Edward W. Robertson

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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Self-Publishing and Failure: A Horrifying Look at My First Covers

As self-published authors, we don’t talk about failure enough.

Tobias Buckell recently wrote a piece about “survivorship bias” and its relation to self-publishing. He argues that the problem with self-publishing is we only hear from the winners. The survivors. When all you hear about are the successes, your view of how easy it is to succeed will be wildly distorted. His argument is based on this great article from You Are Not So Smart, which you should totally read.

Done? Yay. In response to Buckell, authors on KBoards have raised the interesting counterpoint that literally every single trad-published author is a survivor, meaning their whole perspective is skewed. Which.. is tough to argue with. On the other hand, I don’t think it nullifies his point.

A lot of people are self-publishing. Very few of them do well at it. And you almost never hear–and thus learn–from the failures.

Well, I named this blog Failure Ahoy for a reason. I think failure is awesome! Failure is what happens when you try. Fail enough, and you might even succeed. With that in mind, I’m going to post more about failure. I want to make it okay to suck. I have failed in many ways along my self-publishing journey, but there is no more stark or hilarious an illustration of that failure than my first covers. Man, I might need to brace myself here. Like with tequila.

Okay, ready if you are. Let’s dig up some corpses.

Breakers, Cover #1 – February 2012

COMMENTARY: Okay, this one isn’t really a corpse (don’t worry, they’re coming). It’s just the wrong cover for the book. I like it a lot, though. The way the text is broken up and the subtle map is very cool. Awesome concept. But what does this cover say about the book inside it? Looks literary, right? Perhaps something involving sidewalks? And thus a new genre is born.

But my book’s about the end of the world. Viruses and aliens. If my book were more like The Road and less War of the Worlds, I think this cover would be a great fit. However, this book came out during the Golden Age of Amazon Select, which I used to get rolling after 12 solid months of self-publishing failure. As I was planning and executing my free runs, I noticed a couple things.

First, it was kind of hard to get this book listed by the major freebie sites. Second, when my book was free, it didn’t do so well compared to other indie titles in my genre. Yet after its free runs it sold pretty well, relatively speaking, and I was getting some good reviews. After a couple months of carefully comparing my book to others like it, I thought I might have an all right book, but I was pretty sure my cover wasn’t properly expressing the genre.

Breakers, Cover #2 – May 2012

COMMENTARY: Take two. My giveaway numbers for my first three free runs with Cover #1 were 1000 copies, 1600, and about 2000. In its first three months, aided by those free runs, it sold about 800 copies.

When I first went free with this one, my second and current cover, I gave away 25,000 copies. In the 30 days following, it sold 2765 more (Select no longer works like this, unfortunately). Twelve months later, it’s sold over 20,000.

Those sales have also been aided by two sequels, a permafree novella, about 200 more reviews on book one, and plunging into the non-Amazon markets, but I think it’s pretty clear the second cover was much better at driving sales. Articles like this–“The Real Cost of Self-Publishing a Book“–like to play up the costs for cover art, editing, etc. That article says low-end covers start at $150 and can run as high as $3500.

This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I got this cover for $75. I was still very poor at that point, so I spent a lot of time hunting down every cover artist who charged $100 or less. This artist had primarily done YA and covers involving women in snazzy dresses. Not really what you think of when you’re looking for someone to put together a cover for a post-apocalyptic novel full of violence and aliens, but after poring over her portfolio, I thought she could do it.

This was probably the first time I had been right about anything. But it took me three self-published novels, several collections of short stories, and 15 months to reach the point where I had the resources, experience, knowledge, and motivation to sort through these artists, find the one I liked best, and hire her.

The White Tree, Cover #1 – February 2011

COMMENTARY: …and this was how it all started. I made this cover myself, and I’ll give myself credit for this much: I didn’t try to do too much with it. I knew my talents as an artist (none) and didn’t try to overreach.

And that’s about all I did right. Interesting choice on my part to leave the base of the trunk hanging there above the line. Was I unable to draw a couple plain white lines to connect them? Apparently.

I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking, but I was pretty satisfied with this cover at first. I thought it was kind of iconic. If nothing else, you couldn’t beat the production cost ($0). Also, in early 2011, there weren’t a lot of great self-published covers out there. It didn’t look as bad then as it does now. Most of all, it simply felt incredible that, after ten years of pursuing agents and editors, one of my books was finally for sale.

But enough contextualizing. This is not a good cover. Any fool can see that, but apparently I wasn’t your average fool. A part of me knew I’d need to do better once I could afford it, but I thought the writing inside the book was good enough to overcome its humble cover. Ha! Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!

I sold about 100 copies of this in 2011.

The White Tree, Cover #2 – February 2012

COMMENTARY: I still like this cover. I think it’s pretty and captures the mood of the book. It was within my budget ($65) and paid for itself many times over. Thanks to it, and beneficial, now-defunct Select algorithms, I sold maybe 2000 copies of this book in 2012.

With that in mind, I will now reveal the lesson I was only just beginning to take to heart in 2012. This wisdom is so deep and hard-won that I’m not sure anyone else in the history of self-publishing has ever before expressed it:

SPEND SOME MONEY ON YOUR GODDAMN COVERS

I am deeply sympathetic to anyone working with a limited budget. I know what it feels like to make the reckless decision to spend your money on feeding yourself instead of buying a cover for some pipe dream self-publishing venture. But the good news is the market’s matured. It’s 2013 and you can get amazing pre-made covers for as little as $30. No matter how broke you are, find a way to save up that $30.

Incidentally, I might still be using this cover except I wasn’t happy with the way the cover for the sequel turned out. That meant redoing both of them.

The White Tree, Cover #3 – December 2012

COMMENTARY: This cover and the one for its sequel cost a whole bunch. Epic fantasy illustrations will do that to you.

I felt okay shelling out for a third version of the cover because I figured a) it would easily pay for itself long-term, and b) I’d never have to upgrade this series again. It’s been close to six months and I probably just broke even on them. Even with the new covers, these books only sell a fraction as well as my Breakers novels. I guess covers aren’t everything!

The Roar of The Spheres, Cover #1 – March 2011

COMMENTARY: HAHAHAHA

Now, in my defense, I was using this as a placeholder while my real cover came in, and it was only live for a week or two, but…no, you know what, that’s enough. This is what happens when you have no money and no experience self-publishing and you think the words inside are all that matters.

This is what failure looks like.

The Roar of the Spheres, Cover #2 – March 2011

COMMENTARY: The one cover I spent real money on in 2011. This cover cost $125 and I still think it looks great.

But apparently the world disagrees with me, because this is my worst-selling novel by leaps and bounds. So far, I have sold 3 copies of it on Amazon this month. It is May 29th.

To put it another way:

See that amazing downward line between July 2011 and February 2012? The reason that line isn’t jagged like the other parts of the graph is because it sold zero Amazon copies for six straight months.

Its failure to sell despite a sweet new cover is the main reason I didn’t pay to redo the cover on The White Tree for nearly a year. I had “learned” that a new cover doesn’t guarantee a damn thing. And it doesn’t, necessarily–but if you learn how to get your book in front of shoppers, which I had no clue how to do at that point in time, it can make all the difference.

But I wasn’t in position to learn better until the Select program allowed me to get my books in front of readers. It was only then that I started to get a feel for the impact a cover can have on purchasing decisions. And to imagine how my books look when they’re jumbled up with every other title in the store. How critically important it is to make them stand out from the crowd–while at the same time telling a potential reader, “Hey, this is a story about X. If you like stories about X, you might like this book.”

Oh, and for the record, I think Spheres needs a new cover. I love this one, but as with my first Breakers cover, it doesn’t capture the genre. Or maybe I really am the only person who likes it. There’s no guarantees I’m done failing with covers yet.

If I can ever convince myself it’s a good enough book to bother with, I’ll probably try something with a spaceship on it. That last sentence is ironic but also 100% true.

CONCLUSION

Don’t do what I did?

Seriously, that’s the immediate takeaway here: your first covers don’t have to be perfect, but sweet fancy Moses, make sure they’re professional. These days, “professional” doesn’t have to cost any more than $30-60. Later on, if you’re making some sales and feel more confident investing $150-500+ on a cover, you can upgrade. In all honesty, it won’t hurt your career to have a bad cover–because you have no career yet–but it will sure hurt your feelings to wonder why no one wants to buy the book it represents. Go without sales for long enough, and you might give up.

It’s the middle of 2013, and I feel like “Pay for a decent cover” is such widespread and commonsense advice that it’s hardly worth posting about. But I don’t know, maybe there are still lots of people out there it might help. We rarely hear from the people struggling to sell a single copy. If you see your stuff in my early covers, a small investment could make a big difference.

If nothing else, the ones I did myself are pretty funny.

But there’s also this. Some people have the sense, talent, and up-front funds to succeed immediately. But I think most of us are pretty crappy when we start out. It’s virtually guaranteed.

Meanwhile, if all you’re hearing about are the mountains of gold everyone else is making, and there’s not a word spoken about all the junk those former failures went through until they started to succeed now and then, it can make you feel pretty bad.

The real takeaway is that learning to self-publish is a process. In hindsight, the lessons and solutions look obvious, but when you’re mired in the middle of it, it’s never easy to know where to go next.

I’ve learned a few things about covers, but in other areas of the game, I continue to fail mightily. I look forward to talking all about it.

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Amazon’s Vested Interest in Indie Authors

This morning, a post on Kboards mentioned that Amazon has a new “Indie” section of their storefront. Within a handful of posts–and ignoring the fact this list is actually two years old and has been browsable for months, if not that entire two-year period–the thread was awash in posts proclaiming that this was the first step in Amazon’s master plan to shutter indies away in some self-publishing ghetto, where normal shoppers would never see our tainted wares.

Amazon won’t do that. It’s in their vested interest to keep indies in the same population as trad-published books. Segregating us to an indie dungeon would only hurt them.

Why?

Well, for one thing, Amazon thinks the ebook market does best when most titles are $2.99 – 9.99. Major publishers prefer to charge as much as they can. Indie authors price almost exclusively at $0.99 – 5.99 and are probably the single biggest pressure for downward prices in the ebook market.

But yes, Amazon has no use for us and it’s just a matter of time until we’re stuffed into the closet.

In the meantime, rather than fostering the race to the bottom (another major indie boogeyman), comparing Smashwords’ yearly surveys from 2012 and 2013 indicates indie prices have gone up in the last year, with more and more indies pricing and selling well at $3.99 – 5.99. Meanwhile, the average price of ebooks on Kindle bestseller lists has recently fallen to the $7-7.50 range. Right in the middle of Amazon’s $2.99 – 9.99 sweet spot. There now exists a band of prices covering every point between free and $14.99 (and up), allowing Amazon to target every conceivable type of reader, from extreme bargain-hunters to those who equate low prices with low quality.

But I’m sure now is the time when the ebook market will stabilize forever, allowing Amazon to toss us out like last week’s leftovers.

Even if prices were to magically stabilize here, a thriving indie market gives Amazon access to tens of thousands of titles no one else has. They have more books and more data than anyone else in publishing. By not setting arbitrary prices or restricting what gets published, they don’t have to make guesses about what might sell or how to sell it. They have hundreds of thousands of books creating a living ecosystem they can analyze to make their storefront even better–and they’re the only ones with access to that data. The more authors they allow in, and the more those authors are allowed to innovate, the more Amazon learns, and the bigger the advantage they have over every other publishing company on Earth.

But obviously, sooner or later Amazon is going to decide the jig is up and they’ve learned everything there is to know about ebooks and publishing.

We cost Amazon nothing. We’re free money. The only possible threat indies pose to their business is if we somehow poison the pool with bad books, but they’ve built their system so no one sees those books. And sometimes books that everyone would agree are “bad”–terrible editing, ugly covers, derivative plots–sell like gangbusters anyway. Why? I don’t know. But I bet Amazon has a few theories.

Because they were happy to let everyone publish, let consumers decide what they wanted to buy, and take advantage of that emergent behavior to get even better.

It’s tougher than ever to get started as an indie, but I think that has much less to do with Amazon squeezing us and more to do with how hypercompetitive indie authors have become at every aspect of the business. As we continue to innovate, not only does Amazon get 30-65% of everything we sell, they learn everything about how we sell it and what their customers want. The moment Amazon starts segregating us from the market is the moment they forfeit their knowledge-advantage to Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and anyone else looking to grab a corner of the ebook world.

If Amazon’s business model is a) be stupid and b) hand over the keys to the castle to their competitors, then yes, they might want to quash or segregate indie books.

But if they want to maintain dominance, they’ll let us continue to mix it up with the big boys just like we’ve been doing since the launch of KDP (or DTP, if you’re old school). Because collectively, indie authors continue to be one of their sharpest tools they have to remain the biggest, the smartest, and the most powerful player in the bookselling industry.

And that’s not going to change any time soon.

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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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New Release: The Cutting Room: Episode I

As usual, a quiet blog means I’ve got a new book on the way. This time, I’m trying a new format, too: a serial.

In the future, there are many parallel Earths–but only one of them has time travel. Its criminals break into the pasts of other worlds, far beyond the reach of conventional police.

Blake Din is the top agent of the Cutting Room, the group tasked with stopping these trespassers. But on a mission to undo the murder of a young boy, he steps into a far-ranging conspiracy. For the first time, it isn’t one of the other Earths under attack. It’s his own.

A sci-fi thriller in the mold of Minority Report and Quantum Leap, THE CUTTING ROOM: EPISODE I is the first in a six-part serial novel. New episodes weekly.

Get it on any store you like:

Amazon | B&N | Apple | Kobo

Additionally, if you’re a Kobo reader–and they’ve got an app–I’ve got a limited amount of copies to give away. Just follow the (very quick and easy) instructions here.

If you’re new to serialized fiction, it’s pretty much like a TV show: each episode tells its own little story, and the complete book tells an over-arching story of its own. With The Cutting Room, I’ll be releasing new episodes every Wednesday. Each episode is about 30-50 pages long (12,000-15,000 words), and there will be six in total.

Writing in this format was more of a challenge than I expected, but it was really fun. If this book does well enough (and frankly, my standards for “well” are pretty mild), I’d love to write another. Thanks for taking a look.

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No Rules, No Maps, No Dogma, No Limits: A Failure Ahoy! Manifesto

I’m about to spend a few thousand words to make a very simple point.

My goal, career-wise, is to make a living writing fiction. If that is your goal as well, we are very lucky to be alive right now! For one thing, by all accounts, the past smelled terrible. For another, we now have more paths than ever toward our destination.

But the more paths that crop up, the more rules appear about how they ought to be followed. And the problem isn’t that there’s many different paths. The problem is there are many different landscapes. And they aren’t static. Old ones change shape while new ones are summoned into existence every day.

This means anyone trying to sell you a map is probably pointing you in the wrong direction.

Last night, indie blogger/novelist/guru David Gaughran added another feather to his cap: he managed to get banned from a forum he hadn’t participated in for a year.

His crime? The moderators of AbsoluteWrite believed he was trolling their forums with sockpuppets.

Link goes to an account of the incident, complete with hilarious screengrabs. The gist is that an AW member made a joke, the joke got misinterpreted, and a highly dedicated moderator swiftly discovered the poster in question had some IP addresses in common with David Gaughran–possibly because they have both posted to AW from Ireland, which isn’t a super-big country. Regardless, the moderator accused the poster of being a Gaughran sockpuppet, and when the poster insisted he was a person instead of a sock, he got banned on the spot.

Nevermind that the accused, Michael Reilly, has his own book and author page (complete with photo) on Amazon, Smashwords, and more, along with a Facebook fan page, user profiles on other sites, etc. Quite a sting that crafty David Gaughran cooked up, fabricating a whole new identity–and writing a full-length novel–for the sole purpose of infiltrating AW and making subtle jabs at its moderators.

On the other hand, that would explain why we’re having to wait so long for Let’s Get Visible.

I have two points to make. First–and most importantly–this is really, really funny. Second, AW is a respected institution and resource for writers, and it is clearly insane.

Maps and the unchangeable lines drawn on them come in many forms. The reason David Gaughran is such a persona non grata at AW is that he’s an unapologetic advocate of self-publishing–and AW is famously and fanatically anti-self-publishing. The site apparently considers it the height of career suicide. Self-publishers are regularly banned from the site. Other figures booted from the site include indie supernova Hugh Howey, and Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing. Ridan has since…wandered off into the wilderness…but at the time of Sullivan’s banning, the company was cutting a trail made of hundred dollar bills.

These people would be valuable resources, authors and/or publishers making a killing from the shifting publishing landscape. They might possibly have some valuable insight into making a career as an author. But the dogma at AbsoluteWrite is that self-publishing is not a valid career path. So out these people go. Without their voices around as counterpoints, the AW forums become echo chambers warning each other about cliffs that aren’t there. Remaining members who could be making a living as a writer self-publishing right now may never give it a shot.

We’re not talking about the art of writing here. We’re talking about its business. When it comes to business, on what Earth is it more important to cling to ideology? Like the path is more important than the destination? This is about making a living writing, not bushido.

Why not encourage people to pursue whatever path might finally give them the career they’ve always dreamed of?

I consider Dean Wesley Smith a valuable source of information. He’s a hardworking, dedicated professional, and if you follow his advice about productivity, about regularly writing new books and putting them in position to sell, you’ll speed through the swamps or the deserts or whatever you want to call the long, suffering-filled slogs that begin most writer’s careers. That advice is pure gold.

But why does some of his other advice have to be so inflexible? So rigidly defined?

He believes an author should distribute to as many markets as possible. That includes ruling out the option of Amazon Select, which requires you to sell (ebooks) exclusively through Amazon. Granting exclusivity, he argues, is short-term thinking; every second you’re restricted to Amazon is one second you’re not building your presence in other markets.

This isn’t a bad idea. The problem is when it’s treated as an ironclad First Principle.

I launched my career through Select. Within the same year, I moved out of it, but I still think it’s a good play for beginning authors who don’t already have fans or a platform. It can be a pretty dang nice program for established authors, too–people like Ryk Brown and Debora Geary, both of whom sold 100,000+ books last year, are still in it, and they’re no chumps. Not to get too heavily into math, but being in Select directly sustains their success–their high visibility means their books are some of the most-borrowed in the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. Not only do they get paid for these borrows, but the borrows get applied to their sales rank, helping ensure they remain visible to other shoppers. This is a long-term strategy. If self-publishing is a dark and unknown sea, Select is their raft.

Granted, very few of us are Brown or Geary. But a whole lot of us are entering the indie frontier with nothing but a book and the hope it will be seen. And one of the very few ways to get it seen is to take advantage of the powerful tools of KDP Select.

Smith is regrettably dogmatic about promotion, too. In short, he considers it a waste of time until you have a significant backlist–25+ titles. Again, the concept makes sense–don’t waste time promoting when you should be spending that time writing new books–but following it to the letter will often do more harm than good. How long does it really take to set up a Select giveaway? Or to book an ad? Ten minutes? At the cost of a couple hundred lost words, you might walk away with hundreds of extra sales. Maybe enough to ensure you can spend next month writing, too.

As a guideline, his advice is good: “Hey, careful not to spend too much time flogging your books. Remember, the best advertising is a new release.”

As a rule, however, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Writing 25+ books will take most people 5-10 years. I don’t think you have to wait nearly that long to take an active role in selling your work. I have seen dozens of people write several books a year while promoting the books they’ve already written. Because of that, they’re selling copies and making fans today.

That feels like long-term thinking to me.

I’m an indie author. A self-publisher. I’m proud of it. I spend a lot of time at the Kboards Writer’s Cafe. There are many amazing people there who are incredibly generous and eager to share their advice, experience, and even personal financial information with their fellow authors, helping us all navigate the most brutal coastlines and unmapped interiors. I believe it’s the best self-publishing resource in the world.

But I don’t think self publishing is the first, best, or only way to El Dorado. And if AW is pro-trad–and even phrasing it in those terms exposes how ridiculous such positions are–then Kboards is pro-indie. Which often manifests as anti-traditional publishing.

Take the response to another Salon article about a guy who only made $12,000 from an “Amazon bestseller.” The facts were that he made as much per sale as he would have as a typical self-publisher. And that his publisher was directly (if luckily and unintentionally) responsible for the lightning strike of press that caused that flash of sales in the first place.

But about half the discussion on KB leaped to the conclusion that the reason he made so little money was that he was signed with a publisher. He had been screwed, and it was his own fault for signing away his rights. He would have made more self-publishing. I think most people on Kboards are pretty open, but there is a definite population that believes you should never, ever sign away your ebook rights. Not unless a big publisher walks up to you and hands you a check for a million dollars. There Be Dragons, in other words, and their lawyers are better than yours, too.

The thinking is that you will almost always make more money long-term if you hang onto your rights and publish for yourself instead of signing them over to a big publisher. That, unless they’re offering enough to match your projected earnings for the next 20+ years, it would be a poor business decision to sign over your rights.

This, I think, is a bit of wishful thinking. Ebooks may be forever, but sustained sales are not. All books peak and fall. Even Harry Potter. Even Fifty Shades. Even Wool. One of the wonderful things about the indie revolution is we’re much more protective of our book rights, especially on ebooks, but insisting you should never give them up except for silly-money is somewhat paranoid.

It’s also somewhat privileged. I know that many advances are small ($5000-20,000), and they’re often split into two or three or four payments. But very few indie authors are overnight successes. It can take a few years and several books to start earning any real money on your own. Not everyone is in position to wait for that money to start rolling in. While you’re waiting on favorable winds, you’ve still got to eat.

There are other financial reasons to accept traditional contracts, too. Maybe you write in a genre that isn’t yet indie-friendly. Or you want to diversify yourself and give someone else a vested interest in promoting your work for you. Or you feel you’ve plateaued as a self-publisher and want to roll the dice and see if someone at the Big Six can kick you up to the next level.

The fact of the matter is that, if you’re in a position to write full-time, it’s pretty easy to write a few new books every single year. If a trad contract will pay you money right now, and that money is enough to give you the breathing room to write more right now, how can you put a value on that?

How can you tell someone that it’s daft to sign away the rights to one book because they can (maybe, eventually) make more money on their own?

The goal is to make money writing. For a career. If a trad contract can help you begin that career tomorrow, it is worth deep and serious consideration. It’s all a gamble, a risk/reward assessment. You can guess which claim will cough up more gold, but no one can predict the future.

Even now, in 2013, there are people who think self-publishing is a pitfall that will only hamstring or destroy your career. Simultaneously, things have moved so far and so fast that others think any but the largest of traditional contracts is selling yourself short. That going indie is the only way. And if you do go indie, there are others who will tell you there are certain rules for how you must go about it, that there’s a single route through the world, and everything else is a waste of time, effort, and money.

In every instance, I understand the motivation for people laying down these rules for Doing It Right. It’s even noble: the desire to steer other writers away from hazards and toward the career they’ve always wanted.

And I understand why people look to prominent authors and institutions for advice. This job is terrifying! There is almost no security, everything’s in total anarchy, and the specific nature of that anarchy changes every god damn season. It is very comforting to have an authorial belief system, a set of laws to turn to for a clear path through the wilds.

But it should be pretty clear by now there are far more exceptions than there are rules. I’d go so far as to say there are no rules. Instead, there are some ideas. Some concepts. Some guidelines. Some of which may make sense for you, right now, in this exact place and moment in your career. The trains are rarely running in the right direction, let alone on schedule, but fling yourself aboard anything that looks like it’s headed where you want to go.

I opened with the anecdote about AbsoluteWrite because it’s funny, but also because it’s insane. There are respected institutions that are so locked in to a theology of publishing that they will banish a person because they suspect he is another person who they disagree with about the proper way to build a career as a writer. Who is this helping?

By all means, take directions. We could all use a few landmarks to guide us to our goal. But this is one crazy, tripped-out, Dr. Seuss landscape we’re all traveling through. It’s going to look different to everyone who walks through it.

Because it is.

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Appearance on Kobo’s My Writing Life

It’s too early in my day to talk cogently, so something something something I was in the Kobo Writing Life newsletter today.

I like Kobo. They are really serious about helping self-publishers succeed. I hope they have a great year.

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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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Reality Check: Salon’s "My Amazon bestseller made me nothing"

One prominent story making the rounds right now is how an author with an Amazon bestseller only made $12,000 off it. In fact, on Salon, the article’s headline is “My Amazon bestseller made me no money.” The takeaway seems to be that there’s no money in writing. As the author Patrick Wensink writes, “There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession.”

The actual details are a bit scant, but apparently the novel hit #6 on Amazon, selling about 4000 copies. I’m not sure what timespan that’s over–he says it was high on the bestseller list for a week, but it’s possible that 4000 figure is for sales across that month (July 2012), or maybe even all last year. Knowing the actual timespan would help break things down, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot; whatever the case, the bulk of those sales came over that bestselling week.

So let’s contextualize things.

First off, for a book to reach #6 in the Kindle store, it’s got to sell something like 4000 copies in a day. So I assume he’s talking about paperback sales. With this information, let’s rephrase what happened.

He made $12,000. In one week. With one book. Just on Amazon. Just for sales of his paperback.

Now, it’s possible this was for combined print and Kindle sales–details aren’t provided–but if his print version was what hit #6 on the bestseller list, his Kindle sales can’t have been much. May not make intuitive sense, but sales of one version do not guarantee sales of all versions. For instance, two of my books have so far sold a combined 2000 Kindle copies on Amazon this month. Their Amazon print sales? 0. So I don’t know exactly how many of his 4000 sales were for the print version–could be 3000, could be 3900–but anyway, it doesn’t much matter.

Because, again, he made $12,000 in one week for one book on one store on sales that were mostly of one format.

Put another way, if this book had maintained that rank for a year, its Amazon-only, mostly-print royalties to the author would be over $600,000.

In fairness, it’s really, really hard for any book to cling to the #6 rank for an entire year. That’s Harry Potter, Hunger Games, 50 Shades territory. Only one book in thousands has that kind of staying power. But this is just another way to think about what that $12,000 means.

For more context, more than 50% of Amazon’s book sales are for Kindle. If the book had been able to reach as many Kindle readers as paperback readers, its week of sales would have meant more like $20-24,000 in royalties. I’m not sure what percentage of print sales Amazon commands, but the consensus is it’s got about 60% of the ebook market. If you want to give Amazon the extremely generous figure of 50% of total book sales, and you look at what this book would have earned if it had sold equally well in all other outlets, those royalties would be in the $40,000 – 50,000 range.

A decent year’s salary, for a week of sales, on a single book.

Again, this is just a thought experiment. And a manipulative one. The reality is that only those huge bestsellers tend to do well in every market and format. I think most books that sell okay look much more like Wensink’s book–sales are limited mostly to one market and format. Just because the potential’s there doesn’t mean you can reach it.

But the apparent takeaway of this Salon article is that writing is such a poor way to make a living that even writing a bestseller is no guarantee of a year’s living wage, let alone a career. I don’t disagree that it’s very difficult to make a living at this. The Taleist survey of self-publishing–which was almost certainly skewed in favor of successes–showed that 50% of indie authors made less than $500 a year. Meanwhile, the Salon article mentions an advance for a traditionally-published book being just $5000, which is pretty common these days. Not exactly enough to live on.

But I think there are some bigger takeaways here: that unless you’re Harper Lee, you can’t make a career out of a single book. That seems to be a persistent myth among writers. One that sets a lot of us up for disappointment. One that leads us to believe the numbers never work out no matter how many books we write. I think that myth needs to die.

I also think this says something about what it means to be a “bestseller”–specifically, not much. “#6 on Amazon” sounds amazing, but let’s reframe things again. To sell 4000 copies a year on the Kindle side (which I’m much more familiar with than print), you don’t need to come anywhere near #6. All you need to do is maintain a steady rank of #10,000.

Not nearly as easy as it may sound, especially with a single book, but “#10,000” sounds pathetic compared to “A top ten Amazon bestseller.” Few books–six, as it turns out–are #6 or better at any given moment. Impossible odds. Making #10,000, though? That sounds like it could be achievable.

And that, I think, is the real takeaway here. One way to frame Wensink’s story is “Wow, he was a bestseller on the biggest bookstore in the world–and he didn’t even make minimum wage.”

I hear it, and I think, “Wow, this guy made twelve thousand dollars in a single week with a single book. I’ll probably never be able to put up numbers like that–but to make a career, I don’t have to.”

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