Amanda Hocking Is The Exception, Not The Rule

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The web has been abuzz lately (for example) with stories of Amanda Hocking’s incredible self-publishing success (and similar success by other indies). In a nutshell, Hocking has nine self-published works available on Kindle (and other ebook stores) and is selling hundreds of thousands every month and making more money than most writers ever dream about. Well, we dream about it, of course, but never expect to actually see it. Hocking sold 450,000 books on Kindle in January alone. At a 70% royalty that’s some serious moolah. Traditional publishers won’t be picking her up because none of them can offer a deal that’s even close, let alone better than the one she’s managed on her own.

Naturally when a story like this comes along, everyone immediately starts shouting stuff about how the world has completely changed and publishers will no longer be required. People everywhere can self-publish on Kindle and make themselves a million dollars a second. Of course, it’s all bollocks.

Anyone that knows anything about me will know that I have no problem with quality indie or self-publishing. The keyword there is QUALITY, but that’s another post. I’m absolutely chuffed for Amanda Hocking. It’s fantastic to see the kind of success she’s had. But let’s get realistic for a moment. She’s an exception, not a new standard benchmark. Remember Dan Brown and J K Rowling? They’re phenomenally successful authors with traditional print deals. Did every other traditionally published author suddenly become a sales behemoth because they did? Of course not. The fact that it can happen doesn’t mean it will every time.

I blogged back in January 2008 about a Japanese girl that wrote a novel on her phone and ended up with a print deal and 400,000 sales. Did Japanese girls everywhere start making fortunes with mobile phone novels? No.

When it comes to Kindle self-publishing there are some people making huge money and selling massive numbers (like Hocking, or J A Konrath, who used his already high profile to take control of his own ebook sales). There are also some people making moderate to good sales, some making poor sales and some making none. I don’t have any figures, but I’ll bet you that the people making none or low sales outnumber those making high sales by a factor of hundreds of thousands. Just like in print publishing. The music industry is the same – for every Justin Bieber there’s a million wannabes struggling to get noticed. Just because massive success can and does happen occasionally, doesn’t mean it can and will happen to many.

Also, every overnight success is usually on the back of many years of hard work. Just because these people shot to fame and success in short timeframes doesn’t mean they spent no time getting there.

Hocking posted this on her blog a couple of weeks ago, which includes these salient points:

So much of what people are saying about me is, “Look what Amanda Hocking accomplished in a year,” when they really should be saying is, “Look what Amanda Hocking accomplished in twenty years.” Because that’s how long I’ve been writing, that’s how long I’ve been working towards this goal…

There is a common misconception that I published the first novel I ever wrote, and that is not true. The first book I ever published was My Blood Approves, and that was the eighth novel I’d written…

There are no tricks or schemes with self-publishing. It’s just about writing a good book, polishing it really well, getting a good cover, pricing it right, and putting it out there. There are no short cuts. If you want to be successful at this, you have to do the work.

You should really read the whole post, it’s very good. I would also point out that even if you do take Amanda’s advice (which every writer should) and write well, polish, edit, get good covers and layout and so on, you’re still not guaranteed success. You’re giving yourself the best shot, but becoming the next Amanda Hocking or J K Rowling is akin to winning the lottery. It happens very rarely in the grand scheme of things, to a very lucky few. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t chase that kind of success, it doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you and it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it. We all deserve recognition for the hard work we do. The truth is, most of us get a lot less recognition for our hard work than we’d like. That’s life.

Work your arse off and aim for the stars, but don’t get lost in unrealistic expectations. With any luck your hard work and attention to detail and quality will pay off. Certainly we’re going to see more and more people achieving very satisfying success indie publishing their stuff. Things are changing, self-publishing is losing its stigma and new vistas of success are opening to all of us. But even so, success stories like Hocking’s are likely to remain the exception and not the rule.

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

The Uprising in Book Publishing

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In the dark alleyways of publishing, an author uprising is brewing against Big Publishing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about revolution lately thanks to the events unfolding in North Africa.

My wife, Lesleyann, has friends in Egypt, and they’ve kept us up to date via email. Their dispatches alternate between fear, uncertainty, optimism and celebration.

Revolutions are an awkward and messy business. They represent the end of one paradigm and the beginning of the next. While the root causes can trace back decades, when the uprising arrives it can occur with alarming rapidity.

The events in North Africa have recalibrated the meaning of “revolution” for me. I’m thinking now about revolution in the context of a popular uprising.

At the heart of any revolution is a loss of faith in the prevailing regime. In Egypt’s case, a number of catalysts precipitated the revolution; chief among them an oppressive political environment that offered little opportunity for democratic participation, freedom of speech and economic opportunity.

Frederick Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead.” I recall my philosophy professor at U.C. Berkeley 25 years ago explaining the quote with great passion. He said the beauty of the quote went beyond its immediate religious connotation – it was a metaphor for the power of faith. When you believe in something, your faith powers that in which you believe.

If we lose faith in an institution, a regime or a belief system, the very survival of that institution is imperiled.

Every institution is powered by faith. If your house catches on fire, you have faith the local fire department will respond. If you purchase a tomato from your local farmer’s market, you have faith the item you purchased will indeed taste like a tomato.

Often, faith is based on some future expected result. You can’t touch, smell or see it in the present. If we are rewarded for our faith, such as trusting that fire truck to come when we expect it, then our faith in that institution is reinforced.

Faith is the single most important force-of-nature driving all human experience.

Faith, religion, revolution, and publishing. Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this. The embedded PowerPoint below represents my attempt to pull it all together and make sense of where the publishing world is headed.

The Uprising in Book Publishing

In the presentation, I draw parallels between the catalysts for the Egyptian revolution and the author uprising I foresee taking root in publishing.

If authors – the beating heart powering Big Publishing – lose faith in Big Publishing, then big publishing as we know it will die. By “Big Publishing,” I’m referring to the old, pre-self-publishing system embodied by the Big 6 New York publishers, in which the publisher serves as the author’s judge, jury, gatekeeper and executioner.

If Big Publishing approves of your book, they acquire it. Post-acquisition, an author can die happy knowing they’re a published author with all the esteem, respect and future possibilities embodied in this blessing. At least, that’s what most authors are trained to believe.

Unfortunately, it’s tough to find a traditionally published author who waxes eloquent about their post-publication experience. It’s like the author goes to heaven and reports back via John Edward (the guy who talks to dead people) that they discovered famine on the other side of the pearly gates.

Big Publishing, although it employs thousands of talented and well-intentioned professionals, is built upon a broken business model.

The cracks are growing more apparent, and before long, authors – both traditionally published and otherwise – will lose faith in the institution. When that happens, the seeds of revolution are sewn. Some might argue we’re already there.

Ask Not What your Publisher Can Do for You

Two questions and their answers will drive the author uprising against Big Publishing:

1. What can a publisher do for me that I (the author) cannot do for myself?
2. Might a big publisher actually harm my prospects as an author?

Ten years ago, the answers to these simple questions validated the need for Big Publishing. Why? In the old print world, Big Publishing controlled access to readers. They controlled the printing press and the access to retail distribution.

Yet these same questions asked today yield mixed results. In the last four or five months, Joe Konrath started urging readers of his blog to abandon Big Publishing (he calls it “Legacy Publishing”). He contends indie authors can produce, publish, price and promote a book more effectively than Big Publishing.

Amanda Hocking, in her recent interview with USA Today, was quoted as saying, “I can’t really say that I would have been more successful if I’d gone with a traditional publisher.”

No doubt, much of Hocking’s success is because she’s an indie author. She writes great books her readers love. She prices her series-starters at only $.99 and the rest at $2.99. Great books + low prices + enthusiastic fans + an author directly engaged with her fans = viral readership. Few big publishers are prepared to play by these new rules.

Every week we hear of self-published authors who were previously rejected by Big Publishing finding success with self-published ebooks. My presentation lists 50 Indie Ebook Authors to Watch. Brian Pratt, profiled here in December, is one such author. Ruth Ann Nordin is another. Nordin’s An Inconvenient Marriage is the #2 best-selling romance title today in the Apple iBookstore’s romance category, and #35 among all paid titles at Apple.

Two or three years from now when ebooks account for more than 50% of the book market, the same two dangerous questions above will yield a more unequivocal answer in favor of self-publishing.

All the major ebook retailers – Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Amazon – have embraced indie ebook authors and grant them equal shelf presence alongside Big Publishing authors. Smashwords is now distributing over 20,000 titles to most of these retailers (we’re not at Amazon yet). Readers, not publishers, decide what sells.

Do authors still need publishers in this new world order? I think it all goes back to my first question. To survive and thrive, publishers big and small must do for authors what authors cannot or will not do for themselves.

Welcome to the revolution.

Nietzsche And The Downfall Of Big Publishing

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This post, by Smashwords founder Mark Coker, originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 3/3/11.

In the dark alleyways of publishing, an author uprising is brewing against Big Publishing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about revolution lately thanks to the events unfolding in North Africa.

My wife, Lesleyann, has friends in Egypt, and they’ve kept us up to date via email. Their dispatches alternate between fear, uncertainty, optimism and celebration.

Revolutions are an awkward and messy business. They represent the end of one paradigm and the beginning of the next. While the root causes can trace back decades, when the uprising arrives it can occur with alarming rapidity.

The events in North Africa have recalibrated the meaning of "revolution" for me. I’m thinking now about revolution in the context of a popular uprising.

At the heart of any revolution is a loss of faith in the prevailing regime. In Egypt’s case, a number of catalysts precipitated the revolution; chief among them an oppressive political environment that offered little opportunity for democratic participation, freedom of speech and economic opportunity.

Frederick Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead.” I recall my philosophy professor at U.C. Berkeley 25 years ago explaining the quote with great passion. He said the beauty of the quote went beyond its immediate religious connotation – it was a metaphor for the power of faith. When you believe in something, your faith powers that in which you believe.

If we lose faith in an institution, a regime or a belief system, the very survival of that institution is imperiled.

Every institution is powered by faith. If your house catches on fire, you have faith the local fire department will respond. If you purchase a tomato from your local farmer’s market, you have faith the item you purchased will indeed taste like a tomato.

Often, faith is based on some future expected result. You can’t touch, smell or see it in the present. If we are rewarded for our faith, such as trusting that fire truck to come when we expect it, then our faith in that institution is reinforced.

Faith is the single most important force-of-nature driving all human experience.

Faith, religion, revolution, and publishing. Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this. The embedded PowerPoint below represents my attempt to pull it all together and make sense of where the publishing world is headed.

 

See the slideshow, and read the rest of the post, on the Smashwords blog.

The Seven Book Marketing Mistakes That Authors Make (Part 1 of 8)

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This post, by Vikram Narayan, originally appeared on the BookBuzzr blog on 1/16/10.

With over 400 books being published everyday, authors have a particularly big challenge when it comes to promoting a book online. As author Gayle Kelley states “The publisher’s job is to get the word out about my book…which they are doing at what I call from “35,000 feet.” That certainly is not close enough to notice the finer details of intense promotion and selling.” This problem is further compounded by the fact that the time taken to consume a book is much greater than many other forms of entertainment and leisure (see the matrix below.)

 

The BookBuzzr Cost-Consumption Quadrant
If you are sent a link to a YouTube video from a friend, you will probably click on it without thinking too much about it. But if you are sent the PDF of a book from your friend, you may not be as eager to open the book. This is because the time required to read a book is too great. Just because you get a free book does not mean that you will read it. But you may glance through a blog article or spend a few minutes on a stand-alone television show such as the Oscar Awards show. As an author of a book you are competing for the time and sustained attention of your reader with all of these other potential activities (along with other books.) Your reader can either choose to read a book or play a video game. Readers are thus forced to be judicious when it comes to choosing the books that they will read.
Given these dynamics, book marketing and book promotion is one of the most crucial activities that an author needs to master. My team and I at BookBuzzr.com, have had the opportunity to review over 3,000 books that have been uploaded on our site. Some of these books leap out at you and grab you. They tempt you to peek behind the cover. Unfortunately, many books simply fail at making a connection with a potential reader. So we spent some time researching and thinking about the biggest mistakes that authors make when it comes to marketing and promoting their books.
The top 7 mistakes that authors make are:

 

  1. No tag line (one line description that is unique to your book) for the book or author (Posted on Jan 19th, 2010).
     
  2. Being a salesperson (that’s right … the more you try to sell, the less you will sell!) (Posted on Jan 21st, 2010).
     
  3. Not promoting the person and the story behind the book (Posted on Jan 26th, 2010).
     
  4. Being stingy with information about your book (Posted on Jan 28th, 2010).
     
  5. Not creating enough repeat mentions about you or your book (Posted on February 1st, 2010).
     
  6. Not creating the perception of demand exceeding supply ( Posted on Feb 4th 2010)
     
  7. Not enough recommendations from mavens for the book ( Posted on Feb 6th 2010)

The next seven posts will elaborate on each of these mistakes.

(Next: Book Marketing Mistake Number 1 – No Tag Line for Book or Author)

(NOTE: The author wishes to thank Chetan Dhruve, Freya and other members of the BookBuzzr team for their inputs into this series of articles.)

Book Publishers Need To Wake Up And Smell The Disruption

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This post, by Mathew Ingram, originally appeared on Gigaom on 3/1/11.

The writing has been on the wall for some time in the book publishing business: platforms like Amazon’s Kindle and the iPad have caused an explosion of e-book publishing that’s continuing to disrupt the industry on a whole series of levels and reshape the future of the book, as Om has written about in the past. And evidence continues to accumulate that e-books aren’t just something established authors with an existing brand can make use of, but are also becoming a real alternative to traditional book contracts for emerging authors as well — all of which should serve as a massive wake-up call for publishers.

The latest piece of evidence is the story of independent author Amanda Hocking, a 26-year-old who lives in Minnesota and writes fantasy-themed fiction for younger readers. Unlike some established authors such as J.A. Konrath, who have done well with traditional publishing deals before moving into self-publishing their own e-books, Hocking has never had a traditional publishing deal — and yet, she has sold almost one million copies of the nine e-books she has written in less than a year, and her latest book appears to be selling at the rate of about 100,000 copies a month.

It’s true that the prices Hocking charges for these books are small — in some cases only 99 cents, depending on the book — but the key part of the deal is that she (and any other author who works with Amazon or Apple) gets to keep 70 percent of the revenue from those sales. That’s a dramatic contrast to traditional book-publishing deals, in which the publisher keeps the majority of the money and the author typically gets 20 percent or even less. If you sell a million copies of your books and you keep 70 percent of that revenue, that is still significant, even if each book sells for 99 cents.

Read the rest of the post on Gigaom.

An Open Letter To Publishers

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This post, by Andrew Woodworth, originally appeared on his Agnostic, Maybe blog on 3/1/11.

Considering how “many months” Josh Marwell states that HarperCollins has been looking at the eBook issues in his Open Letter to Librarians, the first reply to the whole HarperCollins/Overdrive/26 circulations meltdown is remarkably short on details or assurances of recognition for the issues raised by librarians. For a publisher to explicitly solicit feedback and then carefully restate their case for why they are changing their pricing model means they either don’t care or they don’t get it. Rather than give in to cynicism, I’m opting for the latter since libraries have rapidly changed in the last ten years (just like the last time they visited their pricing model). Perhaps it is time for an update.

Within that time period (well, starting before that, but I digress), libraries have moved from information gatekeepers to information gateways. Libraries have lost the monopoly on knowledge content to the information/communication revolution and have shifted to the role of being an access provider. The key word in that sentence is access. It is now our institutional everything.  We facilitate access to literature and information resources to the communities that we serve, whether it is the local grade school, university faculty, or little old grandmothers.

What this new pricing model does is threaten that access arrangement. And for all the things that you can do to libraries and/or librarians, the last thing you want to do is screw with access. It’s one of those things that librarians have incorporated into the Library Bill of Rights. It’s also one of those things that librarians want to keep as a binary answer (“Yes, we have that” and “No, we don’t have that”) rather than make it a nebulous one (“Well, we might have access to that when your turn comes up but only if we decide to renew the license which is dependent on a number of contingencies…”) Access is one of the core values that librarians will fight to the death for. This “26 and done” idea goes against it completely which is one of the major underlying reasons for the uproar that this has created.

You get the point.

Also, I’d like to highlight this other point as written by Karen Schneider:


Read the rest of the post on Andrew Woodworth‘s Agnostic, Maybe blog.

A Writer Muses On Marketing And Sales, Part I

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What exactly is the difference between marketing and sales?

That’s a question I asked myself recently, and after studying the subject a bit I think I have a useful answer. This post and the posts that follow represent everything I think I now know about marketing and sales, but I claim no mastery in the matter. I simply have a better understanding of how each relates to my aims as an author, and I offer these posts in that spirit.

If the average person has a general conception of marketing and sales it’s that they are aspects of business that drive customer purchases — at times by any means necessary. While true, I think this consumer-driven perspective misplaces the emphasis for authors who would like to profit from marketing and sales. Why? Because it’s hard to imagine an author who would like to have fewer readers, which in turn implies that all marketing and sales efforts are inherently useful for every author. They’re not.

In the great majority of cases, marketing and sales are not a means by which otherwise disinterested consumers can be compelled to spend. All the marketing and sales efforts in the world are generally not going to encourage someone to buy a new stove if their stove is working just fine. Treating marketing and sales as weapons of war may be what amped-up marketing weasels do in caffeinated team-spirit huddles, but I don’t think that’s a useful point of view for authors to adopt. And not just because the opportunity to sell books in a predatory fashion is minimal at best.  

Intent
A better approach for authors is to understand marketing and sales as tools, to understand what those tools can and cannot do, and to understand when they should and should not be employed in the service of an author’s objectives. Unfortunately there is as much conflicting advice about marketing and sales as there are people professing to clarify confusion about the two terms.

Given that they do not naturally differentiate themselves, it’s understandable that definitions of marketing and sales tend to emphasize how the concepts are distinct. But I think it’s a mistake to start with the premise that marketing and sales are different things. From everything I’ve read (and for artistic reasons I’ll get into later) I believe it’s more useful to see marketing and sales as two ends of the same continuum. And that continuum is defined not by the properties of a product, but by the intent of the product’s creator.

If you make something for yourself, or for a specific person, you don’t need to think about selling or marketing that work. Whatever sales is, whatever marketing is, and however the two might or might not relate to each other, none of that matters in instances where a product is going to be conveyed to a specific person. And that’s true without regard to compensation. If you know who you’re delivering a product to it doesn’t matter whether the product is a gift or the fulfillment of a contract: there is nothing you need to know about marketing or sales in order to see your intention through. (Understanding marketing and sales may help leverage a present opportunity for future gain, but that’s not the issue here.)

While these observations may seem absurdly obvious, the implications are important. First, marketing and sales are not inextricably bound to the act of creation or production. Second, marketing and sales are not inextricably bound to financial transactions between two parties. And both conclusions hold whether the product we’re talking about is a simple item, a complex gadget or a creative work.

Reality Check
Marketing and sales matter in instances where either or both of the following is true:

  • The people who are interested in your product are not all known or aware of the product’s availability.
  • The price people will pay for your product has not been agreed to by both parties.

The problem, again, is that these criteria seemingly apply to every product. Worse, if you’re like most writers, the rationality of your entrepreneurial thought process is probably something like this. “I personally know two people who will read my work if I ask them, but I also know there are more than six billion people on the planet. Plus, there are a lot of planets we don’t know about yet, so there are probably at least a trillion potential readers out there I could market to. I also know that most books sell for X dollars, but because my book is special it will easily sell for X + Y dollars, and that’s before the movie comes out. So, conservatively, I’m probably looking at a potential profit of $74 million in the first year, give or take current exchange rates and how interested I am in doing a book tour.”

No matter who you are and no matter what you write, it’s a given that there will always be people who don’t know about your work, and people who aren’t willing to spend what you’re asking even if they think you’re the best writer in the business. That’s as true for you as it is for Stephen King or any other writer. Marketing and sales will never negate those truths no matter how much time, effort and money you throw at them.

Decision Time
What marketing and sales can do — as tools — is increase the likelihood that you will be able to reach more readers. That may or may not also translate into an increase in profits, depending on whether you charge for your work and how much money you spend on marketing and sales.

The effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts also correlates with the clarity you have about your specific authorial aims. For that reason, nothing is more important than having an honest discussion with yourself about your personal goals as a writer, including whether you see writing as a business. What else could it be?

Well, any of the following:

  • A hobby.
  • A dream.
  • An escape.
  • An emotional release.
  • An obsession.
  • A secret obsession.
  • A double-secret obsession.

Being a professional writer is a tough gig to get and a hard one to keep. Then again, so is running a successful restaurant. If you are famous among a small group of friends and family for a few tasty dishes, you may be tempted or encouraged to open your own catering business — or even your own eatery. But you would probably think twice about doing so given the increased risk, responsibilities and complexities of the undertaking. Because writing is a solitary craft it’s a little harder to draw direct parallels, but that only means you should think about the question that much more. (Note: I’m not talking about the definition of a business that the IRS uses, although that’s something else you should probably familiarize yourself with.)

If you aspire to write professionally, or even to turn a profit with your writing, it’s never too early to commit to writing as a business. It costs you nothing to do so, at least up front, and will definitely save you time, money and stress down the road. On the other hand, if you have no plan to turn your writing into a career, then that’s something you should acknowledge as early as possible. It’s going to make your writing life a whole lot easier, if not also more enjoyable.

Admitting that you’re not trying to write professionally does not mean you have to give up fantasies about success finding you, or that you’re freed from the eternal obligation to produce the best work you possibly can for your intended readers. Nobody can predict what will happen once a work is written, and that’s part of the fun of writing. But by the same token you’d have to be loony to bet on a lightning strike. And most if not all of the marketing and sales playbook involves placing bets.

Anything you do to market or sell your writing is going to take time, money or emotional capital. And if you’re like most writers I know you probably have a limited supply of each. So take a few deep breaths, then consider the following question:

Are you in business?

From the point of view of marketing and sales there are only two possible answers: yes or no. To truly understand the difference between marketing and sales, and how those tools relate to your objectives, you need to pick one of those answers. You can change your answer at any time, but you should always know what your answer is.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett’s Ditchwalk.

Publishing, Dead or Alive?

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This podcast, featuring Ron Hogan, originally appeared on the Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond The Book site on 2/27/11 and is provided here in its entirety with the permission of that site.

Attend enough conferences on the future of publishing, and pretty soon, you start to wonder if the future of publishing is conferences about the future of publishing. The small talk and the big presentations alike often portray an industry that is diplomatically referred to as “in transition,” which can reliably be taken to mean, “on its back.” Ask Ron Hogan, who’s been watching the business and working in it since the birth of digital media, for his two cents, and you get a real bargain-priced basket of feisty, no-nonsense views.

“I’m tired of hearing about the death of publishing. If these companies die, it’s because they were dedicated to a dying model,” Hogan says. “I also don’t believe that the book is going to die out; the digital economy is not going to completely overwhelm the existing print market for books anytime soon.

“People like to give each other real books, especially pretty books,” Hogan explains to CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Art books are going to be a category where print is going to continue to matter for some time. There are going to be very cool things that you can do in digital books and e-book apps, but at the same time there are some things that you can really only present effectively and most attractively in paper.”

 Publishing, Dead or Alive? [15:20m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

 

Authors As Salespeople

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A question from my ex-publisher stimulated me think about the pay structure in traditional publishing. The question she asked was: Why couldn’t you sell all those books when you were still under contract? Many factors came into play at the same time to quickly boost my e-book sales. Pricing strategy, volume of books, and massive effort all played a part. But one of the biggest issues was motivation, aka incentive.

In the business world, salespeople work for a small base pay and most of their income is in the form of incentive pay and bonuses. The more they sell, they more money they make. To some extent, this is true in traditional publishing, except that after the initial advance, writers (aka salespeople) only get paid every six months. If other businesses functioned that way, they’d have a hard time hiring and keeping salespeople. It’s hard to stay motivated when you wait half a year for a paycheck… then realize your publisher has kept most of it.

The other factor is information. Most salespeople get constant feedback on their performance. They know at any point exactly how their sales numbers are adding up. They can use that information to tailor their techniques and improve their sales. In traditional publishing, sales information comes too late to be effective and is often hard to decipher.

When you self-publish on Amazon, through both the Digital Text Platform and Create Space, after the initial six-week wait, you get paid every month. You also have access to hourly, daily, and monthly sales data. This information is direct feedback that you can use to figure out what promotional techniques work best. It can also function as incentive. When you see the sales bump up, it’s exciting and motivating.

Together, the steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases. Wouldn’t it be interesting if traditional publishing houses followed Amazon’s lead and incentivized their writers to be diligent salespeople as well?

Publishers will say: It’s not possible. It’s too much bookkeeping. We’ve always done it this way. But Amazon knows what it’s doing, and it’s kicking ass in the publishing world.

What do you think? Would you work harder if your publisher gave you more sales data and paid you more often?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, Passions of the Dead, and Dying for Justice.

 

This is a reprint from LJ Sellers‘ blog.

The Borders And A&R Collapse

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Everyone is blogging about the collapse of REDgroup, the company that owns the bookshop chains of Borders and Angus & Robertson (and Whitcoulls in New Zealand). I was going to write a big long ranty post all about it, but the truth is it’s all been done. A quick web search will yield more opinions than you can fit on a ballot sheet. But I will add, very briefly, my perception of the whole thing. (Which probably means I’m about to write a big long ranty post!)

Lots of people are trying to establish exactly what this collapse is and what caused it. I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not the great ebook revolution; it’s not shitty management by REDgroup; it’s not the global financial crisis; it’s not the rising cost of physical shop rents; it’s not the massive surge in online shopping and stores like Amazon stealing business. At least, it’s not any one of these things. It’s all of these things.

It’s the progress of industry. Sure, the management of the whole group was blindly stupid and greedy, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. Sure, Amazon, Book Depository and stores like them are having a massive impact on brick and mortar bookstores, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. When you combine all the factors at once, this stuff is inevitable. Pretty much every major bookstore chain will suffer. The nature of the industry is changing. It’s a terrible shame for all those people that are going to lose their jobs, but that’s a part of life. It’s like the shipbuilders on the Tyne, the coalminers in the Welsh hills, the dudes that used to run photo processing shops specialising in dark room development. The world moves on, things change, technology develops and old methods and jobs slowly disappear. But new ones also emerge. The smart and the rich are the ones that stay ahead of the curve.

Putting shitty American coffee chains in shitty American book store chains wasn’t going to suddenly make Borders a going business concern. Turning Angus & Robertson into cheap remainder bins with plate glass windows was never going to ensure their survival. High street and mall book stores, just like paper books, are going to be disappearing. There will still be paper books (I’ve talked about this a lot before) but they’ll be specialty books, or Print On Demand books from online stores. Just the same, there will still be book shops, but they’ll be specialty stores, catering to a particular niche of collectors or genre and they’ll have to diversify – comic books, trading cards, games, collectibles – all the stuff that fits the niche.

Whether we like it or not, the world is constantly changing. With change comes death and rebirth. Some things crumble to dust while others are born from the ashes of their predecessor’s demise. There were once people that were skilled at many things that no longer have a place in the world. You can’t blame any one thing except progress. The same is true of the recent book store collapse. There are many mitigating factors that contributed to the stores going under at this particular time, but that’s the small stuff. The changing face of publishing, reading and book selling is going to keep changing.

Within the next decade, I predict, we’ll see very few, if any, big chain book stores. Mass market stuff will be in all the department stores and K-Marts and places like that, but mainly online. Eventually you’ll only get your mass market release in hard copy at a POD booth or ordered that way online. There’ll be specialist stores dealing with specialist buyers and collectible books, while pretty much everyone else buys their stuff online. And the vast majority of it will be ebooks, with a small chunk held by POD releases. There’ll be a rise in collectible, beautiful, probably limited edition hardback releases. Kids starting school now will look at print books the same way we look at vinyl and tape cassettes. If you compare books to albums, you can look at the ebook as the CD and the print book as the vinyl release. The ratios will be pretty similar soon enough, I expect. And before long the CD and will disappear unless you order one, POD style. There’ll be a rise in small press releases with short print runs, and more small press will utilise online bookstores and ebooks for their distribution. Eventually the small press print run will be a thing of the past.

It’s all going to happen, so trying to find a particular reason for the demise of Borders is like trying to look for a particular reason for the demise of the Victorian era. It didn’t die because Victoria did – it ended because we all moved on, in a slow and incremental way with all kinds of contributing factors. That’s life.

Told you I wasn’t going to write a big long ranty post.
 

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

The Numbers Game

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This post, from JA Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 2/18/11.

So I just got off the phone with an acquaintance of mine. She’s a writer whom I met last year at a conference, and she called me asking for advice.

First some background. She’s hit the extended NYT list several times in both hardcover and mass market, and has a backlist of ten books. She was just offered a contract from one of the Big 6 for $200k a book, for a two book deal.

The royalties offered are industry standard 25% for ebooks on net.

She’s thinking about releasing the book herself, and needed some help crunching the numbers. She’s had several previous contracts for $200k a book, but so far none of her books have earned out their advance, even six years later. (This is common, by the way, even though she’s had multiple printings. If I’d been paid $200k for Whiskey Sour or Afraid, I wouldn’t have earned out either.)

Here’s what I told her:

The 25% the publisher is offering is actually based on net. So you’re getting 17.5% of the list price. (Amazon gets 30%, they get 52.5%–which is obscene)

When your agent gets her cut, you’re earning 14.9% of list price on ebooks.

For a $9.99 ebook, that’s $1.49 in your pocket for each one sold.

If ebook prices go down (and they will) it would be 75 cents for you on a $4.99 ebook

If you release a $4.99 ebook on your own, at 70%, you’d earn $3.50 an ebook.

Let’s say you sell a modest 1000 ebooks per month at $4.99.

That’s $9000 a year you’d make on ebooks through your publisher vs. $42,000 a year on your own.
 

Read the rest of the post on JA Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

Promote Your Books in the Publications Section on LinkedIn

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In a recent post, I gave instructions for promoting your books on your LinkedIn profile by using the Reading List by Amazon application to post a book cover image and a link to your book’s Amazon sales page.

Another way to get visibility for your books on LinkedIn is to use the new Publications section on the profile. The great thing about this Publications area is that you can list any type of publication, regardless of whether it is available on Amazon. You can even list free ebooks or newsletters.

Just follow these four easy steps to promote your books and other publications on LinkedIn:

1. Click on “Profile” and make sure you are on the “Edit Profile” tab.

2. Go to the “Are You Published” area and click on “Add Sections.”

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Note: If you don’t see the “Are You Published” box on your profile, look for a similar box that says “Add sections to reflect achievements and experiences on your profile.”

3. On the next screen, click the “Publications” button on the left and then click the “Add to Profile” button.

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4. Complete the publication description on the next screen, then click the “Add Publication” button.  Remember to include important keywords in your publication descriptions, to help people find your profile and your publications when they search by keyword.

Here is what the finished product looks like on my profile:

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The book title is hyperlinked to the book sales page on my website. On my LinkedIn profile, the “Publications” section appeared below the “Experience” section, but you can move some of the sections around by dragging and dropping them.

To add additional books, go back into "Edit Profile" mode, scroll down to the "Publications" area, and click on "Add a Publication."

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Authors as Salespeople

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A question from my ex-publisher stimulated me think about the pay structure in traditional publishing. The question she asked was: Why couldn’t you sell all those books when you were still under contract? Many factors came into play at the same time to quickly boost my e-book sales. Pricing strategy, volume of books, and massive effort all played a part. But one of the biggest issues was motivation, aka incentive.

In the business world, salespeople work for a small base pay and most of their income is in the form of incentive pay and bonuses. The more they sell, they more money they make. To some extent, this is true in traditional publishing, except that after the initial advance, writers (aka salespeople) only get paid every six months. If other businesses functioned that way, they’d have a hard time hiring and keeping salespeople. It’s hard to stay motivated when you wait half a year for a paycheck… then realize your publisher has kept most of it.

The other factor is information. Most salespeople get constant feedback on their performance. They know at any point exactly how their sales numbers are adding up. They can use that information to tailor their techniques and improve their sales. In traditional publishing, sales information comes too late to be effective and is often hard to decipher.

When you self-publish on Amazon, through both the Digital Text Platform and Create Space, after the initial six-week wait, you get paid every month. You also have access to hourly, daily, and monthly sales data. This information is direct feedback that you can use to figure out what promotional techniques work best. It can also function as incentive. When you see the sales bump up, it’s exciting and motivating.

Together, the steady income and the sales data provide a great incentive to spend time everyday blogging, tweeting, posting comments, and writing press releases. Wouldn’t it be interesting if traditional publishing houses followed Amazon’s lead and incentivized their writers to be diligent salespeople as well?

Publishers will say: It’s not possible. It’s too much bookkeeping. We’ve always done it this way. But Amazon knows what it’s doing, and it’s kicking ass in the publishing world.

What do you think? Would you work harder if your publisher gave you more sales data and paid you more often?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, Passions of the Dead, and Dying for Justice.

The Do's And Don'ts Of Cover Design: Publishing Lesson #1

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This post, by Bob Mayer, originally appeared on his Bob Mayer’s Blog on 2/18/11.

A good cover can make or break a book, especially for on-line buying. In a bookstore, most books are racked spine out, so author name sometimes means more. Readers can pick up your book, thumb through, get a feel for story and writing and then decide. On-line, readers see your cover. It has to say, “buy me, I’m a good book” to the reader. If it doesn’t, why would they take the time to possibly download a sample, or even look at product description? The changes in publishing have given the author many great opportunities and self-publishing is a viable option. However, self-publishing requires the author to make a few major decisions, and one of those decisions is cover.

You have a couple of options. You can do it yourself or your can hire a cover artist. There are many programs out there to choose from. There are many do it yourself programs, free programs, even programs that come with your computer that can create cover design. Even Word has the capability of designing a basic cover, but will the cover be good enough to invite the reader in?   The question you have to ask yourself is it worth your time and energy to do it “right”. Hiring someone to do your covers can run as low as $50.00 and as high as $600.00.

This is not an easy decision, especially when you factor in other costs that go into making an eBook available to the reader. We made the decision to invest in the proper tools to do it ourselves because we had the design background, and the technical ability. We purchased the complete InDesign package from Adobe ($1,299.00) partly for the ability to create covers for on-line purchasing, but also because it made it much easier to create the full-jacket cover for our print-on-demand books and for web design.

Even with the proper tools we made a few cover mistakes along the way.

Publishing Mistake #1: Always Judge a Book by its Cover.

Read the rest of the post on Bob Mayer’s Blog. Note that while the author opted to purchase a professional software suite, the design tips provided in the article are equally applicable for use with consumer-grade software or when working with a hired cover designer, they are not specific to InDesign.

INDIE AUTHOR: Being a 21st Century Author Means Re-Thinking Your Path

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This guest post, by Kris Tualla, originally appeared on Beth Barany’s Writer’s Fun Zone on 2/22/11.

I’m rearranging the order of things and having a guest columnist talk about her adventure into becoming an award winning bestselling indie author! Please meet the talented and savvy Kris Tualla. She’s stopping by during her blog tour during the release of her first trilogy. Please give her a warm Writer’s Fun Zone welcome!

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I have an agent. I have full manuscripts requested by major publishing houses. So people ask me all the time, “What made you decide to pursue independent publishing?”

Well… The traditional publishers did. “We don’t do American historicals… no one can sell Scandinavia… publishers LIKE their boxes…” I’ve heard it all.

And this is one of the rejections I received: “I think LOVING THE NORSEMAN has a lovely cast of characters, and a nice, cinematic quality to it. I also liked the balance Ms. Tualla creates in Ryder’s character, allowing him to be vulnerable yet strong. That said, medieval Scotland is a very crowded market…” Blah blah blah.

Looked like it was time to take my “lovely cast” to the people myself.

But there was a huge risk: self-published authors usually produce books which are severely sub-standard. From the writing to the editing to the formatting to the covers, these ignorant hopefuls have worked in a vacuum and have no idea how awful their books are.

So with my agent’s blessing, I took my American-Norwegian historical romance trilogy to e-publishing and print on demand (POD). And I did all the work myself.

Be warned. This is not a path for the faint of heart. The key is adequate editing – because it is IMPOSSIBLE for any author to edit themselves. Even traditionally published print books go through 3-4 rounds of editing before they are released – and many still have typos!

So for anyone reading this post who is considering this path, here is my process:


Read the rest of the post on Beth Barany‘s Writer’s Fun Zone.