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

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

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

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

• Have published 3-6 or more full-length books (or some equivalent in serializations, novellas, and the like)

• Capable of selling at least a few dozen copies of their new release right off the bat

• Are writing and publishing 2+ novels a year

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

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

Anyway, on to the thinkin’.

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

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

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

   On the Virtues of Non-eBook Formats

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

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

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

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

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

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

  What to Pull Out of Select

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Yeah, But You Said There Would Be Strategies Here

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

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

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

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

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

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