ebook sales

Followup: Self-Publishing’s Share of the Kindle Market, by Genre

Two months ago, I took a look at how many of the bestselling Kindle genre titles were self-published. I had two purposes in mind: first, to see whether there were any differences in the success of self-publishing between the big four genres (Romance, Mystery/Thrillers/Suspense, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy).

The second purpose was to provide some more data for the initial Author Earnings report. The report indicated that self-publishers were doing incredibly well within genre ebooks, but one of the more widespread criticisms was that the report was just a snapshot that might not represent anything more than that moment in time.

I thought that was a valid critique, but I also suspected it would prove false — Amazon is amazingly consistent from day to day and month to month, and the AE report looked at a substantial chunk of data. I was betting that later studies would show similar results.

Among the report’s conclusions was that genre fiction accounted for about 70% of all Kindle ebook sales, and that self-published titles accounted for roughly half of that. I used a different methodology, and a worse sample size, but when I checked in February, self-publishing’s share of the bestselling Kindle titles was as follows:

Romance: 49%
Mysteries/Thrillers/Suspense: 11%
Science Fiction: 56%
Fantasy: 49%

Three of the four genres were roughly 50% self-published, with the glaring exception of the thriller market. Meanwhile, here was each genre’s overall share of the Kindle market (methodology explained in the original post):

Romance: 40%
Mysteries/Thrillers/Suspense: 20%
Science Fiction: 5%
Fantasy: 6.33%

This added up to 71.33% of all Kindle ebook sales. I pulled my numbers a few weeks after the first Author Earnings report collected its data, yet my conclusions mirrored theirs: about 70% of all Kindle sales were in these four genres, and of those sales, close to half were of self-published titles.

It’s been two months since then. How do things look today? First, here are the four genres broken down by method of publication — self-published; through a small or medium press; Amazon publishing imprints; and by the Big 5, which includes major genre houses like Harlequin and Baen, where appropriate.

ROMANCE

Self-published – 59%
Small/medium – 3%
Amazon – 12%
Big 5 – 26%

MYSTERY/THRILLER/SUSPENSE

Self-published – 26%
Small/medium – 1%
Amazon – 15%
Big 5 – 58%

SCIENCE FICTION

Self-published – 53%
Small/medium – 7%
Amazon – 12%
Big 5 – 29%

FANTASY

Self-published – 45%
Small/medium – 6%
Amazon – 8%
Big 5 – 41%

There are a few differences between the first grab and this one. The percentage of bestselling self-published romance titles is up by a good percentage. Thrillers are way up, more than double the initial look. Meanwhile, self-published sci-fi and fantasy titles are slightly fewer. Amazon’s publishing imprints are up, representing just under 12% of the total, compared to a little over 9% the first time.

I wouldn’t draw too much from any of these changes, though. You can hardly conjure a pattern out of two whole samples drawn from a methodology that’s prone to variance. What’s most interesting to me here is how little is different: in three of the four major genres, self-published titles still represent about 50% of the bestsellers. Thrillers continues to lag behind, but this month’s look suggests it’s not quite as tough for self-published titles to compete as the original breakdown suggested.

Okay, so what about the genres’ overall market share? Here’s how it breaks down this time:

Romance – 35.2%
Thrillers – 26%
Science Fiction – 5.4%
Fantasy – 6.4%

This adds up to 73% of overall Kindle ebook sales. Crazy.

Compared to February, sci-fi and fantasy are essentially the same. Romance is somewhat smaller, but thrillers are up by a decent percentage. As before, however, I wouldn’t try to read patterns in the differences — I’m not at all sure that romance sales are actually down. The sample sizes involved make this part of the data prone to a fair amount of variance.

Again, what’s most interesting to me isn’t the differences. It’s how similar these numbers are a full two months later — these four genres continue to comprise ~70% of Amazon’s ebook sales, and roughly half of those sales are of self-published books.

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Self-Publishing’s Share of the Kindle Market by Genre

Inspired by the Author Earnings report, I’ve taken a quick whack at looking at what percentage of Kindle ebook sales self-publishers represent by genre. To get there, I simply look at the top 100 bestsellers in each genre—romance, mystery/thriller/suspense, science fiction, and fantasy—and split them up by method of publication. Note that, unlike the Author Earnings study, this is merely a breakdown of the raw number of self-published titles on the bestseller lists, not the number of total book sales within each genre.

Also, instead of five categories of publisher, I use four: self-published, small/medium press, Amazon Publishing, and Big 5 (including, where appropriate, major genre publishers like Harlequin and Baen). For books where the publishing method was unclear, I did a search of the house. If the house published only a single author’s works, I listed it as self-published. If the house published multiple authors, even if it was obviously an author collective, I listed it as small/medium.

Okay! Without further ado, the numbers:

ROMANCE

Self-published: 49%
Small/medium: 11%
Amazon: 9%
Big 5/Harlequin: 30%

MYSTERY/THRILLER/SUSPENSE

Self-published: 11%
Small/medium: 5%
Amazon: 16%
Big 5: 68%

SCIENCE FICTION

Self-published: 56%
Small/medium: 9%
Amazon: 5%
Big 5 (plus Baen): 30%

FANTASY
Self-published: 49%
Small/medium: 7%
Amazon: 7%
Big 5: 37%

One of these things is not like the other! At an immediate glance, one thing is clear: if you’re publishing in romance or SF/F, self-publishing is an extremely viable method. Roughly half of all the bestselling books in each of these genre is self-published. That’s pretty remarkable.

For mysteries and thrillers, however, it’s a different story. Of course you don’t have to be a bestseller to make a living as an independent author, but it’s equally remarkable that just 11% of the top 100 mysteries and thrillers are self-published. That suggests two things. If you’re a thriller author, you may want to keep querying agents. Or that there’s a market inefficiency in thrillers, where there aren’t enough good indie titles to meet demand. It’s also possible that both of those things are true! I couldn’t say.

Also, it should be said that this is just a look at the top 100 in each genre out of hundreds of thousands of total books. It’s quite possible, perhaps even likely, that a broader look at the data would present different trends. However, it does match up well with the Author Earnings study of these genres combined, so I’m not sure a bigger sample would be that much different.

Of course, there’s one more big factor here: each genre’s total share of the Kindle market. Fortunately, that’s really easy to ballpark. By looking at the #100th-ranked book in each genre and dividing that by its overall Kindle rank, we get an estimate of what percentage of the entire Kindle market each genre represents. For instance, if the #100 book in Romance were #1000 in the Kindle store, we could figure that 1 in 10 sales, or 10%, are of romance books.

Here’s how it shakes out:

Romance: 40%
Mysteries/Thrillers: 20%
Fantasy: 6.33%
Sci-Fi: 5%

You’ll note that adds up to 71.33%. Hugh Howey’s much bigger and better sample suggested these four genres comprise 69% of total Kindle sales (though it didn’t break it down by genre). To me, this means the above numbers should be pretty accurate, despite the crude methodology used to determine them.

Obviously, romance is the runaway winner. There is a huge market for it and self-publishers do very well there. Fantasy and science fiction are about neck and neck: fantasy is a little bigger, market-wise, but self-publishers have more share of the science fiction market. Mysteries and thrillers have a very big overall market—half as much as romance, and a fifth of all Kindle sales—but taking advantage of the size of that market appears to be a challenge for self-publishers.

Also, if the Author Earnings report didn’t already make this perfectly clear—holy shit self-publishers sell a lot of books. I knew we’d taken over a big part of the market. I didn’t know that, within three of the four most popular genres, we’d taken half of it.

Quick edit: I should make it perfectly clear that these percentages are very preliminary. Where the Author Earnings report samples nearly 7000 books, including about 2600 of the top 7000 titles in the Kindle store, I’m only sampling the top 100 in each genre. In a sample that modest, even a small variance from the norm might throw things out of balance. For instance, if just five of the books in fantasy were switched from self-published to Big 5, the numbers of each would be nearly equal. I will try to remember to run this again in another month or so and then again later in the year to see whether the results hold.

That said—there are several signposts the data’s pretty accurate. For one thing, among three genres, the percentages are pretty similar across the board. For another, although I divide things up differently, and am only measuring number of titles instead of number of sales, my results are pretty close to those of the Author Earnings survey—which was taken, to my knowledge, 2-3 weeks ago. The lists I looked at today were certainly comprised of many different titles, yet the number of self-published titles on both studies is pretty close. This makes it less likely that either study is an anomaly.

Ultimately, though, time will tell.

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Author Earnings: The Report

In conjunction with an anonymous data hound, indie author Hugh Howey has put together an analysis of book sales on Amazon, breaking down the sales and earnings of genre fiction authors. The part that makes it two scoops of awesome? It’s broken down by how they were published—Big 5, small/medium press, Amazon Publishing, or self-published.

At the moment, the site is dealing with server crashes, but you can—nay, must—read it here.

Now, there are a number of caveats to deal with the results, many of which are addressed within the survey. For one thing, it’s all based on Amazon sales, which are going to skew toward ebooks. Probably to indies, too; while self-published authors also have a strong showing on Barnes & Noble and Kobo (as high as 25% or more), I think we have our biggest share of the market at Amazon. Additionally, the survey is limited to genre fiction: mystery/thrillers, romance, and sci-fi/fantasy. It is widely believe that these are the genres where self-published authors do best. And for perspective (as well as identifying potential market inefficiencies!), it would be nice to know what percentage of the overall adult/YA fiction market these genres represent. (ETA: Oops, those numbers are actually provided! And they are a majority of all Amazon book sales, to the tune of 69% of the sample. Next time, I’ll read the footnotes before posting. Maybe.)

That said, though? This is a big ol’ slice of data, based on the biggest bookseller in the world, and covering many of fiction’s most popular genres. This may be a snapshot, but it’s an expansive one.

And some of the findings—like the fact that self-published authors are outselling the Big 5—are insane.

P.S.: Awesomely, Hugh has made the raw numbers available for download. I don’t have the time to dig into them this second, but I can’t wait to take a peek and see if anything more pops out.

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Challenging Assumptions: Pricing Frontlist Like Backlist and Backlist Like Frontlist

This is the first in a sporadic series of posts examining the publishing market, specifically as it relates to self-publishing. To start things off, I want to look at pricing, and present an ass-backwards case: that it may make more sense to price your oldest, least popular books the highest—and your new books the lowest.

Traditionally, a book is priced highest when it’s brand new. Part of this is due to the formats of a new release itself, which begin with expensive hardcovers and later move on to less expensive paperbacks, but this is frequently how ebooks are treated, too.

For instance, Stephen King’s most recent book Doctor Sleep is currently $10.99. Take a look at his backlist, however, and it’s pretty much all priced lower—mostly $5.99-7.99, with a more recent and enduring book (11/22/63) leading the way at $9.99, and running all the way down to $3.99 (The Shining, currently price-dropped to promote the new sequel Doctor Sleep).

There’s no difference in production costs for an ebook sold today and a copy of that same ebook sold on the day the title came out. So why does it cost less now than when it was new?

The answer is demand. When an author puts out a new book, there is a high level of fan demand for that title. Everyone knows you’ll be able to get it for cheaper later. But so long as the price is semi-reasonable, readers don’t care about shelling out a few extra dollars in exchange for having the specific book they want now. And publishers are happy to take advantage of that demand by setting initial prices higher.

Why reduce price of that same ebook format later? I don’t get invited to sit around a lot of Big Publishing House marketing meetings, but the probable answer is obvious. As demand wanes, you cut price, hoping to lure in new readers. Especially the segments of the market that are more price-sensitive. Over time, as a book steps down the pricing staircase, it drops below the purchase threshold of several different markets, garnering new purchases at every step of the way. Eventually, once the higher-paying markets are exhausted and demand settles down to a trickle, you slot the book into a low price—one that minimizes readers’ resistance to purchase, but isn’t so low that it devalues the author and/or the publisher’s entire catalogue.

That’s the traditional model. It makes a lot of sense. Maximize initial revenues by taking advantage of pent-up demand, then lower prices to draw new readers into the backlist (and, hopefully, convert them into fans who’ll then go on to buy frontlist).

The self-publishing/indie approach is way more fragmented, with different people trying all kinds of different things, but I think the general approach is similar: release a new book at full price, or at a slight discount, let it fade into backlist, then run sales on backlist titles to goose new releases and/or the rest of the backlist.

This makes sense, too. I don’t think it’s a bad approach in the slightest. But I think there is a stark difference between the pre-digital publishing market and the current market. Back in the day, you counted on audience growth through word-of-mouth, right? People still treat word-of-mouth like your #1 weapon for growth from book to book.

Well, I think that’s been replaced. Overshadowed, at least. By visibility.

Yay, a buzzword! That’s how you know this must be smart. To explain this particular use of “visibility,” it’s time to dissect Amazon’s recommendation engine.

When a new book is released on Amazon—and the other stores, too, but Amazon is the one I’m most familiar with, and the one I believe does this best—its resulting sales aren’t just about the pent-up demand waiting for it. Instead, Amazon’s bots process its initial sales, then actively promotes that title to other customers likely to purchase it.

This is largely black box stuff accomplished through emails and on-site recommendations, so it’s hard to capture hard data on these processes. But I’m guessing Amazon’s system is a lot like Netflix, where people who watched/enjoyed Movie A, B, and C will be recommended Movie D, which other people who enjoyed A-C also watched and liked. Amazon has their own version of this front and center, the “alsobot” recommendations on every single product page.

So a new book comes out. Its fans buy it. And then the mighty Algorithm kicks in, recommending the book to potential customers. The people it recommends the book to are (probably) determined by taste-constellations, i.e. the people Amazon’s system thinks are most likely to buy it. And the volume of those recommendations is determined by the volume of outside sales—anything not initially generated by Amazon itself.

The recommendation algorithms are highly adaptive. Both the targeting and the volume of that targeting are influenced by the book’s performance when Amazon puts it in front of potential customers. The better a book converts potential customers to actual purchases, the more the algos ramp up the juice. The worse it does, the more the juice dries up. (For the record, I make no judgments here about a book’s literary quality—just its commercial potential, as predicted and then tested by Amazon.)

For a brief foray into concrete examples, last month, I released a new book. I was able to push about 250 sales through my own devices. Over the course of the month, it saw “organic” algo-driven growth, and finished September with about 1950 sales. Thanks to Amazon’s marketing, it sold 8x as many copies in its first month than I conjured up on my own.

For anyone who spends any time on Amazon, this general process is obvious. But look at what’s happening here: Amazon’s sophisticated recommendation system is identifying potential customers and then pushing something they’re likely to buy right in front of them.

In other words, they’ve slashed a huge shortcut through word-of-mouth. They have replicated an organic process that used to take weeks, months, or years to really kick in, and condensed it to a matter of days.

Back to the launch. Which is no longer just about pent-up demand. It’s about the additional visibility Amazon will hand you on a platter. One that can dwarf the fanbase you bring to the table yourself.

And which you can maximize by releasing a new book at a lower price.

The next question raises itself: What price point will make you the most money? Specifically, what is the best price to maximize visibility (and thus sales) without losing out on too much money in other areas, such as the initial fanbase who’ll happily pay higher prices, or by dropping into an unfavorable royalty rate?

The answer is.. there is no one answer. It’s immensely complicated. It depends so much on how well a book does in those recommendation algos, which is completely out of your control. I mean, besides little things like writing a damn good book with a damn good cover described with a damn good blurb. It depends on if it’s part of a series, and if you expect the new book to lift every backlist title in that series with it. It depends on how many owls you sacrifice to Athena, who probably isn’t even the goddess of books, but whatever, I don’t have time to check Wikipedia right now.

I have no concrete answer. That’s why I titled this “challenging assumptions” and not “slaying assumptions and smiting their ruin on the mountainside.”

I’ve got one bit of data to help approach this, though. In my observation and experience—anecdote alert!—given equal visibility, a book priced at $0.99 will sell roughly 2x as many copies as one priced at $2.99. This is in SF/F; in particularly price-sensitive genres, like New Adult and possibly Romance, the difference may be higher, maybe as high as 3x.

Working from a 2x figure, though, let’s crunch some numbers. Say you have the option of 1000 sales in your first month at $2.99 or 2000 sales at $0.99. $2.99 earns 70% royalties—$2100, in this hypothetical. $0.99 earns 35%—$700. That is a huge difference, one that I have no doubt Amazon intentionally laid out to create a soft floor for ebook prices.

But let’s say you can convert 1 out of every 20 purchases into core fans, people who’ll happily sign up for your mailing list/Facebook page/blog so you can reach them directly when the next book is out. At $2.99, you’ve added 50 core readers. At $0.99, you’ve added 100. Your next book will have twice as many purchases to impress the recommendation algos with than if you’d launched the previous book at $2.99. Multiply by as many books as you intend to write in the series.

Caveats here, of course. A few of the people who signed up for $0.99 books may not buy a sequel at $2.99. And conversion rate naturally degrades the deeper you get into a series. And a 20:1 purchase:signup ratio is generally too high (though it doesn’t really matter what the absolute ratio is, it’s more about the relative ratio of sales between $2.99 and $0.99).

So you can downplay this idea a little bit. Even so, the long-term implications of launching cheap are pretty interesting. And obviously there are more ways to look at this besides $0.99 vs. $2.99. Such as this:

This is from Smashwords’ yearly survey on self-publishing trends. The first thing you’ll note is that it directly contradicts what I claimed above about a title selling twice as much at $0.99 vs. when it’s priced at $2.99. So it’s kind of hilarious that I’m going to use other parts of the data to make a point. But whatever, apply the salt grains as necessary. This Smashwords survey isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s looking at sales across its entire catalogue, not just at the difference in sales volume when a specific book with constant, equal visibility is switched between different prices.

Anyway, that’s outside what I want to look at here, which is that big ol’ hump in unit sales for books priced $2.99-3.99, the slope between $4.99-6.99, and that floor at $7.99+.

If this data is trustworthy, you can use it to explore the various mini-markets of the overall ebook market. For many people, up to $3.99 is a bargain, an impulse purchase. Another smaller segment doesn’t think much of paying up to $6.99 for an ebook. Move to $7.99+, and you’re at frontlist prices. There’s no bargain at all.

Thus I think there’s a pretty crazy case for punting new books out the door at $3.99, max. Even if you’re an indie and you don’t charge much to begin with—few of us go higher than $4.99—just a small initial discount could pay off.

Whatever the case, applying traditional frontlist prices to new releases maximizes earnings from preexisting fans, but drastically reduces your ability to create new fans. Not just over the long-term, but during the short-term recommendation-driven visibility Amazon will grant you as a new release.

That by itself is a strong argument for inverting the traditional pricing structure. On top of that, you’re actually rewarding your existing fans for their loyalty by charging them less than the book’s eventual list price. Treat your readers well, and they’re more likely to stick around for the future. Yay, a lasting career.

I know there are a lot of good arguments against this general premise. Particularly in series, where you can put out new releases at whatever price you want and use the visibility of the new release to push potential readers toward the (bargain-priced!) beginning of the series. Even so, I think it’s worth thinking about. Particularly for standalones and the beginning of a new series, launching at a lower price than your “list” might be the best move.

And here’s the other end of the equation. There is demand for backlist, too. And it’s not all that different from the pent-up demand a fan of an author has for an author’s new books.

All books slide eventually. If you’re so successful that all your books never drop too far in the rankings, this won’t really apply, I guess. But there comes a point when a book has essentially lost all visibility on Amazon. It isn’t on any bestseller lists. It’s buried on the popularity lists. It may be in some alsobots, but mostly of books that aren’t selling anything, either. Amazon is sending few if any recommendation emails about it (which it will do for all books, it’s just more aggressive about new releases).

Meanwhile, a bargain price no longer matters, because no one else is seeing the book to take advantage of an impulse-purchase price. The only people seeing it are those who want it enough to search for it specifically. If your new release has earned you a reader who loves you enough to go hop through the rest of your unrelated catalogue, they’re not likely to blink if that book costs a dollar or two more than the popular stuff.

In practice, then, you might launch at $0.99 and gradually raise to $2.99-3.99 as you exhaust your visibility. Or launch at $2.99 and later move up to $4.99 as sales dwindle to the few who are ignoring the 2,000,000 other ebooks on Amazon to hunt down yours. (Or who are hunting for very specific books through keywords or whatever—though in that case, you will have competition among similar titles, so.)

I don’t care what specific prices you’d want to run with, personally, because everyone’s calculations are going to be different, and because I don’t ascribe to any philosophies about “devaluing your work” (let alone the entire ebook market—take that, books as we knew you!). Personally, all I care about is reaching enough readers to guarantee I can keep writing new books until the day I die and/or am replaced by a long-winded robot. Speaking of, I could have summarized most of this post with “Hey, loss leaders work.”

But given the way online bookstores promote new titles, and the sensitivities potential customers display toward various price points, I think there’s a case to do things backwards. To build your strategy not around preexisting demand, but around visibility.

The best way to do that? Start low, my friends. Devalue your work like there’s no tomorrow! And reap the benefits in the long run.

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Self-Publishing Podcast #75: Launch Strategies

A couple days ago, I rejoined the Self-Publishing Podcast once again. This time, we’re talking launch strategies, box sets, sales trends, and how to give a big boost to later releases in your series, among other things. This is either the third or fourth time I’ve been on the show—apparently I’m now the Justin Timberlake to the SPP’s SNL—but I had a particularly great time on this episode, and feel we covered an awful lot of ground.

My August and September were far and away my best months ever, so I was really happy to be able to break down what I did and explore how to replicate it. Hope it’s helpful.

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Getting Your Start as an Indie Author, Part 3: Strategies!

So, looking back over Part 1 and Part 2, here are the conclusions I’d put forward.

First, Amazon Select no longer offers much if any reward to most of its participants. Meanwhile, a new market has opened (Kobo), and while everyone is waiting for B&N to keel over and die, the Nook store is still selling boatloads of books every single day. Until they close, the sales are there. It’s hard to know exactly where Apple’s at, but they’re a legit ebookstore too. Lots of people make lots of money there. I sure don’t, but you can’t win ’em all.

So the current environment favors distributing everywhere in a way it didn’t back when Select was a magic bullet. Even if geographical or technical challenges makes it hard to publish direct to B&N, Apple, and Kobo, just use Draft2Digital or Smashwords.

Waiting to publish and/or promote is a bad idea (I hath decreed it!). So what do we do with our first book?

I see a few ways to go with this. The first option is to toss your first book into Select for a single three-month period with the knowledge it’s highly unlikely to do much for you. Call this the “At least it’s better than nothing.” In fact, let’s make sections!

“At Least It’s Better Than Nothing”

Sure, the other stores exist, and sell books, but with so few ways to advertise or otherwise reach Nook/Kobo/Apple readers, you’re sacrificing very little by starting out in Select. And free runs still have some utility. You may sell a few copies post-free. You may start to get a feel for how appealing your book is; don’t read too much into any one failure, but if it gives a bunch of copies away with little to no promotion, you might just be on to something. And perhaps most valuably, free runs are still a good way to garner some initial reviews to qualify your book for promotion at the various advertisers.

Here’s how I would handle it. Do a couple free runs immediately, just 1-2 days long. Feel free to extend them if you really explode, but try to save two free days. Next, schedule Book #2 to publish about a week before Book #1 expires from Select. (This may require waiting a short while to publish #1 or #2, so let’s just pretend I didn’t spend 1500 words condemning the idea of waiting in Part 2.) Do not enroll #2 in Select. Instead, schedule a free run on #1 for the day after #2 goes live, with the hope this will get #2 off to a stronger launch.

When #1 reverts to paid, see how it sells. If you’re satisfied with the way things are going, you can enroll #2 in Select at this point and re-up #1. But if Select is as dead as it is for most people, #1 is ready to expire and #2 was never enrolled. As soon as #1 exits the program, distribute both books to all channels, uploading directly wherever possible.

The idea here isn’t to use Select to rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales. Those days are long gone, sad trombone. Rather, the idea is to leverage the power of free to get readers to take a chance on you, to build up Book #1’s infrastructure (its reviews, alsobots, etc.), to gain mailing list subscribers, and to support the launch of #2. Any real sales over this period is just a bonus.

This is a very short-term plan and it’s highly unlikely to make you a rock star, but at least it’s a plan.

“The Boring Way That I Do Things: Sales and Ads”

Option number two is what I’m (mostly) currently doing. It’s not how I got here, but I think it should work all right, with a few modifications. Basically, it consists of publishing to all platforms, then running advertised sales, particularly to bolster new releases.

To get a little grittier with my nits, if I were just starting out with this method, I’d upload direct to all four major self-publishing platforms (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple). If for some reason you can’t upload to BN or Apple, use Draft2Digital. Their price changes go through much faster than Smashwords, and if you’re running regular sales, it’s going to be important to be able to change prices quickly–like within 24 hours. You’ll probably want to publish to Smashwords and distribute to all the other markets eventually, but honestly, they’re all so small you’re not missing out.

Then.. scramble for reviews.

And by reviews I mostly mean “Amazon reviews,” although BookBub will look at everything you’ve got, including Goodreads, so they’re all worth getting. The purpose isn’t the reviews themselves, but to get enough that the various ad sites will agree to advertise your book. While there’s no such thing as enough reviews, the scale we’re looking at is somewhere around 5-20; ~5 will qualify you for smaller sites, and ~20+ will start to look pretty good to the big ones.

How do you get these reviews? Honest ones, that is? Some people have had success with giveaways at LibraryThing and Goodreads (offer free copies in exchange for honest reviews), but that’s seriously all I know about that. I hate stuff like chasing reviews and it makes me want to give up and go home.

But the reviews aren’t going to just show up on their own, and in my experience it takes something like 100 sales to get 1 single review, so do the math. It could be months–years!–before your book has ~20 reviews arrive organically. You’ll have to chase them down somehow. If it helps, think of them as a Legend of Zelda sidequest. O brave warrior, you must track down the 20 Lost Reviews in order to unlock the Dungeon of Forbidden Advertising!

That out of the way, things are much simpler: find places that advertise ebooks, and book ads. To be a little more specific, find places that advertise ebooks well. Places that immediately cover the cost of the ad or come close to it. Some people like to argue that all advertising is valuable, because brand awareness, and when a consumer sees something seven times mumble grumble sales, but you’re not Crest toothpaste on a shelf with Arm & Hammer and the store brand. You’re one book on a shelf of two million. The people seeing your ad are probably never going to stumble over your book again.

I’m aware of five good ebook advertising sites. In roughly descending order: BookBub, POI, ENT, KBT, Book Blast. Generally speaking, it’s best to advertise at $0.99. At $0.99, these sites will generally break even or better, and the goal is to reach as many new readers as possible.

Run ads whenever your sales dry up, which as a new author will probably be always. And when book #2 arrives, try to have ads in place for book #1. It’s generally effective to drop to $0.99 for three days (the day before the ad, to ensure your price lowers; the day of the ad; and the day after to pick up the stragglers), but if you keep selling at $0.99 and you like what you’re seeing, stick with it as long as you like.

And that’s it, really. The downsides are there are only so many places to advertise, competition for spots is fierce, and BookBub is the only effective site I know about to reach beyond Amazon, but as they say, it is what it is. Even temporary boosts will reach new readers and may shake up your alsobots, leading to a longer tail of post-promo sales. It’s a long-term strategy, too. You’ll only be able to advertise any one book every so often, but as long as you keep writing new ones, that’s fresh material to promote.

This is the core of my current strategy, for whatever it’s worth, but I do have some qualms that it might be tough for brand-new authors to book ads at desirable sites. And there’s the review threshold to get over. But I see new authors doing this on KBoards right now, so it’s not impossible.

Now.. my favorite idea.

“The Nuclear Option!”

While I was mulling around the idea of this little series, I ran this idea by a group of writers I know–several of whom are much more successful than myself, and all of whom are very smart–and it was pretty much roundly rejected. So bear in mind that if this were a commercial, that commercial would say “Five out of six full-time indies think this is a Bad Idea!”

But it is, I think, what I would do if I were just starting today.

I would go permafree immediately.

For those just dipping their toes into the self-publishing waters, “permafree” means setting your book free permanently. Bit of a misnomer, as technically you can revert it to paid at any time, but the idea is to set it to $0.00 forever as a free introduction to your series. It’s a powerful tactic because it costs readers nothing to give your book a shot, and if they like it enough, they’ll go pay actual money for the later books in the series. Indies do this all the time. It’s one of our most basic tactics.

The unconventional bit of this is that writers generally don’t put it to use until they’ve got three books in the series out in the world.

The idea is to wait until you’ve got a couple sequels to make money from before you start giving the first one away for nothin’. But I’m not sure why the magic number is three. I’ve seen people go permafree with great results when they only had two books. So if it works for two, why not one??

…oh right, the part where you’re making zero money. But here’s what you’re making instead: readers. Of your stuff. At a much faster rate than you’ll be gaining them by charging $2.99. Readers who will (hopefully) go on to buy your sequels when they do come out (so long as you have a mailing list or other way to alert them), helping launch those books higher, and ultimately making you more money–and thus getting you closer to a real career–than you would have made waiting until book #3 to drop #1 to free.

And if you’d be worried about giving away a potential bestseller before it has the chance to find its legs, good news! The logistics of permafree require your book to start life as a paid title. Since you can’t set your BN price to $0.00 yourself, you’ll have to distribute your book there via Smashwords. It can take a few weeks for a SW-distributed book to go live at BN. Even after it does show up free on BN, it may take Amazon days, weeks, or months to pricematch to free.

And you can test the waters in the other stores as well. Upload direct to Kobo, Apple, and even BN and see whether the book takes off as a paid title. If it doesn’t, and you want to hasten the pricematching process, lower your price at Apple and Kobo to $0.00. As soon as the free SW version shows up at BN, pull your self-published version from sale.

It’s an extremely simple plan, there’s flexibility in the execution, and since advertising beyond Amazon is so limited, making a book permafree is probably the best option for reaching readers in the other stores. Amazon’s algos are pretty cruel these days. The trend is almost always down, and once your first 30 days as a new release are up, the cliff can come hard and fast. Diversifying your readership in other stores will help keep things steady between new releases.

Also, it’s pretty dang low-effort. Upload, tweak a couple prices, then remind Amazon that it’s free elsewhere until they pricematch. Once it qualifies (reviews etc.), sub it to freebie sites. That’s pretty much it. Go write!

But this plan isn’t without drawbacks. Some authors feel that books downloaded for free wind up with lower reviews than books people paid for, and there’s anecdotal and logical support for that idea (although no comprehensive studies I’m aware of). You’ll be giving up some unknown amount of initial income until your sequels arrive. If you’re on a tight budget, that’s a real consideration, especially if you could use those earnings to invest in snazzier covers or advertising or whatever. Someone suggested to me there’s psychological value in knowing total strangers have paid real money for a book you wrote, particularly in the fragile early days.

I’m unswayed. Free is one of the few tools brand-new authors have to make themselves competitive. If you can see yourself using it eventually, why wait? Why not fire it up right now and grab all the visibility you can in every store you can get into? Why not start gathering a mailing list right off the bat?

Anyway, let’s look at the timing on this. Day zero, you publish to Amazon, Smashwords, and wherever you’re uploading direct. It then takes a few days to be approved by Smashwords premium distribution (which you need to distribute to BN). If you haven’t met their formatting demands, you’ll have to try again; there’s a few more days. Once approved, it’ll probably be a couple days until it actually ships, and even then it can take 2-3 weeks for the free book to actually show up at BN. Once it does, Amazon rarely pricematches immediately. Even if you’re reporting your free book on their “tell us about a lower price” link, it can be days or weeks before they decide to match.

At this point, you’re beyond Amazon’s new release window, and if you’ve buckled down on the sequel, you should only be a couple months out from publishing. Yay. You gave #1 a shot as a paid title, and even if permafreeing it before #2 is out turns out to be a stupid idea, it’ll only be a stupid idea for a couple months until #2 goes live and permafree magically becomes a good idea.

You could hedge a bit more by waiting to set the permafree wheels in motion until #2 is almost ready. Finish up #2, then hit publish as soon as Amazon sets #1 to $0.00.

Anyway, this rationale is getting ridiculously long.

Let’s take a step back and look at what brand-new indies have to work with: virtually nothing. No fans, no reviews, no experience. The only way to accumulate those things is to publish a book and get it into readers’ hands. There are two factors in getting a reader to choose a book: first, they have to see it; second, it has to look interesting enough to overcome their resistance to buy. Making a book free creates visibility and reduces resistance. QED. I said QED!

Well, there you go. These are just ideas, obviously. None of them are sacred, particularly revolutionary, or likely to make anyone an instant King Kong bestseller. On the plus side, they’re very simple, they should work for almost all genres, and each route should be infinitely more effective than waiting for all the readers to spontaneously yank your book out of that pile of two million.

These should be looked at as customizable templates, too. For instance, it might make a lot of sense to start off with Better Than Nothing and transition to The Boring Way as soon as your first Select term is up–use your free days to pull in reviews and give your book a little test drive, then publish to the other stores 90 days later, bolstered by whatever ads you can scrounge together. In fact, if I weren’t bold enough to try the Nuclear Option, that’s probably what I’d do, personally.

Now, these strategies are all situational, dependent on the current ebook environment, but there’s an underlying strategy that should be effective no matter which way the Amazon algo-winds are blowing. SM Reine already wrote the book on the foundation of an indie career, but to summarize:

1) Write in a series

2) Start up a mailing list immediately

3) Do something to get your books in front of readers

That process, or something close to it, is basically the story of every big indie’s career. This post has focused on 3), but unless you’re also doing 1) and 2), it’s going to be much harder to continue building on your prior success.

When it comes to 3), 2013 feels tougher than 2012. Even in its post-May 2012, watered-down state, Select was a strong tool for reaching readers. After a series of algorithm changes starting in February 2013, however, the program is virtually useless for generating post-free sales. Nothing remotely as effective has shown up to replace it.

In a tough environment like that, I’d be looking for strategies that are low-risk–plans that will almost certainly result in the steady accumulation of new readers–yet are aggressive enough to make you stand out. Like instant permafree or regular $0.99 sales. It might take several books and a year of publishing before you start to see strong book launches, but at least there will be visible progress as a trickle of new readers joins your mailing list, Facebook page, blog, etc.

By contrast, I’m not really a fan of strategies where the potential payoff is huge, but where you might lose out on months and months of growth if things don’t come together. Like waiting to publish until you have multiple books ready to go. This is an attempt to swing for the fences that is likely to result in a strikeout.

Even so, I can’t deny the awesomeness of big bold moves. Whatever route you go down, it’s vital to understand that you can’t count on readers appearing from nowhere. You’ve got to learn how to reach them, whether it’s through direct social means (participating on Goodreads or whatever) or more passive, low-effort methods (presenting a book to potential readers via making it free or advertising a sale). Learn to do that, and you’ll be in good shape.

Good luck, everybody. I’m happy to discuss ideas in the comments. And if you’re just getting your start, or you’ve just broken through, I’d love to hear your experience.

P.S. — For unknown reasons, the comments section of this blog like to disappear sometimes. Refreshing a couple times will generally convince them to show up. This is one of the many things I lament, but don’t have time to fix. The glorious life of a mid-list indie.

I’m perfectly happy writing these posts for free, but if you feel like giving me a hand, I’ve just released a box set of my main series that’s currently just $0.99. It’s available at Amazon, B&N, and Kobo.

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Getting Your Start as an Indie Author, Part 2: Don’t Wait

(Previous post: Where We’re At Today)

That increasingly popular piece of advice comes in two main flavors, but it boils down to this: Wait.

Wait to self-publish until you have multiple books ready to go. Alternately, publish away, but don’t bother promoting any of them until you’ve got X many books out in the wild. Canny, subject-reading viewers might have already guessed where I stand on this issue, but there are some logical reasons to wait. Which I will now attempt to scrutinize to death.

In both cases, the idea of waiting is to conserve your resources until you’re more likely to hit critical mass. If you’ve only got one book, and you advertise it, or you give it away, that’s it. Readers don’t have anything else to pick up. You’ll get more bang for your buck if you hold off on the promo until you have several titles out there, all of which will benefit every time you promote each one. In the meantime, by focusing on your writing, you can get new material out there sooner.

Meanwhile, the advantage in waiting to publish is this: every store promotes new releases more heavily than old books. They all have their own ways of doing so, but new releases are more visible. In Amazon’s case, they’ll actively and heavily promote new books that are selling well. That’s why new books can get so sticky in the rankings. The #100 book in the store isn’t selling 700 copies each and every day by coincidence. It’s hanging out there because Amazon is pushing it to thousands of customers day after day.

So you don’t want to burn those new release days when you’re an unknown with zero readers and your book will sink into the sludge. Instead, by waiting to go live until you have multiple books, each one of those books will be propelled by new-release fuel–and if you’ve got enough rockets going off at once, with readers moving from one book to the next, you may coax the whole bundle into catching fire.

Both of these are smart ideas based on long-term thinking. However, I think they’re high-variance strategies. High risk/high reward. Especially waiting to publish. This may work out very well for a few people, but for most, I think it’s going to backfire.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that self-publishing is composed of two discrete skills: writing, and publishing. To succeed, you generally have to be good at both. Publishing includes a dirty word: marketing. I don’t know about you, but when I started out at this, my marketing skills blew. In part because I thought “marketing” meant “yelling at people on Twitter.” I’ve blathered at length about an indie author’s need to hone the craft of selling books, but the gist is this. If you wait to promote, or to publish, you also wait to learn how to sell your wonderful junk. If you’re a natural, maybe this isn’t so much of an issue, but it’s hard to know if you’re a natural until you’ve actually gotten out there and tried it.

The second reason not to wait–especially to publish–is this: self-publishing is no Field of Dreams-type shit. It isn’t true that “if you write it, they will come.” If you wait to publish until you have, say, three books, the most likely outcome is this: all three books will sink like stones.

You don’t have any fans waiting to snatch them up. A few of your friends and family might buy them–if you’re lucky–and a handful of people might stumble on them in the midst of obscure searches, but it is vital to understand that there are virtually no books that just start selling from scratch organically. When books hit big out of the blue, there is almost always an inciting push behind them. A bloc of readers pouncing all at once. After that initial burst of sales, Amazon starts pushing them to other readers, and if the books are appealing, they take off from there, but it’s like a wildfire: it would never have started without a spark.

I’m guessing proponents of waiting are perfectly aware of that, and would only recommend such a strategy in conjunction with a spark of some kind. My question is.. where does that spark come from?

From what I’ve seen, many of the people advising new indies to wait are romance authors. Romance is an unstoppable juggernaut. Go look at the Kindle bestseller lists; at any point in time, 35-50% of it will be romance. Romance authors have resources that don’t exist for other genres. There are entire communities and blogs devoted to spotlighting new romance books for their readerships’ consideration. If you can arrange to get your new releases announced by these signal-boosters, that may be all it takes.

But few if any of these resources exist for self-published authors in other genres. I don’t know of a single sci-fi/fantasy book blog of note. Not one that’s wide open to self-published authors, anyway. And certainly not one capable of moving the needle, as they say.

That means many of us, including romance authors who don’t have access to these resources, won’t have any audience whatsoever available to us at launch. Our new releases will be lucky to sell 1 copy/day by themselves, and after they’ve stopped being new releases, we’ll be lucky to do 1/week.

This was my experience, anyway, and in hanging around KBoards all the time, it seems to be typical. For first books, anyway. But if you publish your first book as soon as it’s ready–and then promote it–and you’ve set up a mailing list link in the back of your book so new fans can hear about the next one–then you will have an audience waiting for the second book. Modest, maybe, but extant. And that audience will provoke Amazon into promoting the new book to other customers, who will then be incited to check out the first book. Repeat with each book in the series, hopefully with a growing audience for every new book.

In a hypothetical example, say you’re a fairly speedy writer capable of finishing a new book every three months. You put out your first book as soon as it’s done. Book two comes three months later. Book three is out three months after that. That’s six months to learn how to publish and market, as well as six months to build up an audience.

If you wait, you’ve got zero firsthand experience and zero guaranteed readership. If you play your cards right, you may be able to make your sales blow up in a big way, boosted by all these new releases cross-promoting each other, but it’s a big gamble. That gamble is lessened, of course, if you’re one of those superheroes capable of writing a new book every month (so you’re only losing two months instead of six), and if you’re savvy enough to have built a waiting fanbase/inciting event even before you publish your first book.

But I would argue that if you’re that productive and that savvy, you’re going to succeed no matter what you do.

The other huge flaw in building a strategy around waiting is that it assumes you’ve written an appealing book. What if you’ve actually written a dud? It could even be a very good book, but it turns out it just doesn’t have that much appeal, or it’s surprisingly difficult to market. Worse yet, if this is a series, then you’ve just spent all that time writing a series of duds.

So get that first book out there, says I. Learn how to get it in front of readers and then discover whether those readers will react to it well enough to justify continuing the series. If not, well bummer, but at least you can move on to something else with more potential.

Convinced not to wait, then? Well, that’s all I got. At the absolute least, if you are going to wait to publish, make damn sure you’ve got a plan to immediately sell those books once they do go live. That will minimize the risk of everything tanking. Oh, and be ready to scramble. A good plan of battle never survives first contact with the enemy. (Note to self: quit describing readers as “the enemy.”)

There you go, a comically long argument of what not to do that delivers no useful information about what to do. Coming next: advice that might actually be useful! Part 3: Strategies!

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eBooks and the Myth of the "Summer Slump"

Books don’t sell in the summer.

Traditionally, the seasonality of book sales is decidedly Southern Hemisphere. Better sock away those December riches, because come July, it’s going to be slim pickings. Back when I was querying agents, summer was advised as both an unusually good and an unusually bad time to do so, because the publishing industry supposedly shuts down until adults come back from beaches and kids go back to school.

Dean Wesley Smith chronicled the “summer slump” here, stating publishing houses punted summer because “it was known that the lowest time for buying books by customers was May through the middle of September.” Despite the ebook/indie revolution, “That has not changed.” Just last week, Digital Book World led an article with “Typically July is one of the slowest months in book publishing.” Google “summer slump” and “book sales” and you’ll find dozens of indie authors advising other indies how to make it through the doldrums without losing hope even as sales (and incomes) slide away into the ooze.

I ran into this same phenomenon myself last year. Great May/June, okay July, then a long, steady slide, until my October was so bad–about $860, as my primary job–I was starting to wonder whether I could keep doing this. Thankfully, a new release turned things around.

Yesterday, someone on KBoards asked whether, in order to avoid the summer slump, they should wait to release their next book until fall. Given what we know, it’s a good question. There’s just one problem.

Books sell just fine in summer.

eBooks do, at least. If you compare the number of sales needed to sustain a given rank on Amazon’s Kindle store, to my eye, it’s the same in July as it was in February. As per the quick and dirty formula I tossed out in that post, to determine how many copies a Kindle title is currently selling, take 100,000 and divide it by its sales rank. Or, to put it another way, rank x sales = 100,000. This rule of thumb comes close whether you’re selling 1/day or 1000/day.

Let’s look at the rank and daily sales of several titles from this July and see how they compare to the numbers from February.

Rank x Sales = Score ; Estimated February Rank

#95,000 x 1 = 95,000

#12,000 x 10 = 120,000
#2429 x 50 = 121,450
#852 x 120 = 102,240
#819 x 136 = 111,348
#767 x 148 = 113,516
#325 x 280 = 91,000

All right, whole bunch of numbers. What are we actually looking at? An easy way to conceptualize this is to go to the extremes. If Amazon sold so few books that all it took to rank #100 was 1 sale/day, you’re looking at a score of 100 (#100 x 1). By contrast, if it was selling so many books that a rank of #100 required ten million sales/day, your score is 1,000,000,000 (#100 x 10,000,000).

To put it another way, say that it took you 100 sales yesterday to rank #1000. If today it took 200 sales to stay at #1000, that would mean all the books above you were suddenly selling much more, too. Yesterday, your hypothetical score was 100K; today, it’s 200K.

Thus a lower “score” is indicative of lower storewide sales volume while a higher score means more ebooks are being sold on Amazon each day.

Across a broad range of ranks, the average score of those seven books above is 107,793. If anything, more Kindle books are selling right now this summer than were selling in the weeks immediately after the Christmas boom had calmed down.

For ebooks, the “summer slump” is a myth.

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. While the sample size leaves something to be desired, the most obvious qualification to this methodology is that the “100,000 formula” isn’t a real formula, but more of a rule of thumb. It’s imprecise. Back in February, for instance, it was also true that 10 sales/day would sustain a rank of #12,000, and 120,000 ≠ 100,000.

So if you think I had my original score wrong, and you believe 120,000 was “normal,” then our current score of 108,000 would indicate sales are down by 10% from February.

For most ranks I was looking at in February, however, the score was closer to 100K. Largely in the 95-110K range. To my eyes, the current score of 108K is virtually identical to February. And the number of sales needed to sustain that #12,000 rank was the same in February as it is right now in late July.

That, to me, is the key takeaway: Amazon ebook sales may be down for the summer, but it is not immediately obvious. It’s even possible they’re up. If the slump is so small it can’t be detected, I don’t think it can be called a “slump” at all.

ADDENDUM

The above table is probably a little confusing, since the “score” is pure abstraction. So here’s another way to think about it. Below, here are the same books above translated into estimated February ranks vs. actual July ranks.

February – July – “Winner”

#100,000 – #95,000 – February

#10,000 – #12,000 – July

#2000 – 2429 – July

#833 – #852 – July

#735 – #819 – July

#676 – #767 – July

#357 – #325 – February

If the July rank is worse, that means it would take more sales in July to have climbed as high as it did in February, and thus volume is up now (and vice versa). “Winner” indicates which month seems to have seen higher sales.

Two notes here–I can tell you the February estimates are wrong for the ranks of #10,000 and #2000. The real numbers were more like #12,000 and #2200-2400. Meanwhile, in July, that works out to a rank of.. #12,000 and #2429. Again, it looks like ebook sales volume is heavier in July 2013 than it was in February 2013–but they’re close enough to look pretty much the same.

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Quick and Dirty Math: How Many Self-Published Authors Are Making a Living?

A couple days ago, Passive Guy suggested Amazon should make a bigger deal out of the success of KDP and its self-publishing program. In it, he included a made-up press release as an example of how powerful such a thing would be, including these (again, fictional) numbers:

The top-selling 50 authors publishing through KDP received an average of over $110,000 in monthly royalty payments.

Over 20,000 KDP authors earned monthly royalty payments of more than $10,000.

Over 60,000 KDP authors earned monthly royalty payments of more than $5,000.

Just to be perfectly clear, these numbers aren’t the real ones. They’re just an example of how startling they might be. But it made me wonder: is there a way to guess what the numbers might really be?

Well, I’m about to try. My process will be quick and dirty, but I think we might be able to ballpark it.

First off, David Gaughran has estimated indie books make up 30% or more of Amazon’s numerous bestseller lists. His work was indirectly backed up by a press release from Nook Press that 25% of their sales were indie. Another recent quote from Kobo put their indie authors at 20% of total unit sales, but they’re the new kids on the block and their discoverability isn’t all that great yet. I’m sticking with 25%.

Next, let’s look at potential earnings. How many sales does it take to earn, say, $1000 a month? For a $4.99 book (a little on the high end, for indies, but common enough), your royalties at 70% are going to be $3.50. Not all sales are at 70%–some are to markets that only pay 35%, like Australia. Up to 10% of my sales are to 35%-royalty territories. Treating that as a rule of thumb, we need to adjust our $3.50 figure, multiplying it by 0.95. In other words, for every sale of a $4.99 book, the author can expect to take home about $3.33.

Neat how that works out, because $1000 / $3.33 = 300 sales/month. 10/day. On Amazon.com, selling 10 books/day will give you a Kindle rank of about #12,000.

So at any given moment, 12,000 books are hitting that baseline of 300/month. And maybe something like 25% of those titles are indie. Meaning, at any given moment, something like 3000 indie books are earning $1000+/month on Amazon.com.

Upping it to $2000 means 600 copies/month, or 20/day, or a rank of #6000. 25% of 6000 = 1500 indie books earning $2000+/month.

To make $5000 at $4.99, a book has to sell 1500/month, or 50/day, or maintain a rank of about #2200-2400ish. So maybe something like 600 indie books are earning $5000 or more during any given month.

Note I’m saying “books,” not “authors.” That’s because translating this from books –> authors is very complicated and I’m not sure I can take a reasonable stab at it. But let’s pretend, for the moment, the two are equivalent.

Now, the numbers above are just for Amazon.com. Amazon UK is something like 15% the size of the US store. Amazon DE is an order of magnitude smaller, and the other stores barely register (for indie English-language sales, anyway), so let’s lump them all together and call it an extra 20%. That gives us the following numbers:

~3600 KDP books might make $1000+/month

Of those, ~1800 might make $2000+/month

And ~720 indie titles might make $5000+/month

These numbers look a lot smaller than PG’s, both in quantity and in income brackets, and this is with a price of $4.99, which is higher than most indie books. But here is the giant, messy, complicating favor that I have so far avoided like the plague: most successful indie authors have more than one book. Most have three or seven or twenty. That means the 3600 books capable of making $1000/month are unlikely to be doing so for 3600 different authors. The real number is more like, I don’t know, 1500-2500 authors.

But this also means many indie authors are capable of making nontrivial money with ranks much worse than #12,000. They just have to have more than one book.

Taking a stab at all that is.. daunting. But before I see if I can do that–which will require another post–let’s work with the numbers we do have some more. Because Amazon isn’t the only game in town.

In fact, conventional wisdom says they have 60% of the US ebook market. If so, by comparison, B&N has maybe 10-12%. I don’t know how many indies make up the remaining ~30%, but let’s pretend that indies have a quarter of those markets, too. Probably generous, but what can you do. Research, I guess.

So if Amazon is 60% of the US market, let’s take our Amazon.com number of 3000 indie books earning $1000+ and prorate that across the rest of the market by multiplying by 1.67. That gives us 5000. If we rashly assume that non-American English markets follow Amazon’s trends, and we add 20%, that bumps it up to 6000. Across the English-language indie ebook spectrum, then, we might have something like this:

6000 indie books might make $1000+/month

Of those, 3000 might make $2000+/month

And about 1200 indie titles might make $5000+/month

Now, this is really, really casual math. It requires a lot of assumptions and a lot of multiplying, which means that any mistakes are compounded. So don’t treat it as gospel. It’s just a rough stab.

And it’s possible these numbers are a fraction of the indie authors making a decent to significant income off their writing. Not only do most indies have multiple books–I didn’t account for any books making less than $1000/month, but ten books at $100/month will earn you the exact same money–but all these figures have been drawn from the lowest ends of the scale. If a #2000 rank is good for $5000/month, that means about 500 indie books are doing that well on Amazon–but the ones on the upper end are doing much, much better. An indie with a $2.99 book ranked #100 is making something along the lines of $1000-1500 a day.

Much of that top money will wind up repeatedly skewed to the top indies, of course. But for illustrative purposes, if you can launch a new $2.99 book to #100 and stick it there for 30 days, you’ve just made something like $30,000, minimum. On one book for one month. It doesn’t have to sell a single extra copy for you to get by for the next year in most parts of the US.

This process and more modest versions of it happen on Amazon every day. You put out a new release, and (if it sells fairly well) Amazon promotes it for thirty days; a few weeks or months later, it (generally) slides down the charts, maybe until it’s down there where no one can see it. It would be largely unaccounted-for in the methodology I put together here.

I don’t know how to account for that (or for the “most authors have multiple books” problem, which cuts both ways). But I think that, at a conservative estimate, it’s likely that at least 10,000 indie authors are making at least a part-time wage from their writing. And it could be a whole lot more.

I don’t know how that compares to the population of traditional authors, either. But if nothing else, there’s evidence that the indie revolution has provided a career for thousands and thousands of writers who didn’t have one before.

And that’s pretty cool.

ETA: An earlier version of this post put the $5000+ club at 1500, not 1200. But let’s not allow my failure at basic multiplication to detract from the credibility of this post!

As long as I’m adding this postscript, I should note that one of the reasons I show my work is so other people can identify any errors (and so people can tweak the sliders, should they disagree with my assumptions). If you think I’ve made an error, or you’ve got an idea for how to attack more complex problems like the “multiple books” issue, please speak up!

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Self-Publishing and Failure: A Horrifying Look at My First Covers

As self-published authors, we don’t talk about failure enough.

Tobias Buckell recently wrote a piece about “survivorship bias” and its relation to self-publishing. He argues that the problem with self-publishing is we only hear from the winners. The survivors. When all you hear about are the successes, your view of how easy it is to succeed will be wildly distorted. His argument is based on this great article from You Are Not So Smart, which you should totally read.

Done? Yay. In response to Buckell, authors on KBoards have raised the interesting counterpoint that literally every single trad-published author is a survivor, meaning their whole perspective is skewed. Which.. is tough to argue with. On the other hand, I don’t think it nullifies his point.

A lot of people are self-publishing. Very few of them do well at it. And you almost never hear–and thus learn–from the failures.

Well, I named this blog Failure Ahoy for a reason. I think failure is awesome! Failure is what happens when you try. Fail enough, and you might even succeed. With that in mind, I’m going to post more about failure. I want to make it okay to suck. I have failed in many ways along my self-publishing journey, but there is no more stark or hilarious an illustration of that failure than my first covers. Man, I might need to brace myself here. Like with tequila.

Okay, ready if you are. Let’s dig up some corpses.

Breakers, Cover #1 – February 2012

COMMENTARY: Okay, this one isn’t really a corpse (don’t worry, they’re coming). It’s just the wrong cover for the book. I like it a lot, though. The way the text is broken up and the subtle map is very cool. Awesome concept. But what does this cover say about the book inside it? Looks literary, right? Perhaps something involving sidewalks? And thus a new genre is born.

But my book’s about the end of the world. Viruses and aliens. If my book were more like The Road and less War of the Worlds, I think this cover would be a great fit. However, this book came out during the Golden Age of Amazon Select, which I used to get rolling after 12 solid months of self-publishing failure. As I was planning and executing my free runs, I noticed a couple things.

First, it was kind of hard to get this book listed by the major freebie sites. Second, when my book was free, it didn’t do so well compared to other indie titles in my genre. Yet after its free runs it sold pretty well, relatively speaking, and I was getting some good reviews. After a couple months of carefully comparing my book to others like it, I thought I might have an all right book, but I was pretty sure my cover wasn’t properly expressing the genre.

Breakers, Cover #2 – May 2012

COMMENTARY: Take two. My giveaway numbers for my first three free runs with Cover #1 were 1000 copies, 1600, and about 2000. In its first three months, aided by those free runs, it sold about 800 copies.

When I first went free with this one, my second and current cover, I gave away 25,000 copies. In the 30 days following, it sold 2765 more (Select no longer works like this, unfortunately). Twelve months later, it’s sold over 20,000.

Those sales have also been aided by two sequels, a permafree novella, about 200 more reviews on book one, and plunging into the non-Amazon markets, but I think it’s pretty clear the second cover was much better at driving sales. Articles like this–“The Real Cost of Self-Publishing a Book“–like to play up the costs for cover art, editing, etc. That article says low-end covers start at $150 and can run as high as $3500.

This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I got this cover for $75. I was still very poor at that point, so I spent a lot of time hunting down every cover artist who charged $100 or less. This artist had primarily done YA and covers involving women in snazzy dresses. Not really what you think of when you’re looking for someone to put together a cover for a post-apocalyptic novel full of violence and aliens, but after poring over her portfolio, I thought she could do it.

This was probably the first time I had been right about anything. But it took me three self-published novels, several collections of short stories, and 15 months to reach the point where I had the resources, experience, knowledge, and motivation to sort through these artists, find the one I liked best, and hire her.

The White Tree, Cover #1 – February 2011

COMMENTARY: …and this was how it all started. I made this cover myself, and I’ll give myself credit for this much: I didn’t try to do too much with it. I knew my talents as an artist (none) and didn’t try to overreach.

And that’s about all I did right. Interesting choice on my part to leave the base of the trunk hanging there above the line. Was I unable to draw a couple plain white lines to connect them? Apparently.

I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking, but I was pretty satisfied with this cover at first. I thought it was kind of iconic. If nothing else, you couldn’t beat the production cost ($0). Also, in early 2011, there weren’t a lot of great self-published covers out there. It didn’t look as bad then as it does now. Most of all, it simply felt incredible that, after ten years of pursuing agents and editors, one of my books was finally for sale.

But enough contextualizing. This is not a good cover. Any fool can see that, but apparently I wasn’t your average fool. A part of me knew I’d need to do better once I could afford it, but I thought the writing inside the book was good enough to overcome its humble cover. Ha! Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!

I sold about 100 copies of this in 2011.

The White Tree, Cover #2 – February 2012

COMMENTARY: I still like this cover. I think it’s pretty and captures the mood of the book. It was within my budget ($65) and paid for itself many times over. Thanks to it, and beneficial, now-defunct Select algorithms, I sold maybe 2000 copies of this book in 2012.

With that in mind, I will now reveal the lesson I was only just beginning to take to heart in 2012. This wisdom is so deep and hard-won that I’m not sure anyone else in the history of self-publishing has ever before expressed it:

SPEND SOME MONEY ON YOUR GODDAMN COVERS

I am deeply sympathetic to anyone working with a limited budget. I know what it feels like to make the reckless decision to spend your money on feeding yourself instead of buying a cover for some pipe dream self-publishing venture. But the good news is the market’s matured. It’s 2013 and you can get amazing pre-made covers for as little as $30. No matter how broke you are, find a way to save up that $30.

Incidentally, I might still be using this cover except I wasn’t happy with the way the cover for the sequel turned out. That meant redoing both of them.

The White Tree, Cover #3 – December 2012

COMMENTARY: This cover and the one for its sequel cost a whole bunch. Epic fantasy illustrations will do that to you.

I felt okay shelling out for a third version of the cover because I figured a) it would easily pay for itself long-term, and b) I’d never have to upgrade this series again. It’s been close to six months and I probably just broke even on them. Even with the new covers, these books only sell a fraction as well as my Breakers novels. I guess covers aren’t everything!

The Roar of The Spheres, Cover #1 – March 2011

COMMENTARY: HAHAHAHA

Now, in my defense, I was using this as a placeholder while my real cover came in, and it was only live for a week or two, but…no, you know what, that’s enough. This is what happens when you have no money and no experience self-publishing and you think the words inside are all that matters.

This is what failure looks like.

The Roar of the Spheres, Cover #2 – March 2011

COMMENTARY: The one cover I spent real money on in 2011. This cover cost $125 and I still think it looks great.

But apparently the world disagrees with me, because this is my worst-selling novel by leaps and bounds. So far, I have sold 3 copies of it on Amazon this month. It is May 29th.

To put it another way:

See that amazing downward line between July 2011 and February 2012? The reason that line isn’t jagged like the other parts of the graph is because it sold zero Amazon copies for six straight months.

Its failure to sell despite a sweet new cover is the main reason I didn’t pay to redo the cover on The White Tree for nearly a year. I had “learned” that a new cover doesn’t guarantee a damn thing. And it doesn’t, necessarily–but if you learn how to get your book in front of shoppers, which I had no clue how to do at that point in time, it can make all the difference.

But I wasn’t in position to learn better until the Select program allowed me to get my books in front of readers. It was only then that I started to get a feel for the impact a cover can have on purchasing decisions. And to imagine how my books look when they’re jumbled up with every other title in the store. How critically important it is to make them stand out from the crowd–while at the same time telling a potential reader, “Hey, this is a story about X. If you like stories about X, you might like this book.”

Oh, and for the record, I think Spheres needs a new cover. I love this one, but as with my first Breakers cover, it doesn’t capture the genre. Or maybe I really am the only person who likes it. There’s no guarantees I’m done failing with covers yet.

If I can ever convince myself it’s a good enough book to bother with, I’ll probably try something with a spaceship on it. That last sentence is ironic but also 100% true.

CONCLUSION

Don’t do what I did?

Seriously, that’s the immediate takeaway here: your first covers don’t have to be perfect, but sweet fancy Moses, make sure they’re professional. These days, “professional” doesn’t have to cost any more than $30-60. Later on, if you’re making some sales and feel more confident investing $150-500+ on a cover, you can upgrade. In all honesty, it won’t hurt your career to have a bad cover–because you have no career yet–but it will sure hurt your feelings to wonder why no one wants to buy the book it represents. Go without sales for long enough, and you might give up.

It’s the middle of 2013, and I feel like “Pay for a decent cover” is such widespread and commonsense advice that it’s hardly worth posting about. But I don’t know, maybe there are still lots of people out there it might help. We rarely hear from the people struggling to sell a single copy. If you see your stuff in my early covers, a small investment could make a big difference.

If nothing else, the ones I did myself are pretty funny.

But there’s also this. Some people have the sense, talent, and up-front funds to succeed immediately. But I think most of us are pretty crappy when we start out. It’s virtually guaranteed.

Meanwhile, if all you’re hearing about are the mountains of gold everyone else is making, and there’s not a word spoken about all the junk those former failures went through until they started to succeed now and then, it can make you feel pretty bad.

The real takeaway is that learning to self-publish is a process. In hindsight, the lessons and solutions look obvious, but when you’re mired in the middle of it, it’s never easy to know where to go next.

I’ve learned a few things about covers, but in other areas of the game, I continue to fail mightily. I look forward to talking all about it.

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