indie authors

A Brief Note on Hachette v. Amazon

Right now, it’s hard to get through the day without stumbling over a new story, opinion, or petition regarding the ongoing dispute between Amazon and Big 5 publisher Hachette. For the most part, I don’t have a “side” on the issue — I largely agree with David Gaughran, who cautions against leaping to conclusions about business negotiations between two behemoths when we know virtually nothing about the terms either side is asking for.

Well, it turns out one of the reasons we don’t know much about those terms or the negotiations is that, according to a letter from Kindle VP David Naggar, Hachette didn’t even respond to Amazon’s request to discuss things until after their contract expired in March.

Actually, strike that — Hachette didn’t even respond then. Per the letter, Naggar says that:

We reached out to Hachette for the first time to discuss terms at the beginning of January for our contract which terminated in March. We heard nothing from them for three full months. We extended the contract into April under existing terms. Still nothing. In fact we got no conversation at all from Hachette until we started reducing our on-hand print inventory and reducing the discounts we offer customers off their list prices. Even since then, weeks have gone by while we waited for them to get back to us.

In other words, big, bad, bullying Amazon didn’t start leaning on Hachette over disagreements in terms. They only started leaning on Hachette after Hachette had spent months ignoring Amazon’s attempts to negotiate.

Hard to negotiate when one side refuses to talk.

Even so, and even as a self-published author, I’m not especially interested in defending Amazon. Nor even of criticizing Hachette. For all I know, Hachette was stalling negotiations because it was the only way they could divert a gigantic meteor on a collision course with Earth.

What I’m interested in are the facts. The fact that there weren’t any facts at all only goes to illustrate that authors haven’t been rallying behind Hachette because Hachette is a guardian of literature and Amazon is a gold-grubbing Smaug.

They’ve been doing so because Hachette is the one in control of their paycheck*.

Otherwise, how can you accuse Amazon of not playing fair when Hachette is refusing to step foot on the field?

*You can argue the same thing goes for indie authors backing Amazon. Most of indies’ talk, however, has been in response to the rather one-sided media coverage of this whole affair. Completely different context, in my opinion.

Additionally — I readily admit there’s a danger in taking Naggar’s account at face value. He is one of Amazon’s biggest dogs, after all, and there’s an obvious risk that he’s spinning or omitting the details. If it’s a lie that Hachette’s been so unresponsive, however, it’s a bold one — and only supports the idea that we have no damn idea what’s happening between the two of them, and might form our opinions accordingly.

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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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Write. Publish. Repeat: If You’re an Indie Author, You’ll Probably Want This

In “stuff you might want to consider purchasing” news: the guys from the Self-Publishing Podcast have put out a book about (you guessed it!) self-publishing. Called Write. Publish. Repeat., it’s available on Amazon, Amazon UK, Nook, and Kobo.

If you’re not familiar with the SPP crew, well, they helped reinvent serialized fiction for the digital era and were some of the first writers contracted for Amazon’s own serial program. They’re insanely prolific—like, millions of words a year; David Gaughran recently blogged about the methods described in their book—and their podcast is one of the best resources out there for independent authors. WPR is the distillation of nearly two years of that podcast into one book.

For the moment, it’s available for $2.99, but I think it will be raised to its list price of $5.99 pretty quick. Hope you find it useful.

(Extra special bonus: in it, they compare me to Justin Timberlake. Next time, I will insist they compare JT to me.)

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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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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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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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Amazon’s Vested Interest in Indie Authors

This morning, a post on Kboards mentioned that Amazon has a new “Indie” section of their storefront. Within a handful of posts–and ignoring the fact this list is actually two years old and has been browsable for months, if not that entire two-year period–the thread was awash in posts proclaiming that this was the first step in Amazon’s master plan to shutter indies away in some self-publishing ghetto, where normal shoppers would never see our tainted wares.

Amazon won’t do that. It’s in their vested interest to keep indies in the same population as trad-published books. Segregating us to an indie dungeon would only hurt them.

Why?

Well, for one thing, Amazon thinks the ebook market does best when most titles are $2.99 – 9.99. Major publishers prefer to charge as much as they can. Indie authors price almost exclusively at $0.99 – 5.99 and are probably the single biggest pressure for downward prices in the ebook market.

But yes, Amazon has no use for us and it’s just a matter of time until we’re stuffed into the closet.

In the meantime, rather than fostering the race to the bottom (another major indie boogeyman), comparing Smashwords’ yearly surveys from 2012 and 2013 indicates indie prices have gone up in the last year, with more and more indies pricing and selling well at $3.99 – 5.99. Meanwhile, the average price of ebooks on Kindle bestseller lists has recently fallen to the $7-7.50 range. Right in the middle of Amazon’s $2.99 – 9.99 sweet spot. There now exists a band of prices covering every point between free and $14.99 (and up), allowing Amazon to target every conceivable type of reader, from extreme bargain-hunters to those who equate low prices with low quality.

But I’m sure now is the time when the ebook market will stabilize forever, allowing Amazon to toss us out like last week’s leftovers.

Even if prices were to magically stabilize here, a thriving indie market gives Amazon access to tens of thousands of titles no one else has. They have more books and more data than anyone else in publishing. By not setting arbitrary prices or restricting what gets published, they don’t have to make guesses about what might sell or how to sell it. They have hundreds of thousands of books creating a living ecosystem they can analyze to make their storefront even better–and they’re the only ones with access to that data. The more authors they allow in, and the more those authors are allowed to innovate, the more Amazon learns, and the bigger the advantage they have over every other publishing company on Earth.

But obviously, sooner or later Amazon is going to decide the jig is up and they’ve learned everything there is to know about ebooks and publishing.

We cost Amazon nothing. We’re free money. The only possible threat indies pose to their business is if we somehow poison the pool with bad books, but they’ve built their system so no one sees those books. And sometimes books that everyone would agree are “bad”–terrible editing, ugly covers, derivative plots–sell like gangbusters anyway. Why? I don’t know. But I bet Amazon has a few theories.

Because they were happy to let everyone publish, let consumers decide what they wanted to buy, and take advantage of that emergent behavior to get even better.

It’s tougher than ever to get started as an indie, but I think that has much less to do with Amazon squeezing us and more to do with how hypercompetitive indie authors have become at every aspect of the business. As we continue to innovate, not only does Amazon get 30-65% of everything we sell, they learn everything about how we sell it and what their customers want. The moment Amazon starts segregating us from the market is the moment they forfeit their knowledge-advantage to Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and anyone else looking to grab a corner of the ebook world.

If Amazon’s business model is a) be stupid and b) hand over the keys to the castle to their competitors, then yes, they might want to quash or segregate indie books.

But if they want to maintain dominance, they’ll let us continue to mix it up with the big boys just like we’ve been doing since the launch of KDP (or DTP, if you’re old school). Because collectively, indie authors continue to be one of their sharpest tools they have to remain the biggest, the smartest, and the most powerful player in the bookselling industry.

And that’s not going to change any time soon.

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Self-Publishing 101: David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Visible

So you have written a book. After long, thoughtful consideration, possibly in the form of a sixth shot of tequila, you have decided to self-publish it. Unfortunately, for most of us indie authors, the next step is much tougher than writing the book itself: getting people to see the damn thing.

Note I say “see” instead of “buy.” The distinction’s intentional. If you’ve already gotten a potential reader to your book’s product page, the techniques for convincing them to buy it are very limited and very simple: an eye-catching, professional cover. A compelling blurb. A strong sample. And a reasonable price.

But that advice is so common-sense and commonplace that chances are your eyes glazed over while you were reading it.

The real challenge is getting readers to see your book in the first place. And the advice on that front tends to be limited, contradictory, or flat-out wrong. Well, I’ve got some good news for you: David Gaughran, author of the excellent self-publishing primer Let’s Get Digital, has a new book out dedicated to understanding how to get your own books in front of potential readers. It’s called Let’s Get Visible, and it’s available just about any place you might like to buy it, including Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Kobo.

I’ll be right up front and say I’m a friend of David’s, so take that for what it’s worth. But I read the book and I think it’s pretty dang good. Readers of this blog are probably already familiar with the mechanics of Amazon’s popularity lists, but Visible also covers some critical business involving categories, advertising, and launch strategies. In fact, I employed what he calls “Going for Broke” to launch my last Breakers novel Knifepoint. (Although at the time it may have been labeled “Balls to the Wall.”)

Other things I appreciate about Visible: the strategies and concepts he outlines don’t take much time to put in place, they’re all ethical and above-board, and they help provide a framework for understanding how future changes to Amazon’s recommendation system will impact your particular approach. The problem with digital publishing is the specifics change all the time. If you’ve got a handle on the theory behind how bookstores promote a title, it gets a whole lot easier to roll with the punches.

Anyway, I’m not much for a hard sell, but I think it’s going to help a lot of people. If you’re an indie author, you should absolutely go take a look.

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No Rules, No Maps, No Dogma, No Limits: A Failure Ahoy! Manifesto

I’m about to spend a few thousand words to make a very simple point.

My goal, career-wise, is to make a living writing fiction. If that is your goal as well, we are very lucky to be alive right now! For one thing, by all accounts, the past smelled terrible. For another, we now have more paths than ever toward our destination.

But the more paths that crop up, the more rules appear about how they ought to be followed. And the problem isn’t that there’s many different paths. The problem is there are many different landscapes. And they aren’t static. Old ones change shape while new ones are summoned into existence every day.

This means anyone trying to sell you a map is probably pointing you in the wrong direction.

Last night, indie blogger/novelist/guru David Gaughran added another feather to his cap: he managed to get banned from a forum he hadn’t participated in for a year.

His crime? The moderators of AbsoluteWrite believed he was trolling their forums with sockpuppets.

Link goes to an account of the incident, complete with hilarious screengrabs. The gist is that an AW member made a joke, the joke got misinterpreted, and a highly dedicated moderator swiftly discovered the poster in question had some IP addresses in common with David Gaughran–possibly because they have both posted to AW from Ireland, which isn’t a super-big country. Regardless, the moderator accused the poster of being a Gaughran sockpuppet, and when the poster insisted he was a person instead of a sock, he got banned on the spot.

Nevermind that the accused, Michael Reilly, has his own book and author page (complete with photo) on Amazon, Smashwords, and more, along with a Facebook fan page, user profiles on other sites, etc. Quite a sting that crafty David Gaughran cooked up, fabricating a whole new identity–and writing a full-length novel–for the sole purpose of infiltrating AW and making subtle jabs at its moderators.

On the other hand, that would explain why we’re having to wait so long for Let’s Get Visible.

I have two points to make. First–and most importantly–this is really, really funny. Second, AW is a respected institution and resource for writers, and it is clearly insane.

Maps and the unchangeable lines drawn on them come in many forms. The reason David Gaughran is such a persona non grata at AW is that he’s an unapologetic advocate of self-publishing–and AW is famously and fanatically anti-self-publishing. The site apparently considers it the height of career suicide. Self-publishers are regularly banned from the site. Other figures booted from the site include indie supernova Hugh Howey, and Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing. Ridan has since…wandered off into the wilderness…but at the time of Sullivan’s banning, the company was cutting a trail made of hundred dollar bills.

These people would be valuable resources, authors and/or publishers making a killing from the shifting publishing landscape. They might possibly have some valuable insight into making a career as an author. But the dogma at AbsoluteWrite is that self-publishing is not a valid career path. So out these people go. Without their voices around as counterpoints, the AW forums become echo chambers warning each other about cliffs that aren’t there. Remaining members who could be making a living as a writer self-publishing right now may never give it a shot.

We’re not talking about the art of writing here. We’re talking about its business. When it comes to business, on what Earth is it more important to cling to ideology? Like the path is more important than the destination? This is about making a living writing, not bushido.

Why not encourage people to pursue whatever path might finally give them the career they’ve always dreamed of?

I consider Dean Wesley Smith a valuable source of information. He’s a hardworking, dedicated professional, and if you follow his advice about productivity, about regularly writing new books and putting them in position to sell, you’ll speed through the swamps or the deserts or whatever you want to call the long, suffering-filled slogs that begin most writer’s careers. That advice is pure gold.

But why does some of his other advice have to be so inflexible? So rigidly defined?

He believes an author should distribute to as many markets as possible. That includes ruling out the option of Amazon Select, which requires you to sell (ebooks) exclusively through Amazon. Granting exclusivity, he argues, is short-term thinking; every second you’re restricted to Amazon is one second you’re not building your presence in other markets.

This isn’t a bad idea. The problem is when it’s treated as an ironclad First Principle.

I launched my career through Select. Within the same year, I moved out of it, but I still think it’s a good play for beginning authors who don’t already have fans or a platform. It can be a pretty dang nice program for established authors, too–people like Ryk Brown and Debora Geary, both of whom sold 100,000+ books last year, are still in it, and they’re no chumps. Not to get too heavily into math, but being in Select directly sustains their success–their high visibility means their books are some of the most-borrowed in the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. Not only do they get paid for these borrows, but the borrows get applied to their sales rank, helping ensure they remain visible to other shoppers. This is a long-term strategy. If self-publishing is a dark and unknown sea, Select is their raft.

Granted, very few of us are Brown or Geary. But a whole lot of us are entering the indie frontier with nothing but a book and the hope it will be seen. And one of the very few ways to get it seen is to take advantage of the powerful tools of KDP Select.

Smith is regrettably dogmatic about promotion, too. In short, he considers it a waste of time until you have a significant backlist–25+ titles. Again, the concept makes sense–don’t waste time promoting when you should be spending that time writing new books–but following it to the letter will often do more harm than good. How long does it really take to set up a Select giveaway? Or to book an ad? Ten minutes? At the cost of a couple hundred lost words, you might walk away with hundreds of extra sales. Maybe enough to ensure you can spend next month writing, too.

As a guideline, his advice is good: “Hey, careful not to spend too much time flogging your books. Remember, the best advertising is a new release.”

As a rule, however, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Writing 25+ books will take most people 5-10 years. I don’t think you have to wait nearly that long to take an active role in selling your work. I have seen dozens of people write several books a year while promoting the books they’ve already written. Because of that, they’re selling copies and making fans today.

That feels like long-term thinking to me.

I’m an indie author. A self-publisher. I’m proud of it. I spend a lot of time at the Kboards Writer’s Cafe. There are many amazing people there who are incredibly generous and eager to share their advice, experience, and even personal financial information with their fellow authors, helping us all navigate the most brutal coastlines and unmapped interiors. I believe it’s the best self-publishing resource in the world.

But I don’t think self publishing is the first, best, or only way to El Dorado. And if AW is pro-trad–and even phrasing it in those terms exposes how ridiculous such positions are–then Kboards is pro-indie. Which often manifests as anti-traditional publishing.

Take the response to another Salon article about a guy who only made $12,000 from an “Amazon bestseller.” The facts were that he made as much per sale as he would have as a typical self-publisher. And that his publisher was directly (if luckily and unintentionally) responsible for the lightning strike of press that caused that flash of sales in the first place.

But about half the discussion on KB leaped to the conclusion that the reason he made so little money was that he was signed with a publisher. He had been screwed, and it was his own fault for signing away his rights. He would have made more self-publishing. I think most people on Kboards are pretty open, but there is a definite population that believes you should never, ever sign away your ebook rights. Not unless a big publisher walks up to you and hands you a check for a million dollars. There Be Dragons, in other words, and their lawyers are better than yours, too.

The thinking is that you will almost always make more money long-term if you hang onto your rights and publish for yourself instead of signing them over to a big publisher. That, unless they’re offering enough to match your projected earnings for the next 20+ years, it would be a poor business decision to sign over your rights.

This, I think, is a bit of wishful thinking. Ebooks may be forever, but sustained sales are not. All books peak and fall. Even Harry Potter. Even Fifty Shades. Even Wool. One of the wonderful things about the indie revolution is we’re much more protective of our book rights, especially on ebooks, but insisting you should never give them up except for silly-money is somewhat paranoid.

It’s also somewhat privileged. I know that many advances are small ($5000-20,000), and they’re often split into two or three or four payments. But very few indie authors are overnight successes. It can take a few years and several books to start earning any real money on your own. Not everyone is in position to wait for that money to start rolling in. While you’re waiting on favorable winds, you’ve still got to eat.

There are other financial reasons to accept traditional contracts, too. Maybe you write in a genre that isn’t yet indie-friendly. Or you want to diversify yourself and give someone else a vested interest in promoting your work for you. Or you feel you’ve plateaued as a self-publisher and want to roll the dice and see if someone at the Big Six can kick you up to the next level.

The fact of the matter is that, if you’re in a position to write full-time, it’s pretty easy to write a few new books every single year. If a trad contract will pay you money right now, and that money is enough to give you the breathing room to write more right now, how can you put a value on that?

How can you tell someone that it’s daft to sign away the rights to one book because they can (maybe, eventually) make more money on their own?

The goal is to make money writing. For a career. If a trad contract can help you begin that career tomorrow, it is worth deep and serious consideration. It’s all a gamble, a risk/reward assessment. You can guess which claim will cough up more gold, but no one can predict the future.

Even now, in 2013, there are people who think self-publishing is a pitfall that will only hamstring or destroy your career. Simultaneously, things have moved so far and so fast that others think any but the largest of traditional contracts is selling yourself short. That going indie is the only way. And if you do go indie, there are others who will tell you there are certain rules for how you must go about it, that there’s a single route through the world, and everything else is a waste of time, effort, and money.

In every instance, I understand the motivation for people laying down these rules for Doing It Right. It’s even noble: the desire to steer other writers away from hazards and toward the career they’ve always wanted.

And I understand why people look to prominent authors and institutions for advice. This job is terrifying! There is almost no security, everything’s in total anarchy, and the specific nature of that anarchy changes every god damn season. It is very comforting to have an authorial belief system, a set of laws to turn to for a clear path through the wilds.

But it should be pretty clear by now there are far more exceptions than there are rules. I’d go so far as to say there are no rules. Instead, there are some ideas. Some concepts. Some guidelines. Some of which may make sense for you, right now, in this exact place and moment in your career. The trains are rarely running in the right direction, let alone on schedule, but fling yourself aboard anything that looks like it’s headed where you want to go.

I opened with the anecdote about AbsoluteWrite because it’s funny, but also because it’s insane. There are respected institutions that are so locked in to a theology of publishing that they will banish a person because they suspect he is another person who they disagree with about the proper way to build a career as a writer. Who is this helping?

By all means, take directions. We could all use a few landmarks to guide us to our goal. But this is one crazy, tripped-out, Dr. Seuss landscape we’re all traveling through. It’s going to look different to everyone who walks through it.

Because it is.

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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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