markets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROMANCE

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

MYSTERY/THRILLER/SUSPENSE

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

SCIENCE FICTION

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

FANTASY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If So, Readers Sure Love Their Lemons

Yesterday, Dear Author blogger Sunita raised the idea that self-published genre fiction is creating a market for lemons–an environment where readers have no easy way to identify good books from bad books. If true, the author argues, this would be a very bad thing: if readers have no way to tell good from bad, many will simply quit reading altogether, turning to other media instead.

The argument goes like this: on Amazon, the chief ways to determine whether a book might be good are a) price and b) reviews. Yet both are highly flawed. In other markets, higher prices are usually an indicator of better quality. But with ebooks, you’ll often find a New York-published bestseller priced the exact same as a completely unknown self-published title. Thus price tells us nothing about whether a book is likely to be any good.

Reviews are no better. As evidence of this, Sunita points out that bestselling genre fiction typically has higher ratings than literary classics like The Great Gatsby. Self-published bestsellers have even higher ratings than the classics within their genres. Hugh Howey’s Wool, for instance, is shown to have better ratings than works like Ender’s Game, Cryptonomicon, or Neuromancer. Since the author can’t believe Wool might actually be better, Amazon’s reviews clearly aren’t useful for helping readers find good books, either.

It seems to me the discrepancy in ratings is evidence of a much simpler possibility: there is no problem at all. The system is working perfectly.

If the reviews are better on popular, bestselling genre fiction than on the classics, maybe what that means is.. genre fans enjoy genre fiction more than the general populace enjoys the classics. Classics which, incidentally, are largely recommended through word of mouth and trusted sources like reviewers and critics–who Sunita states are the best ways to discover new writers. Yet reviews are better on self-published bestsellers, whose initial popularity is generated almost entirely through Amazon’s recommendation system. Wouldn’t that mean that Amazon’s recommendation system is better than word of mouth or “trusted sources”?

Well, no. Not for her, anyway. Because she’s making two big mistakes. The first is assuming that her consumer habits are commonplace. I.e., the way she uses reviews doesn’t work well for her, therefore they must not be working for any customers. Yet the amount of people participating in the review system indicates that’s far from universal.

The second mistake is one she actually approaches in the article–and then immediately dismisses: “It’s entirely possible that readers of the Ward and Howey books were more satisfied with their reading experience than readers of the Tartt, Gibson, etc. … I have more trouble with the idea that the Ward and Howey books are better books.”

What is the difference between a “better” book and a book that readers are more satisfied with?

I think that, to many if not most readers, that’s two ways of saying the same thing. For Sunita, however, there is clearly a distinction. That’s because she only seems to recognize one area of quality: a book’s artistic or literary quality. What she’s leaving out is a book’s commercial or entertainment quality. These aren’t exclusionary. I like both. My personal favorite books are the ones that combine literary flair with strong and active plots (including many of the SF titles Sunita listed).

But I think it is beyond clear that most readers care far more about being entertained than being arted at.

Since more people are reading for entertainment than literature, Amazon’s reviews reflect those interests. Since Sunita values the opposite, it’s no wonder the system doesn’t work for her.

You know who it does seem to be working for? The readers. Who choose genre fiction 70% of the time they enter the Kindle store. And who, within those genres, choose self-published fiction as much as 50% of the time. And who leave higher ratings for both genre fiction and self-published titles.

If we’re lobbing lemons into the market, they must taste pretty god damn good.

ETA: Some cool stuff in the comments, particularly from Courtney Milan, who says smart things about the Amazon review system and the way indies interact with it. (At this point, I feel like using “smart” in conjunction with Courtney is getting redundant.) Some interesting replies from Sunita, too.

I’ll say this: it’s weird and somewhat counterintuitive that indie books average higher ratings than trad-published titles. (The main reason for this, as Courtney mentions, is probably that we push more actively for them.) Obviously, that could have implications on reader purchasing behavior–but even so, that would only matter if the books weren’t actually all that good, right? Which ought to result in more negative reviews, which would then balance things out. I’m still confused by the thrust of this post, and think its conclusions are overstated.

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

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

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

Okay! Without further ado, the numbers:

ROMANCE

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

MYSTERY/THRILLER/SUSPENSE

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

SCIENCE FICTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how it shakes out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimately, though, time will tell.

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Author Earnings: The Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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What I’d Like to See from Booksellers in 2013: A Holiday Wishlist

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.

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The Great Amazon Experiment, Week ?: Failure Ahoy!

I haven’t been updating this because there’s been little to report. I’ve had my ebook, When We Were Mutants & Other Stories, up for about 3 months. Here are the facts:

1) It’s sold about 10 copies. Most of those (somewhere between 6 and all) have been to friends, family, and friends of family.

2) I’ve varied the price from $0.99 to $2.99.

3) I did a small amount of self-promotion.

4) On days it sold a copy, its Amazon rank was in the 30-40,000 range. On days it sold two copies, it cracked 10,000.

Here, then, are the conclusions we can reach:

1) If you don’t have a platform, a built-in audience, your guaranteed sales are essentially zero.

2) A low price doesn’t guarantee sales.

3) I have no doubt advertising and self-promotion helps, but you can’t just introduce yourself at Amazon and on kindleboards and expect results.

4) Most ebooks on Amazon sell a trivial amount of copies that won’t even result in a trivial regular income.

More broadly, I don’t doubt venues like this will result in careers for a minor amount of self-published authors. That’s already been proven true. But in my anecdotal experience, it isn’t easy and it’s far from guaranteed. It takes a lot of work and a lot of talent. Huh, that sounds like exactly what it takes to make it in the regular publishing world.

It’s possible a change in covers, or more books available, would bump me up to a small, self-sustaining sales rate. Even then, there’s no guarantee of greater success than what I’m already experiencing.

In terms of making me money and supporting my writing income, then, releasing this story collection has so far been a failure. But I’m glad I put the effort into it for three reasons: 6 of the 8 stories here have already been published, meaning I sacrificed few rights; there was a possibility it would have turned into a small but regular income source; and lastly, it made me learn the skills to format and publish ebooks on Kindle. That itself has already led to job leads for me.

Ultimately, if you take a chance and put in some work, you never know how far it can take you. But for ebook sales, it seems, like in all other things, you’re no likelier to find overnight success than to win the lottery–yet as a corollary, the more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. It’s valuable to know both these things before diving into the fray.

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The Great Amazon Experiment, Week 2: Small Fry, Prepare to Get Eaten Alive by the Giant Long-Fanged Authorosaurs

Sales of When We Were Mutants & Other Stories picked up a little last week–and I do mean “a little”; that span saw a grand total of three purchases–and I can explain why: again, word of mouth. Someone I know mentioned it to some of their friends, who surfed over, saw it listed at a negligible price, and ordered away.

Conclusions drawn (usual Small Sample Size Theatre caveats apply): word of mouth from trusted sources is a much, much more powerful force than random advertising. The (admittedly limited) self-promotion I made on Kindleboards.com and Amazon’s board resulted in zero sales. Someone telling their friends “Hey, this stuff is good, you should check it out” resulted in two.

Again, this dataset is so small it risks meaninglessness, but whatever evidence there is points to “word of mouth = $.” “HAI GUYS BUY MY BOOK = 🙁 “

Thoughts on Pricing

I dropped the price from $1.99 to $0.99 for the last week, but that appeared to make no difference. If the material’s worth anything at all, $2 for a couple hundred pages is a bargain. I could be biased by feeling like a fool when I was selling it at $1, but I have a hard time believing the jump from $1 to $2 is enough to scare off legions of penny-pinching ereaders.

While I’m on the subject, Amazon is doing some brilliant things here. Setting a low-end cap of $0.99 is just plain smart, heading off the inevitable race to the bottom that would have resulted without a lower limit. Without that, people would step all over themselves to sell their novels for a penny. Granted, hundreds (thousands?) of people are just giving their work away for free, but at least this way there’s some limit to the ways people can sell themselves short.

Next month, they’ll provide 70% royalties (instead of 35%) for anyone selling their books at $2.99 and up. More brilliance: while this doesn’t force anyone to up their prices, it creates a strong incentive for a soft cap of $2.99. Given these rates, authors who sell at $0.99 will have to sell six times books to match the profits of one sale at $2.99. I consider it unlikely that readers are six times as likely to buy a $0.99 book as a $2.99 book. (For that matter, let’s have some pride here, people. In restaurants, the most-bought bottle of wine is the second-cheapest bottle on the list. No one who offers a $10 blowjob has a full set of teeth. Treat your work like it’s worth the work you put into it.)

Ranting aside.. I can see pricing one work at $0 or $1 to provide a cheaper entrypoint into your other books. I may experiment with that myself by offering one story from WWWM for free when I up the price on the collection to $2.99.

(Immediate update: I just read indie authors will no longer be able to price books at $0–only publishing houses will be able to price at that rate. Or at any rate, it costs indies something to do so? Dunno the specifics. But I like this, if only because, as is probably clear, people giving their work away for free makes me grumpy.)

On the Market for Short Stories

I’ve been suspicious short stories and collections might not sell as well as novels. A recent thread on Amazon gave words to my fears. Why buy a collection of short stories when there are so many–and so many good ones!–available for free at scores of online magazines? I mean, almost every story I’ve sold is available at no cost wherever it was published.

As for individual short stories, as I said in that thread, I would pay $0.99 as fast as I can open my electronic wallet for a story by Neal Stephenson or Iain M. Banks. For a story from random unknown nobody, pbbt. No dice.

I do think, however, collections are viable. They can have the page bulk of novels, and if I were to read a short story at a magazine I really liked, surfed over to Amazon, and saw they had a low-priced collection, I’d be tempted. I think this is part of the phenomenon J.A. Konrath has pointed to that, even though he has much of his work available for free on his website, people go over to Amazon to pay money for it anyway. Several possible factors: a) people will pay a small sum to get a work in the format they prefer; b) they just overlook the free stuff, assuming a pro like Konrath must only have his work for sale through a professional retailer; c) they want to support an author they like.

Long-Term Predictions for Indie Authors

First off, the term “indie authors” makes me mad for some reason, but it works fine for indie bands and films, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll get used to it, but right now it smacks of relabeling yourself something less truthful/awful than “dude or dudette who couldn’t sell to a real publisher.” You know, like how people say “HPV” instead of “genital warts.”

Objections of terminology aside, indie authors are currently in a golden age. It’s incredibly cheap and easy to get your work in front of a potentially vast audience that’s currently going mad for ebooks. People with little to no success in traditional publishing are raking in thousands of sales of self-published books.

I think that’s great! Diversity is healthy in any environment, including economic ones. But I wonder if this flourishing of strange, sometimes beautiful small creatures is about to face mass extinction.

E-readers are exploding. Somebody buys a Kindle or an iPad, the first they they want to do is stuff it full of apps and ebooks. Get their money’s worth. I do think we’re still on the exponential growth section of the curve, but eventually, be it next year or in 2525, most people who will ever get an ereader will have got it, and will no longer be buying books at a frantic “Give me MOAR!!!” pace.

Second, for the moment, big publishers fucking suck at getting their new releases and their backlists available at reasonable prices (and I do consider $6-15, depending on what format the physical copy’s currently in, to be reasonable). Nimble, fast-acting indie authors are doing well in part because the professional competition has only begun to lumber onto the scene.

That won’t last. Publishers will get their act together. Quite possibly, more midlist authors like Joe Konrath will begin offering their own professional titles at indie-author rates. There’s really nothing to stop bestsellers from doing this, either, so long as they take the precaution of informing their publishers of this via email rather than by phone, where they’d be deafened by shrieks of dismay.

Sooner or later, this professional competition will arrive. Likely, there will still be two main submarkets: the big pros with the big publishers at the $6-15 range, and the indies, abandoned midlisters, and go-their-own-way pros occupying the $1-5 market. There will still be room for success for authors who’ve never sold one word professionally. But I imagine once the e-equivalent of the danbrownosaurs and stepheniemeyergators stake out their territory, a vast amount of those agile little indie-mammals are going to get devoured wholesale as readers turn to authors they trust at prices comparable to what the unknowns can offer.

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Two New Pro Sci-Fi Magazines

Both Redstone Science Fiction and Lightspeed Magazine officially opened their doors today. As professionally paying markets–i.e., paying at least 5 cents/word for fiction–they join roughly a dozen other sci-fi venues willing to fork over that much cash for content.

One new pro market’s a pretty big deal. Two on the same day is downright awesome. Give them a look. I have–and have no doubts I’ll be flooding their slush piles with submissions in the immediate future.

Electric Spec Breaks Down Their Rejection Process

Editor Betsy takes a look at why she says no.

“Weak writing” knocked out ten of the 46 submissions she read.

Obviously the way you open the story makes a huge difference. About ten more submissions had a problem either with a contrived opening line or an opening that started too slow. The definition of “too slow” is gonna be a little more subjective than identifying a basic lack of grammar or what’s a cliche (they’re slush readers, if it’s a cliche, they’ll know it), but between poor writing and blah openings, about 40% of this submissions batch was ruled out within the first page–probably within the first paragraph, or even the first line.

The key to selling short fiction, it just now occurs to me, is writing well enough to make the editor read to the end. Well duh. But there are two less-obvious hurdles here. Main thing is, it’s incredibly, unfathomably easy to stop reading a submission. In my minimal exposure to slush, almost all the ones that aren’t outright bad suffer from a crippling mediocrity, an audible lack of voice and authority. If you entice an editor to read to the end, you’ve done better than almost everyone around you.

It could be they read through to the end and then realize your ending’s no good. But this is the point at which subjectivity starts to play a much bigger role. Your incredibly subtle resolution: is it too confusing? Gaggingly pretentious? More clever than meaningful? Or does it brilliantly capture the uncertainty of real life?

Well, who the fuck knows? But if you make an editor read that far, at least they’ve got to make that decision. If you can regularly put them in that position, I think that’s when you start regularly selling stories.