Edward W. Robertson

There Will Be Nearly 500,000 eBooks Published in 2013: The Difficulty of Long-Term Projections

That could be the entire post, really.

For context, this morning I was reading a cool post by Courtney Milan about estimating the value of your book’s rights. In it, she compares the value of a hypothetical trad contract vs. what you’d earn self-publishing it. Overall, it’s a very reasonable piece that isn’t about banner-waving for one side or the other, but is rather about assessing the money value of either option so you can make the best decision about which route to take.

The problem, sort of, is that she compares both examples over a 35-year span. On the one hand, when you’re talking about book contracts that can for last decades beyond your death–although she points out the rather neat fact that all authors can reclaim their rights after 35 years–it’s perfectly valid to assess the long-term pros and cons about signing such a contract.

On the other hand… who knows how things are going to look 5 years from now, let alone 35.

So, given that the future of the book industry and ebooks in particular is so unknowable, there’s an argument to be made that up-front money–i.e. an advance–should be weighted more heavily than long-term royalty projections. Which isn’t to say I think Courtney’s wrong; her projections sound very reasonable, and thus helpful in reaching a decision about what to do with your book. This is just something to think about.

Anyway, over the course of discussing the ongoing chaos that is present-day publishing, I went to look at how many new ebooks are currently being published. Late last December, I noted there were 1.8 million titles in the Kindle store. Checking the numbers today, there are just over 2.1 million.

300,000 new titles in a little under 8 months.

Prorate that for the rest of 2013, and that’s roughly 472,000 new books.

1293 every day.

54 per hour.

A new ebook is being published to Amazon almost every minute.

I don’t have any particularly strong insight into this. Besides maybe “Holy shit.” But, to circle back to long-term projections, if books continued to be published at the current rate, then 35 years from now, the Kindle store would contain about 18,620,000 books. Nearly nine times as many titles as are available today.

Or not, because 35 years from now, there may well not be a “Kindle” store. I have no earthly idea.

For the record, I’ll readily admit that “Oh man I have no idea how to even begin to approach this” is far less useful than “Here is one method to help you assess the value of your book rights in regards to whether to sell them to a publisher or maintain them for yourself.”

I think Courtney has laid out a very good process for decision-making. It’s a great post. But hard numbers can provoke confidence. I would like to use a few other numbers to illustrate how far away publishing in 2013 might be from publishing in 2048: one (book per minute), half a million (per year), nine (times as many as we have now).

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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!

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.

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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New Release: Reapers (Breakers, Book 4)

Well, I’ve been pretty quiet lately. As usual, that means one of two things: either the police have finally caught up to me, or I’ve got a new book out. Luckily for me, it’s the latter: Reapers, the newest book in my post-apocalyptic Breakers series. In it, a hunt for a missing person leads former agent Ellie Colson through the wastelands of New York State–and right into the middle of an explosive gang war.

AVAILABLE AT:

Amazon | B&N | Kobo

“Oh,” you say. “That’s nice, but that’s the fourth book in a series, and I like to start at the beginning.” Yes, I can see how that would be a problem.. but hey wait what’s this??

AVAILABLE AT:

Amazon | B&N | Kobo

“Yeah, but a set that fine must cost like two million dollars.” It sure looks like it! But for the next few days, it’s just $0.99.

For the writers out there, this is the second prong of my release strategy (the first being the typical “alert my mailing list/Facebook page that a new book exists”). Most of the big advertisers won’t run a brand-new book. BookBub used to, but no longer, and places like ENT generally require a decent number of reviews before they’ll feature something. But they’re obviously happy to run an older title, so long as it meets their standards, and right now they love featuring steeply discounted box sets, because their readers love the value.

I can’t afford to leave this set at $0.99 forever, but I’ve got some ads on it running in a couple days which will hopefully lead to spillover on Reapers. I’ll see how the ads go, and then, after a few days, I’ll probably raise the price on the box set to something like $5.99–still a bargain, just not a no-doubt choice over the individual titles, which will be temporarily reduced to $3 each. I’ll be playing it by ear as to when exactly to tweak prices up, but the set’s standard list price will wind up at $9.99 ($3 off the first three books’ list).

I’m hardly the first to say “Hey, you know what people like? More books for less money.” But with new releases, it’s all about how high you can fling them into the ranks. Since a box set is one of the most potent sales tools there is, to me, it makes extra sense to pair it with a new release.

I don’t have any ads or donation buttons on this blog, so if you these posts helpful, consider picking up one of the above books. I’ll never know if you don’t, but who knows, you might even like them.

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Getting Your Start as an Indie Author, Part 2: Don’t Wait

(Previous post: Where We’re At Today)

That increasingly popular piece of advice comes in two main flavors, but it boils down to this: Wait.

Wait to self-publish until you have multiple books ready to go. Alternately, publish away, but don’t bother promoting any of them until you’ve got X many books out in the wild. Canny, subject-reading viewers might have already guessed where I stand on this issue, but there are some logical reasons to wait. Which I will now attempt to scrutinize to death.

In both cases, the idea of waiting is to conserve your resources until you’re more likely to hit critical mass. If you’ve only got one book, and you advertise it, or you give it away, that’s it. Readers don’t have anything else to pick up. You’ll get more bang for your buck if you hold off on the promo until you have several titles out there, all of which will benefit every time you promote each one. In the meantime, by focusing on your writing, you can get new material out there sooner.

Meanwhile, the advantage in waiting to publish is this: every store promotes new releases more heavily than old books. They all have their own ways of doing so, but new releases are more visible. In Amazon’s case, they’ll actively and heavily promote new books that are selling well. That’s why new books can get so sticky in the rankings. The #100 book in the store isn’t selling 700 copies each and every day by coincidence. It’s hanging out there because Amazon is pushing it to thousands of customers day after day.

So you don’t want to burn those new release days when you’re an unknown with zero readers and your book will sink into the sludge. Instead, by waiting to go live until you have multiple books, each one of those books will be propelled by new-release fuel–and if you’ve got enough rockets going off at once, with readers moving from one book to the next, you may coax the whole bundle into catching fire.

Both of these are smart ideas based on long-term thinking. However, I think they’re high-variance strategies. High risk/high reward. Especially waiting to publish. This may work out very well for a few people, but for most, I think it’s going to backfire.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that self-publishing is composed of two discrete skills: writing, and publishing. To succeed, you generally have to be good at both. Publishing includes a dirty word: marketing. I don’t know about you, but when I started out at this, my marketing skills blew. In part because I thought “marketing” meant “yelling at people on Twitter.” I’ve blathered at length about an indie author’s need to hone the craft of selling books, but the gist is this. If you wait to promote, or to publish, you also wait to learn how to sell your wonderful junk. If you’re a natural, maybe this isn’t so much of an issue, but it’s hard to know if you’re a natural until you’ve actually gotten out there and tried it.

The second reason not to wait–especially to publish–is this: self-publishing is no Field of Dreams-type shit. It isn’t true that “if you write it, they will come.” If you wait to publish until you have, say, three books, the most likely outcome is this: all three books will sink like stones.

You don’t have any fans waiting to snatch them up. A few of your friends and family might buy them–if you’re lucky–and a handful of people might stumble on them in the midst of obscure searches, but it is vital to understand that there are virtually no books that just start selling from scratch organically. When books hit big out of the blue, there is almost always an inciting push behind them. A bloc of readers pouncing all at once. After that initial burst of sales, Amazon starts pushing them to other readers, and if the books are appealing, they take off from there, but it’s like a wildfire: it would never have started without a spark.

I’m guessing proponents of waiting are perfectly aware of that, and would only recommend such a strategy in conjunction with a spark of some kind. My question is.. where does that spark come from?

From what I’ve seen, many of the people advising new indies to wait are romance authors. Romance is an unstoppable juggernaut. Go look at the Kindle bestseller lists; at any point in time, 35-50% of it will be romance. Romance authors have resources that don’t exist for other genres. There are entire communities and blogs devoted to spotlighting new romance books for their readerships’ consideration. If you can arrange to get your new releases announced by these signal-boosters, that may be all it takes.

But few if any of these resources exist for self-published authors in other genres. I don’t know of a single sci-fi/fantasy book blog of note. Not one that’s wide open to self-published authors, anyway. And certainly not one capable of moving the needle, as they say.

That means many of us, including romance authors who don’t have access to these resources, won’t have any audience whatsoever available to us at launch. Our new releases will be lucky to sell 1 copy/day by themselves, and after they’ve stopped being new releases, we’ll be lucky to do 1/week.

This was my experience, anyway, and in hanging around KBoards all the time, it seems to be typical. For first books, anyway. But if you publish your first book as soon as it’s ready–and then promote it–and you’ve set up a mailing list link in the back of your book so new fans can hear about the next one–then you will have an audience waiting for the second book. Modest, maybe, but extant. And that audience will provoke Amazon into promoting the new book to other customers, who will then be incited to check out the first book. Repeat with each book in the series, hopefully with a growing audience for every new book.

In a hypothetical example, say you’re a fairly speedy writer capable of finishing a new book every three months. You put out your first book as soon as it’s done. Book two comes three months later. Book three is out three months after that. That’s six months to learn how to publish and market, as well as six months to build up an audience.

If you wait, you’ve got zero firsthand experience and zero guaranteed readership. If you play your cards right, you may be able to make your sales blow up in a big way, boosted by all these new releases cross-promoting each other, but it’s a big gamble. That gamble is lessened, of course, if you’re one of those superheroes capable of writing a new book every month (so you’re only losing two months instead of six), and if you’re savvy enough to have built a waiting fanbase/inciting event even before you publish your first book.

But I would argue that if you’re that productive and that savvy, you’re going to succeed no matter what you do.

The other huge flaw in building a strategy around waiting is that it assumes you’ve written an appealing book. What if you’ve actually written a dud? It could even be a very good book, but it turns out it just doesn’t have that much appeal, or it’s surprisingly difficult to market. Worse yet, if this is a series, then you’ve just spent all that time writing a series of duds.

So get that first book out there, says I. Learn how to get it in front of readers and then discover whether those readers will react to it well enough to justify continuing the series. If not, well bummer, but at least you can move on to something else with more potential.

Convinced not to wait, then? Well, that’s all I got. At the absolute least, if you are going to wait to publish, make damn sure you’ve got a plan to immediately sell those books once they do go live. That will minimize the risk of everything tanking. Oh, and be ready to scramble. A good plan of battle never survives first contact with the enemy. (Note to self: quit describing readers as “the enemy.”)

There you go, a comically long argument of what not to do that delivers no useful information about what to do. Coming next: advice that might actually be useful! Part 3: Strategies!

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Getting Your Start as an Indie Author in 2013, Part 1: Where We’re At Today

Last year, I wrote a series of posts about what I would do if I were just getting my start as an indie author. It was intended to be a modest and simple way to get your foot in the door even if, like me, you’ve been on Facebook 18 months but still find yourself terrified that one wrong click will announce to the world that it’s been nine days since you last put on pants.

But the problem with last year is that it was last year. In the timescale of indie authors, “last year” is like another epoch. I may as well have written a guide on the best way to trap an allosaurus. Interesting, perhaps, as a historical document, but not all that relevant in this brave new world of “mammals.”

That right there is the problem. My advice, at the time, was (hopefully) relevant, because I had just graduated from indie-hobo to making a living at this (by my comically low standards). Then things changed. And they changed some more. And they changed again. When the landscape changes this fast, as soon as you take off, you no longer have a clear view of what’s happening down on the ground. By the time someone’s an expert, they’re obsolete.

That’s maybe a bit harsh. But it is absolutely critical to understand that nobody is offering bulletproof advice. And that, perversely, people with less authority–indies with little to no track record–may be in better position to offer quality advice than people who’ve sold hundreds and thousands of their books.

I don’t know where that leaves me exactly, and you know what, I’m not going to bother to figure it out. A couple weeks ago, someone asked me how to get started here and now. I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that anymore, but it’s an interesting question. So here’s some advice and analysis! Some or all of it might be worthless! Enjoy figuring that out for yourself.

Okay. To understand what you might do differently in 2013, we should probably look at what is different. What’s changed over the last year?

First, the biggie: Select sucks. The way Amazon treats free giveaways has changed repeatedly. Right now, even people who are giving away as many as 40,000 copies of their books during a free run are often seeing just a few dozen sales afterwards.

I don’t know the exact mechanics of the latest algo change, but the results aren’t there anymore. It isn’t just about the algos, either. Back in February, Amazon changed their affiliate agreement in a way that diminished or destroyed a lot of the freebie-advertising affiliate sites. Select isn’t dead for all books and strategies, but it’s been reduced to a fraction of its former power. It’s no longer the no-duh choice for anyone, let alone new authors.

Now, some good news: Kobo threw open the doors to self-publishers, joining Amazon, B&N, and Apple as markets we can directly upload our work to. Kobo got a lot of early hype as this was happening last summer. A lot of indie gurus painted them as the next big thing, particularly in international markets.

That hasn’t exactly happened yet, so here’s my assessment of Kobo: they’re a cool company whose self-publishing wing (Writing Life) is run by great people. So far, they’ve managed to capture a few percent of the various English-speaking markets, except Canada, where they’re Godzilla. Currently, they are probably the fourth-largest market for self-published authors, who make up some 25% of their total sales. A new store is a new opportunity to be discovered.

On the distribution side, Smashwords has made a couple cool improvements, allowing you to upload epubs and to set up preorders at B&N, Kobo, and Apple. They also seem to have made modest improvements to the quality and speed of their distribution process. Bigger yet, the first real alternative to Smashwords popped into being: Draft2Digital. While they don’t publish to as many venues as Smashwords, they cover the major outlets, and generally seem to be much speedier and more responsive. It’s now significantly easier to reach the big markets like B&N, which non-US residents can’t publish to directly, and Apple, which has a steep learning curve.

In terms of advertising, BookBub exploded on the scene and is hands down the best mover of free and discount books (although that means their ads are expensive and can be hard to book). Kindle Books and Tips converted from a freebie site and now runs discount books. Their results can be a little inconsistent, but are often in the same tier as ENT and POI–pretty great, in other words. BookBlast opened up, too. Operating on the BookBub model, it isn’t yet large enough to be the cornerstone of an advertising campaign, but their rates are very fair, the results are there, and they’ve been growing steadily. There still aren’t enough ways to advertise to non-Amazon readers, but we have a few new tools at our disposal. And as long as there’s money to be made, effective advertising options should continue to grow.

Eight jillion other things happened, too, but these are the ones that feel significant to me. And they all pretty much point in the same direction: away from Select freebies and toward wide distribution bolstered by $0.99 sales.

But success with that model generally means having multiple books and building an audience in multiple markets. Which, by definition, excludes brand-new authors. So now that the easy button of Select has been disconnected, what should new authors do instead?

Well, I’ve got an idea. It’s pretty simple and obvious. But before I get to that, I want to look at an idea that’s kind of its opposite–and which is becoming an increasingly popular piece of advice. Part 2: Don’t Wait.

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Smashwords Now Allows Preorders

As per their blog, authors published through Smashwords will now be able to set up preorders on B&N, Kobo, and Apple.

My immediate response to this is it’s not as useful as it might sound, but it’s still one of the most interesting things Smashwords has ever done–and they should do lots more things like this.

Now, to the bitching and complaining! For one thing, if you upload direct to Kobo and Apple, you’re already able to set up preorders for your books. For many of us, then, the only upgrade this would provide would be the option to set up preorders at BN. And, of course, one name is conspicuously missing from all this talk: Amazon.

This isn’t a “Who cares, Amazon is all that matters” problem, either. It’s a logistical one. The advantage of preorders–piling up sales in advance, all of which get credited to your rank on day one–can only be exploited if you let your readers know ahead of time. Meanwhile, many of us alert our readers to our new books via mailing list. So what do you do, send to your list a month in advance saying, “Hey, preorder on BN here,” then send it again at release time to hit up your Amazon readers, too? Maybe I’m too paranoid about the sanctity of my list, but I don’t like the idea of doubling the amount of “Buy my crap” emails I send to my readers. Additionally, I think many of them wouldn’t bother grabbing the preorder; it’s not a strong call to action, as the marketing buzzwords go. I think a fair amount of the email recipients would wait until the second, release day email, diluting the efficiency of the preorder.

But none of that is Smashwords’ fault, and that’s not to say BN preorders would be useless. You could certainly alert your Facebook page or your blog in advance without alienating readers, or bite the spam-bullet and resign yourself to two email sends per book. It could be a pretty dang useful tool at what remains the second-biggest ebookstore in the US.

Still, it’s not exactly murderously cool. And that’s leaving aside the insurmountable problem that SW doesn’t make changes fast enough to run reliable sales through it. $0.99 sales are a big part of the indie game right now. Until SW can quickly and reliably adjust prices to Apple, Kobo, and BN, they’re not on my radar.

For people who use SW to reach those places, though, that’s a sweet new feature. And it’s exactly the sort of thing I love seeing Smashwords pursue. Because in order for SW to be useful, SW has to be useful. They have to provide indies with options and tools we don’t have access to for ourselves. Prior to this, SW was useful for about five things:

1) Publishing permafree books to BN

2) Allowing non-US residents to publish to BN

3) Allowing people who don’t have a Mac and infinite patience to publish to Apple

4) Publishing to the host of smaller stores that don’t have a self-publishing platform (Sony, Diesel)

I swear I had a fifth point, but now I can’t think of anything else, which kind of sums up the whole SW experience. Wait, I just walked my dog and thought of two more:

5) You publish so much stuff (like a story per day) that it’s more efficient to let SW handle all the non-Amazon distribution

6) You publish a lot of work at $0.99, where SW’s 60% royalty is more attractive than the 35-45% at other stores

But most of these advantages are of limited value (publishing to Sony) or don’t apply to broad swathes of indie authors (being unable to publish to BN). So I’m extremely happy to see Smashwords add features that are useful to every self-published author out there. I want to see more stuff like this! I want SW to force me to think about long and hard whether I’m really better off distributing for myself.

I’m skeptical that will ever be the case, and while I don’t think BN preorders are a game-changer, this has caused me to reevaluate Smashwords to some degree. Yeah, there’s a lot to complain about with them. But with just two or three changes, I bet they could have us lining up in droves.

It’s good to be reminded to keep an open mind. That’s probably the most useful tool we indie authors have.

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eBooks and the Myth of the "Summer Slump"

Books don’t sell in the summer.

Traditionally, the seasonality of book sales is decidedly Southern Hemisphere. Better sock away those December riches, because come July, it’s going to be slim pickings. Back when I was querying agents, summer was advised as both an unusually good and an unusually bad time to do so, because the publishing industry supposedly shuts down until adults come back from beaches and kids go back to school.

Dean Wesley Smith chronicled the “summer slump” here, stating publishing houses punted summer because “it was known that the lowest time for buying books by customers was May through the middle of September.” Despite the ebook/indie revolution, “That has not changed.” Just last week, Digital Book World led an article with “Typically July is one of the slowest months in book publishing.” Google “summer slump” and “book sales” and you’ll find dozens of indie authors advising other indies how to make it through the doldrums without losing hope even as sales (and incomes) slide away into the ooze.

I ran into this same phenomenon myself last year. Great May/June, okay July, then a long, steady slide, until my October was so bad–about $860, as my primary job–I was starting to wonder whether I could keep doing this. Thankfully, a new release turned things around.

Yesterday, someone on KBoards asked whether, in order to avoid the summer slump, they should wait to release their next book until fall. Given what we know, it’s a good question. There’s just one problem.

Books sell just fine in summer.

eBooks do, at least. If you compare the number of sales needed to sustain a given rank on Amazon’s Kindle store, to my eye, it’s the same in July as it was in February. As per the quick and dirty formula I tossed out in that post, to determine how many copies a Kindle title is currently selling, take 100,000 and divide it by its sales rank. Or, to put it another way, rank x sales = 100,000. This rule of thumb comes close whether you’re selling 1/day or 1000/day.

Let’s look at the rank and daily sales of several titles from this July and see how they compare to the numbers from February.

Rank x Sales = Score ; Estimated February Rank

#95,000 x 1 = 95,000

#12,000 x 10 = 120,000
#2429 x 50 = 121,450
#852 x 120 = 102,240
#819 x 136 = 111,348
#767 x 148 = 113,516
#325 x 280 = 91,000

All right, whole bunch of numbers. What are we actually looking at? An easy way to conceptualize this is to go to the extremes. If Amazon sold so few books that all it took to rank #100 was 1 sale/day, you’re looking at a score of 100 (#100 x 1). By contrast, if it was selling so many books that a rank of #100 required ten million sales/day, your score is 1,000,000,000 (#100 x 10,000,000).

To put it another way, say that it took you 100 sales yesterday to rank #1000. If today it took 200 sales to stay at #1000, that would mean all the books above you were suddenly selling much more, too. Yesterday, your hypothetical score was 100K; today, it’s 200K.

Thus a lower “score” is indicative of lower storewide sales volume while a higher score means more ebooks are being sold on Amazon each day.

Across a broad range of ranks, the average score of those seven books above is 107,793. If anything, more Kindle books are selling right now this summer than were selling in the weeks immediately after the Christmas boom had calmed down.

For ebooks, the “summer slump” is a myth.

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. While the sample size leaves something to be desired, the most obvious qualification to this methodology is that the “100,000 formula” isn’t a real formula, but more of a rule of thumb. It’s imprecise. Back in February, for instance, it was also true that 10 sales/day would sustain a rank of #12,000, and 120,000 ≠ 100,000.

So if you think I had my original score wrong, and you believe 120,000 was “normal,” then our current score of 108,000 would indicate sales are down by 10% from February.

For most ranks I was looking at in February, however, the score was closer to 100K. Largely in the 95-110K range. To my eyes, the current score of 108K is virtually identical to February. And the number of sales needed to sustain that #12,000 rank was the same in February as it is right now in late July.

That, to me, is the key takeaway: Amazon ebook sales may be down for the summer, but it is not immediately obvious. It’s even possible they’re up. If the slump is so small it can’t be detected, I don’t think it can be called a “slump” at all.

ADDENDUM

The above table is probably a little confusing, since the “score” is pure abstraction. So here’s another way to think about it. Below, here are the same books above translated into estimated February ranks vs. actual July ranks.

February – July – “Winner”

#100,000 – #95,000 – February

#10,000 – #12,000 – July

#2000 – 2429 – July

#833 – #852 – July

#735 – #819 – July

#676 – #767 – July

#357 – #325 – February

If the July rank is worse, that means it would take more sales in July to have climbed as high as it did in February, and thus volume is up now (and vice versa). “Winner” indicates which month seems to have seen higher sales.

Two notes here–I can tell you the February estimates are wrong for the ranks of #10,000 and #2000. The real numbers were more like #12,000 and #2200-2400. Meanwhile, in July, that works out to a rank of.. #12,000 and #2429. Again, it looks like ebook sales volume is heavier in July 2013 than it was in February 2013–but they’re close enough to look pretty much the same.

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New Release: The Cutting Room (The Complete Season)

What’s up everyone. I’ve been quiet lately–working furiously, if there’s anything furious about “sitting in a chair seven days a week”–but in the meantime, here’s something new: the complete book of my previously serialized time travel thriller The Cutting Room. And for the next few days, it’s just $0.99.

AVAILABLE AT:

Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Apple

Thanks for taking a look. Once I’ve got a bit of breathing room with my work in progress, I’ll start blogging again–including a look at my experience with The Cutting Room as a serialized novel. It’s been an interesting process.

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Epic Fantasy Box Set: The Strife of Gods & Kings

Psst. Hey. You like epic fantasy? How about lots of epic fantasy novels from some bestselling authors (and me) bundled for a ridiculously cheap price? Then this may be relevant to your interests: the four-book fantasy box set The Strife of Gods & Kings, currently just $0.99.

If we’ve stumbled into a Bizarro Universe where you know me, but not the other authors in the set, here’s a quick rundown. David Dalglish, author of the Half-Orcs series, is perhaps the poster boy for indie epic fantasy. He’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies by himself, and within the next year, he’ll have books coming out with both Orbit and Amazon’s 47 North.

Michael Wallace also began indie, but his Righteous thrillers boomed so big he was quickly snatched up by Amazon’s mystery imprint Thomas & Mercer, where he has sold an absurd amount of books. In addition to his thrillers, he’s written a few fantasy novels. I’m hoping some day he’ll cross back over to the Dark Side for good.

Lastly, I’m me. Hi. My book The White Tree is in here. You might like it.

I’ve read both dudes’ work. It’s great stuff and I’m honored to be in this set with them. Hope you like it.

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Quick and Dirty Math: How Many Self-Published Authors Are Making a Living?

A couple days ago, Passive Guy suggested Amazon should make a bigger deal out of the success of KDP and its self-publishing program. In it, he included a made-up press release as an example of how powerful such a thing would be, including these (again, fictional) numbers:

The top-selling 50 authors publishing through KDP received an average of over $110,000 in monthly royalty payments.

Over 20,000 KDP authors earned monthly royalty payments of more than $10,000.

Over 60,000 KDP authors earned monthly royalty payments of more than $5,000.

Just to be perfectly clear, these numbers aren’t the real ones. They’re just an example of how startling they might be. But it made me wonder: is there a way to guess what the numbers might really be?

Well, I’m about to try. My process will be quick and dirty, but I think we might be able to ballpark it.

First off, David Gaughran has estimated indie books make up 30% or more of Amazon’s numerous bestseller lists. His work was indirectly backed up by a press release from Nook Press that 25% of their sales were indie. Another recent quote from Kobo put their indie authors at 20% of total unit sales, but they’re the new kids on the block and their discoverability isn’t all that great yet. I’m sticking with 25%.

Next, let’s look at potential earnings. How many sales does it take to earn, say, $1000 a month? For a $4.99 book (a little on the high end, for indies, but common enough), your royalties at 70% are going to be $3.50. Not all sales are at 70%–some are to markets that only pay 35%, like Australia. Up to 10% of my sales are to 35%-royalty territories. Treating that as a rule of thumb, we need to adjust our $3.50 figure, multiplying it by 0.95. In other words, for every sale of a $4.99 book, the author can expect to take home about $3.33.

Neat how that works out, because $1000 / $3.33 = 300 sales/month. 10/day. On Amazon.com, selling 10 books/day will give you a Kindle rank of about #12,000.

So at any given moment, 12,000 books are hitting that baseline of 300/month. And maybe something like 25% of those titles are indie. Meaning, at any given moment, something like 3000 indie books are earning $1000+/month on Amazon.com.

Upping it to $2000 means 600 copies/month, or 20/day, or a rank of #6000. 25% of 6000 = 1500 indie books earning $2000+/month.

To make $5000 at $4.99, a book has to sell 1500/month, or 50/day, or maintain a rank of about #2200-2400ish. So maybe something like 600 indie books are earning $5000 or more during any given month.

Note I’m saying “books,” not “authors.” That’s because translating this from books –> authors is very complicated and I’m not sure I can take a reasonable stab at it. But let’s pretend, for the moment, the two are equivalent.

Now, the numbers above are just for Amazon.com. Amazon UK is something like 15% the size of the US store. Amazon DE is an order of magnitude smaller, and the other stores barely register (for indie English-language sales, anyway), so let’s lump them all together and call it an extra 20%. That gives us the following numbers:

~3600 KDP books might make $1000+/month

Of those, ~1800 might make $2000+/month

And ~720 indie titles might make $5000+/month

These numbers look a lot smaller than PG’s, both in quantity and in income brackets, and this is with a price of $4.99, which is higher than most indie books. But here is the giant, messy, complicating favor that I have so far avoided like the plague: most successful indie authors have more than one book. Most have three or seven or twenty. That means the 3600 books capable of making $1000/month are unlikely to be doing so for 3600 different authors. The real number is more like, I don’t know, 1500-2500 authors.

But this also means many indie authors are capable of making nontrivial money with ranks much worse than #12,000. They just have to have more than one book.

Taking a stab at all that is.. daunting. But before I see if I can do that–which will require another post–let’s work with the numbers we do have some more. Because Amazon isn’t the only game in town.

In fact, conventional wisdom says they have 60% of the US ebook market. If so, by comparison, B&N has maybe 10-12%. I don’t know how many indies make up the remaining ~30%, but let’s pretend that indies have a quarter of those markets, too. Probably generous, but what can you do. Research, I guess.

So if Amazon is 60% of the US market, let’s take our Amazon.com number of 3000 indie books earning $1000+ and prorate that across the rest of the market by multiplying by 1.67. That gives us 5000. If we rashly assume that non-American English markets follow Amazon’s trends, and we add 20%, that bumps it up to 6000. Across the English-language indie ebook spectrum, then, we might have something like this:

6000 indie books might make $1000+/month

Of those, 3000 might make $2000+/month

And about 1200 indie titles might make $5000+/month

Now, this is really, really casual math. It requires a lot of assumptions and a lot of multiplying, which means that any mistakes are compounded. So don’t treat it as gospel. It’s just a rough stab.

And it’s possible these numbers are a fraction of the indie authors making a decent to significant income off their writing. Not only do most indies have multiple books–I didn’t account for any books making less than $1000/month, but ten books at $100/month will earn you the exact same money–but all these figures have been drawn from the lowest ends of the scale. If a #2000 rank is good for $5000/month, that means about 500 indie books are doing that well on Amazon–but the ones on the upper end are doing much, much better. An indie with a $2.99 book ranked #100 is making something along the lines of $1000-1500 a day.

Much of that top money will wind up repeatedly skewed to the top indies, of course. But for illustrative purposes, if you can launch a new $2.99 book to #100 and stick it there for 30 days, you’ve just made something like $30,000, minimum. On one book for one month. It doesn’t have to sell a single extra copy for you to get by for the next year in most parts of the US.

This process and more modest versions of it happen on Amazon every day. You put out a new release, and (if it sells fairly well) Amazon promotes it for thirty days; a few weeks or months later, it (generally) slides down the charts, maybe until it’s down there where no one can see it. It would be largely unaccounted-for in the methodology I put together here.

I don’t know how to account for that (or for the “most authors have multiple books” problem, which cuts both ways). But I think that, at a conservative estimate, it’s likely that at least 10,000 indie authors are making at least a part-time wage from their writing. And it could be a whole lot more.

I don’t know how that compares to the population of traditional authors, either. But if nothing else, there’s evidence that the indie revolution has provided a career for thousands and thousands of writers who didn’t have one before.

And that’s pretty cool.

ETA: An earlier version of this post put the $5000+ club at 1500, not 1200. But let’s not allow my failure at basic multiplication to detract from the credibility of this post!

As long as I’m adding this postscript, I should note that one of the reasons I show my work is so other people can identify any errors (and so people can tweak the sliders, should they disagree with my assumptions). If you think I’ve made an error, or you’ve got an idea for how to attack more complex problems like the “multiple books” issue, please speak up!

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