites like Pixel of Ink earn scads and scads of money off their affiliate sales, which include any Amazon purchases made by a customer who was driven to the site by clicking on one of POI’s free book listings. I don’t know how many freebie orders POI generates, but I’m pretty positive they’re good for well more than 20K a day.

In other words, they’re going to be way, way past the cap.

Here’s the question: what percentage of their current orders are of paid books vs. free books? If they’re past the 80% mark, how much are they going to have to change their listings–by decreasing free mentions, increasing paid mentions, or both–to not forfeit their affiliate earnings?

Turns out I can drop some very rough math on this. I think that, generally speaking, a free book listing will get about 15 times as many orders as a paid book listing. In other words, that’s a 15:1 ratio. To come in under the new requirements, sites need to hit a 4:1 ratio. That means the bargain book sites will have to post approximately four times as many paid books as free ones.

Right now, nobody’s all that close to those numbers.

POI’s closest; they already run around a 2:1 ratio of paid:free. ENT runs about 1:1. So does BookBub. FKBT runs several times more free books than paid. My figures are extremely back-of-the-envelope here, but you can see that major change is on the way. Either the major sites are going to have to offer a lot more paid books (although I doubt that tripling their paid listings would triple their paid orders), or offer a lot fewer free books. It could shake out that they list 50-80% fewer free books every day than they do now.

Now, it’s possible things aren’t as grim as that. These sites are so big that Amazon may have reached special arrangements with them to allow them to run more freebies–POI and ENT were already contacted about this general issue a few months back. Or my 15:1 ratio could be off. It’s extrapolated from ad results, but it’s not like I have direct access to these sites’ affiliate numbers. But it could be closer to status quo than I think.

That said, it’s pretty clear that things will change. The question is how much. And there are two obvious outcomes of these changes.

First, if you’re an author, it’s going to be tougher to get your free book mentioned on the major sites. Probably the medium-sized sites, too.

Second, the bargain sites may open to more for advertising of discounted titles, giving authors more venues to promote $0.99 sales and such. If demand from authors for freebie mentions is high enough, and supply is limited enough, the sites might start charging to list free books. And if the results are there, we’ll totally pay them for that, too.

This will be another blow to Select, making the program more winner-takes-all than ever. Why would they harm the program? Because they care infinitely more about the overall ebook market than they do about Select. EDIT: And it might not even be about the ebook market. This could be nothing more than an attempt to correct a problem with the affiliate program, which may feel it’s overpaying for the results its ebook affiliates are providing Amazon.

Whatever the case, it may be extremely chaotic over the next few weeks and months. As the bargain sites attempt to adjust to the new guidelines, you can guarantee they’re going to err on the side of caution, meaning very few free books will be listed each day. They might loosen up as they learn to work with the new system, but who knows how long it could take.

This is why I remain ambivalent about Select in general. Success depends heavily on these bargain book sites. If they change their rules, or Amazon changes the rules for them, it can leave authors caught on the carpet.

As they say, though, from crisis comes opportunity. If there are fewer site-launched freebies dominating the charts each day, that may leave more room for more “organic” free runs for books to claw their way up the ranks on their own (or aided by a bevy of small sites instead). Especially in the transition period, the books that do very well on free runs could do even better than ever, because there’s less competition vying for clicks.

That’s about as far as I can squint into the future. I fear that shit is about to get real. If you’ve got any questions, thoughts, or predictions, fire away.

EDIT, 2/28: Some numbers have started to emerge from affiliates who links to ebooks. The performance of free books vs. paid books varies heavily depending on how the site owner built their readership, but the order numbers have looked.. challenging. The best ratio I’ve seen was 91% free books, 9% paid. Others have been as high as 98.5% free. Michael Gallagher, owner of FKBT, estimates his links to free books get 148 times as many clicks as his links to paid books.

It sounds like virtually all of the freebie sites are going to have to make some changes: some minor, some drastic. March should be interesting.

I don’t like mixing advertising with content, but I gotta eat. If you like post-apocalyptic fiction, my new release Knifepoint is $2.99 on Amazon and B&N.

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The New Release: An Anatomy of the First 100 Sales

This morning, I broke 100 sales on my new book Knifepoint (don’t go hitting me up for riches yet, they’re all at $0.99). Since it’s in several stores, including a bevy of international ones, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at where those sales came from and see what if anything pops up.

Here’s how those first 100 sales break down:

83 – Amazon
4 – Amazon UK
1 – Amazon DE
10 – B&N
2 – Kobo (1 Canada, 1 Portugal)
0 – iBookstore

That’s 0 at the iBookstore because it was under review until just a few minutes ago, which is kind of a funny commentary on Apple in general–high standards that sometimes get in the way of their ability to sell shit. (But I’ll give them this, they have incredible customer support. After 36 hours of my book being under review, I inquired about its status. They got it live less than an hour later.) The rest of it follows common perceptions about the various storefronts: Amazon is the biggest by far; B&N is several times smaller than Amazon, but a few times larger than Kobo or the iBookstore; Kobo cleans up in Canada but also has a smattering of sales across the rest of the entire world.

100 sales is a pretty small sample size, but oddly enough, this lines up very closely with my sales for the last four months, which break down about like this:

85% – Amazon (all domains)
9% – B&N
4.5% – Kobo
1% – iBookstore, Smashwords, print

Those are just my numbers, of course. In reality, I think the iBookstore’s share of the ebook market is pretty similar in size to Kobo’s–I just haven’t been able to get anything going there. Meanwhile, Amazon’s market share these days is supposed to be 60% or less, but 85% of my sales come from it. While I’m no longer interested in being exclusive to Amazon through their Select program, without Amazon, I wouldn’t be making a living at this. That right there is why so many of us indies are Amazon-boosters.

Here’s the big question I’d ask myself, if I were a crazy person who talks to himself: Could I make up for the 15% of my non-Amazon sales by returning to the exclusivity of Select? I suspect I could right now, but I couldn’t begin to project how things would look a year from now. There’s an advantage to being in a store early on. For instance, I think the iBookstore’s ranks are getting harder and harder to crack, whereas 12-18 months ago, it wasn’t too tough to get a foothold. The same thing could wind up true for Kobo, which doesn’t have awesome discoverability, yet is growing by the day. Sneak up their ranks early, and it could give you a lasting advantage.

That said, if my non-Amazon sales were 10% of my total, I might be reconsidering Select. And if they were 5%, I would almost certainly hop back into the program. It’s hard to get going in the other stores, but Select is the easy-button. That’s why so many indies come off like they’re pro-Select. Well, few of them are fans of Select qua Select. They’re fans of things that let them sell books.

7% of those first 100 sales are non-US, by the way. I’ve been doing pretty well in in non-US markets lately, with nearly a quarter of my Amazon sales for February coming from the UK. It’s tough to get going there, too, but if you can, it’s like having access to a whole new market on par with one of the major non-Amazon stores.

…and I guess that’s it. Was it actually interesting to look at those first 100 sales? I don’t know, but it was certainly easier than writing that damned “how to interpret Select giveaway numbers” post I’ve been putting off.

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Using KDP Select to Crowdsource Your Novel’s Appeal, Part 1: The Basics

In my last post, I talked about how last year’s changes to Amazon’s algorithms were probably intended to put a stronger filter on free books. The idea was to use the wisdom of crowds to ensure that only the Select books with the most sales potential wound up in front of paying customers once the books’ free runs concluded.

This is why authors like Joe Konrath hardly notice a difference. Konrath writes entertaining stuff in popular genres with quality covers (and his name recognition, reviews, etc. probably don’t hurt, either). He’s able to do as well as ever. While it’s good that stories like that are being shared–I self-publish because of Konrath, so without posts like his, this post would never exist–I tend to focus on those of us who are still quite a ways from being Konraths ourselves.

For many of us, then, there is a big difference in Select. Specifically, it’s a lot worse. But even if your books don’t seem to be able to knock it out of the park like Konrath and others, Select can still be useful. Not just to sell books. But to learn how to make your books better.

I touched on this last time, but when you make a book free, you eliminate a reader’s biggest resistance to picking it up: price. When a reader sees a book that costs nothing, and they’re actively looking for new books, their only consideration is whether that book looks like it might be any good.

For an author, this can be a crazy-valuable tool.

You can use free to gauge how much appeal your book’s got. And if you think it should get better results than you’re seeing when it’s free, that’s an indication you may need to tweak its appearance to get shoppers to give it a chance.

I’m going to split this into two parts. In this post, I’m going to lay out the general concept. In the followup, I’m going to dive into specific numbers to look out for, as well as a discussion of how to analyze your results. In other words, this first part will be about eyeballing things and trusting your gut, and in the second part, we’re gonna drop some science on it.

Onward. So you’ve set your book free. The question you’re asking readers is: Does this book look any good? Their answer–the number of times they download it–will help you decide what if anything needs to be done to improve the book’s appeal. In very basic terms, this is how the answers break down.

A few hundred downloads or less: Your book may not be connecting with readers. Think hard about giving it a makeover.

A few thousand downloads: Sweet, your book’s got something going for it. You might consider some tweaks, but you’re on the right track.

Thousands upon thousands of downloads: Congratulations, your book looks like it rules.

Now there’s a huge caveat here. If your book didn’t get many downloads, that’s probably because few free book sites mentioned it. That may itself be a sign that your book needs work–freebie bloggers tend to have good eyes for books that will do well; if they’re not picking you up, readers might not, either–but it may just be a sign your free run ran into some bad luck. (Or that it isn’t ready yet–many sites require 5-20 reviews to run a book; the biggest sites tend to have higher requirements.) That’s why I would never make a decision about changing my book’s appearance based on a single free run.

But if you’ve made it free, say, 3-5 different times or more, and nothing much has happened, your gut may start wondering whether it’s time for change.

Your book was free, so you know its price isn’t the issue. Most free downloads don’t bother checking out the sample, so the writing probably isn’t the problem (though you can never rule it out). That leaves three things: cover, category, and blurb.

The cover is crucial. Simple thought-experiment: if the cover doesn’t look professional, why would a potential reader expect the writing and story inside it to be any better?

The categories are pretty big, too. They’re how readers find the kinds of books they want to read. Don’t get cute with them. Unless you’re Nicholas Sparks, if you put your book in Romance, it damn well better have an HEA. If you put your book in SF, but it’s essentially a romance with lasers, don’t be surprised that SF readers aren’t leaping to over themselves to snap it up

The blurb is less important than the other two, but it still makes a difference. Is it confusing? Does it express your core concept/hook? Blurbs suck and everyone hates writing them, but a good one is money

I’m hardly the first to stress the importance of these things, but when you’ve got the visibility of freebie sites, and you remove price from the equation, these are really the only factors left. That makes it easy to pinpoint what areas of your book need work. Is the blurb good? Is it in the right category? Then consider a new cover. Do you have a sweet cover, but you’re still only managing a few hundred downloads? First check your categories, then consider the blurb.

When it comes to covers, some people get attached to what they’ve got–I’ve done it, too–but if it’s not working, it’s not working. A cover should be gorgeous and immediately tell a potential reader what genre it is. Like, if you’re writing space opera, you don’t have to have a planet and/or a spaceship on your cover, but if not, something about your cover better say that it’s high tech, futuristic, adventuresome, and sense-of-wonder-ful. It’s true that there are a lot of successful books with terrible covers, but a lot of those people already have big fanbases. If you don’t, and you literally can’t give your books away, you have have a problem.

But it may not be with your book’s content. It may be with its appeal. Especially when you’re first getting started, there’s so much to learn about what works and what doesn’t. Don’t treat a poor free run as a failure. Treat it as the chance to learn very powerful lessons. It may be much harder to sell books through Select than it used to, but it still offers a priceless tool: direct and widescale reader feedback about what they respond to and what they don’t.

Use that tool correctly. By definition, a pattern is something that happens more than once; don’t overreact to one weak free run. But if it happens again, raise an eyebrow. If it happens a third time, raise the other one. Then think about switching it up. Try a new cover. Check your blurb and your categories. Try another couple runs and see if it makes a difference. It could just be that your story has a very narrow audience, but worst-case scenario, the crowd has told you you’re probably better off writing and promoting something else.

By the way–you can learn from your successes, too. If your book kicks ass every time it goes free, then you’ve done something very, very well. Probably lots of things. The crowd may have taught you to stick with that cover artist. That genre. That series. Because you’ve connected with your readers. If you can do it again, and again after that, you may be looking at a career.

I write this blog for fun, and to pay it forward for all the great advice I’ve learned from other writers, but (in what is surely a coincidence!) I’ve got a new book out today on Amazon, B&N, and Kobo. It is currently one dollar. Want to help me out? Give it a look.

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Did Amazon Change Algorithms to Protect Their Readers?: The Ten Thousand Gatekeepers of KDP Select

Anyone who follows this blog knows that last May, Amazon drastically changed their popularity lists (available on the left sidebar of the main Kindle store) to change the way free downloads were factored into the ranks. On last week’s Self-Publishing Podcast #42, I was asked whether this change was done in order to present readers with better books.

The short answer: yes.

The longer answer: not necessarily better books, but certainly more profitable ones. That’s a very important distinction to make right off the bat. In all media, there’s an ongoing, centuries-long debate about whether a work’s value is based on its commercial appeal or its artistic qualities. As it turns out, I have nothing to contribute to that debate. So what follows should in no way be taken as a judgment of books that have failed to thrive under the recent Select model. Some of my books did worse as well.

But here’s what we know. Between the birth of the Select program in December 2011 and mid-March 2012, all it took for a book to hit the first few pages of its category after a free run was a few hundred downloads. 2000+ would essentially guarantee you’d be near the top of your category, probably for 2-5 days. Because a free download was weighted the same as a paid sale. And very few books are currently selling hundreds of copies per day on Amazon. Right now, about 1000 sell 100/day. Maybe 500 sell 200/day. And only something like 100 sell 500+/day. The numbers were a little lower a year ago, but not by all that much.

Meanwhile, every day, freebie aggregate blogs were pointing their readerships toward several dozen free titles. The biggest blogs had tens of thousands of subscribers, more or less guaranteeing every book featured would pick up at least 1000 downloads. There was some level of curation involved–covers had to be at least halfway decent, and there was typically a rating threshold of some kind–but the blogs had no real way to test the commercial potential of the books they mentioned. And when a book is free, the resistance to downloading it is much, much lower than when that book has a price tag attached to it.

The result is that a lot of books with lower commercial appeal wound up displacing books with higher commercial appeal. On Amazon’s popularity lists, 1000 free downloads beat 100 paid sales, and new Select books were picking up thousands of free downloads every single day. The gatekeepers weren’t strong enough to keep out the low-appeal books, meaning readers were less likely to buy the books in front of them or to be satisfied with the titles they did purchase.

What was the solution? Well, Amazon wasn’t about to start curating these books themselves. Amazon is all about letting massive numbers of consumers reach their own decisions, proving in the most meaningful possible fashion which books have the highest commercial appeal. So some churn of their lists was probably a good thing, as it broke up the stagnation of long-term bestsellers (by the way, the iBookstore is currently struggling with this problem) and presented more voracious readers with fresh material. But this was too much, and it was too unregulated.

The answer was to raise the standards for which books would get prime placement. And in typical Amazon fashion, they would tie that standard to consumer behavior.

In March, they started testing new popularity lists; in May, there was a new algorithm. The winner no longer weighted free downloads equally with paid sales, but at something near a 10:1 scale. And instead of weighting the last 1-7 days of sales + downloads, it looked at the last 30.

So instead of needing 2000+ downloads to land high on the charts–a number most decent-looking books promoted by the top sites could cross; about 100 free books managed that number of downloads per day–their new formula required somewhere between 8000-20,000 downloads to really hit it big. The more niche or iffy books couldn’t hit those numbers anymore; fewer than twenty per day could climb those heights. With exceptions, the only books that could rake in that many downloads were the ones that would have guaranteed commercial appeal when plunked in front of readers. The gatekeepers–readers, making their download decisions one click at a time–were made stronger.

They crowdsourced commercial appeal. In the environment of the time, one or two or three thousand readers downloading a free book wasn’t a terribly accurate predictor of that book’s potential. But if you upped those numbers ten times over–to ten or twenty or thirty thousand reader downloads–you had a much more accurate barometer for which books would sell when they were awarded with extra visibility.

It was a net gain for readers, who had an easier time finding appealing books, but a net loss for writers, fewer of whom could pull in the number of downloads required to hit the jackpot.

Again, I’m presenting this without judgment. A book’s surface appeal, which prompts free downloads, doesn’t necessarily represent its deeper appeal, which prompts word of mouth and long-term sales (to say nothing of literary or artistic appeal). And Amazon’s current algos aren’t perfect. Certain factors–the readership demographics of the major blogs, crossover appeal of the larger genres, Amazon’s categories, etc.–means that certain subgenres (romance, thrillers, etc.) have an easier time of it than more niche subgenres (epic fantasy, Westerns?, etc.).

This is just my narrative of what happened. Amazon’s standards/algos weren’t high enough to deal with the emerging free book market; the rewards for making your book free were disproportionately high compared to their average commercial value.

So they raised their standards. And a lot of authors were left scrambling for a new solution.

The silver lining to these changes is that we as authors can take advantage of the raised standards to gauge the appeal of our own books. But since this post is already closing in on 1000 words long, I’m going to tackle that in a followup.

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Amazon Wants Borrows to Pay $2

In one sense, it isn’t news that Amazon wants the payment to authors for Select borrows to be about $2.00. The program is now over a year old, and in that time, the rate has always been pretty close to that mark. But this December, a lot of people thought things might be different. Amazon announced that they were adding a bonus payment to the Select pool, doubling their borrows budget to $1.4M. There was talk that borrows might pay $3 or even $4 apiece. I didn’t think it would get that high, but I figured it would be a big enough pot to keep borrows in the $2-2.50 range.

The December 2012 borrows rate was recently announced. The payout? $1.88.

Well. A bit skimpy. But how does that compare to the history of the program? Here’s the per-borrow payment each month since Select started.

12/11 – $1.70
1/12 – $1.60
2/12 – $2.01
3/12 – $2.18
4/12 – $2.48
5/12 – $2.26
6/12 – $2.08
7/12 – $2.04
8/12 – $2.12
9/12 – $2.29
10/12 – $2.36
11/12 – $1.90
12/12 – $1.88

Over the course of the program, Select has paid an average monthly rate of $2.07 per borrow. Its lowest payout was $1.60 in January 2012; its highest was $2.48 in April 2012. The payment rate has never been more than 20% lower than $2.00 or 25% higher than $2.00. Trend-wise, the per-borrow payment has never increased more than 3 months in a row, and it’s never decreased for more than 3 months in a row.

Based on these numbers, I think we can conclude a few things about Amazon.

Amazon wants borrows to pay about $2 apiece

Amazon doesn’t want to set the borrow rate at a hard $2 apiece

Amazon is really good at modeling consumer behavior

They’ve done better over the holidays than expected

Rad. All this raises a few immediate questions.

Why $2?

The glib economics answer is Amazon believes $2 is the rough price point at which enough authors will stay enrolled in Select to give Prime customers an enjoyable selection of books and thus incentivize them to re-up next time, too. As for how Amazon reached that $2 figure in the first place, I don’t know. The obvious answer is that $2 is about what an author would be paid for a sale of a $2.99 book at a 70% royalty, making a borrow just as good as a sale.

Why not a hard $2 monthly payment?

I think there are several reasons for this. For one thing, a $600,000 or $1,500,000 pot looks a lot more enticing to authors than $2/borrow. There’s a bit of a gambling element to it. Sure, borrows may only have been $2.04 this month, but what if they go up to, say, $2.40 next month? And what if I can get more of them than I did last month? That could really add up. *click, enrolled*

For another thing, maybe Amazon doesn’t have perfect confidence in their predictions of customer behavior. If they set borrows at $2, and next month Fire sales explode and they wind up with double the borrows they had last month, Select would cost them twice what they had budgeted. Amazon’s got riches for days, so maybe an extra $200K or $600K is no big deal, considering it’s a cost incurred by selling all those new Kindles/getting all those new Prime subscriptions, but even Amazon has budgets.

But the most important thing, I think, is that Amazon loves complex systems. They don’t want to lay down rules from above, they want to build dynamic ecosystems, because if you build them right, such systems are self-correcting–and provide you with all kinds of awesome data. For instance, if you set the borrow payment at $2, and authors slowly decide that’s insufficient, they’ll unenroll. The selection of titles in the Kindle Online Lending Library will shrink, making it less attractive to Prime members, leading to fewer subscriptions and less $$$ for Amazon.

But if you make the per-borrow payment dynamic, then you have a self-correcting element to push the system back to equilibrium. Maybe $2 isn’t worth enrolling, but as there are fewer books sharing the pot and/or fewer Prime customers borrowing them, the borrow payment creeps up. Maybe at $2.25, a few more authors decide it’s worth their while to join up. At $2.50, even more jump ship for Select. The KOLL has more titles, making it more exciting for prospective Prime customers, leading to (hopefully) a resurgence in subscriptions. And then as more authors and Prime customers join up, the per-borrow payment shrinks again, but who cares? You’ve got fresh blood in the program. To leave it, they’re going to have to a) decide it’s no longer worth it and b) take action to get out of it. Until they do, you’ve got authors’ content and customers’ money.

And in the meantime, you get to collect all this awesome data about how all these groups react to the changes in the system.

Because Amazon doesn’t know that $2 is the ideal borrow payment. Maybe authors will flood Select with titles for just $1/borrow. If so, great news for Amazon. They can offer even better service to their customers at little or no extra cost to themselves.

Why might Amazon have had better holidays than they anticipated?

I don’t know that for a fact. But look at the numbers above. To date, the only months the borrow payment rate has dipped below $2 are in November, December, and January–the leadup to Christmas, Christmas itself, and the post-Christmas boom. If they wanted borrows to be around $2, then they’ve had a few more Prime customers both holiday seasons than they predicted.

What does this mean for authors going forward?

Well, that would seem like good news. Because a lot of those new Prime members have their membership because they bought a Kindle Fire. And new Kindle Fire owners means more people around to buy ebooks.

It also means the Select program is pretty stable. There are still a lot of authors in the program and a lot of Prime members borrowing their books. From Amazon’s perspective, this is just dandy. And if everything’s working as they like, it’s less likely that they’re going to put out a lot of shiny new incentives to the Select program.

Note: there is a big difference between “less likely” and “won’t”. However well Select is doing for Amazon, the bloom is off the rose. They could decide to do something about that at any time.

But the program looks stable, and it looks like a winner. I’m having a hard time typing this, because I feel like there are good odds I’ll soon be proven hilariously wrong at any moment, but don’t count on any big changes to the program soon.

And in the meantime, expect to be paid about $2 per borrow. Amazon appears to want to keep it there–and Amazon is pretty good at getting what they want.

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What I’d Like to See from Booksellers in 2013: A Holiday Wishlist

It is an amazing time to be an author. No joke. It has probably never been easier or more realistic to make a living writing books. Self-publishing platforms offered by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and elsewhere have made it incredibly easy for authors to reach readers directly. Maybe too easy! Well, you don’t have to buy it, chums.

But I am deeply in love with all these companies. After spending most of a year gazing creepily into their Nooks and crannies, I have determined they are very much like people. Some take more time to understand than others. Some are easygoing. Others are grumpy. Whatever their faults, however, I love them all, because they have given me the job I have always wanted to had: writing books.

And just like friends and relatives, none of them is perfect. Since they’ve all come to me begging for advice, I’ve assembled a list of ways they can improve (from the perspective of indie authors) over the next year. It should be stated and restated that none of these suggestions means I think any of these places is useless or bad. I genuinely love all of them.

But some could be better to me. If I were these places, and I cared what indie authors thought, here’s what I would do to improve the experience in 2013.

Amazon needs to improve the Select program.

In 2012, Select changed everything. It released in early December of 2011 and allowed unknown authors to give their books away to thousands of readers. With a decent free run to vault them up Amazon’s popularity lists, an author could go on to sell a lot of their books over the next 7+ days, too. Over the period of just a few months, uncounted indie authors built real careers on the back of Select.

In March, Amazon tested ways to alter the program, because (presumably) it resulted in a lot of questionable books at the top of the popularity lists, which is one of their major drivers of sales. In May, they decided they had a better system, and watered down the effectiveness of freebies significantly. Within six months of Select going live and changing everything, Amazon neutered it.

The outcome looks great for Amazon. Only the books that gave away the greatest number of copies saw a significant boost in sales afterwards (and instead of lasting for 1-2 weeks, that boost could last for a full month!). That meant only the books that had been most vetted by free downloaders wound up in front of paying customers.

Which meant it became more of a winner-takes-all program. Great for indie books with strong packaging in popular genres. Not so great for niche subgenres, or for anyone who doesn’t fall into, say, the top 2-5% of the Select program.

I don’t know, maybe it’s best for readers to only be served up with the best of the best indie books. But it is not the best for authors. Especially those with quality books but whose genre/luck/ability to massage the big book blogs isn’t the strongest. Offering Select authors a 70% royalty in certain non-English-speaking territories isn’t enough. The KOLL doesn’t provide them enough alternative visibility, either (and anyway, it still disproportionately rewards those at the top). Exclusivity should be worth something. There’s got to be another way to get started as a new author besides trashing other books on Goodreads, building a following, and then releasing a New Adult book. Please add a new incentive to Select in 2013.

Barnes & Noble needs an affiliate program.

As far as I know, there is no B&N equivalent to free and bargain Kindle book blogs like Pixel of Ink, Ereader News Today, and Free Kindle Books and Tips, to name just the largest. Blogs like these are instrumental for helping indie authors run promotions and get in touch with eager readers, yet there’s not a single blog remotely like this for B&N.

Why are there a jillion Kindle blogs and zero for Nook? Because Kindle blogs make lots of money off Amazon’s affiliate program. When they direct a shopper to Amazon, they receive a cut of anything that shopper goes on to buy during that trip. This incentivizes entrepreneurs to set up sites meant to alert readers to free, bargain, and noteworthy books available on Amazon. If these blogs do a good job at that, they make lots and lots AND LOTS of money.

B&N has an affiliate program, but they don’t extend it to ebooks. Thus nobody cares enough to get one going for ebooks. Thus indie authors and small publishers have far fewer methods to promote ebooks on B&N. I don’t know why they don’t extend this program to ebooks. It seems like free money for everyone–B&N gets advertising at a small cost of the sales generated by that advertising; bloggers get affiliate money; authors get royalties–yet B&N discontinued the program earlier this year. Maybe the numbers just didn’t add up.

But this is one of the chief reasons Amazon has a robust indie market and B&N is a very distant second. If they want a share of that market, they’ve got to open up ways for people to participate in it. I think that starts with affiliate percentages on ebooks.

This goes for all the ebookstores, really. If I were a smaller outlet like Sony, I would be murdering myself–or better yet, everyone else!–to set up an effective affiliate program and get other people selling my products for me.

Kobo needs an automated new releases list.

Kobo’s got a bunch of lists on their site, but most appear to be hand-operated. As in, books are selected to appear on them by hand. That’s cool, but it rewards established authors who already have the name recognition to be selected for these lists.

This extends to new releases. Yet the new release lists are one of the few areas where new authors who have either a) great books or b) savvy can push their books up the list, drawing new eyeballs.

I love Kobo. They’ve made great strides in 2012, they’re super personable, they’re indie-friendly, and I think they will soon be/already are a vital part of the ebook and indie marketplace. Now they just need to make it a little easier for new authors to get a toehold in their store. A big step in that direction includes a new release list that’s ordered by bestsellers and sortable by genre.

An automated list of bestselling freebies would be nice, too, but one step at a time.

The iBookstore needs more avenues to visibility.

Apple’s iBookstore is deeply intriguing. When you’re not used to it, it looks awful. Browsing is weird. It’s a miracle anyone can find anything. But once you’re used to it, it’s not bad at all. In fact, it’s got a bunch of different categories to find books in, a few lists of bestsellers, bargain-priced books, and staff picks, and as an author, you can set prices in 50 different countries and counting, allowing you to target prices and promotions to markets as they emerge.

But the iBookstore is not all that deep. It’s easy to find the bestselling books, as well as the ones the iBookstore team hand-selects to appear on the couple lists they’ve got, but that’s about it. Its searchability is less than great. Like Kobo, it’s very winner-takes-all. The tail isn’t very long with Apple (or, to be more accurate, very fat). They’re well-curated, but maybe a little too well-curated. Let’s add a few more ways for books to be discovered. Let indies work to prove their worthy rather than relying on you to be placed in front of shoppers.

Amazon needs to quit obsessing about new releases.

You thought I was done with Amazon? Ha ha! In the words of Kramer, not bloody likely!

In the last 1-2 years, Amazon has geared their site more and more toward new releases. Hot New Releases lists now last 30 days instead of 90. The popularity lists measure the last 30 days of sales rather than the last ~7. It has resulted in a system where new releases are king, and if you don’t sell well right off the bat, you may never have the chance to. For new writers, there’s really no such thing as “organic” growth on Amazon. You either bring a fanbase to the table to buy your new book the instant it goes live, or you struggle in total obscurity until you give away enough books to have a fanbase for your next release.

This is a catastrophic system. On the one hand, by measuring the last full 30 days of sales, it makes it very difficult for a short-term boost to be big enough to get a book selling in any real numbers. On the other hand, by only measuring the last 30 days, you ensure that books that did gain from short-term boosts and are now finding their audience will die a noisy death as soon as that 30-day cliff rolls around.

Please vary it up a little. I know, you’ve got 1,800,000 ebooks and counting. Who cares about all that old crap when you’re adding 100,000 titles per month. But right now, too many elements of the system run along similar lines. Book sales crash too hard and rockets launch too fast. Vary it up so that authors can actually claw their ways up the ranks. And when it comes time to fade, let them parachute gradually rather than smashing into a big red writer-shaped puddle.

You’re too volatile, is what I’m saying. Having multiple systems working on 30-day scales isn’t helping anyone except people who understand how to game new releases.

Smashwords needs to quit sucking.

I feel bad for saying this, because Smashwords founder Mark Coker is pretty cool, and a definite friend of indies. But at this point, his ebook distribution service doesn’t offer a whole lot of value. It’s good to use if you don’t have a Mac and want to be on iTunes. It’s nice if you don’t live in the US but want to distribute to B&N. And it’s useful to get out to all those other tiny stores where nobody sells anything but you may as well be there because hey why not. Oh, and it lets you put free books on B&N, which is awesome for you but seems kind of useless for Smashwords.

Otherwise, there is no benefit to uploading through Smashwords instead of going direct to all the places that let you go direct (as of this writing, that includes [with some caveats] Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and the iBookstore).

On the contrary, Smashwords distribution can actually hurt you in a lot of ways. The Meatgrinder forces you to use .docs rather than the epubs that are industry-standard elsewhere. That means an additional round of formatting for many authors. Even .doc-users have to meet Smashwords’ rather rigid style guide. Smashwords doesn’t categorize books all that accurately, either, leaving your books in a wasteland of discoverability when they are pushed to other markets. And changes made to your books on Smashwords can take weeks or even months to filter through to the other stores.

I mean, Smashwords could be a pretty good service for a lot of authors, specifically the subset that wants to just buckle down and write rather than micromanaging their books on all the various vendors. Upload to Smashwords, distribute widely, collect checks, party party. I am far too data/control-neurotic to do that, but that is a valuable service. No joke.

But not accepting epubs and having very specific formatting requirements for .docs makes it less convenient to go through them, and their general sluggishness makes it excessively difficult to run effective sales or promotions. In fact, given pricematching between stores, having delayed price changes can result in authors losing hundreds or thousands of dollars when Amazon slashes their book prices down to match prices on Sony that should have been changed a month ago.

So there you go, SW. Get faster, get more precise in areas like category mapping, and accept epubs. I’m sure that’s just as easy as I’ve made it sound.

Everyone except Kobo and the iBookstore needs to improve their customer service.

Kobo and iBookstore: awesome. Knowledgable, prompt, helpful, eager. Everyone else: terrible. Take a lap.

B&N’s customer service department has apparently all been zapped to Lost, because they don’t respond at all anymore. Amazon has no phone number for emergencies and their representatives are inconsistent at best. Smashwords is small and can take a long time to reply. Sony says, “Sorry, take it up with Smashwords.”

I know this stuff costs a lot of money. But two stores are doing it right. If you can afford to step up your CS game, look to Kobo and Apple.

Sony needs to exist.

That place is just a myth, right? A land of makebelieve sales? As far as ebookstores, the more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. Out of roughly 14,000 books sold this year, I think about a dozen of those were on Sony. That is probably being generous. Sony: please prove you exist.

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I’m New to Indie Publishing, Part 5: The Long Term

Okay, so at this point, we’re not newbie indie writers anymore. We’ve looked at releasing your first book and using Select to start selling it. In the next step, we kept with Select to build up some fans and learn more about what makes for an attractive book. Third was about examining the pros and cons of Select in preparation for where to go next. And after concluding that Select isn’t perfect, we looked at expanding into non-ebook formats and identifying when and what to pull from Select.

Then a lot of time elapsed. Sorry. I was busy putting some theories to the test. Another, more accurate way to put that is “I was scrambling like mad to make the actual transitions I intended to talk about.” Those were a fun couple months, where “fun” is also meant to be understood as “something not all that fun at all.”

But it’s lookin’ good now, and the experience helped me feel ready to talk about the next step. About hitting a stable career and the specific tactics used to get there. I’m hardly the first to come up with these strategies, but that is not about to stop me from talking about them as if I own them and am revealing them for the very first time!

The way I see it, there are three or four solid ways to continue selling books without a ton of active promotion. Naturally, all of this depends on writing new books in the meantime, as well as in cultivating a mailing list/fanbase to alert whenever that new release is ready. I hope this provides some stuff to think about even if you’re already well-familiar with concepts like permafree.

Staying in Select

No matter how many times DWS or KKR insist that you’re missing out on sales, angering potential readers, and otherwise acting a fool, the exclusivity of Select sometimes makes sense as a long-term plan. There are at least two ways to make this work.

The first is the much more common scenario. If you’ve got an established series, running a Select giveaway is a great way to support a new release or to boost flagging sales. A Select giveaway costs nothing and provides you with precise control of when your promo runs. It gets your book in a lot of new hands, giving you the opportunity to build your mailing list or your Facebook page or whatever tools you prefer to use to have direct contact with your fans. There are all kinds of theories and strategies for selling books, but I haven’t seen any as revolutionary as Select. I’ve seen it build dozens of careers this year, including mine.

I mean, I’m leery of Select. I’m less in love with it by the day. But it still works very, very well for some people, particularly authors of series. With 3+ books, you can run a free promo of one book every month without having to make a given book free more than once every three months. That’s a good long time between free runs. Enough to let a book recharge its batteries a bit. That strikes me as a far more sustainable strategy than trying to give away the same book every month (although even that can work), especially if you’re adding a new book or two (or three!) to the series every year.

The second long-term use of Select is if you’re selling so well that you never even need to give copies of your books away. This might sound like a great reason to leave Select–if your books are doing that well, surely they will sell in the other stores as well–but here’s the thing: borrows. If your books are doing great, they’ll place highly in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (the KOLL), which is what Kindle-users browse to find books to borrow. The KOLL only represents the subset of books in Select (along with a small number of traditionally published books that have negotiated special arrangements with Amazon), so the competition there is much less fierce. If you’re a strong seller, chances are you’ll wind up with great visibility in the KOLL.

Let’s think about this for a moment. Despite the growth of all the other stores, Amazon retains something like 60% of the ebook market. Meanwhile, before Christmas made everything all crazy, Amazon was getting about 250,000 borrows per month. These were split up among a smaller pool of books (everything in Select) and the books at the top were rewarded with a disproportionately high cut of the borrows. While a bestseller like Hugh Howey’s Wool has done plenty well in the other stores, it might do even better by staying in Select and racking up borrows; he’s intimated as much on comments on Kindleboards.

Crazy, I know, and totally counterintuitive–unless you think of the KOLL as a completely separate market. A small store, sure, with just a few hundred thousand customers per month, but it’s also got a much smaller selection to split those customers between. It’s the guaranteed opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond, and that is generally a safer bet than it is to fling your book at the other stores and hope its word of mouth allows it to do just as well at B&N, Kobo, the iBookstore, Kobo, Smashwords, Sony, and all the rest as it did at Amazon.

I’ll put it another way. Let’s say Librios, the god of books, strolls down from book-heaven and presents you with a choice. He can make you a bestseller at Kobo, but you have to remove your book from the iBookstore. Mwa ha ha ha! Would you do it?

Unless you’re already a bestseller at both places, of course you would. The argument for publishing to every possible outlet is that you never know where a book might take off, so you should buy as many lotto tickets as possible to up your chances of breaking out.

But if you’re doing that great with Select and its borrows, you have already won the lotto.

The concept that it is best to publish to every store isn’t a universal truth, then, it’s a dogmatic principle. Your situation doesn’t care about principles. Your situation cares about your situation. Look at your placement on the KOLL. Look at your monthly borrows, and remember those apply to your bestseller rank, too. I don’t know where the cutoff point is, but if, say, 20%+ of your income is generated by borrows, it might make more sense to stick with a winning ticket than to go chasing a hypothetical 40% of the marketplace that might never materialize for you.

Moving into the Other Stores

But you know what? Select kind of sucks. Giveaways aren’t as effective as they once were. Amazon is throttling freebies on sites like POI and ENT, meaning they list about half as many free books each day as they did a couple months ago. Meanwhile, other markets continue to grow. And rather than improving the Select carrot in any meaningful way, Amazon is hitting authors with an impotent stick, offering 70% royalties in India and Brazil for Select books and just 35% for non-Select titles. What incredible opportunity! India has a billion people! Brazil is the most populous country in South America! Yeah, and they’re not exactly busting down the ebook doors just yet. At this moment, I have sold 1100+ books on Amazon in December and given away another 11,500+. 0 of those have been in Brazil. Great incentive, guys.

Anyway, it just doesn’t feel safe to me. I like the idea of diversity. Diversity is healthy. It lets you weather change and disaster. It feels good to not have to rely on so many things beyond your control–Amazon algorithms, free book sites, yadda yadda yadda.

So let’s say you’re thinking about exiting Select for the greener pastures of BN etc. Here’s the thing: don’t do it until you have an actual plan to sell at BN. Letting your books sit around waiting to be struck by sales-lightning is a terrible idea. The slow burn leading to a boom of success is something of a myth. It’s an outlier, at the very least. If you’re selling 2/month at BN, that’s not going to lead to growth. Maaaybe if you’re doing 20/month. You need to be climbing ranks, accumulating meaningful alsobots, etc. A book doesn’t have to be a bestseller in every store to be a valuable part of your writin’ business, but you have to do something to get sales going.

Because the idea that a good book will eventually find its audience is just that. An idea. A wish. Cream only rises to the top because it is less dense than the lower-fat milk beneath it and it is a natural law of physics that less-dense substances will float on top of denser substances. Books are not dairy products. Writers can trick you with metaphors about selling books because it is a writer’s job to trick people into believing in places and things that aren’t true. So. Books are books.

Fortunately, it does not require a 12-point business plan to sell them outside Amazon. Here’s a few simple ways to actually make it worth your while to leave Select.

The Perma-Free Option

This plan is super-simple: if you have a series, make the first book free. Permanently. You can accomplish this by setting the price to $0.00 on Kobo and the iBookstore, using Smashwords to distribute at $0.00 to BN, and getting Amazon to pricematch your title to $0.00. This plan is awesome because it requires very little work to set up and virtually no work to maintain. Readers check out your first book because it costs nothing, and if they like it, maybe they go pay real money for book two.

A lot of people have seen great success with this plan. The common pattern of sales is a genuine slow burn that eventually explodes as a series picks up steam. After some time–a few months, typically–sales tail off, but still continue to come in at a nice, steady level. And since there are several different stores to build an audience in, you can experience this cycle at four or five different places with a single series.

Some authors don’t like free books. They don’t like the idea of giving away something they worked so hard on. They think free books devalue the marketplace and will eventually be the ruin of us all.

Well, good news, Scrooge. You don’t have to.

Just Write a Series

That may be all it takes to start selling in other stores. If you’d prefer to have a career now rather than counting on some five-year business plan whose chief tenets are magical thinking and wishcasting the future, I recommend starting your first couple books in Select, then transitioning out once you’ve got 3+ books in that series.

The idea is to use Select to pick up initial visibility, sales, and fans despite being a no-name nobody who’s otherwise lucky to sell 1/week. Once you’ve got something of a fanbase on Amazon, and no longer have to rely exclusively on giveaways to sell a new book, you can get going in other stores just by releasing the entire series there at once.

Why does it make a difference to release a series together (or at least tightly-spaced) rather than one at a time over several months? Because a series is like an A-Team. There aren’t a lot of Rambo-books out there, invincible one-book killing squads that can’t be stopped no matter how many trad-shirt enemies get in their way. It is very rare to have a book that good.

But if you’ve got a squad of books, they help each other out. They pull each other up when one of them stumbles. BN, for instance, has a new releases list that goes back 90 days. You have a much better chance of climbing high up this list if you fire three titles at it all at once–giving browsers three chances to find your series–rather than hitting it with a single book at a time. There are cases in which books enter a state of positive reinforcement where they haul each other faster and faster down the track.

There are no guarantees this will actually work. This plan is a definite citizen of the Sovereign Nation of My Books Will Magically Sell Themselves. But at least it ups your odds. “Synergy,” it’s called, if you’re a fan of words that could get you punched. Depending on the store, you’ll only be eligible for new release lists for 1-3 months. Take advantage of this visibility while you’ve got it. Let your series be an A-Team. That is what series are designed to do.

Do Something. Anything at All. Seriously, Just Do Something to Get Started

Here is a slightly less magical plan: when you move your books out of Amazon, advertise or promote your books in some way. If you know a site that advertises to Nook users, book an ad for soon after your books go live on BN (and then tell me where you advertised, because non-Amazon ad sites are as rare as snipes). Do something. Anything at all to get some initial sales and, with any luck, provoke your books into continuing to sell.

Because here is another law of physics, one that might actually apply to books: a body at rest tends to stay at rest. A book that isn’t selling tends to continue not to sell. Anti-Select people like to talk about the opportunity cost of Select–all the potential non-Amazon sales you’re giving up by being exclusive to Amazon–but if you are in the other stores, and you’re not selling anything, then you’re incurring an opportunity cost by not being in Select, where you could be sparking sales through giveaways.

Even if you’re generally anti-marketing, then, do something to get sales going. Do a $0.99 sale along with a new release. Book an ad. Blog your ass off. Whatever. The goal is to get the new store you’re in to start selling your book for you so you don’t have to keep doing this stupid marketing stuff.

Here’s an example of all this junk in action. I published Melt Down, the sequel to Breakers, to Barnes & Noble on October 16. My October sales there were 8. 4 for Breakers, 4 for Melt Down. I made $16.30 in October. Melt Down was only out a couple weeks, so why don’t we double that to represent a full month going forward. 16 sales. 3-4/week. $30-40 a month. Whoopee.

In early November, dissatisfied with my new release sales everywhere, I threw a bunch of junk together. A guest post on my friend’s popular blog. An ENT ad. Etc. I reduced Breakers and Melt Down to $0.99. Aided by advertising, being on BN’s new releases list, and a $0.99 sale, I sold a few hundred copies over there. The boost was short-lived. About five days. After that, I restored them to $2.99 and $3.99. But even after things settled down, the sale had given them some visibility. Alsobots. A few reviews. Maybe a bit of word of mouth. Six weeks later, they’re continuing to sell about 3/day. $7/day, $200/month.

The difference between $40/month and $200/month probably isn’t the difference between dogfood dinner and organic prime rib, but this is where Dean Wesley Smith’s mantra about creating as many revenue streams as possible through as many sites as possible starts to make sense. But I don’t agree with his ideas about tossing your work out there and doing nothing to promote it. Not when you’re still scrabbling to establish a career and every dollar matters. Take a few days off to give yourself a kick, then get back to writing.

The Hybrid Solution

I’m talking about all this stuff like it’s just that simple, but it’s not. Even when you’re in Select, and you’re on Amazon, which all sorts of sites offer advertising and support for, selling books is tough. Selling books in non-Amazon stores is even tougher. If you’re making a career out of indiedom, cutting off Select and taking the plunge into the other stores could be a serious risk to your sales. If it gets bad enough, you could find yourself back with–shudder!–a real job.

So maybe it’s a good idea to leave some books in Select and others out. That’s been my plan since August–move my Breakers series into the other stores while keeping The Cycle of Arawn in Select. My thinkin’ was to hedge my bets. By keeping Arawn in Select, I could still run free giveaways to keep sales steady even as Breakers dwindled on Amazon and fought to get established in the other stores.

It worked. Or maybe it worked, question mark? Since it’s only been a few months and all. My sales shrank for a couple months, but then Breakers got going on BN, and now it’s going on Kobo, and I just did a big Select giveaway of Arawn back on Amazon, and woooooo Christmas.

Anyway, it doesn’t particularly matter how it worked for me. The concept is what’s important. Having one series in and one series out is just about being flexible. Which you can’t do if you have bizarre, unbreakable principles about how a very fluid book market is supposed to work. Unless you think there is something morally heinous about it, Select isn’t an ideology, it’s a tool. Every single (non-heinous) strategy is just a tool. Tools are made to be picked up when they can be useful and set down when the job changes or you find a better tool to get the old job done.

A Summary

The problem with these long-range business plans–write ten book before you start promoting; forego Select and get your start in all the markets right now–is that even if they are sound in principle (and I mostly think they’re not), no one can predict how they’ll play out for an isolated, individual career. A hard, rigid plan may not be the best fit for where you are right now in your life. If you’re relying on your income as an author to survive, and that income is partly or wholly reliant on using Select, then obviously you’re going to want to be a lot more cautious and gradual about leaving the program than someone with a day job that pays all the bills and affords the luxury of taking high-risk gambles or embarking on years-long plans.

That seems like such common sense that I’m sitting here thinking, “Dude, you can’t seriously be trying to pass that off as wisdom. That is so obvious and self-evident that you are an idiot for bothering to type it aloud.” Yet I see people passing down hard and fast rules to new writers all the time. Stuff that sounds so insane it would make more sense as deliberate sabotage.

I’ve tried to pull together some specific strategies here–when it makes sense to stick with Select, going permafree, how and when to transition from other stores–but I think success as an independent author boils down to a handful of very basic ideas.

One, you need to keep writing. This is the advice that everyone gives, because it is the best advice. I don’t know how many books you “need” to write per year to sustain a career. I am going to say one, at the very, very least. Two or three or four is going to make it a lot easier on yourself. Depending on your background, four books per year may sound impossible, almost comically fast and virtually guaranteed to produce hackish drivel, but you can write a lot when you’re writing as a full-time job. The very fastest indies I’ve seen put out a new full-length novel every single month.

I sure don’t write that fast (although I may be capable of 3-4/year now), but that’s just to provide a sense of scale. The specifics don’t matter. If you want to make this a full-time job, then you have to treat it like a full-time job. Let that not be lost in all this babble of tactics.

Second, you have to try things for yourself. You have to find something that works for you, and when you find it, you have to keep doing it. Aggressively.

As long as it’s not evil, a specific tactic has no value judgment attached to it. If you’re getting results from Select, keep doing Select. If not, try the other stores. Try ads, even if Konrath says they’re stupid and never did him any good. Try anything. Try everything. Failure’s good. Failure’s cool. Failing means you’re trying.

If you’re done failing, and you’ve got to the point where your fans will follow you down any path, then congratulations, you’ve won. For most of us, it’s still a struggle. If someone’s found a way to make it work, I hate to see other writers put that down just because the author is using Select or erotica or serials or whatever damn trend is bringing the judge-hounds sniffing around. If it works and you like it, do it now, because it may not work tomorrow.

But even if it does stop, you’ve probably wound up with more fans. More experiences. More resources to get you through to the next port in the storm. It gets easier. I think. How’s that for reassuring?

This series of posts is now to the end of my experience. I don’t know where it goes from here. I am sure the next year of changes will force me to find out.

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