That could be the entire post, really.
For context, this morning I was reading a cool post by Courtney Milan about estimating the value of your book’s rights. In it, she compares the value of a hypothetical trad contract vs. what you’d earn self-publishing it. Overall, it’s a very reasonable piece that isn’t about banner-waving for one side or the other, but is rather about assessing the money value of either option so you can make the best decision about which route to take.
The problem, sort of, is that she compares both examples over a 35-year span. On the one hand, when you’re talking about book contracts that can for last decades beyond your death–although she points out the rather neat fact that all authors can reclaim their rights after 35 years–it’s perfectly valid to assess the long-term pros and cons about signing such a contract.
On the other hand… who knows how things are going to look 5 years from now, let alone 35.
So, given that the future of the book industry and ebooks in particular is so unknowable, there’s an argument to be made that up-front money–i.e. an advance–should be weighted more heavily than long-term royalty projections. Which isn’t to say I think Courtney’s wrong; her projections sound very reasonable, and thus helpful in reaching a decision about what to do with your book. This is just something to think about.
Anyway, over the course of discussing the ongoing chaos that is present-day publishing, I went to look at how many new ebooks are currently being published. Late last December, I noted there were 1.8 million titles in the Kindle store. Checking the numbers today, there are just over 2.1 million.
300,000 new titles in a little under 8 months.
Prorate that for the rest of 2013, and that’s roughly 472,000 new books.
1293 every day.
54 per hour.
A new ebook is being published to Amazon almost every minute.
I don’t have any particularly strong insight into this. Besides maybe “Holy shit.” But, to circle back to long-term projections, if books continued to be published at the current rate, then 35 years from now, the Kindle store would contain about 18,620,000 books. Nearly nine times as many titles as are available today.
Or not, because 35 years from now, there may well not be a “Kindle” store. I have no earthly idea.
For the record, I’ll readily admit that “Oh man I have no idea how to even begin to approach this” is far less useful than “Here is one method to help you assess the value of your book rights in regards to whether to sell them to a publisher or maintain them for yourself.”
I think Courtney has laid out a very good process for decision-making. It’s a great post. But hard numbers can provoke confidence. I would like to use a few other numbers to illustrate how far away publishing in 2013 might be from publishing in 2048: one (book per minute), half a million (per year), nine (times as many as we have now).
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.
Last week, Passive Guy’s mentioned the publishing industry has jacked up book prices well beyond the rate of inflation. Curious, I decided to compare prices for myself. I didn’t know what I would find, but two results popped out: adjusted for inflation, publishers have tripled the price of mass market paperbacks. And this leap in prices coincides with the period of mass consolidation within the publishing industry.
The full results are available at David Gaughran’s blog. Dude has a lot of readers. Way more than I do.
This is a huge topic, one I may well explore in further depth down the road. Oh, in the meantime, one other thing that jumped out at me? Right now, many indie books are the exact same price as the original mass market paperbacks–paperbacks that helped revitalize the entire industry.
The same day I posted about the March 19 and May 3 changes to Amazon’s popularity lists, I summarized those changes on Kindleboards as well. One of the questions asked repeatedly there and elsewhere was, Why? Why is Amazon switching things up? Why would they make changes that would deliberately harm authors in their Select program?
The short answer is: We don’t know.
The long answer is: Well, we just really don’t have any way to know. But they probably didn’t change things with the goal of hurting Select. That was probably a casualty of pursuing other goals. Maybe they have found that so many free books have hurt their overall sales. Maybe having a constant churn of free-driven books was preventing bestsellers from taking root. Maybe these changes had nothing whatsoever to do with Select. Phoenix Sullivan thinks they’re in anticipation of the fall of the agency model, and I’m looking forward to her more detailed explanation. Maybe, as several people on KB suggested, there were just too many poor-quality books being rewarded through the free process, and customers weren’t happy with the books that were often most visible to them.
I don’t know. I still don’t. And the thing is, I didn’t make any assumptions about Amazon’s motives when I was looking at the data we used to draw our conclusions about the mechanics of Amazon’s lists. Data first, then theories. Entering with a theory is a good way to misinterpret what you’re looking at to fit that theory.
After all, we have no clue what Amazon’s goals are. Assumedly, they are trying to make as much money as possible, but even that–our safest and best assumption–isn’t a certainty, and in any event can be heavily qualified. They’ve already shown a willingness to take losses in the short-term to try to build the long-term. Their original Kindle strategy wasn’t to immediately profit from Kindle sales, but to get enough ereaders out there that the ebook market could flourish. Hell, maybe Jeff Bezos doesn’t ultimately care about money at all! Perhaps Amazon is his stab at creating an AI capable of guiding us through and settling us in space! Like he’s been dreaming about since he was a child!
So we don’t know their goals. And whatever their unknown goals may be, we don’t know whether they’re using rational methods to achieve those goals. Amazon’s smart, but they’re not infallible. Any attempt to deduce their motives through a process of figuring out what’s logical is faulty by virtue of assuming the new algorithm wasn’t put in place by madmen, or by a guy with a gnarly champagne hangover, or by a team of very smart people who, just once, reached a faulty conclusion about how to sell books. Or by someone who personally hates us all.
Speculating about Amazon’s motives is fun. In its way, it is more fun than looking at one number and comparing it to another number, and then repeating that comparison five hundred times until you have a strong enough pattern of results to be confident in. (I know. Hard to believe anything could be more fun.) But unless Bezos himself comes forth to announce what they’re up to, and is meanwhile attached to a device that can flawlessly detect whether the wearer is telling the truth, all our speculation is just an assumption built on a foundation of other assumptions.
So: I don’t know why Amazon changed things. I can make guesses. But all I can tell you for certain is they made a set of changes. Does the why matter? What will understanding Amazon’s motives help?
Since last month, I’ve been trying out Amazon’s KDP Select program with my novels. Select is, to boil it down, a deal where you make your book exclusive to Amazon for 90 days in exchange for another sales route (borrows) and the ability to make your book free for 5 days. Being allowed to give your book away for nothing might not sound like much of a positive, but it can be kind of a big deal.
By and large, Select has been a very positive experience for me, one I should really blather about here. For now, check out Jim Kukral’s piece on Huffington Post about the pros and cons of the program. In it, he quotes several authors–including one stunningly handsome one–on their experiences with and feelings about Select. It’s a good snapshot of the ambivalent mood and level of success the indie community has for the program.
Oh, and since Jim started gathering his info for the piece, I’ve had another great Select run. Two days ago, I made Breakers free for one day. It was downloaded about 1600 times. Since going back to paid status, I’ve sold a bit over 300 copies.
So yeah, I’m a fan of Select.
David Gaughran has a great post on this today. Here’s the quick summary: people continue to attack Amazon for its monopolistic, predatory, anti-competitive practices when it comes to ebooks, particularly when it comes to the Amazon’s KDP Select program, which allows authors certain perks in exchange for offering their content exclusively to Amazon.
The thing is, the reason this program has been so effective is because it works. For self-publishers, it’s far from impossible to establish a presence at Amazon and sell some serious books. At B&N? The sledding is much, much tougher. As Gaughran points out, at B&N, the playing field continues to be tilted significantly in favor of the big publishing houses. For everyone else–indie and small-press books–sales are almost entirely driven by direct traffic to their books’ pages. In other words, B&N isn’t doing anything to help them be seen.
My experience there has been and continues to be just that. Last year, my books were never going great at Amazon, but there were always 15-20 sales at the end of every month. With B&N, most months the totals were zero.
So last month, I signed up for Select with all my novels. After all, I had nothing to lose. (Actually, I had a little to lose by pulling those books from Smashwords, but we’re talking about hamburger money. Not Fatburger money, either. A lucky month might get me a cheeseburger at In-N-Out.) In the last four weeks, I’ve done very, very well.
I’ll get into that in greater detail pretty soon. And Select isn’t a magic bullet, either. It doesn’t work for everyone. But it’s yet another example of the way Amazon is making it possible for more and more authors to make a living. Right now, B&N simply isn’t doing that. And that’s why so many authors have no problem in giving them up without a look back.
In celebration of the site’s 500,000th hit, Moonrat at Editorial Ass is running a contest giving away a partial manuscript crit. In celebration of my newly-developed ability to take shots on unlikely but useful career opportunities like this, I am posting about it to become eligible.
You shouldn’t, though, because that would decrease my chances of winning. Even though it could be some of the most useful feedback you’re likely to get prior to your Amazon reviews. So seriously, don’t do it, other writers. Unless you post under my name, too. Thanks in advance.