self-publishing

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.

21 Comments

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.

1 Comment

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.

5 Comments

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.

2 Comments

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.

32 Comments

Using KDP Select to Crowdsource Your Novel’s Appeal, Part 1: The Basics

In my last post, I talked about how last year’s changes to Amazon’s algorithms were probably intended to put a stronger filter on free books. The idea was to use the wisdom of crowds to ensure that only the Select books with the most sales potential wound up in front of paying customers once the books’ free runs concluded.

This is why authors like Joe Konrath hardly notice a difference. Konrath writes entertaining stuff in popular genres with quality covers (and his name recognition, reviews, etc. probably don’t hurt, either). He’s able to do as well as ever. While it’s good that stories like that are being shared–I self-publish because of Konrath, so without posts like his, this post would never exist–I tend to focus on those of us who are still quite a ways from being Konraths ourselves.

For many of us, then, there is a big difference in Select. Specifically, it’s a lot worse. But even if your books don’t seem to be able to knock it out of the park like Konrath and others, Select can still be useful. Not just to sell books. But to learn how to make your books better.

I touched on this last time, but when you make a book free, you eliminate a reader’s biggest resistance to picking it up: price. When a reader sees a book that costs nothing, and they’re actively looking for new books, their only consideration is whether that book looks like it might be any good.

For an author, this can be a crazy-valuable tool.

You can use free to gauge how much appeal your book’s got. And if you think it should get better results than you’re seeing when it’s free, that’s an indication you may need to tweak its appearance to get shoppers to give it a chance.

I’m going to split this into two parts. In this post, I’m going to lay out the general concept. In the followup, I’m going to dive into specific numbers to look out for, as well as a discussion of how to analyze your results. In other words, this first part will be about eyeballing things and trusting your gut, and in the second part, we’re gonna drop some science on it.

Onward. So you’ve set your book free. The question you’re asking readers is: Does this book look any good? Their answer–the number of times they download it–will help you decide what if anything needs to be done to improve the book’s appeal. In very basic terms, this is how the answers break down.

A few hundred downloads or less: Your book may not be connecting with readers. Think hard about giving it a makeover.

A few thousand downloads: Sweet, your book’s got something going for it. You might consider some tweaks, but you’re on the right track.

Thousands upon thousands of downloads: Congratulations, your book looks like it rules.

Now there’s a huge caveat here. If your book didn’t get many downloads, that’s probably because few free book sites mentioned it. That may itself be a sign that your book needs work–freebie bloggers tend to have good eyes for books that will do well; if they’re not picking you up, readers might not, either–but it may just be a sign your free run ran into some bad luck. (Or that it isn’t ready yet–many sites require 5-20 reviews to run a book; the biggest sites tend to have higher requirements.) That’s why I would never make a decision about changing my book’s appearance based on a single free run.

But if you’ve made it free, say, 3-5 different times or more, and nothing much has happened, your gut may start wondering whether it’s time for change.

Your book was free, so you know its price isn’t the issue. Most free downloads don’t bother checking out the sample, so the writing probably isn’t the problem (though you can never rule it out). That leaves three things: cover, category, and blurb.

The cover is crucial. Simple thought-experiment: if the cover doesn’t look professional, why would a potential reader expect the writing and story inside it to be any better?

The categories are pretty big, too. They’re how readers find the kinds of books they want to read. Don’t get cute with them. Unless you’re Nicholas Sparks, if you put your book in Romance, it damn well better have an HEA. If you put your book in SF, but it’s essentially a romance with lasers, don’t be surprised that SF readers aren’t leaping to over themselves to snap it up

The blurb is less important than the other two, but it still makes a difference. Is it confusing? Does it express your core concept/hook? Blurbs suck and everyone hates writing them, but a good one is money

I’m hardly the first to stress the importance of these things, but when you’ve got the visibility of freebie sites, and you remove price from the equation, these are really the only factors left. That makes it easy to pinpoint what areas of your book need work. Is the blurb good? Is it in the right category? Then consider a new cover. Do you have a sweet cover, but you’re still only managing a few hundred downloads? First check your categories, then consider the blurb.

When it comes to covers, some people get attached to what they’ve got–I’ve done it, too–but if it’s not working, it’s not working. A cover should be gorgeous and immediately tell a potential reader what genre it is. Like, if you’re writing space opera, you don’t have to have a planet and/or a spaceship on your cover, but if not, something about your cover better say that it’s high tech, futuristic, adventuresome, and sense-of-wonder-ful. It’s true that there are a lot of successful books with terrible covers, but a lot of those people already have big fanbases. If you don’t, and you literally can’t give your books away, you have have a problem.

But it may not be with your book’s content. It may be with its appeal. Especially when you’re first getting started, there’s so much to learn about what works and what doesn’t. Don’t treat a poor free run as a failure. Treat it as the chance to learn very powerful lessons. It may be much harder to sell books through Select than it used to, but it still offers a priceless tool: direct and widescale reader feedback about what they respond to and what they don’t.

Use that tool correctly. By definition, a pattern is something that happens more than once; don’t overreact to one weak free run. But if it happens again, raise an eyebrow. If it happens a third time, raise the other one. Then think about switching it up. Try a new cover. Check your blurb and your categories. Try another couple runs and see if it makes a difference. It could just be that your story has a very narrow audience, but worst-case scenario, the crowd has told you you’re probably better off writing and promoting something else.

By the way–you can learn from your successes, too. If your book kicks ass every time it goes free, then you’ve done something very, very well. Probably lots of things. The crowd may have taught you to stick with that cover artist. That genre. That series. Because you’ve connected with your readers. If you can do it again, and again after that, you may be looking at a career.

I write this blog for fun, and to pay it forward for all the great advice I’ve learned from other writers, but (in what is surely a coincidence!) I’ve got a new book out today on Amazon, B&N, and Kobo. It is currently one dollar. Want to help me out? Give it a look.

2 Comments

Appearance on the Self-Publishing Podcast #42

For the last few weeks, I’ve been too busy to do anything except revise my upcoming novel, but when the guys at the Self-Publishing Podcast invited me back on the show, I jumped at the chance. In the last year, host authors Johnny B. Truant, Sean Platt, and David Wright have exploded; their serialized Yesterday’s Gone has sold tens of thousands of copies, Amazon picked them up for a couple Kindle Serials, and they continue to produce new titles with staggering prolificacy. Dudes know their shit.

So in their latest episode (#42), I went on to talk with them about Select and what Amazon’s algorithms have been up to since I was on the show last May, but I expected to learn plenty from them, too. I wasn’t disappointed.

You can watch the show here. I had a blast. Hope there’s something useful for you, too.

2 Comments

Amazon Wants Borrows to Pay $2

In one sense, it isn’t news that Amazon wants the payment to authors for Select borrows to be about $2.00. The program is now over a year old, and in that time, the rate has always been pretty close to that mark. But this December, a lot of people thought things might be different. Amazon announced that they were adding a bonus payment to the Select pool, doubling their borrows budget to $1.4M. There was talk that borrows might pay $3 or even $4 apiece. I didn’t think it would get that high, but I figured it would be a big enough pot to keep borrows in the $2-2.50 range.

The December 2012 borrows rate was recently announced. The payout? $1.88.

Well. A bit skimpy. But how does that compare to the history of the program? Here’s the per-borrow payment each month since Select started.

12/11 – $1.70
1/12 – $1.60
2/12 – $2.01
3/12 – $2.18
4/12 – $2.48
5/12 – $2.26
6/12 – $2.08
7/12 – $2.04
8/12 – $2.12
9/12 – $2.29
10/12 – $2.36
11/12 – $1.90
12/12 – $1.88

Over the course of the program, Select has paid an average monthly rate of $2.07 per borrow. Its lowest payout was $1.60 in January 2012; its highest was $2.48 in April 2012. The payment rate has never been more than 20% lower than $2.00 or 25% higher than $2.00. Trend-wise, the per-borrow payment has never increased more than 3 months in a row, and it’s never decreased for more than 3 months in a row.

Based on these numbers, I think we can conclude a few things about Amazon.

Amazon wants borrows to pay about $2 apiece

Amazon doesn’t want to set the borrow rate at a hard $2 apiece

Amazon is really good at modeling consumer behavior

They’ve done better over the holidays than expected

Rad. All this raises a few immediate questions.

Why $2?

The glib economics answer is Amazon believes $2 is the rough price point at which enough authors will stay enrolled in Select to give Prime customers an enjoyable selection of books and thus incentivize them to re-up next time, too. As for how Amazon reached that $2 figure in the first place, I don’t know. The obvious answer is that $2 is about what an author would be paid for a sale of a $2.99 book at a 70% royalty, making a borrow just as good as a sale.

Why not a hard $2 monthly payment?

I think there are several reasons for this. For one thing, a $600,000 or $1,500,000 pot looks a lot more enticing to authors than $2/borrow. There’s a bit of a gambling element to it. Sure, borrows may only have been $2.04 this month, but what if they go up to, say, $2.40 next month? And what if I can get more of them than I did last month? That could really add up. *click, enrolled*

For another thing, maybe Amazon doesn’t have perfect confidence in their predictions of customer behavior. If they set borrows at $2, and next month Fire sales explode and they wind up with double the borrows they had last month, Select would cost them twice what they had budgeted. Amazon’s got riches for days, so maybe an extra $200K or $600K is no big deal, considering it’s a cost incurred by selling all those new Kindles/getting all those new Prime subscriptions, but even Amazon has budgets.

But the most important thing, I think, is that Amazon loves complex systems. They don’t want to lay down rules from above, they want to build dynamic ecosystems, because if you build them right, such systems are self-correcting–and provide you with all kinds of awesome data. For instance, if you set the borrow payment at $2, and authors slowly decide that’s insufficient, they’ll unenroll. The selection of titles in the Kindle Online Lending Library will shrink, making it less attractive to Prime members, leading to fewer subscriptions and less $$$ for Amazon.

But if you make the per-borrow payment dynamic, then you have a self-correcting element to push the system back to equilibrium. Maybe $2 isn’t worth enrolling, but as there are fewer books sharing the pot and/or fewer Prime customers borrowing them, the borrow payment creeps up. Maybe at $2.25, a few more authors decide it’s worth their while to join up. At $2.50, even more jump ship for Select. The KOLL has more titles, making it more exciting for prospective Prime customers, leading to (hopefully) a resurgence in subscriptions. And then as more authors and Prime customers join up, the per-borrow payment shrinks again, but who cares? You’ve got fresh blood in the program. To leave it, they’re going to have to a) decide it’s no longer worth it and b) take action to get out of it. Until they do, you’ve got authors’ content and customers’ money.

And in the meantime, you get to collect all this awesome data about how all these groups react to the changes in the system.

Because Amazon doesn’t know that $2 is the ideal borrow payment. Maybe authors will flood Select with titles for just $1/borrow. If so, great news for Amazon. They can offer even better service to their customers at little or no extra cost to themselves.

Why might Amazon have had better holidays than they anticipated?

I don’t know that for a fact. But look at the numbers above. To date, the only months the borrow payment rate has dipped below $2 are in November, December, and January–the leadup to Christmas, Christmas itself, and the post-Christmas boom. If they wanted borrows to be around $2, then they’ve had a few more Prime customers both holiday seasons than they predicted.

What does this mean for authors going forward?

Well, that would seem like good news. Because a lot of those new Prime members have their membership because they bought a Kindle Fire. And new Kindle Fire owners means more people around to buy ebooks.

It also means the Select program is pretty stable. There are still a lot of authors in the program and a lot of Prime members borrowing their books. From Amazon’s perspective, this is just dandy. And if everything’s working as they like, it’s less likely that they’re going to put out a lot of shiny new incentives to the Select program.

Note: there is a big difference between “less likely” and “won’t”. However well Select is doing for Amazon, the bloom is off the rose. They could decide to do something about that at any time.

But the program looks stable, and it looks like a winner. I’m having a hard time typing this, because I feel like there are good odds I’ll soon be proven hilariously wrong at any moment, but don’t count on any big changes to the program soon.

And in the meantime, expect to be paid about $2 per borrow. Amazon appears to want to keep it there–and Amazon is pretty good at getting what they want.

2 Comments

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.

13 Comments

Learn Your Craft, Dummy–No, I’m Not Talking About Writing

Writers can’t agree on anything. That is because we are simply a subset of “people,” who can’t agree on anything either, but it is more fun to pretend there is something different about us that makes us especially prone to bashing each other’s heads over the most minor of issues. If nothing else, writers are–hypothetically–particularly skilled at rhetoric and word-usin’, so our spats often look more dramatic and convincing than they are.

For instance, there’s a subset of authors out there who will argue quite vehemently that in the early days of your writing career, it is worthless–counterproductive, even–to actually try to sell your books.

Instead, you should wait until you’ve got a decent backlist built up. Five, ten, twenty books. Something like that. Because you’re new to this, it’s more important to work on your craft than to waste time flogging your first books. There’s little point in marketing if you can’t yet write worth a damn. And do you know how little damns are worth? Nothing. Damn this cold weather! See, I’m just giving them away.

Furthermore, when you only have one book up, you’ve only got one book to sell. Captured eyeballs have no other titles to wander off toward. None of yours, anyway. Whereas if you have five or ten books, if you point a potential reader to one of them, they will also have four or nine other books of yours to peruse. Marketing efforts become much more efficient and thus timeworthy when you have more than one book to sell.

And really, the argument concludes, if you write a lot of books, make them available everywhere, and make sure they look nice, you won’t need to market. The books will sell themselves. You won’t even know how! Cream rises to the top, you know. Because it is of a lesser density than the less-fatty milk beneath it and thus it is a law of the natural universe that it will rise. The same physical law of science applies to books. Just ask Newton.

There’s some truth to all these ideas. I have found that is indeed easier to sell books when you have multiples of them to play with. There are all kinds of tricks and games you can play with a three-book series, for instance. And it is very difficult to keep one book selling all the time. It is like.. pushing a snowball up a hill that is also covered in snow. The further you push the ball, the bigger and heavier it gets; as you exhaust places and means to advertise a given book, the more snow it accumulates. It gets harder and harder to keep moving. But if you’ve got nine other little snowballs waiting down the hill, when one ball gets too big to push, forget it and run down to one of the others. Let the big one melt for a while.

And it is simply true that your fifth or tenth book will be better than your first. Unless you’re Joseph Heller. But for all us non-Hellers, in the early days, it is just a better use of time to focus on your writing instead of your sales. Work on your craft and the sales will come later. Craft!

But here’s the thing. Marketing is a craft, too.

That’s right. Marketing is a craft. It’s a science and an art–one of the dark ones, mwa ha ha ha!–and there are just as many myths about selling as there are about writing. For instance, did you know you don’t need a social media presence at all? (I italicized that because italics means you’re an expert. Fact.) It definitely helps, but there are all kinds of things you can do to promote books that don’t involve time-consuming Facebook sessions or blogging. Oops.

Your initial attempts to sell your book are going to be just as hamhanded and cliche-riddled as the first book you wrote. So you know what? Probably best to get them out of the way early. When nobody’s going to see your embarrassment. Thing is, every attempt to sell is a learning experience. The curve is steep. It just doesn’t take that much time and effort to accumulate a clue or two. In fact, this whole damn thing is like D&D. It takes much more experience points to advance from level 19 to level 20 than it does from level 1 to level 2. If you devote the next three years to writing–no marketing, no promotion, nothing but writing–maybe you come out the other side as a 20th Level Writer. But guess what? You are still a 1st Level Salesman. The puniest little kobold can knock you unconscious. Sweet Tiamat! Get behind the fighters!

Meanwhile, if you dedicated 95% of those three years to writing and 5% to learning how to sell books, you’re going to emerge from the dungeon as a 19th Level Writer and, say, an 8th Level Salesman. From there, guess who’s going to have an easier time building their career?

Not to mention the very minor point that if you learn how to sell your books well enough to quit your job or at least reduce your hours, you can dedicate all that extra time to writing. (See? Italics.) You will have more books and they will be better than the person who comes home from their office and dreams up stories for two hours every night while their spouse dreams up new ways to kill them without being caught. One guy’s scrabbling to get in a Sunday afternoon killing dragons with his buddies while the other woman is spending every day slaughtering her way across the Castle of the Golden Lich. Guess who levels up faster?

I’ve just spent 400 words expounding on something that is self-evident once you hear it. Selling is a skill. A craft. To get good at it, you have to work at it. Should you spend more time learning how to sell than you do learning how to write? Absolutely not. I mean, maybe. Look, it’s your life. If you’re a writer, the writing should come first.

But not putting in the effort to learn even rudimentary ways to get your books in front of people who might actually be interested in buying them? That’s shooting yourself in the foot. No. It’s worse. It’s denying you even have legs. Well, you do! You have legs. Learn how to use them, for god’s sake. Don’t rely on outside forces to get you moving. If you sit in one place, the only thing that’s going to get you rolling is an earthquake. You don’t have to train to become a marathon-seller. But at least learn to walk.

By the way one of my books is free until Christmas. See how easy this is? (Side note: this very last bit is irony. This post will in no way change the outcome of my giveaway. I just got aggravated reading for the hundredth time about how writers shouldn’t bother to learn how to sell the things they are writing.)

10 Comments