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!