indie life

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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Appearance on Kobo’s My Writing Life

It’s too early in my day to talk cogently, so something something something I was in the Kobo Writing Life newsletter today.

I like Kobo. They are really serious about helping self-publishers succeed. I hope they have a great year.

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Selling eBooks on Kobo: A Very Incomplete Guide

Last summer, Kobo opened the doors to their own self-publishing program, Kobo Writing Life. It quickly caught a lot of buzz about being the Next Big Thing for indie authors. I don’t know about that just yet, but it’s definitely a major international market, and if you’re a self-publisher or small press, you want to be in it.

But like every online bookstore, it does some things its own way. And getting started on any new store is tough. I don’t know any super-secret tips to instant Kobo bestsellerdom, but I’ve picked up a few (and let me stress the “few”) tricks to understanding the site. I’ll continue to update this page as I learn more.

Linking to Your Books on Kobo

Being able to link to your books is kind of a little bit important. I mean, if you’re one of those people who likes selling books, anyway. So this is a big one: when you upload a new version of a book to Kobo, it will change that book’s web address. Oops. Suddenly all your previous links to that title are obsolete.

This is one of those “What the hell, man?” things, but fortunately, there’s a workaround. Kobo itself has written the guide on this one, explaining how to make permanent links to your books. It’s very simple. Formatting your links like they recommend is going to save you a lot of trouble should you ever want to update your books.

Edit: Author Monique Martin (who has basically picked Kobo up and folded it directly into her wallet, and by the way, you can get the first book in her series free) reminds me there’s another issue with publishing a new version of your book to Kobo: you’ll lose all your Kobo-specific reviews.

This is another reason to get your Goodreads reviews linked up (more on that below). Still, if you only have a handful of Kobo-specific reviews, don’t be afraid to update your book, especially for something major like adding a link to your new mailing list. But if the update is minor, it may not be worth losing reviews.

According to Monique, Kobo knows about this problem and is working on the issue.

Linking Your Goodreads Reviews to Your Titles

One of Kobo’s features is the ability to display your Goodreads reviews on your Kobo pages. I know, this is horrifying–Goodreads ratings are often much lower than we’ve been conditioned to expect from Amazon–but you should do it.

First off, these reviews will remain even if you have to republish a new version of your book. Second, many, many Kobo books are already linked up to GR. This means Kobo users are more used to seeing the GR scale. Third, I’m becoming more and more convinced that the average rating of your reviews is less important than how many of them you have.

I’m talkin’ social proof. Something that has proven itself to be popular is automatically interesting. If you have two cool-looking books in front of you, which one are you more likely to buy, the one with 5 reviews, or the one with 500? It turns out crowds are pretty wise. We’re programmed to follow them for a reason.

Anyway, do it or don’t do it. But linking your Goodreads reviews to Kobo is pretty dang easy. Author Eric Kent Edstrom has an awesome guide. He also has a somewhat more complicated version that may be worth trying instead, particularly if your books have normal ISBNs as well. Sometimes linking your books up is instant, but it may take up to a couple days until your GR reviews display properly.

Kobo Allows Pre-Orders

Like Apple, Kobo gives indie authors the chance to set up pre-orders on their books. This one’s kind of neat, especially if you’ve already got a few fans at Kobo who’ll buy early and help give your book extra visibility before it even goes live.

I haven’t used it yet myself, but the process seems very simple. You’ll need your cover art and your book file all ready to go, but if you’ve got that, just set up your book as normal. At the “Publish your eBook” stage (the fifth and final part of Writing Life’s publishing process), set the publication date to whenever your book’s going live. Right above the list date, there’s a button for “Allow preorders.” Want pre-orders? Just click the button. Boom.

My Book’s Live, But My Ranks Are All Crazysauce

Yeah. There are two things about Kobo ranks that are very confusing until you get the hang of them. First off, Kobo assigns ranks to every book in the system, including those with zero sales. So don’t pop the champagne when your book shows up with a rank as soon as it goes live. All that means is it’s tied with every other book that hasn’t sold a copy yet.

Second, Kobo is highly international. And they calculate separate ranks for each region your book’s in (Canada, United States, New Zealand, etc.). Meanwhile, they’ll display rank based on whatever region you’re viewing from. So if you’ve sold 10,000 copies in Canada, but only 3 in the US, and you visit the site from the US, you’re going to see a rank based on those 3 US sales.

These two factors get particularly vexing if you’re from a small, non-English-speaking region. Since there’s so little volume being sold in that region, new books can show up with some pretty sweet ranks, which has led some people to think Kobo isn’t reporting sales. They are. Alternately, you’re selling books, but your rank isn’t budging–why? Well, your rank is updating–but only in the region(s) where you’re making sales. If you’re not from that region, you just can’t see the change.

Kobo Allows Regional Pricing, Too

This feature isn’t that unique. Amazon and Apple have regional pricing, too. But it’s something you should take advantage of. Since Kobo calculates separate ranks for each region, you’ll probably wind up with most of your initial sales skewed to one or two regions. Canada, most likely. Kobo started in Canada, and while it was recently acquired by Japan-based Rakuten, Canada seems to remain its major market.

But Kobo is active all around the world. How do you get rolling in all those other global markets? Well, the biggest weapon we’ve got in that fight is price. Selling nada in the UK? Try slashing your UK prices. Could just be on one book. Unlike Amazon or B&N, Kobo lets you set your price to $0.00, so you could try that with a title, too.

I know some authors hate pricing at $0.99 or its regional equivalent. Some people even hate giving their books away. Heretics! To that I say: price however you want. It’s your book, and if you’d rather stand by your principles than sell any copies of it, price it at whatever you please.

But you may want to suspend those principles until it’s sold some. Gotten visible. Which may require a low initial price. That’s the sweet thing about regional pricing. You don’t have to discount it everywhere. And unlike Amazon, which requires a minimum price threshold ($2.99) in all territories if you want to earn 70% royalties in any of them, Kobo keeps distinct payment rates for each territory. In other words, if you want to price at $4.99 in Australia and $0.99 in New Zealand, they’ll still pay you 70% royalties on your Australian sales. That is because Kobo loves you.

Oh yeah, and if you didn’t know this, Kobo’s royalty payments are more generous than anyone but Apple. For books priced between $1.99-12.99, they pay 70%. Everything above or below that range still earns 45%. Beats the tar out of Amazon or B&N.

Hey, I Did All This Stuff and I’m Still Not Selling

I know. Kobo’s very cool, but in some ways they’re the toughest store to get rolling in. All I can tell you is to be aggressive. Try making at least one of your books free for a while (or permanently). Hunt out sites that list Kobo books. Experiment with advertising. Shake your fist at the north. I don’t know.

But don’t neglect Kobo just because it’s tough. It’s also a major market, one that can go a long way toward providing you with a living as an indie author. It may take a while to gather steam there, but I hope this stuff with hasten that process and keep things rolling smoothly. Questions? Fire away.

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

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

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

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

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Amazon is About to Throttle Free Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The New Release: An Anatomy of the First 100 Sales

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

Here’s how those first 100 sales break down:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The short answer: yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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