selling beyond Amazon

Getting Your Start as an Indie Author, Part 3: Strategies!

So, looking back over Part 1 and Part 2, here are the conclusions I’d put forward.

First, Amazon Select no longer offers much if any reward to most of its participants. Meanwhile, a new market has opened (Kobo), and while everyone is waiting for B&N to keel over and die, the Nook store is still selling boatloads of books every single day. Until they close, the sales are there. It’s hard to know exactly where Apple’s at, but they’re a legit ebookstore too. Lots of people make lots of money there. I sure don’t, but you can’t win ’em all.

So the current environment favors distributing everywhere in a way it didn’t back when Select was a magic bullet. Even if geographical or technical challenges makes it hard to publish direct to B&N, Apple, and Kobo, just use Draft2Digital or Smashwords.

Waiting to publish and/or promote is a bad idea (I hath decreed it!). So what do we do with our first book?

I see a few ways to go with this. The first option is to toss your first book into Select for a single three-month period with the knowledge it’s highly unlikely to do much for you. Call this the “At least it’s better than nothing.” In fact, let’s make sections!

“At Least It’s Better Than Nothing”

Sure, the other stores exist, and sell books, but with so few ways to advertise or otherwise reach Nook/Kobo/Apple readers, you’re sacrificing very little by starting out in Select. And free runs still have some utility. You may sell a few copies post-free. You may start to get a feel for how appealing your book is; don’t read too much into any one failure, but if it gives a bunch of copies away with little to no promotion, you might just be on to something. And perhaps most valuably, free runs are still a good way to garner some initial reviews to qualify your book for promotion at the various advertisers.

Here’s how I would handle it. Do a couple free runs immediately, just 1-2 days long. Feel free to extend them if you really explode, but try to save two free days. Next, schedule Book #2 to publish about a week before Book #1 expires from Select. (This may require waiting a short while to publish #1 or #2, so let’s just pretend I didn’t spend 1500 words condemning the idea of waiting in Part 2.) Do not enroll #2 in Select. Instead, schedule a free run on #1 for the day after #2 goes live, with the hope this will get #2 off to a stronger launch.

When #1 reverts to paid, see how it sells. If you’re satisfied with the way things are going, you can enroll #2 in Select at this point and re-up #1. But if Select is as dead as it is for most people, #1 is ready to expire and #2 was never enrolled. As soon as #1 exits the program, distribute both books to all channels, uploading directly wherever possible.

The idea here isn’t to use Select to rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales. Those days are long gone, sad trombone. Rather, the idea is to leverage the power of free to get readers to take a chance on you, to build up Book #1’s infrastructure (its reviews, alsobots, etc.), to gain mailing list subscribers, and to support the launch of #2. Any real sales over this period is just a bonus.

This is a very short-term plan and it’s highly unlikely to make you a rock star, but at least it’s a plan.

“The Boring Way That I Do Things: Sales and Ads”

Option number two is what I’m (mostly) currently doing. It’s not how I got here, but I think it should work all right, with a few modifications. Basically, it consists of publishing to all platforms, then running advertised sales, particularly to bolster new releases.

To get a little grittier with my nits, if I were just starting out with this method, I’d upload direct to all four major self-publishing platforms (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple). If for some reason you can’t upload to BN or Apple, use Draft2Digital. Their price changes go through much faster than Smashwords, and if you’re running regular sales, it’s going to be important to be able to change prices quickly–like within 24 hours. You’ll probably want to publish to Smashwords and distribute to all the other markets eventually, but honestly, they’re all so small you’re not missing out.

Then.. scramble for reviews.

And by reviews I mostly mean “Amazon reviews,” although BookBub will look at everything you’ve got, including Goodreads, so they’re all worth getting. The purpose isn’t the reviews themselves, but to get enough that the various ad sites will agree to advertise your book. While there’s no such thing as enough reviews, the scale we’re looking at is somewhere around 5-20; ~5 will qualify you for smaller sites, and ~20+ will start to look pretty good to the big ones.

How do you get these reviews? Honest ones, that is? Some people have had success with giveaways at LibraryThing and Goodreads (offer free copies in exchange for honest reviews), but that’s seriously all I know about that. I hate stuff like chasing reviews and it makes me want to give up and go home.

But the reviews aren’t going to just show up on their own, and in my experience it takes something like 100 sales to get 1 single review, so do the math. It could be months–years!–before your book has ~20 reviews arrive organically. You’ll have to chase them down somehow. If it helps, think of them as a Legend of Zelda sidequest. O brave warrior, you must track down the 20 Lost Reviews in order to unlock the Dungeon of Forbidden Advertising!

That out of the way, things are much simpler: find places that advertise ebooks, and book ads. To be a little more specific, find places that advertise ebooks well. Places that immediately cover the cost of the ad or come close to it. Some people like to argue that all advertising is valuable, because brand awareness, and when a consumer sees something seven times mumble grumble sales, but you’re not Crest toothpaste on a shelf with Arm & Hammer and the store brand. You’re one book on a shelf of two million. The people seeing your ad are probably never going to stumble over your book again.

I’m aware of five good ebook advertising sites. In roughly descending order: BookBub, POI, ENT, KBT, Book Blast. Generally speaking, it’s best to advertise at $0.99. At $0.99, these sites will generally break even or better, and the goal is to reach as many new readers as possible.

Run ads whenever your sales dry up, which as a new author will probably be always. And when book #2 arrives, try to have ads in place for book #1. It’s generally effective to drop to $0.99 for three days (the day before the ad, to ensure your price lowers; the day of the ad; and the day after to pick up the stragglers), but if you keep selling at $0.99 and you like what you’re seeing, stick with it as long as you like.

And that’s it, really. The downsides are there are only so many places to advertise, competition for spots is fierce, and BookBub is the only effective site I know about to reach beyond Amazon, but as they say, it is what it is. Even temporary boosts will reach new readers and may shake up your alsobots, leading to a longer tail of post-promo sales. It’s a long-term strategy, too. You’ll only be able to advertise any one book every so often, but as long as you keep writing new ones, that’s fresh material to promote.

This is the core of my current strategy, for whatever it’s worth, but I do have some qualms that it might be tough for brand-new authors to book ads at desirable sites. And there’s the review threshold to get over. But I see new authors doing this on KBoards right now, so it’s not impossible.

Now.. my favorite idea.

“The Nuclear Option!”

While I was mulling around the idea of this little series, I ran this idea by a group of writers I know–several of whom are much more successful than myself, and all of whom are very smart–and it was pretty much roundly rejected. So bear in mind that if this were a commercial, that commercial would say “Five out of six full-time indies think this is a Bad Idea!”

But it is, I think, what I would do if I were just starting today.

I would go permafree immediately.

For those just dipping their toes into the self-publishing waters, “permafree” means setting your book free permanently. Bit of a misnomer, as technically you can revert it to paid at any time, but the idea is to set it to $0.00 forever as a free introduction to your series. It’s a powerful tactic because it costs readers nothing to give your book a shot, and if they like it enough, they’ll go pay actual money for the later books in the series. Indies do this all the time. It’s one of our most basic tactics.

The unconventional bit of this is that writers generally don’t put it to use until they’ve got three books in the series out in the world.

The idea is to wait until you’ve got a couple sequels to make money from before you start giving the first one away for nothin’. But I’m not sure why the magic number is three. I’ve seen people go permafree with great results when they only had two books. So if it works for two, why not one??

…oh right, the part where you’re making zero money. But here’s what you’re making instead: readers. Of your stuff. At a much faster rate than you’ll be gaining them by charging $2.99. Readers who will (hopefully) go on to buy your sequels when they do come out (so long as you have a mailing list or other way to alert them), helping launch those books higher, and ultimately making you more money–and thus getting you closer to a real career–than you would have made waiting until book #3 to drop #1 to free.

And if you’d be worried about giving away a potential bestseller before it has the chance to find its legs, good news! The logistics of permafree require your book to start life as a paid title. Since you can’t set your BN price to $0.00 yourself, you’ll have to distribute your book there via Smashwords. It can take a few weeks for a SW-distributed book to go live at BN. Even after it does show up free on BN, it may take Amazon days, weeks, or months to pricematch to free.

And you can test the waters in the other stores as well. Upload direct to Kobo, Apple, and even BN and see whether the book takes off as a paid title. If it doesn’t, and you want to hasten the pricematching process, lower your price at Apple and Kobo to $0.00. As soon as the free SW version shows up at BN, pull your self-published version from sale.

It’s an extremely simple plan, there’s flexibility in the execution, and since advertising beyond Amazon is so limited, making a book permafree is probably the best option for reaching readers in the other stores. Amazon’s algos are pretty cruel these days. The trend is almost always down, and once your first 30 days as a new release are up, the cliff can come hard and fast. Diversifying your readership in other stores will help keep things steady between new releases.

Also, it’s pretty dang low-effort. Upload, tweak a couple prices, then remind Amazon that it’s free elsewhere until they pricematch. Once it qualifies (reviews etc.), sub it to freebie sites. That’s pretty much it. Go write!

But this plan isn’t without drawbacks. Some authors feel that books downloaded for free wind up with lower reviews than books people paid for, and there’s anecdotal and logical support for that idea (although no comprehensive studies I’m aware of). You’ll be giving up some unknown amount of initial income until your sequels arrive. If you’re on a tight budget, that’s a real consideration, especially if you could use those earnings to invest in snazzier covers or advertising or whatever. Someone suggested to me there’s psychological value in knowing total strangers have paid real money for a book you wrote, particularly in the fragile early days.

I’m unswayed. Free is one of the few tools brand-new authors have to make themselves competitive. If you can see yourself using it eventually, why wait? Why not fire it up right now and grab all the visibility you can in every store you can get into? Why not start gathering a mailing list right off the bat?

Anyway, let’s look at the timing on this. Day zero, you publish to Amazon, Smashwords, and wherever you’re uploading direct. It then takes a few days to be approved by Smashwords premium distribution (which you need to distribute to BN). If you haven’t met their formatting demands, you’ll have to try again; there’s a few more days. Once approved, it’ll probably be a couple days until it actually ships, and even then it can take 2-3 weeks for the free book to actually show up at BN. Once it does, Amazon rarely pricematches immediately. Even if you’re reporting your free book on their “tell us about a lower price” link, it can be days or weeks before they decide to match.

At this point, you’re beyond Amazon’s new release window, and if you’ve buckled down on the sequel, you should only be a couple months out from publishing. Yay. You gave #1 a shot as a paid title, and even if permafreeing it before #2 is out turns out to be a stupid idea, it’ll only be a stupid idea for a couple months until #2 goes live and permafree magically becomes a good idea.

You could hedge a bit more by waiting to set the permafree wheels in motion until #2 is almost ready. Finish up #2, then hit publish as soon as Amazon sets #1 to $0.00.

Anyway, this rationale is getting ridiculously long.

Let’s take a step back and look at what brand-new indies have to work with: virtually nothing. No fans, no reviews, no experience. The only way to accumulate those things is to publish a book and get it into readers’ hands. There are two factors in getting a reader to choose a book: first, they have to see it; second, it has to look interesting enough to overcome their resistance to buy. Making a book free creates visibility and reduces resistance. QED. I said QED!

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Well, there you go. These are just ideas, obviously. None of them are sacred, particularly revolutionary, or likely to make anyone an instant King Kong bestseller. On the plus side, they’re very simple, they should work for almost all genres, and each route should be infinitely more effective than waiting for all the readers to spontaneously yank your book out of that pile of two million.
These should be looked at as customizable templates, too. For instance, it might make a lot of sense to start off with Better Than Nothing and transition to The Boring Way as soon as your first Select term is up–use your free days to pull in reviews and give your book a little test drive, then publish to the other stores 90 days later, bolstered by whatever ads you can scrounge together. In fact, if I weren’t bold enough to try the Nuclear Option, that’s probably what I’d do, personally.
Now, these strategies are all situational, dependent on the current ebook environment, but there’s an underlying strategy that should be effective no matter which way the Amazon algo-winds are blowing. SM Reine already wrote the book on the foundation of an indie career, but to summarize:
1) Write in a series
2) Start up a mailing list immediately
3) Do something to get your books in front of readers
That process, or something close to it, is basically the story of every big indie’s career. This post has focused on 3), but unless you’re also doing 1) and 2), it’s going to be much harder to continue building on your prior success.
When it comes to 3), 2013 feels tougher than 2012. Even in its post-May 2012, watered-down state, Select was a strong tool for reaching readers. After a series of algorithm changes starting in February 2013, however, the program is virtually useless for generating post-free sales. Nothing remotely as effective has shown up to replace it.
In a tough environment like that, I’d be looking for strategies that are low-risk–plans that will almost certainly result in the steady accumulation of new readers–yet are aggressive enough to make you stand out. Like instant permafree or regular $0.99 sales. It might take several books and a year of publishing before you start to see strong book launches, but at least there will be visible progress as a trickle of new readers joins your mailing list, Facebook page, blog, etc.
By contrast, I’m not really a fan of strategies where the potential payoff is huge, but where you might lose out on months and months of growth if things don’t come together. Like waiting to publish until you have multiple books ready to go. This is an attempt to swing for the fences that is likely to result in a strikeout.
Even so, I can’t deny the awesomeness of big bold moves. Whatever route you go down, it’s vital to understand that you can’t count on readers appearing from nowhere. You’ve got to learn how to reach them, whether it’s through direct social means (participating on Goodreads or whatever) or more passive, low-effort methods (presenting a book to potential readers via making it free or advertising a sale). Learn to do that, and you’ll be in good shape.
Good luck, everybody. I’m happy to discuss ideas in the comments. And if you’re just getting your start, or you’ve just broken through, I’d love to hear your experience.

P.S. — For unknown reasons, the comments section of this blog like to disappear sometimes. Refreshing a couple times will generally convince them to show up. This is one of the many things I lament, but don’t have time to fix. The glorious life of a mid-list indie.

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I’m perfectly happy writing these posts for free, but if you feel like giving me a hand, I’ve just released a box set of my main series that’s currently just $0.99. It’s available at Amazon, B&N, and Kobo.
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Self-Publishing 101: David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Visible

So you have written a book. After long, thoughtful consideration, possibly in the form of a sixth shot of tequila, you have decided to self-publish it. Unfortunately, for most of us indie authors, the next step is much tougher than writing the book itself: getting people to see the damn thing.

Note I say “see” instead of “buy.” The distinction’s intentional. If you’ve already gotten a potential reader to your book’s product page, the techniques for convincing them to buy it are very limited and very simple: an eye-catching, professional cover. A compelling blurb. A strong sample. And a reasonable price.

But that advice is so common-sense and commonplace that chances are your eyes glazed over while you were reading it.

The real challenge is getting readers to see your book in the first place. And the advice on that front tends to be limited, contradictory, or flat-out wrong. Well, I’ve got some good news for you: David Gaughran, author of the excellent self-publishing primer Let’s Get Digital, has a new book out dedicated to understanding how to get your own books in front of potential readers. It’s called Let’s Get Visible, and it’s available just about any place you might like to buy it, including Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Kobo.

I’ll be right up front and say I’m a friend of David’s, so take that for what it’s worth. But I read the book and I think it’s pretty dang good. Readers of this blog are probably already familiar with the mechanics of Amazon’s popularity lists, but Visible also covers some critical business involving categories, advertising, and launch strategies. In fact, I employed what he calls “Going for Broke” to launch my last Breakers novel Knifepoint. (Although at the time it may have been labeled “Balls to the Wall.”)

Other things I appreciate about Visible: the strategies and concepts he outlines don’t take much time to put in place, they’re all ethical and above-board, and they help provide a framework for understanding how future changes to Amazon’s recommendation system will impact your particular approach. The problem with digital publishing is the specifics change all the time. If you’ve got a handle on the theory behind how bookstores promote a title, it gets a whole lot easier to roll with the punches.

Anyway, I’m not much for a hard sell, but I think it’s going to help a lot of people. If you’re an indie author, you should absolutely go take a look.

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

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

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

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

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The New Release: An Anatomy of the First 100 Sales

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

Here’s how those first 100 sales break down:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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I’m New to Indie Publishing, Part 5: The Long Term

Okay, so at this point, we’re not newbie indie writers anymore. We’ve looked at releasing your first book and using Select to start selling it. In the next step, we kept with Select to build up some fans and learn more about what makes for an attractive book. Third was about examining the pros and cons of Select in preparation for where to go next. And after concluding that Select isn’t perfect, we looked at expanding into non-ebook formats and identifying when and what to pull from Select.

Then a lot of time elapsed. Sorry. I was busy putting some theories to the test. Another, more accurate way to put that is “I was scrambling like mad to make the actual transitions I intended to talk about.” Those were a fun couple months, where “fun” is also meant to be understood as “something not all that fun at all.”

But it’s lookin’ good now, and the experience helped me feel ready to talk about the next step. About hitting a stable career and the specific tactics used to get there. I’m hardly the first to come up with these strategies, but that is not about to stop me from talking about them as if I own them and am revealing them for the very first time!

The way I see it, there are three or four solid ways to continue selling books without a ton of active promotion. Naturally, all of this depends on writing new books in the meantime, as well as in cultivating a mailing list/fanbase to alert whenever that new release is ready. I hope this provides some stuff to think about even if you’re already well-familiar with concepts like permafree.

Staying in Select

No matter how many times DWS or KKR insist that you’re missing out on sales, angering potential readers, and otherwise acting a fool, the exclusivity of Select sometimes makes sense as a long-term plan. There are at least two ways to make this work.

The first is the much more common scenario. If you’ve got an established series, running a Select giveaway is a great way to support a new release or to boost flagging sales. A Select giveaway costs nothing and provides you with precise control of when your promo runs. It gets your book in a lot of new hands, giving you the opportunity to build your mailing list or your Facebook page or whatever tools you prefer to use to have direct contact with your fans. There are all kinds of theories and strategies for selling books, but I haven’t seen any as revolutionary as Select. I’ve seen it build dozens of careers this year, including mine.

I mean, I’m leery of Select. I’m less in love with it by the day. But it still works very, very well for some people, particularly authors of series. With 3+ books, you can run a free promo of one book every month without having to make a given book free more than once every three months. That’s a good long time between free runs. Enough to let a book recharge its batteries a bit. That strikes me as a far more sustainable strategy than trying to give away the same book every month (although even that can work), especially if you’re adding a new book or two (or three!) to the series every year.

The second long-term use of Select is if you’re selling so well that you never even need to give copies of your books away. This might sound like a great reason to leave Select–if your books are doing that well, surely they will sell in the other stores as well–but here’s the thing: borrows. If your books are doing great, they’ll place highly in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (the KOLL), which is what Kindle-users browse to find books to borrow. The KOLL only represents the subset of books in Select (along with a small number of traditionally published books that have negotiated special arrangements with Amazon), so the competition there is much less fierce. If you’re a strong seller, chances are you’ll wind up with great visibility in the KOLL.

Let’s think about this for a moment. Despite the growth of all the other stores, Amazon retains something like 60% of the ebook market. Meanwhile, before Christmas made everything all crazy, Amazon was getting about 250,000 borrows per month. These were split up among a smaller pool of books (everything in Select) and the books at the top were rewarded with a disproportionately high cut of the borrows. While a bestseller like Hugh Howey’s Wool has done plenty well in the other stores, it might do even better by staying in Select and racking up borrows; he’s intimated as much on comments on Kindleboards.

Crazy, I know, and totally counterintuitive–unless you think of the KOLL as a completely separate market. A small store, sure, with just a few hundred thousand customers per month, but it’s also got a much smaller selection to split those customers between. It’s the guaranteed opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond, and that is generally a safer bet than it is to fling your book at the other stores and hope its word of mouth allows it to do just as well at B&N, Kobo, the iBookstore, Kobo, Smashwords, Sony, and all the rest as it did at Amazon.

I’ll put it another way. Let’s say Librios, the god of books, strolls down from book-heaven and presents you with a choice. He can make you a bestseller at Kobo, but you have to remove your book from the iBookstore. Mwa ha ha ha! Would you do it?

Unless you’re already a bestseller at both places, of course you would. The argument for publishing to every possible outlet is that you never know where a book might take off, so you should buy as many lotto tickets as possible to up your chances of breaking out.

But if you’re doing that great with Select and its borrows, you have already won the lotto.

The concept that it is best to publish to every store isn’t a universal truth, then, it’s a dogmatic principle. Your situation doesn’t care about principles. Your situation cares about your situation. Look at your placement on the KOLL. Look at your monthly borrows, and remember those apply to your bestseller rank, too. I don’t know where the cutoff point is, but if, say, 20%+ of your income is generated by borrows, it might make more sense to stick with a winning ticket than to go chasing a hypothetical 40% of the marketplace that might never materialize for you.

Moving into the Other Stores

But you know what? Select kind of sucks. Giveaways aren’t as effective as they once were. Amazon is throttling freebies on sites like POI and ENT, meaning they list about half as many free books each day as they did a couple months ago. Meanwhile, other markets continue to grow. And rather than improving the Select carrot in any meaningful way, Amazon is hitting authors with an impotent stick, offering 70% royalties in India and Brazil for Select books and just 35% for non-Select titles. What incredible opportunity! India has a billion people! Brazil is the most populous country in South America! Yeah, and they’re not exactly busting down the ebook doors just yet. At this moment, I have sold 1100+ books on Amazon in December and given away another 11,500+. 0 of those have been in Brazil. Great incentive, guys.

Anyway, it just doesn’t feel safe to me. I like the idea of diversity. Diversity is healthy. It lets you weather change and disaster. It feels good to not have to rely on so many things beyond your control–Amazon algorithms, free book sites, yadda yadda yadda.

So let’s say you’re thinking about exiting Select for the greener pastures of BN etc. Here’s the thing: don’t do it until you have an actual plan to sell at BN. Letting your books sit around waiting to be struck by sales-lightning is a terrible idea. The slow burn leading to a boom of success is something of a myth. It’s an outlier, at the very least. If you’re selling 2/month at BN, that’s not going to lead to growth. Maaaybe if you’re doing 20/month. You need to be climbing ranks, accumulating meaningful alsobots, etc. A book doesn’t have to be a bestseller in every store to be a valuable part of your writin’ business, but you have to do something to get sales going.

Because the idea that a good book will eventually find its audience is just that. An idea. A wish. Cream only rises to the top because it is less dense than the lower-fat milk beneath it and it is a natural law of physics that less-dense substances will float on top of denser substances. Books are not dairy products. Writers can trick you with metaphors about selling books because it is a writer’s job to trick people into believing in places and things that aren’t true. So. Books are books.

Fortunately, it does not require a 12-point business plan to sell them outside Amazon. Here’s a few simple ways to actually make it worth your while to leave Select.

The Perma-Free Option

This plan is super-simple: if you have a series, make the first book free. Permanently. You can accomplish this by setting the price to $0.00 on Kobo and the iBookstore, using Smashwords to distribute at $0.00 to BN, and getting Amazon to pricematch your title to $0.00. This plan is awesome because it requires very little work to set up and virtually no work to maintain. Readers check out your first book because it costs nothing, and if they like it, maybe they go pay real money for book two.

A lot of people have seen great success with this plan. The common pattern of sales is a genuine slow burn that eventually explodes as a series picks up steam. After some time–a few months, typically–sales tail off, but still continue to come in at a nice, steady level. And since there are several different stores to build an audience in, you can experience this cycle at four or five different places with a single series.

Some authors don’t like free books. They don’t like the idea of giving away something they worked so hard on. They think free books devalue the marketplace and will eventually be the ruin of us all.

Well, good news, Scrooge. You don’t have to.

Just Write a Series

That may be all it takes to start selling in other stores. If you’d prefer to have a career now rather than counting on some five-year business plan whose chief tenets are magical thinking and wishcasting the future, I recommend starting your first couple books in Select, then transitioning out once you’ve got 3+ books in that series.

The idea is to use Select to pick up initial visibility, sales, and fans despite being a no-name nobody who’s otherwise lucky to sell 1/week. Once you’ve got something of a fanbase on Amazon, and no longer have to rely exclusively on giveaways to sell a new book, you can get going in other stores just by releasing the entire series there at once.

Why does it make a difference to release a series together (or at least tightly-spaced) rather than one at a time over several months? Because a series is like an A-Team. There aren’t a lot of Rambo-books out there, invincible one-book killing squads that can’t be stopped no matter how many trad-shirt enemies get in their way. It is very rare to have a book that good.

But if you’ve got a squad of books, they help each other out. They pull each other up when one of them stumbles. BN, for instance, has a new releases list that goes back 90 days. You have a much better chance of climbing high up this list if you fire three titles at it all at once–giving browsers three chances to find your series–rather than hitting it with a single book at a time. There are cases in which books enter a state of positive reinforcement where they haul each other faster and faster down the track.

There are no guarantees this will actually work. This plan is a definite citizen of the Sovereign Nation of My Books Will Magically Sell Themselves. But at least it ups your odds. “Synergy,” it’s called, if you’re a fan of words that could get you punched. Depending on the store, you’ll only be eligible for new release lists for 1-3 months. Take advantage of this visibility while you’ve got it. Let your series be an A-Team. That is what series are designed to do.

Do Something. Anything at All. Seriously, Just Do Something to Get Started

Here is a slightly less magical plan: when you move your books out of Amazon, advertise or promote your books in some way. If you know a site that advertises to Nook users, book an ad for soon after your books go live on BN (and then tell me where you advertised, because non-Amazon ad sites are as rare as snipes). Do something. Anything at all to get some initial sales and, with any luck, provoke your books into continuing to sell.

Because here is another law of physics, one that might actually apply to books: a body at rest tends to stay at rest. A book that isn’t selling tends to continue not to sell. Anti-Select people like to talk about the opportunity cost of Select–all the potential non-Amazon sales you’re giving up by being exclusive to Amazon–but if you are in the other stores, and you’re not selling anything, then you’re incurring an opportunity cost by not being in Select, where you could be sparking sales through giveaways.

Even if you’re generally anti-marketing, then, do something to get sales going. Do a $0.99 sale along with a new release. Book an ad. Blog your ass off. Whatever. The goal is to get the new store you’re in to start selling your book for you so you don’t have to keep doing this stupid marketing stuff.

Here’s an example of all this junk in action. I published Melt Down, the sequel to Breakers, to Barnes & Noble on October 16. My October sales there were 8. 4 for Breakers, 4 for Melt Down. I made $16.30 in October. Melt Down was only out a couple weeks, so why don’t we double that to represent a full month going forward. 16 sales. 3-4/week. $30-40 a month. Whoopee.

In early November, dissatisfied with my new release sales everywhere, I threw a bunch of junk together. A guest post on my friend’s popular blog. An ENT ad. Etc. I reduced Breakers and Melt Down to $0.99. Aided by advertising, being on BN’s new releases list, and a $0.99 sale, I sold a few hundred copies over there. The boost was short-lived. About five days. After that, I restored them to $2.99 and $3.99. But even after things settled down, the sale had given them some visibility. Alsobots. A few reviews. Maybe a bit of word of mouth. Six weeks later, they’re continuing to sell about 3/day. $7/day, $200/month.

The difference between $40/month and $200/month probably isn’t the difference between dogfood dinner and organic prime rib, but this is where Dean Wesley Smith’s mantra about creating as many revenue streams as possible through as many sites as possible starts to make sense. But I don’t agree with his ideas about tossing your work out there and doing nothing to promote it. Not when you’re still scrabbling to establish a career and every dollar matters. Take a few days off to give yourself a kick, then get back to writing.

The Hybrid Solution

I’m talking about all this stuff like it’s just that simple, but it’s not. Even when you’re in Select, and you’re on Amazon, which all sorts of sites offer advertising and support for, selling books is tough. Selling books in non-Amazon stores is even tougher. If you’re making a career out of indiedom, cutting off Select and taking the plunge into the other stores could be a serious risk to your sales. If it gets bad enough, you could find yourself back with–shudder!–a real job.

So maybe it’s a good idea to leave some books in Select and others out. That’s been my plan since August–move my Breakers series into the other stores while keeping The Cycle of Arawn in Select. My thinkin’ was to hedge my bets. By keeping Arawn in Select, I could still run free giveaways to keep sales steady even as Breakers dwindled on Amazon and fought to get established in the other stores.

It worked. Or maybe it worked, question mark? Since it’s only been a few months and all. My sales shrank for a couple months, but then Breakers got going on BN, and now it’s going on Kobo, and I just did a big Select giveaway of Arawn back on Amazon, and woooooo Christmas.

Anyway, it doesn’t particularly matter how it worked for me. The concept is what’s important. Having one series in and one series out is just about being flexible. Which you can’t do if you have bizarre, unbreakable principles about how a very fluid book market is supposed to work. Unless you think there is something morally heinous about it, Select isn’t an ideology, it’s a tool. Every single (non-heinous) strategy is just a tool. Tools are made to be picked up when they can be useful and set down when the job changes or you find a better tool to get the old job done.

A Summary

The problem with these long-range business plans–write ten book before you start promoting; forego Select and get your start in all the markets right now–is that even if they are sound in principle (and I mostly think they’re not), no one can predict how they’ll play out for an isolated, individual career. A hard, rigid plan may not be the best fit for where you are right now in your life. If you’re relying on your income as an author to survive, and that income is partly or wholly reliant on using Select, then obviously you’re going to want to be a lot more cautious and gradual about leaving the program than someone with a day job that pays all the bills and affords the luxury of taking high-risk gambles or embarking on years-long plans.

That seems like such common sense that I’m sitting here thinking, “Dude, you can’t seriously be trying to pass that off as wisdom. That is so obvious and self-evident that you are an idiot for bothering to type it aloud.” Yet I see people passing down hard and fast rules to new writers all the time. Stuff that sounds so insane it would make more sense as deliberate sabotage.

I’ve tried to pull together some specific strategies here–when it makes sense to stick with Select, going permafree, how and when to transition from other stores–but I think success as an independent author boils down to a handful of very basic ideas.

One, you need to keep writing. This is the advice that everyone gives, because it is the best advice. I don’t know how many books you “need” to write per year to sustain a career. I am going to say one, at the very, very least. Two or three or four is going to make it a lot easier on yourself. Depending on your background, four books per year may sound impossible, almost comically fast and virtually guaranteed to produce hackish drivel, but you can write a lot when you’re writing as a full-time job. The very fastest indies I’ve seen put out a new full-length novel every single month.

I sure don’t write that fast (although I may be capable of 3-4/year now), but that’s just to provide a sense of scale. The specifics don’t matter. If you want to make this a full-time job, then you have to treat it like a full-time job. Let that not be lost in all this babble of tactics.

Second, you have to try things for yourself. You have to find something that works for you, and when you find it, you have to keep doing it. Aggressively.

As long as it’s not evil, a specific tactic has no value judgment attached to it. If you’re getting results from Select, keep doing Select. If not, try the other stores. Try ads, even if Konrath says they’re stupid and never did him any good. Try anything. Try everything. Failure’s good. Failure’s cool. Failing means you’re trying.

If you’re done failing, and you’ve got to the point where your fans will follow you down any path, then congratulations, you’ve won. For most of us, it’s still a struggle. If someone’s found a way to make it work, I hate to see other writers put that down just because the author is using Select or erotica or serials or whatever damn trend is bringing the judge-hounds sniffing around. If it works and you like it, do it now, because it may not work tomorrow.

But even if it does stop, you’ve probably wound up with more fans. More experiences. More resources to get you through to the next port in the storm. It gets easier. I think. How’s that for reassuring?

This series of posts is now to the end of my experience. I don’t know where it goes from here. I am sure the next year of changes will force me to find out.

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I’m New to Indie Publishing, Part 4: Moving Beyond Amazon

In my last post in this series, I looked at whether Select is as useful in the long term of an indie author’s career as it is in the short term, concluding that Select carries several costs and risks. My skepticism may be weird, coming after two posts that were nothing but rah-rah Select cheerleading, but Select isn’t a life-philosophy. There’s no Tao Te KDP Select. As I’ve said before, Select is a tool. And I think it is, in general, most effective as a tool for those who are just starting out.

Which isn’t to say it becomes useless once an author’s established. But things are a little different.

Before we get started, two things. What do I mean that an author is “established,” or has reached a “medium-term” portion of their career? Hell, I don’t know. Somewhere between fresh out of the gates and automatic bestseller? To put it in more concrete terms, I’m thinking about authors whose careers, at present, roughly match up to these guidelines:

  • Have published 3-6 or more full-length books (or some equivalent in serializations, novellas, and the like)
  • Capable of selling at least a few dozen copies of their new release right off the bat

  • Are writing and publishing 2+ novels a year

This is just ballpark thinking. To abstract these points a bit, the idea is that you’ve got a backlist of sorts, you’ve got the infrastructure in place to generate some sales with new releases (be this a mailing list, canny advertising, or whatever), and that you’re continuing to put out new books on at least a fairly regular schedule. To get even more abstract: you don’t just have a book or two out there floating in the ooze. Instead, you’ve got resources at your disposal to take advantage of when sales slow down and it’s time to give yourself a boost.

Onto the second qualification: take all this advice with a grain of salt. In fact, take it with two grains, because salt is delicious. But also take two grains because I’m not coming at this from the perspective of somebody with lengthy, firsthand expertise. I don’t sell 50,000 copies a month. My garage doesn’t contain a Ferrari and an elephant. Some twenty months into my indie career, I’m just breaking into this phase myself. I’m coming at it from the perspective of someone whose own floor is barely in place, who’s able to make a living, but not one most people would consider respectable. I’m observing and experimenting with all this stuff right now. That means what I’m seeing is present-day info, which is nice in a business changing this fast, but it could also mean I’m heading down the path to disaster. Just want to toss that out there!

Anyway, on to the thinkin’.

If the early stage of an indie career is about building your floor, I think the middle stage is about building.. the stuff that goes on top of the floor. Maybe this metaphor should be about a castle? In which case, the middle phase of your career is about raising new turrets, bastions, ramparts, moats, curtain walls lined with merlons, murder holes…you get the picture. All the infrastructure that will defend your career against the threats of the outside world and a rapidly changing industry. Logically, the best way to build a stable, steady career is to establish multiple revenue streams for yourself. To cast aside the shackles of Select and spread your arms to the healing rays of iTunes, Kobo, B&N, etc.

…or maybe the best way to build a stable career is to continue to reach as many readers as possible. And maybe that involves staying in Select.

I think both are valid points of view, so I’m going to explore both strategies, as well as some that fall in between. First off, though, is a bit of a cheat. You can be in Select and other stores. How? With paperbacks and other non-ebook formats, of course.

   On the Virtues of Non-eBook Formats

If you haven’t already, expanding to these other formats–the most obvious ones are paperbacks and audiobooks–is worth exploring. I know, not everyone is as lazy as me. They were downloading CreateSpace templates with one hand while uploading their ebooks to KDP with the other. Well you know what, pal, if you’re that ambidextrous, there are probably easier ways to make money than writing books.

And I think that, in the early phases of indiedom, it’s okay to focus exclusively on ebook formats. Ebooks are the easiest format for indies to break into, and proper formatting doesn’t require much specialized talent. Certainly not like producing quality cover art. Meanwhile, formatting a paperback or getting an audiobook produced requires an author to learn an entirely new set of skills. Considering how little money you’re likely to make off these formats in the early going, I think it’s perfectly valid to ignore them in favor of working on new books.

At first. Somewhere in this middle phase, however, I think it’s worth your while to take a break from your daily schedule to learn how to get these other formats available for people to buy. Hell, you don’t even have to learn paperback formatting for yourself. There are a lot of people out there who’ll do it for you for $30-100 a pop. That may not have been feasible for your to pay in the early going, when every cent mattered, but if you’re bringing in monthly sales, it’s time to invest some of that revenue into new ways to sell your books. With audiobooks, it can be expensive to hire a narrator outright, but if you agree on a royalty split, your total costs should be minimal.

If you choose to learn to format paperbacks for yourself, chances are you’ll find the next one takes far less time to produce. My first paperback took me several days to format. I’m finishing the second one right now. It took me maybe three hours in total to produce, including emails to my cover artist and such, and cost $50: $25 for CreateSpace’s expanded distribution, and $25 for the paperback cover. (Technically, an additional $25 on top of the ebook cover I’d commissioned earlier.) It is very difficult to predict the future, but assuming CreateSpace doesn’t go out of business in the next two months, I believe this minor investment of time and money will pay for itself many times over.

I think that’s all I’ll say about that. Other people have covered the importance of other revenue streams in much more detail, and with far greater experience, than I’m capable of doing. Paperbacks and audiobooks may never be a major component of your income, but they can be a small tower of your empire, a place to take refuge in even when other towers are collapsing. And if these formats are an area you enjoy exploring, you may be able to use these bastions as strongholds from which to expand your reach. Man, I write too much epic fantasy. I’m talking about getting paperbacks into local bookstores. Serializing audiobooks on your website. That sort of thing.

Back to ebooks. Specifically, to stay in Select, or to start heading sail for distant stores?

  What to Pull Out of Select

Again, I have a handy dodge. Unless all your titles are in successful series, you may have noticed that one of your books just doesn’t seem to get any juice from Select. Maybe the big freebie blogs rarely mention it when it’s free. Maybe you’ve never wound up with enough reviews, or a high enough review rating, to meet those blogs’ standards. Maybe everything about selling this book feels like pushing a boulder uphill.

Well, I say stop pushing that boulder. Nobody likes pushing boulders. Some books are just tough sells. It’s hard to know which ones are boulders before they’re up for sale–few people intend to write dud books–but given enough time, and several other books for comparison, it’s pretty easy to tell which of your books are tough sells, and may never see any significant benefit from Select. These are the books whose monthly sales columns make you want to shake your head and send them to the corner with a pointy cap on.

These boulders are perfect candidates to roll out of Select and into the other stores. The truth is they probably won’t sell like gangbusters elsewhere, either–if they lack that certain appeal in one store, they probably won’t have it anywhere–but they’ll more than likely sell a few copies here and there. They may gradually pick up a few reviews, not that those appear to be nearly as important beyond Amazon. And once you’re ready to transition your better-selling books to other stores, new readers who snap up your bestsellers will have other titles of yours to buy, too.

Additionally, novellas, short stories, and story collections all tend to have a hard time in Select, but may do better on platforms like iTunes. If you’re not getting any Select traction with them, don’t be afraid to let them expire from the program and distribute them to other stores.

   Should I Upload Directly? Or Use a Third-Party Distributor?

When it comes to the other stores, I recommend uploading directly whenever possible. Smashwords is a useful company and service, particularly if you’re trying to get into stores you can’t partner with directly (such as B&N, if you’re outside the US, or Apple, if you’re a human). But they’re very clumsy. They don’t always catalogue books correctly, and any changes you make to pricing, content, etc. may take days, weeks, even months to filter out to all the other stores. Use Smashwords where it makes sense–when you can’t get into a store, when you’ve got a book you’re all but certain you’ll rarely if ever change (an unpopular short story collection, say), when you’re making a book permanently free, and to be present on Smashwords itself.

But if you can, go direct through Kobo. Go direct through Barnes & Noble. If you’ve got a Mac, apply to sell direct through iTunes. Much like learning to format paperbacks, once you’ve learned to format an epub for the other stores, doing it with your next book will take no time at all. You may be able to upload the same Word document, or just have Calibre export an epub instead of a mobi. In exchange for this small expenditure of your time, you’ll have direct control over your books. You’ll be able to change prices, blurbs, categories, etc. in a matter of hours rather than days and weeks. And if you have to suddenly change your whole strategy–because, for instance, OMG selling books outside Amazon is impossible–you can unpublish tonight rather than waiting months to abandon the other stores and scurry back to Select like the scurvy rat ye be.

Okay, dunno where that came from. I don’t write any pirate fiction. Point is, you want to remain nimble at all times. Nimbleness (nimbility?) is one of your chief weapons as an indie. You want to be able to react to changes the moment after they happen. If you publish through a third-party distributor, you lose that flexibility. Don’t use Smashwords (or anywhere else) just because it’s easy. Use it smartly. Use it when it’s to your advantage. Otherwise, preserve control of your work wherever possible. You’ll thank yourself later.

Hey, I gave you that advice. You should be thanking me.

   Yeah, But You Said There Would Be Strategies Here

I know. But this is getting loooooong, and I have a new novel to flog. Anyway, all these things are strategies, kind of. And they’re applicable to all authors, whether or not Select is a major plank of your platform.

A lot of opinion-having writers feel like Select is an either/or proposition. It isn’t. Once you’ve reached this middle phase of your indie career, you should be in position to decide for yourself whether you want to stay in Select or branch out to other stores–but whatever you decide, you’ve still got options.

Even if you think you’ll stick with Select, you can kick your non-performing titles out of the nest and see if they have better luck elsewhere. Start building new floors at Kobo and B&N and iTunes, however tiny, in case you change your mind down the road. Your boulders aren’t doing you any good in Select anyway. Just fire ’em off and forget ’em.

If you plan to get all your books out of Select and into the other stores.. well, follow that exact same process, but more aggressively. Be faster to pull the trigger on suspected boulders. Use these advance scouts to get a feel for how the other stores work so you’ll be in best position to sell your popular titles. This metaphor is terribly mixed. But don’t fire and forget. Fool around with your scouts, then fool around some more.

Whatever your top-level strategy, bear in mind that the ebook is not the only property you have to work with. Your story is what’s of value. People will buy that story in whatever format it comes in–ebook, paperback, audiobook, holocube, neuronasal spraypaper. But you have to give them the option first. Once you’ve got a few books out there, try to find the chance to take a few weeks off your writing to devote to other formats.

This is 2300 words. That’s a lot of words. I will endeavor to produce another batch by tomorrow.

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I’m New to Indie Publishing, Part 3: Is Select a Long-Term Answer?

Last post, I looked at how to run big giveaways in order to build up your floor as an author. As long as you’re comfortable giving away thousands of copies of your books, it’s a fast, low-effort way to grab your first real visibility. Along the way, you’re gaining fans, which will help you sell your next book, as well as reviews and likes and tags and all that, which will help you sell this book the next time you promote it.

This whole strategy is based on KDP Select, however. Which requires selling exclusively through Amazon. Which continues to be a contentious and divisive topic within the indie publishing world.

The pro-Select crowd more or less believes this: “Select is a tool, nothing more. I’ve gotten better results through it than I ever have when my book was available at all the other stories. Until that changes, I’m going to stick with what’s working for me–Select, and Amazon exclusivity.”

The anti-Select argument has a few facets to it. Some people have a philosophical problem with exclusivity; they want readers to be able to buy their books through whatever store and on whatever format they prefer. Others just think Select is a bad business decision: it’s not sustainable, the gains from free giveaways are temporary, and you aren’t factoring in the opportunity cost of exclusivity: you don’t know what your books could be selling in the other stores. “I want steady, organic growth. A long-term career. The best way to achieve this is to make my books available in as many stores and formats as I possibly can.”

This perspective is perhaps most visibly argued by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. These two are long-term pros with all kinds of great advice about protecting your rights as an author and running your business wisely. I’ve met them once, and found them smart, approachable, and downright excited to share what they know with new authors. (Hi, Kris! RadCon 2010–I was the young dude in the Bukowski shirt. Got flustered when you told me he was one of Dean’s favorites.)

But I also think they’re full of crap.

To me, the business plan of pushing your work out to every stores is a strategy of hope. As in, “I’m going to sell my work in every store, and hope the readers there magically find it.” It’s the power of prayer, in other words–and we all know God helps those who help themselves.

So you can hope. Or, you can enroll in Select. At the cost of hoping you might sell at the other markets, you now have a powerful tool to create visibility for yourself in what remains the majority share of the ebook market.

That said? I’m growing skeptical of Select. I don’t think it is necessarily a long-term part of an indie author’s career.

Boy, this is going to be a long post. Here’s the thing. The benefits of Select depend on giving away a lot of books. You can only give away a lot of books if a lot of people know you have a book to give away. The way most books give away thousands of copies is through being listed by the big three freebie blogs: ENT, POI, and FKBT. In other words, your success as a self-published author depends on a new set of gatekeepers.

These gatekeepers have their own sets of standards as to which books they’ll choose to promote. These standards may or may not be public. If you’ve got a book that doesn’t meet their standards–whether because of your cover, your genre, your number or average rating of reviews, or you gave their dog a dirty look nine years back–Select may not be of any use to you. Note that I surely don’t blame these blogs for having standards–they’ve built their own readership by curating titles and offering up what appear to be the good ones; if they had no standards, no one would follow them–I’m just saying that your success in Select depends on factors outside of your control.

Speaking of factors outside of your control: Amazon is not reliable. Not 100%. Using Select, you’ll run into glitches all the time. Your free day may not start as scheduled, or at all. Your book may not go free on time or go back to paid on time. You may not be displayed on the free ranks for hours or days at a time, curtailing the effectiveness of your promo. And you know how much immediate customer support Amazon offers for these problems? Zero. There’s no phone number for you to call. If you email KDP support, you’ll be lucky to get a response by the next day, and it will probably be several days after that before they’ll address your issue. Too late to matter, in other words.

Amazon’s algorithms that help translate free promotions into paid sales aren’t reliable, either. They’ve already changed twice this year: once in March, once in May. They could change again at any time. Could be better, could be worse. There’s no way to know until it happens.

Then there’s the matter of sustainability. I don’t know if it’s sustainable to pick up sales by giving away thousands of free copies on a regular basis. No one knows this. The Select program hasn’t even been out a year yet. If we’re talking about a career, we’re talking about decades of time. Can you get effective results by giving away a book month after month and year after year?

Common sense says you’ll see diminishing returns, but in a business as chaotic as the current ebook world, common sense needs to sit down and shut up. I can relate that, anecdotally, I have seen a handful of people who have been able to run highly successful monthly or semi-monthly giveaways of a title and pick up some real sales afterwards. The May changes to Amazon’s algorithms have made this harder to do, but people are still doing it. (And this mostly depends on POI picking you up every time you go free.)

But they’re not common. There is a larger pool of people who can regularly give away a decent number of copies on a regular basis, but their post-free sales aren’t that inspirational. I’m talking a few dozen extra sales following a giveaway. Probably no more than a couple hundred bucks in income. And then there is an even larger pool of authors who get very inconsistent results. Sometimes, they may give away thousands of copies during a promotion, but other times, they aren’t picked up anywhere and they’re lucky to give away a few hundred.

And there is an opportunity cost. This cost is totally unknown, of course; you can’t know how your book would do in the other stores until it is in the other stores. This is what I’ve seen, though. A book that does well in Select tends to sell in the other stores, too. Probably not like gangbusters. Usually not enough to make up the difference. But it will sell some. And I’ve had some books that gained nothing from Select wind up selling more in the other stores than they have on Amazon. Again, not sales by the truckload. But a few here and there. Furthermore, all the things you’ll learn about selling books by being in Select–covers and categories and all the rest–largely apply to the other stores as well. After seasoning yourself in Select, it should be easier to take what you’ve learned and apply it to Apple and B&N and Kobo as well.

Then there’s the issue of trying to become a big fish in a small pond. Of trying to stay ahead of the curve rather than blindly following what dummies like me are trying to pass along as fresh news.

In order to make Select work, then, you have to rely on the gatekeepers of blogs. You have to rely on Amazon to actually run your promo as scheduled and to not change the program’s effectiveness three weeks from now. And you have to rely on the Select concept being one that will work for years and years down the road. Meanwhile, you can’t know where you’d be at in the other stores if you’d never tried Select in the first place.

All that said? I still recommend Select as a starting point. Right here, right now, Select still works very well for a great many people. Even for seasoned indies, the other stores can be a struggle. Select remains well-understood and easy to leverage. It’s particularly useful for a series and for getting new books off the ground before you have a fanbase to do that for you.

But for all these reasons, I think a longer-term strategy involves more than Select. I, for one, am trying to make a career out of this. I don’t like the idea of my success being dependent on a handful of blogs, a single store, a single program, and a single trick. I still have a couple books enrolled in Select, but I’m trying to make it one of my tools rather than my only tool.

Okay, this post is approaching Konrathian lengths. I’m going to explore medium-term strategies in a followup post instead. But I thought it was necessary to lay out all my thoughts about Select before delving into where you might go with your career after you’re, say, 6-12 months into your career, have 2-6 titles out there, and have run multiple giveaways. That way, you’ll know where I’m coming from, and can adjust your own strategies accordingly.

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Exploring Bold New Non-Amazon Frontiers, Day 1: Barnes & Noble

Over the last few months, I’ve grown disillusioned enough with Amazon Select to pull my book Breakers from the program. Yesterday, its exclusivity expired. Today, Breakers is available on Barnes & Noble for the Nook reader.

It should be in Kobo as well at some point, but it appears to be stuck in publishing at the moment.

Selling beyond Amazon is a tricky proposition. Amazon has a lot of different places for a book to be discovered–bestseller lists for free and paid titles, popularity lists, hot new releases, alsobots, email recommendations, its internal search engine, etc. Between all these venues, as well as the Select program, it’s possible–not easy, but possible–to actively sell your book through a number of different methods. Methods which authors talk about all over the place.

For stores like iTunes and Barnes & Noble, however, the only really effective method I’ve heard about is “write a series and make book one free.” Common wisdom holds it’s possible for romance and erotica to sell well on B&N. Everything else, however, tends to sink into the morass, which is why, when it comes to the non-Amazon storefronts, indie authors’ most common reaction is the e-equivalent of throwing up their hands and muttering to themselves.

Self included. The entirety of my non-Amazon strategy to date has been to make one of my novellas free for nearly a year. That did approximately nothing to spur sales of my other titles, even before I started pulling them to go into Select. And in the first two months since returning to paid, that novella has sold 11 copies on iTunes and 0 on B&N.

In other words, I’m clueless.

But that’s what I’m hoping to address now. I know that Breakers can sell when it’s in front of people, so unlike my other titles, if I can find a way to get it some visibility in the other stores, it should sell. Hypothetically. So how do you find that visibility?

With B&N, new releases appear to get a bit of it. Since going live over there, Breakers has sold 3 copies, which a) I’m almost certain is attributable to being automatically added to the new release listings, and b) has already made me more money than I’ve ever made in a single month at B&N. New releases seem to be listed for up to 90 days over there. The default sorting appears to be by “Top Matches,” whatever that means. It could be an algorithm of some kind, or it could be codeword for “a big publisher paid us for this placement.”

Virtually everything on the first 100 default titles of Science Fiction & Fantasy, All New Releases is a trad book priced between $7.99-14.99. The few exceptions near the top are trad authors publishing short works (Terry Brooks and Laurell K. Hamilton). There are a handful of indies in the last ~30, some of which are free. All of these books have nice sales ranks. If you’ve got a series, it might be smart to start it out in Select, then pull it out once you’ve got 3+ titles and try to create instant momentum for the rest of the series by making the first book free and hoping its New Release placement will pull the rest of your books along behind it.

Beyond that, though, it looks like B&N shoppers have to do some pretty active searching to find any new releases that aren’t big bestsellers. Bummer.

Bestseller rank on B&N is less volatile/more sluggish than on Amazon, by the way. For instance, a single sale of a new release on Amazon would put your initial rank around #50,000; Breakers, with three sales (only one of which might be counted toward its rank) is currently #379,078 on B&N. I saw the same thing with my free title: over the months, roughly 1000 downloads pushed it up to something like #15,000 in the ranks. With no paid sales three months later, it’s still at #51,251.

What this means in practice is it’s harder to attain a high rating, but once you do, it’s easier to stay sticky. This is another reason trad books sell much better there while indie books have a hard time gaining traction. But if you’re an indie with a big old fanbase, you can probably do pretty well for yourself.

Well, none of this is encouraging so far. On the plus side: 3 sales so far isn’t nothing. If I wind up averaging just 1/day at B&N, I’ll consider it a success.

I’ll try to come back to my progress at B&N a week from now. By then, I hope to be up and running at Kobo as well. I’ve also applied to sell directly through iTunes, but I have no idea when or if I’ll be granted access. I probably should have applied for that weeks or months in advance. Learn from my mistakes, people!

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