indie author

Six Things Every Writer Needs to Succeed (Psst: MFA is not on this list.)

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This post by ML Swift originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 1/14/15.

When Therese asked if I’d like to scratch out an article for Writer Unboxed, I literally — in the most figurative sense of the word — stood up, turned around, and knocked the gold bricks out of my chair. Did I read her note correctly? Would I like to write an essay for the website I’ve worshipped for over three years, and — e’en if for a day, ere I’m shown the door fore’er — dispense Parker-esque aphorisms to the most respected minds in the industry, while at the same time, make a complete and utter fool of myself? Would I? Would I? I pounced on the keyboard: “Does a bear sh—?” Wait. Breathe. Backspace and delete. Respond as if it were as commonplace as “You want fries with that?”

“Why, yes, Therese, that would be lovely.” There you go. Classy. Mature. Professional. Kiss, kiss; hug, hug. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

By dinnertime, my euphoric ride on the Cumulonimbus9 had ended with a belly-flop to earth, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere, dusting off rainbows and gnawing my thumbnail like a piece of beef jerky. “Mike, what in the world were you thinking?” Actually, if you really want to get down and velveteen about it, I used a much more colorful, less Hogwarts-friendly expression.

You see, that very morning, Sharon Bially had written a post listing six criteria for an impressive writer’s resumé, and according to the stats, I was batting zero. Even worse, I didn’t foresee three of the six items making my five-, ten-, or twenty-year plan. Her suggestions, in order of my probable attainment (from “most likely” to “you’ve got to be kidding”) included:

 

Read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

2014: The Year When Science Fiction And Fantasy Woke Up To Diversity

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This post by Damien Walter originally appeared on The Guardian on 1/2/15.

A year of unprecedented success for women writers was matched by a flood of new voices from the self-publishing scene

Looking back at 2014, you can sum it up in one word: diversity. The world of science fiction and fantasy saw diversity not only in the voices that found success, definitively turning the page on 2013’s chainmail binkinigate, but also in the means of production. While the metaphysical themes so vital to SF continued their conquest of the mainstream, it was the year when independent digital publishing changed the genre for good.

One book dominated the awards in 2014: Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. This debut novel evokes a future world in which gender is unimportant, a transformation Leckie renders by exclusively referring to characters with the pronoun “she”. Its unconventional take on gender politics helped Ancillary Justice make a clean sweep of the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA awards, a rare and deserved achievement.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Adjusting To Being A Full-Time Author – Part 2

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This post by Michael Hicks originally appeared on his site on 1/30/12.

In this second installment of my musings about moving from a full-time day job to writing for a living, let’s take a look at some of the financial issues you need to be aware of in the rapidly evolving industry of self-publishing…

 

Keep The Faith, But Don’t Count On Next Month’s Income

Between February and August 2011, I made a ton of money, around $105,000, from my book royalties. Not like the big authors, but more than the “modest car payment” amount I’d been making before from month to month. I had stars in my eyes and money burning a big hole in my pocket. We already had some hefty financial obligations (I’d been a well-paid federal employee, remember, and had the payments to go with it), and made some financial decisions based on “projections” that, in hindsight, maybe weren’t such a good idea.

Because in September, a month after I left NSA, sales took a nosedive after Amazon (which is where I get over 95% of my royalties) apparently changed some of its algorithms. The royalties for that month were about $7,000. Yes, that’s a lot of money to a lot of people, but in terms of our existing financial commitments, that was not good at all. Even if Amazon hadn’t changed anything, eventually your bestsellers are going to drop off the list. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any books in the top 100 except King, Koontz, and Patterson, right?

 

Read the full post on Michael Hicks’ site.

 

Smashwords Year in Review 2014 and Plans for 2015

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 12/31/14.

Each year I provide Smashwords authors and publishers a review of our progress in the year as well as hints of our plans for the coming year. So here goes.

2014 marked another exciting year for Smashwords as we create new ebook distribution tools and capabilities that give our authors and publishers a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

If you’re new to Smashwords, a brief introduction to Smashwords is in order.

I founded Smashwords in 2008 to empower writers to become professional self-publishers. I wanted to transfer the power of publishing from publishers to authors. Back in 2008, large publishers controlled the printing press, the knowledge of professional publishing, and the all-important access to retail distribution. Publishers had the power to determine your fate as an author. No more. I wanted to make authors the captains of their own destiny.

Over the last six going on seven years, Smashwords introduced our free ebook printing press, Meatgrinder, which made it possible for any writer anywhere to publish an ebook in minutes; we opened distribution for the first time to major retailers and library partners that were previously inaccessible to self-published authors; we developed sophisticated yet easy-to-use publishing tools that help writers and small indie presses publish with pride and professionalism; we worked to actively educate our authors and publishers how to leverage best practices to publish with greater success; and we’ve been fierce (but friendly!) advocates for the rights and long term interests of the indie author community.

We exist to serve our authors and publishers, and we serve you by developing tools and relationships that help you publish faster, smarter and more effectively. Our time-saving tools help you spend more time writing and producing and less time managing multiple upload platforms.

In the years since we launched, Smashwords has grown to become the world’s largest distributor of self-published books. To the extent we’ve been successful is entirely thanks to the continued support of the authors, publishers and retailers we serve. You’re running a business, and we realize you work with Smashwords by choice, not by necessity. Through continuous improvement of everything we do, we will always work to earn and deserve your continued business, trust and partnership.

So let’s take a look at our progress for the year.

 

Read the full post on the Smashwords blog.

 

The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur

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This article by William Deresiewicz originally appeared on The Atlantic on 12/28/14.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it?

Pronounce the word artist, to conjure up the image of a solitary genius. A sacred aura still attaches to the word, a sense of one in contact with the numinous. “He’s an artist,” we’ll say in tones of reverence about an actor or musician or director. “A true artist,” we’ll solemnly proclaim our favorite singer or photographer, meaning someone who appears to dwell upon a higher plane. Vision, inspiration, mysterious gifts as from above: such are some of the associations that continue to adorn the word.

Yet the notion of the artist as a solitary genius—so potent a cultural force, so determinative, still, of the way we think of creativity in general—is decades out of date. So out of date, in fact, that the model that replaced it is itself already out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, and has been since about the turn of the millennium, one that’s in the process of reshaping what artists are: how they work, train, trade, collaborate, think of themselves and are thought of—even what art is—just as the solitary-genius model did two centuries ago. The new paradigm may finally destroy the very notion of “art” as such—that sacred spiritual substance—which the older one created.

Before we thought of artists as geniuses, we thought of them as artisans. The words, by no coincidence, are virtually the same. Art itself derives from a root that means to “join” or “fit together”—that is, to make or craft, a sense that survives in phrases like the art of cooking and words like artful, in the sense of “crafty.” We may think of Bach as a genius, but he thought of himself as an artisan, a maker. Shakespeare wasn’t an artist, he was a poet, a denotation that is rooted in another word for make. He was also a playwright, a term worth pausing over. A playwright isn’t someone who writes plays; he is someone who fashions them, like a wheelwright or shipwright.

A whole constellation of ideas and practices accompanied this conception. Artists served apprenticeships, like other craftsmen, to learn the customary methods (hence the attributions one sees in museums: “workshop of Bellini” or “studio of Rembrandt”). Creativity was prized, but credibility and value derived, above all, from tradition. In a world still governed by a fairly rigid social structure, artists were grouped with the other artisans, somewhere in the middle or lower middle, below the merchants, let alone the aristocracy. Individual practitioners could come to be esteemed—think of the Dutch masters—but they were, precisely, masters, as in master craftsmen. The distinction between art and craft, in short, was weak at best. Indeed, the very concept of art as it was later understood—of Art—did not exist.

 

Read the full article on The Atlantic.

 

Business Musings: Things Indie Writers Learned in 2014

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This post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch originally appeared on her site on 12/23/14.

I’d love to say nothing, but that’s not true—if we’re discussing indie writers who have remained in the business for several years. There will always be new indie writers who know very little, and there will always be those with “experience” who turn a year or two worth of sales into a know-it-all platform.

However, those indie writers who’ve been at this since the beginning of the self-publishing revolution in 2009 have learned a lot in 2014. Like last week’s piece, “What Traditional Publishing Learned in 2014,” this week’s will be my opinion. Next week, I’ll examine what I learned (or relearned) in 2014, before moving to brand-new topics.

A few bits of organizational business: Unlike my previous two blog series, The Freelancer’s Survival Guide  and The Business Rusch, Business Musings will appear irregularly. Sometimes it’ll show up in the old Thursday slot like last week’s, and sometimes it’ll show up on a different day like this week’s. Sometimes it’ll be long (like this week), sometimes there will be two or three posts in a week, and sometimes there will be none. If you worry that you might miss one, check back and look at the tab Business Musings under either the Business Resources or Writer Resources in the header.

Also, please note that, as in the past, I’ll be using “indie writer” instead of “self-published writer,” following the music model. I’ll also talk about “indie publishing” instead of “self publishing,” because so many writers who are not with traditional publishers have started their own presses. It’s not accurate to lump all writers who are not following the traditional route into the self-publishing basket any longer, if it ever was.

So, back to the topic at hand. What did indie writers learn in 2014? I wish they all learned the same things simultaneously, but they didn’t (and won’t). I also wish that there were indie writer financial statements, like there are financial statements for the big traditional publishers (which is what I based much of last week’s piece on).

Even if indie writers have formed corporations, those corporations are privately held, and therefore the quarterly financial reports are not public. Privately held companies do not need to list their earnings to anyone outside of the company (except the IRS), and therefore the smart ones do not.

So, in this blog post, I’m piecing together a lot of other people’s blog posts, anecdotal evidence, and just plain common sense. In other words, good old journalist me feels a bit uncomfortable, even though this is an opinion piece, because I don’t have as much quantifiable information as I’m used to for these blogs.

What have indie writers learned?

 

Read the full, very lengthy (and very much worth reading in full) post, which goes into detail on 15 specific lessons learned, on Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site.

 

Don't Pay to Self-Publish

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing on 11/23/14.

My name is Joe Konrath, and I write fiction.

I’ve sold over a million books by self-publishing.

You probably were searching for “how to self-publish” or something similar and my blog came up.

This post for all newbie writers considering self-publishing. While it would be extremely helpful to you to take a week and read my entire blog to get a full understanding of how the publishing industry works, here’s the most important thing you need to know:

DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now you can certainly pay people to help you publish. Freelancers such as editors, cover artists, book formatters, proofreaders, and so on.

But when you hire a freelancer to assist you, you keep your rights.

That’s very important.

When you write something, you own the copyright. That’s automatic, even if you don’t register with the copyright office.

Copyright means exactly that; you have the right to copy it, to distribute it, to give it away, to sell it. You own those rights.

But if you pay someone to publish you, you GIVE THEM YOUR RIGHTS.

NEVER GIVE ANYONE YOUR RIGHTS.

There are many publishers, called vanity presses, that exist to prey on writers who don’t know any better. These presses are sometimes part of big, recognizable publishers, and it’s easy to be tricked into thinking that if you pay hundreds, or thousands, of dollars, you’ll be published by a major press.

The truth is, major presses PAY THE AUTHOR, not the other way around.

I have sold books to major publishers, and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then I had to hire lawyers to get those books back so I could self-publish them. Because I make 10x as much money self-publishing as I did by selling my rights to publishers.

If you are looking to get a publisher, do your research.

Check out David Gaughran, Writer Beware, and Preditors & Editors. They have a lot of information about publishers you should avoid.

Learn all you can about vanity presses. Don’t get suckered in.

Ask questions. Seek answers. And DON’T PAY ANYONE TO PUBLISH YOU.

Now some Q&A.

Q: I saw an ad for a publisher. Are they legit?

 

Read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

Ebook Publishing Gets More Difficult from Here – Here's How to Succeed

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 11/19/14.

First the good news.

For indie (self-published) authors, there’s never been a better time to publish an ebook. Thanks to an ever-growing global market for your ebooks, your books are a couple clicks away from over one billion potential readers on smart phones, tablets and e-readers.

As a Smashwords author, you have access to tools, distribution and best practices knowledge to publish ebooks faster, smarter and less expensively than the large publishers can. In the world of ebooks, the playing field is tilted to the indie author’s advantage.

Now the bad news.

Everything gets more difficult from here. You face an uphill battle. With a couple exceptions – namely Scribd and Oyster – most major ebook retailers have suffered anemic or declining sales over the last 12-18 months.

The gravy train of exponential sales growth is over. Indies have hit a brick wall and are scrambling to make sense of it. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve heard a number of indie authors report that their sales at Amazon dropped significantly since July when Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited (I might write about Kindle Unlimited in a future blog post). Some authors are considering quitting. It’s heartbreaking to hear this, but I’m not surprised either. When authors hit hard times, sometimes the reasons to quit seem to outnumber the reasons to power on. Often these voices come from friends and family who admire our authorship but question the financial sensibility of it all.

The writer’s life is not an easy one, especially when you’re measuring your success in dollars. If you’re relying on your earnings to put food on your family’s table, a career as an indie author feels all the more precarious.

At times like this, it’s important for all writers to take a deep breath, find their grounding, remember why they became an author in the first place, and make important decisions about their future. It’s times like this that test an author.

Don’t fail the test.

Back in December, in my annual publishing predictions for 2014, I speculated that growth in the ebook market would stall out in 2014. I wrote that after a decade of exponential growth in ebooks with indies partying like it was 1999, growth was slowing.

I wrote that the hazard of fast-growing markets – the hazard of the rapid rise of ebooks – is that rapid growth can mask flaws in business models. It can cause players to misinterpret the reasons for their success, and the assumptions upon which they build and execute their publishing strategy. Who are these players? I’m talking about authors, publishers, retailers, distributors and service providers – all of us. It’s easy to succeed when everything’s growing like gangbusters. It’s when things slow down that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are tested.

I urged authors to embrace the coming shakeout rather than fear it. Let it spur you on to become a better, more competitive player in the months and years ahead. Players who survive shakeouts usually emerge stronger out the other end.

 

What’s causing the slowdown?

While every individual author’s results will differ from the aggregate, I think there are several drivers shaping the current environment.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which includes further analysis and specific action items, on the Smashwords Blog.

 

The War of the Words

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This article by Pete Gessen originally appeared in Vanity Fair‘s December 2014 issue.

Amazon’s war with publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing has earned it a black eye in the media, with the likes of Philip Roth, James Patterson, and Stephen Colbert demanding that the online mega-store stand down. How did Amazon—which was once seen as the book industry’s savior—end up as Literary Enemy Number One? And how much of this fight is even about money? Keith Gessen reports.

 

I. Discovery

Otis Chandler is a tall, serious, bespectacled man in his mid-30s whose grandfather, also named Otis Chandler, used to own the Los Angeles Times. Chandler grew up in Los Angeles, attended boarding school near Pomona, and then, like his father and grandfather, went to Stanford. Upon graduation he entered the computer field. Because it was the turn of the millennium, that meant working at a start-up: Chandler found a job at Tickle.com, which was an early venture in social networking. At Tickle, Chandler eventually became a project manager, starting a dating site called LoveHappens.com. It did O.K. In 2004, Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide, parent company of Monster.com, the huge job-posting site, and about a year and a half later, Chandler left.

He started to think about what he should do with himself. One day, while visiting a bookish friend, he had what he calls an epiphany. “He had one of those bookshelves in his apartment,” Chandler told me when I met him in San Francisco. “You know what I mean, the bookshelf when you walk into someone’s house, the one where they keep all their favorite books. I walked into his living room and started checking out his shelf and just grilling him, like, ‘That looks cool. What’d you think of it? What’d you think of that?’ ” He left his friend’s place with 10 good books. “I was like, if I could go to all my friends’ living rooms and grill them about what books they like, I would never lack for a good book again. But instead of doing that, why don’t I just build a site where everybody puts their shelves in their profiles?”

 

Read the full article on Vanity Fair.

 

The Perks, Pitfalls, and Paradoxes of Amazon Publishing

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This article by Nina Shapiro originally appeared on Seattle Weekly on 11/4/14.

Amid a boycott and bicoastal culture clash, Amazon has created a new model of publishing. Where does that leave authors?

One day in 2012, Megan Chance, a historical-fiction writer from the Kitsap Peninsula, arrived at Amazon.com’s South Lake Union headquarters for a meeting. The retail giant’s sleek new campus was bustling with software engineers of various nationalities, marketing mavens, and MBAs. The floor Chance visited, though, was practically empty. “There were, like, four people there,” Chance recalls. “It was bizarre.”

The two-decade-old online retailer was still getting a relatively new and little-understood division going—one devoted not only to selling books on the vast digital platform it had created, but also to publishing them. With the frenetic speed of a start-up, Amazon Publishing had in a few years launched a series of imprints devoted to different niches: mystery, romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and more. Now, the company’s fledgling imprint devoted to her genre, Lake Union Publishing, wanted to publish Chance’s latest work, Bone River, a novel about a 19th-century ethnologist who develops a mystical connection to a mummy.

Chance, in her early 50s, was at a low point in her career. She had spent two decades writing books that languished on bookstore shelves, caught in what she believed was a “vicious cycle” common to the publishing world. She had sold her first book to Hachette, which saw enough promise in the work to give her a big advance. The book sold poorly, though, and the publisher paid for a smaller print run the next time around, according to Chance. Those numbers weren’t great either. After that, she says, Hachette “was done.” She moved on to another publisher, where the downward spiral continued.

She was ready again for a new publisher with Bone River, but the New York publishers she approached didn’t bite. “Come back to us when you have better numbers,” she recalls being told.

 

Read the full article on Seattle Weekly.

 

What Seth Godin Can Teach Us About Book Publishing

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This post by Jennifer Tribe originally appeared on clearprose communications on 5/14/14.

If you’ve ever read anything by Seth Godin, you know he’s not a man who’s content to just go with the flow. He’s been questioning and analyzing the business world — “poking the box,” as he calls it — for decades.

He applies that same inquisitive nature to publishing, too. Godin is the author of 17 bestselling books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s worked with a traditional publisher and he’s experimented with self-publishing. In other words, he’s been around the book block quite a few times.

Godin’s commentary on the book publishing industry is some of the sharpest I’ve read, and his techniques for crafting and promoting a book are often ingenious.

If you’re a non-fiction author, you’d do well to tear a page from Godin’s playbook — here’s how.

 

1] Understand that the idea is the thing

In Godin’s world, a book is a vehicle for an idea — the idea is the product — which means that right now, the traditional publishing industry is focused on the wrong thing.

[Publishers] will only thrive if they understand that an entirely new business model will have to be built and understood. And it will have nothing whatsoever to do with paper. It will be about ideas.Which is what book publishing was supposed to be about all along, right?

 

Click here to read the full post on clearprose communications.

 

The Self-Publishing Revolution Is Only Just Beginning.

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 9/21/14.

Reflections On My Stockholm Trip

I spent a couple of days in Stockholm last week, and did three events in just over 24 hours for Lava Forlag, meeting authors at all stages of the journey. Here are my reflections on my time there.

The indie revolution is expanding…and it is incredibly exciting to see the light dawning in people’s eyes.

The Swedish publishing industry is still in the old traditional, print dominated way of doing things right now. Ebooks haven’t taken off yet, Amazon hasn’t opened its .se store and authors are still focused on the route of agents and publishers to reach readers.

I was told that the biggest publishers are integrated with the media companies – in the same way as Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp owning Harper Collins, the Fox Network, The Times and the Wall Street Journal.

When big media owns all the publishing channels, there is little chance for the independent voice against such established behemoths. But change is coming…

I was asked to Stockholm by the lovely Kristina Svensson, an indie author who sees the digital future coming to Sweden in the next few years. I spoke to the audience of authors about my reality, the world I live in, where authors are writing what they want, publishing what they want, and in many cases, making a decent living from their words.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

How To Diversify Your Income Beyond Your Book

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This post by Kristen Eckstein originally appeared on The Future of Ink on 9/5/14.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a children’s book author, fiction writer, non-fiction how-to author, business person, or even a fine artist. The fact is, in this modern age of book publishing, you’re in business…

Period.

You’re in sales, you’re in the business of selling books, and hopefully you’re in the business of using your books as a gateway to make even more money with external products and services.

Any seasoned author will tell you that you won’t quickly get rich off book sales profits and royalties alone. The average traditionally-published non-fiction book royalty is a whopping 6% after print cost and the distributor’s discount.

That’s about 9 cents on a book that retails for $10. To make back the average advance of $500 for this type of book, you’d have to sell 5,556 copies. That’s over 5,500 copies before you’d see another penny from the publisher!

On the same indie-published book (that is, you own the distribution rights and publish under your own name, not through a self-publishing services company or vanity publisher), you’d make about $1.50 per copy.

To make $500 in book sales alone, you’d still need to sell over 300 copies.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Future of Ink.

 

Want to Successfully Publish? First, Are You a “Real” Writer?

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 9/15/14.

For many writers (me included), we don’t start off with the confidence to yell to the world, “I’m going to be a professional author!” Heck, I wrote a 178,000 word “novel” and still didn’t believe I was a writer. Later, I had over a year and a half of consistent blogging under my belt, multiple short stories, and newbie novels that had been at least good enough to win prestigious contests and yet….

I was not a “real writer.”

Schrödinger Writer? If you put a writer in an office at a keyboard, is the writer alive or dead (real or fake) until the book is published?

 

We’ve Come a LONG Way, Baby

The literary landscape has shifted dramatically. More avenues of publishing have opened and become appealing, thus this silly question of, “Are we a real writer?” holds far less power. Believe it or not, when I began blogging, I dedicated countless posts to answering this very question. In retrospect, I did it for me as much as for others.

I’ve always asserted that we are what we do. What is our primary career focus (beyond a necessary day job)? The second we sit at a keyboard and write, we are writers. Yet, as my first “novel” glaringly illustrates, we might not yet be a “good writer.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

Ten Key Things You Need To Know About The Self-Publishing Industry

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This post by blurb staff originally appeared on the blurb blog on 9/2/14.

Before you take the leap, look over the ledge. The more you know about how self-publishing a book really works, the better off you’ll be in the long run. Here are ten truths that may not be exactly self-evident, but will help you make better decisions, spend less money, and create the book you’ve been dreaming about.

 

1. Self-publishing is simple.

It’s making a book for yourself. No more, no less. You won’t have to pitch your book to a publishing house that likely isn’t interested, you won’t have to hire an agent to represent you, and you won’t have to bargain for royalties and advances. It’s just you, your talent, and publishing and marketing tools provided by a platform or service.

 

2. Self-publishing is complicated.

That’s all very true, but you’ll still find yourself facing a world of decisions. From relatively simple ones to book size and cover type to huge ones like which self-publishing platform to go with, you’re on the hook for every aspect of the journey. And, unfortunately, there aren’t many short cuts. While the challenge can be fun, be aware that you’ll need to become an expert (or at least aware of) a whole new world. Royalties, typesetting conventions, ISBNs, distribution, marketing trends—–you’ll need to learn a lot if you want to succeed. Luckily, there are a lot of guides out there to help you on the way.

 

Click here to read the full post on the blurb blog.