iTunes

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.

Yesterday, I noticed my novella The Zombies of Hobbiton was #34 on iTunes in Science Fiction & Literature. #34! That sounded like big news. Especially considering my Amazon sales are way, way down after the most recent algorithm changes that are strangling Select in its crib. That prompted me to take a real look at the iTunes store for the first time. I love Amazon and all, but I don’t like the idea of having all my eggs in one basket.

Here’s the problem. iTunes is a lot harder to read than Amazon.

There are a whole lot of different factors for this. Some of them are personal. I just haven’t ever really spent any time browsing the store. I’ve looked at my own books a couple times, but I found the store clumsy and confusing, especially when it came to navigation. Guess who just discovered iTunes has a back button!

The second factor is a cultural one. Among indie authors, Amazon is king. It currently owns something like 60% of the ebook market, yet it probably commands closer to 90% of the discussion. People just don’t talk about B&N or iTunes or Kobo or Sony, except perhaps to point and laugh. Maybe I need to expand my horizons, but in the circles I run in, very little analysis is focused on the workings of the other stores. And this makes sense. Who cares about how Kobo works if it’s only pulling 3% of all book sales? (Note: I made that number up.) Just distribute there through Smashwords and forget about it. Now let’s talk about Amazon some more.

In that environment, you don’t get communities of authors coming together to swap information and compare notes. Like, I am aware some indie authors do really well on iTunes or B&N, but I have no clue what’s driving that success.

The third and possibly biggest factor in the unknowns of iTunes is the real killer: I don’t have access to real-time sales figures.

I distribute to iTunes through Smashwords. Smashwords is a great program, but it places a filter between me and what’s happening with my books. For instance, right now, May 13, SW only has updated figures for Apple through March 31. Sales are all tallied on a lump sum, too–like, if SW updates their iTunes on May 15, and I sold 10 books during that period (I didn’t), it will list all those sales as occurring on May 15. Oh, and if you’re giving away a book for free, iTunes doesn’t give out numbers for how many copies you’ve had downloaded.

To summarize: so I’m stumbling around the store, with no real awareness of what I’m looking at, and with sales figures that lag 6-10 weeks behind whatever I might be doing with my books today.

To summarize another way: damn it.

But we can watch the storefront itself. And here’s what I’ve seen so far. iTunes updates constantly–like, possibly more than once an hour. Yesterday, after I spotted my book at #34 on Science Fiction & Literature, it quickly dropped to #35, then #36. A few hours later, it was at #58; a half hour later, it rose to #56, before falling back to #58, #63, and #64 when I stopped paying attention.

This morning, I first saw it back up at #34 (and sandwiched between Iain M. Banks and Neal Stephenson, my two favorite SF authors!). That was about an hour ago. Checking again, it’s currently at #36. I also saw Hugh Howey’s Wool take a big leap yesterday–it vaulted from somewhere in the 60s to #5, propelled, no doubt, by news of Howey’s movie deal. The Wool Omnibus was already at #1. Right now, Wool has slipped to #18, with the Omnibus at #4.

So we’re seeing a lot of volatility. At least within this category. What this suggests to me is that the sample size of sales is pretty low. It may only take a handful to vault you to the top, and if you don’t continue to sell regularly, you’ll quickly be knocked off the list by those who are. Possibly, it took me just one sale to get The Zombies of Hobbiton to #34. After that, it slid throughout the day into the #60s until this morning, when it sold another copy, kicking it back up to that same #34 placement. That small rise yesterday afternoon from #58 to #56 suggests the possibility sales figures are higher, but I don’t know iTunes’ algorithms well enough to put any major faith in that. Possibly, books ahead of me were just falling faster than I was.

Sales on any given store are driven by two things: external visibility–you driving traffic to your books via word of mouth, ads, etc.–and internal visibility, where the store’s own lists, recommendations, emails, etc. put your book in front of new customers. What this tells me is that if you want to stay on iTunes’ volatile bestseller lists, and you don’t have the fanbase to keep that up on their own, you’re going to have to find a way to get yourself on some of iTunes’ other lists and other sources of internal visibility. And I know far too little about the store just yet to know how to do that.

For fun, I’m going to guess my book is currently selling 1 copy/day. This doesn’t contradict the data and it will keep my expectations nice and low. I sell through Smashwords at $1.99. I get 60% of each sale made on iTunes through SW. So my cut for each copy sold will be about $1.19. If I can keep this up for a month, I expect to see around $36 from this title over that period.

And you know what? I would take that. In a heartbeat. Soon, I’ll have a novel and another novella up at iTunes as well. If I can figure out how to produce similar sales for them, my income through Apple would be a nice supplement to what I’m doing on Amazon–and would go a long ways towards convincing me to take my other titles out of Select, too. We’ll see if that’s possible. iTunes remains much more difficult to examine than Amazon. It may be weeks or months before I’ve got any solid conclusions. Expect more posts in this series as I continue to gather new information.

I spend a lot of time talking about Amazon here. That’s natural. Not only are they the biggest gorilla in the ebook business, but they’re the one I understand best. I can barely find my way around the iTunes store. To cap it off, after I started getting excited about Select back in February, I pulled all my novels from the other stores to meet Amazon’s exclusivity requirements. My total presence in the other stores consisted of one novella, which I made free, two short story collections priced at $0.99, and a longer collection at $2.99.

So it should be no surprise that according to Smashwords’ most recent updates, my total sales among all non-Amazon stores in 2012 have added up to about $30.

Well, last week I changed my novella The Zombies of Hobbiton from free to $1.99. Today, I was poking around iTunes. Here’s what I saw in Top Science Fiction & Literature Paid Books:

#34! In the entire Sci-Fi category! WOOOOO! Time to throw a party! Time to throw five parties!

Actually, I have absolutely no idea what that means in terms of sales. For all I know it only takes 1 sale/day to reach #34 in Sci-Fi. (And from what I hear from other authors, that’s probably a lot more realistic than thinking #34 means 10 or 100/day.) But you know what? Considering how crummy my sales of Amazon have been since the most recent algorithm change, I’m pretty damn happy to maybe be selling 1/day of something over on Apple. Time to get a couple more things out of Select and see what happens.

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