indie authors
The changes in Amazon’s affiliate program had many of us worried that it would become much harder for authors to run successful free book promotions. On the day the changes went into effect, I joined the Self-Publishing Podcast to discuss these changes and what they might mean.
A week later, it appears that the reports of the death of free books have been greatly exaggerated, with most major free sites deciding to take a hit to their own income rather than to shake up their core model. Even so, I think it’s a useful conversation exploring how to use free, how to move beyond free, and the dangers of relying on tactics that are so situational. Even if the big sites don’t make any more major changes–and it’s still very early in the game–it’s good to be reminded how reliant we are on them for successful free promotions.
And as usual, I had a blast. Hope you enjoy.
In my last post, I talked about how last year’s changes to Amazon’s algorithms were probably intended to put a stronger filter on free books. The idea was to use the wisdom of crowds to ensure that only the Select books with the most sales potential wound up in front of paying customers once the books’ free runs concluded.
This is why authors like Joe Konrath hardly notice a difference. Konrath writes entertaining stuff in popular genres with quality covers (and his name recognition, reviews, etc. probably don’t hurt, either). He’s able to do as well as ever. While it’s good that stories like that are being shared–I self-publish because of Konrath, so without posts like his, this post would never exist–I tend to focus on those of us who are still quite a ways from being Konraths ourselves.
For many of us, then, there is a big difference in Select. Specifically, it’s a lot worse. But even if your books don’t seem to be able to knock it out of the park like Konrath and others, Select can still be useful. Not just to sell books. But to learn how to make your books better.
I touched on this last time, but when you make a book free, you eliminate a reader’s biggest resistance to picking it up: price. When a reader sees a book that costs nothing, and they’re actively looking for new books, their only consideration is whether that book looks like it might be any good.
For an author, this can be a crazy-valuable tool.
You can use free to gauge how much appeal your book’s got. And if you think it should get better results than you’re seeing when it’s free, that’s an indication you may need to tweak its appearance to get shoppers to give it a chance.
I’m going to split this into two parts. In this post, I’m going to lay out the general concept. In the followup, I’m going to dive into specific numbers to look out for, as well as a discussion of how to analyze your results. In other words, this first part will be about eyeballing things and trusting your gut, and in the second part, we’re gonna drop some science on it.
Onward. So you’ve set your book free. The question you’re asking readers is: Does this book look any good? Their answer–the number of times they download it–will help you decide what if anything needs to be done to improve the book’s appeal. In very basic terms, this is how the answers break down.
- A few hundred downloads or less: Your book may not be connecting with readers. Think hard about giving it a makeover.
- A few thousand downloads: Sweet, your book’s got something going for it. You might consider some tweaks, but you’re on the right track.
- Thousands upon thousands of downloads: Congratulations, your book looks like it rules.
Now there’s a huge caveat here. If your book didn’t get many downloads, that’s probably because few free book sites mentioned it. That may itself be a sign that your book needs work–freebie bloggers tend to have good eyes for books that will do well; if they’re not picking you up, readers might not, either–but it may just be a sign your free run ran into some bad luck. (Or that it isn’t ready yet–many sites require 5-20 reviews to run a book; the biggest sites tend to have higher requirements.) That’s why I would never make a decision about changing my book’s appearance based on a single free run.
But if you’ve made it free, say, 3-5 different times or more, and nothing much has happened, your gut may start wondering whether it’s time for change.
Your book was free, so you know its price isn’t the issue. Most free downloads don’t bother checking out the sample, so the writing probably isn’t the problem (though you can never rule it out). That leaves three things: cover, category, and blurb.
- The cover is crucial. Simple thought-experiment: if the cover doesn’t look professional, why would a potential reader expect the writing and story inside it to be any better?
- The categories are pretty big, too. They’re how readers find the kinds of books they want to read. Don’t get cute with them. Unless you’re Nicholas Sparks, if you put your book in Romance, it damn well better have an HEA. If you put your book in SF, but it’s essentially a romance with lasers, don’t be surprised that SF readers aren’t leaping to over themselves to snap it up
- The blurb is less important than the other two, but it still makes a difference. Is it confusing? Does it express your core concept/hook? Blurbs suck and everyone hates writing them, but a good one is money
For the last few weeks, I’ve been too busy to do anything except revise my upcoming novel, but when the guys at the Self-Publishing Podcast invited me back on the show, I jumped at the chance. In the last year, host authors Johnny B. Truant, Sean Platt, and David Wright have exploded; their serialized Yesterday’s Gone has sold tens of thousands of copies, Amazon picked them up for a couple Kindle Serials, and they continue to produce new titles with staggering prolificacy. Dudes know their shit.
So in their latest episode (#42), I went on to talk with them about Select and what Amazon’s algorithms have been up to since I was on the show last May, but I expected to learn plenty from them, too. I wasn’t disappointed.
You can watch the show here. I had a blast. Hope there’s something useful for you, too.
It is an amazing time to be an author. No joke. It has probably never been easier or more realistic to make a living writing books. Self-publishing platforms offered by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and elsewhere have made it incredibly easy for authors to reach readers directly. Maybe too easy! Well, you don’t have to buy it, chums.
But I am deeply in love with all these companies. After spending most of a year gazing creepily into their Nooks and crannies, I have determined they are very much like people. Some take more time to understand than others. Some are easygoing. Others are grumpy. Whatever their faults, however, I love them all, because they have given me the job I have always wanted to had: writing books.
And just like friends and relatives, none of them is perfect. Since they’ve all come to me begging for advice, I’ve assembled a list of ways they can improve (from the perspective of indie authors) over the next year. It should be stated and restated that none of these suggestions means I think any of these places is useless or bad. I genuinely love all of them.
But some could be better to me. If I were these places, and I cared what indie authors thought, here’s what I would do to improve the experience in 2013.
Amazon needs to improve the Select program.
In 2012, Select changed everything. It released in early December of 2011 and allowed unknown authors to give their books away to thousands of readers. With a decent free run to vault them up Amazon’s popularity lists, an author could go on to sell a lot of their books over the next 7+ days, too. Over the period of just a few months, uncounted indie authors built real careers on the back of Select.
In March, Amazon tested ways to alter the program, because (presumably) it resulted in a lot of questionable books at the top of the popularity lists, which is one of their major drivers of sales. In May, they decided they had a better system, and watered down the effectiveness of freebies significantly. Within six months of Select going live and changing everything, Amazon neutered it.
The outcome looks great for Amazon. Only the books that gave away the greatest number of copies saw a significant boost in sales afterwards (and instead of lasting for 1-2 weeks, that boost could last for a full month!). That meant only the books that had been most vetted by free downloaders wound up in front of paying customers.
Which meant it became more of a winner-takes-all program. Great for indie books with strong packaging in popular genres. Not so great for niche subgenres, or for anyone who doesn’t fall into, say, the top 2-5% of the Select program.
I don’t know, maybe it’s best for readers to only be served up with the best of the best indie books. But it is not the best for authors. Especially those with quality books but whose genre/luck/ability to massage the big book blogs isn’t the strongest. Offering Select authors a 70% royalty in certain non-English-speaking territories isn’t enough. The KOLL doesn’t provide them enough alternative visibility, either (and anyway, it still disproportionately rewards those at the top). Exclusivity should be worth something. There’s got to be another way to get started as a new author besides trashing other books on Goodreads, building a following, and then releasing a New Adult book. Please add a new incentive to Select in 2013.
Barnes & Noble needs an affiliate program.
As far as I know, there is no B&N equivalent to free and bargain Kindle book blogs like Pixel of Ink, Ereader News Today, and Free Kindle Books and Tips, to name just the largest. Blogs like these are instrumental for helping indie authors run promotions and get in touch with eager readers, yet there’s not a single blog remotely like this for B&N.
Why are there a jillion Kindle blogs and zero for Nook? Because Kindle blogs make lots of money off Amazon’s affiliate program. When they direct a shopper to Amazon, they receive a cut of anything that shopper goes on to buy during that trip. This incentivizes entrepreneurs to set up sites meant to alert readers to free, bargain, and noteworthy books available on Amazon. If these blogs do a good job at that, they make lots and lots AND LOTS of money.
B&N has an affiliate program, but they don’t extend it to ebooks. Thus nobody cares enough to get one going for ebooks. Thus indie authors and small publishers have far fewer methods to promote ebooks on B&N. I don’t know why they don’t extend this program to ebooks. It seems like free money for everyone–B&N gets advertising at a small cost of the sales generated by that advertising; bloggers get affiliate money; authors get royalties–yet B&N discontinued the program earlier this year. Maybe the numbers just didn’t add up.
But this is one of the chief reasons Amazon has a robust indie market and B&N is a very distant second. If they want a share of that market, they’ve got to open up ways for people to participate in it. I think that starts with affiliate percentages on ebooks.
This goes for all the ebookstores, really. If I were a smaller outlet like Sony, I would be murdering myself–or better yet, everyone else!–to set up an effective affiliate program and get other people selling my products for me.
Kobo needs an automated new releases list.
Kobo’s got a bunch of lists on their site, but most appear to be hand-operated. As in, books are selected to appear on them by hand. That’s cool, but it rewards established authors who already have the name recognition to be selected for these lists.
This extends to new releases. Yet the new release lists are one of the few areas where new authors who have either a) great books or b) savvy can push their books up the list, drawing new eyeballs.
I love Kobo. They’ve made great strides in 2012, they’re super personable, they’re indie-friendly, and I think they will soon be/already are a vital part of the ebook and indie marketplace. Now they just need to make it a little easier for new authors to get a toehold in their store. A big step in that direction includes a new release list that’s ordered by bestsellers and sortable by genre.
An automated list of bestselling freebies would be nice, too, but one step at a time.
The iBookstore needs more avenues to visibility.
Apple’s iBookstore is deeply intriguing. When you’re not used to it, it looks awful. Browsing is weird. It’s a miracle anyone can find anything. But once you’re used to it, it’s not bad at all. In fact, it’s got a bunch of different categories to find books in, a few lists of bestsellers, bargain-priced books, and staff picks, and as an author, you can set prices in 50 different countries and counting, allowing you to target prices and promotions to markets as they emerge.
But the iBookstore is not all that deep. It’s easy to find the bestselling books, as well as the ones the iBookstore team hand-selects to appear on the couple lists they’ve got, but that’s about it. Its searchability is less than great. Like Kobo, it’s very winner-takes-all. The tail isn’t very long with Apple (or, to be more accurate, very fat). They’re well-curated, but maybe a little too well-curated. Let’s add a few more ways for books to be discovered. Let indies work to prove their worthy rather than relying on you to be placed in front of shoppers.
Amazon needs to quit obsessing about new releases.
You thought I was done with Amazon? Ha ha! In the words of Kramer, not bloody likely!
In the last 1-2 years, Amazon has geared their site more and more toward new releases. Hot New Releases lists now last 30 days instead of 90. The popularity lists measure the last 30 days of sales rather than the last ~7. It has resulted in a system where new releases are king, and if you don’t sell well right off the bat, you may never have the chance to. For new writers, there’s really no such thing as “organic” growth on Amazon. You either bring a fanbase to the table to buy your new book the instant it goes live, or you struggle in total obscurity until you give away enough books to have a fanbase for your next release.
This is a catastrophic system. On the one hand, by measuring the last full 30 days of sales, it makes it very difficult for a short-term boost to be big enough to get a book selling in any real numbers. On the other hand, by only measuring the last 30 days, you ensure that books that did gain from short-term boosts and are now finding their audience will die a noisy death as soon as that 30-day cliff rolls around.
Please vary it up a little. I know, you’ve got 1,800,000 ebooks and counting. Who cares about all that old crap when you’re adding 100,000 titles per month. But right now, too many elements of the system run along similar lines. Book sales crash too hard and rockets launch too fast. Vary it up so that authors can actually claw their ways up the ranks. And when it comes time to fade, let them parachute gradually rather than smashing into a big red writer-shaped puddle.
You’re too volatile, is what I’m saying. Having multiple systems working on 30-day scales isn’t helping anyone except people who understand how to game new releases.
Smashwords needs to quit sucking.
I feel bad for saying this, because Smashwords founder Mark Coker is pretty cool, and a definite friend of indies. But at this point, his ebook distribution service doesn’t offer a whole lot of value. It’s good to use if you don’t have a Mac and want to be on iTunes. It’s nice if you don’t live in the US but want to distribute to B&N. And it’s useful to get out to all those other tiny stores where nobody sells anything but you may as well be there because hey why not. Oh, and it lets you put free books on B&N, which is awesome for you but seems kind of useless for Smashwords.
Otherwise, there is no benefit to uploading through Smashwords instead of going direct to all the places that let you go direct (as of this writing, that includes [with some caveats] Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and the iBookstore).
On the contrary, Smashwords distribution can actually hurt you in a lot of ways. The Meatgrinder forces you to use .docs rather than the epubs that are industry-standard elsewhere. That means an additional round of formatting for many authors. Even .doc-users have to meet Smashwords’ rather rigid style guide. Smashwords doesn’t categorize books all that accurately, either, leaving your books in a wasteland of discoverability when they are pushed to other markets. And changes made to your books on Smashwords can take weeks or even months to filter through to the other stores.
I mean, Smashwords could be a pretty good service for a lot of authors, specifically the subset that wants to just buckle down and write rather than micromanaging their books on all the various vendors. Upload to Smashwords, distribute widely, collect checks, party party. I am far too data/control-neurotic to do that, but that is a valuable service. No joke.
But not accepting epubs and having very specific formatting requirements for .docs makes it less convenient to go through them, and their general sluggishness makes it excessively difficult to run effective sales or promotions. In fact, given pricematching between stores, having delayed price changes can result in authors losing hundreds or thousands of dollars when Amazon slashes their book prices down to match prices on Sony that should have been changed a month ago.
So there you go, SW. Get faster, get more precise in areas like category mapping, and accept epubs. I’m sure that’s just as easy as I’ve made it sound.
Everyone except Kobo and the iBookstore needs to improve their customer service.
Kobo and iBookstore: awesome. Knowledgable, prompt, helpful, eager. Everyone else: terrible. Take a lap.
B&N’s customer service department has apparently all been zapped to Lost, because they don’t respond at all anymore. Amazon has no phone number for emergencies and their representatives are inconsistent at best. Smashwords is small and can take a long time to reply. Sony says, “Sorry, take it up with Smashwords.”
I know this stuff costs a lot of money. But two stores are doing it right. If you can afford to step up your CS game, look to Kobo and Apple.
Sony needs to exist.
That place is just a myth, right? A land of makebelieve sales? As far as ebookstores, the more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. Out of roughly 14,000 books sold this year, I think about a dozen of those were on Sony. That is probably being generous. Sony: please prove you exist.
Writers can’t agree on anything. That is because we are simply a subset of “people,” who can’t agree on anything either, but it is more fun to pretend there is something different about us that makes us especially prone to bashing each other’s heads over the most minor of issues. If nothing else, writers are–hypothetically–particularly skilled at rhetoric and word-usin’, so our spats often look more dramatic and convincing than they are.
For instance, there’s a subset of authors out there who will argue quite vehemently that in the early days of your writing career, it is worthless–counterproductive, even–to actually try to sell your books.
Instead, you should wait until you’ve got a decent backlist built up. Five, ten, twenty books. Something like that. Because you’re new to this, it’s more important to work on your craft than to waste time flogging your first books. There’s little point in marketing if you can’t yet write worth a damn. And do you know how little damns are worth? Nothing. Damn this cold weather! See, I’m just giving them away.
Furthermore, when you only have one book up, you’ve only got one book to sell. Captured eyeballs have no other titles to wander off toward. None of yours, anyway. Whereas if you have five or ten books, if you point a potential reader to one of them, they will also have four or nine other books of yours to peruse. Marketing efforts become much more efficient and thus timeworthy when you have more than one book to sell.
And really, the argument concludes, if you write a lot of books, make them available everywhere, and make sure they look nice, you won’t need to market. The books will sell themselves. You won’t even know how! Cream rises to the top, you know. Because it is of a lesser density than the less-fatty milk beneath it and thus it is a law of the natural universe that it will rise. The same physical law of science applies to books. Just ask Newton.
There’s some truth to all these ideas. I have found that is indeed easier to sell books when you have multiples of them to play with. There are all kinds of tricks and games you can play with a three-book series, for instance. And it is very difficult to keep one book selling all the time. It is like.. pushing a snowball up a hill that is also covered in snow. The further you push the ball, the bigger and heavier it gets; as you exhaust places and means to advertise a given book, the more snow it accumulates. It gets harder and harder to keep moving. But if you’ve got nine other little snowballs waiting down the hill, when one ball gets too big to push, forget it and run down to one of the others. Let the big one melt for a while.
And it is simply true that your fifth or tenth book will be better than your first. Unless you’re Joseph Heller. But for all us non-Hellers, in the early days, it is just a better use of time to focus on your writing instead of your sales. Work on your craft and the sales will come later. Craft!
But here’s the thing. Marketing is a craft, too.
That’s right. Marketing is a craft. It’s a science and an art–one of the dark ones, mwa ha ha ha!–and there are just as many myths about selling as there are about writing. For instance, did you know you don’t need a social media presence at all? (I italicized that because italics means you’re an expert. Fact.) It definitely helps, but there are all kinds of things you can do to promote books that don’t involve time-consuming Facebook sessions or blogging. Oops.
Your initial attempts to sell your book are going to be just as hamhanded and cliche-riddled as the first book you wrote. So you know what? Probably best to get them out of the way early. When nobody’s going to see your embarrassment. Thing is, every attempt to sell is a learning experience. The curve is steep. It just doesn’t take that much time and effort to accumulate a clue or two. In fact, this whole damn thing is like D&D. It takes much more experience points to advance from level 19 to level 20 than it does from level 1 to level 2. If you devote the next three years to writing–no marketing, no promotion, nothing but writing–maybe you come out the other side as a 20th Level Writer. But guess what? You are still a 1st Level Salesman. The puniest little kobold can knock you unconscious. Sweet Tiamat! Get behind the fighters!
Meanwhile, if you dedicated 95% of those three years to writing and 5% to learning how to sell books, you’re going to emerge from the dungeon as a 19th Level Writer and, say, an 8th Level Salesman. From there, guess who’s going to have an easier time building their career?
Not to mention the very minor point that if you learn how to sell your books well enough to quit your job or at least reduce your hours, you can dedicate all that extra time to writing. (See? Italics.) You will have more books and they will be better than the person who comes home from their office and dreams up stories for two hours every night while their spouse dreams up new ways to kill them without being caught. One guy’s scrabbling to get in a Sunday afternoon killing dragons with his buddies while the other woman is spending every day slaughtering her way across the Castle of the Golden Lich. Guess who levels up faster?
I’ve just spent 400 words expounding on something that is self-evident once you hear it. Selling is a skill. A craft. To get good at it, you have to work at it. Should you spend more time learning how to sell than you do learning how to write? Absolutely not. I mean, maybe. Look, it’s your life. If you’re a writer, the writing should come first.
But not putting in the effort to learn even rudimentary ways to get your books in front of people who might actually be interested in buying them? That’s shooting yourself in the foot. No. It’s worse. It’s denying you even have legs. Well, you do! You have legs. Learn how to use them, for god’s sake. Don’t rely on outside forces to get you moving. If you sit in one place, the only thing that’s going to get you rolling is an earthquake. You don’t have to train to become a marathon-seller. But at least learn to walk.
By the way one of my books is free until Christmas. See how easy this is? (Side note: this very last bit is irony. This post will in no way change the outcome of my giveaway. I just got aggravated reading for the hundredth time about how writers shouldn’t bother to learn how to sell the things they are writing.)
6/14 EDIT: For the moment, Midnight’s Tale is only $0.99–and was just accepted as a Kindle Single.
The paradox of writing is that the more you do it, the less time you have for the activity that, in all likelihood, caused you to become a writer in the first place: reading. This morning, I cured some of my mounting guilt over writing more fiction than I read with George Berger’s Midnight’s Tale.
Midnight’s Tale is an epic novella of a young goat’s quest to understand love. Okay, maybe not “epic,” per se, but it is funny and winning with a strong style. Despite serving as my first foray into George’s work, I’m not at all surprised I liked it; I became aware of him through Kindleboards, where his posts are consistently funny, charmingly sarcastic, and self-deprecating. Eventually, I had to pick up one of his books. I’m glad I did. His style on the boards translates very well to his fiction.
As you might have guessed, Midnight’s Tale is literary fiction. “Literary fiction” is a dirty word in some circles, and as an author primarily concerned with vengeful robots, ambitious sorcerers, and Ancient Egyptian asteroid-catapults, I feel like I should say something like “Yeah, but it’s not like that other stuff.” I’ll just say this: think of all the irrelevant cliches out there about your genre of choice. Well, literary fiction’s got the same baseless prejudice thrown its way, too.
This is getting off topic, which is that Midnight’s Tale is warm and funny and I liked it. It’s a fast read, but well worth the money. Go give it a look.
(This will be the first in what I hope will become regular series dedicated to indie authors I’ve stumbled over and liked. Meanwhile, more numbers tomorrow!)
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Raina was just a girl when the plague came. She survived. Her parents didn't. Neither did the world. As civilization fell, she took to the ruins of...
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