Month: March 2014

Is Kindle Countdown the new Free? Keeping Books Visible in 2014

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This post by M. Louisa Locke originally appeared on her blog on 2/25/14.

For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling.

However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment with the new promotional tool, the Kindle Countdown, that has been introduced as part of KDP Select.

In this post I am going to:

A. Review how successful the strategies I pursued last year were for selling books in 2013.

B. Address whether or not Free is failing as a strategy.

C. Compare the Kindle Countdown promotions to Free promotions.

D. Assess whether or not Kindle Countdown promotions can replace free-book promotions as my primary promotional strategy for 2014.

 

Click here to read the full post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

 

That Damned Anonymous Panned My Book!

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This post by Pete Morin originally appeared on his site on 3/10/14.

In the past week, there has been a great deal of exposure of a petition to Amazon seeking to remove anonymity from all Amazon book reviewers. With a great deal of help from author Anne Rice’s nearly one million Facebook followers, the petition, initiated by one of Rice’s fans, has garnered over 5,000 signatures.

In the scheme of things, 5,000 is not a lot of signatures, but I am still baffled that this many people – I might assume many of them are authors and Rice fans – could put their names behind the mandate expressed in the petition.

Before we get to the petition itself, though, I want to point out a few things.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Amazon forums, and perhaps out of morbid curiosity, followed and reviewed the history of many of the more egregious instances of author versus author, author versus reviewer, and perhaps the worst instances: author fans on reviewer. These nasty encounters occur in the dark recesses of the Amazon book world, more commonly surrounding self-published works of erotica, romance and paranormal romance. As I read none of those (I swear), I am a mere wide-eyed spectator.

Let me say that one of the worst examples of this kind of gang attack was perpetrated by Ms. Rice herself, who posted a one-star review on her Facebook page, for all of her nearly 1 million fans to see, with a link to the review. You need no imagination to know what happened.

So then, this petition was submitted by one Todd Barselow, an independent editor and avowed fan of Ms. Rice, last week. (Mr. Barselow once attempted to raise money via gofundme to pay for a trip to New Orleans to visit the author and her son.) In just a short period of time, news of the petition – and more importantly, Ms. Rice’s championing of it (complete with PR photos)- has reached a variety of press outlets, all liberally using the press package delivered to them. Interesting! Still, with all of that worldwide press coverage, the petition still stands at just 5,280 signatures.

 

Click here to read the full post on Pete Morin’s site.

 

How Do Hitmen Operate?

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This article by Ryan Jacobs originally appeared on The Pacific Standard on 1/28/14, and will be of particular interest to authors of crime, military and espionage thrillers.

British criminologists claim that hitmen are more boring than we make them out to be, but their analysis can’t account for the behavior of “Master” killers.

If a hitman excels at his craft, he’ll operate quietly and without incident. In theory, the whispered meetings will be held in secret, the job will be executed with precision and grace, and no one will witness the escape.

For those reasons, the few criminologists who do attempt to study these misdeeds acknowledge the thorny methodological problems associated with examining “a secret world” to which they have no access. Of course, that hasn’t exactly stifled their ambitions.

A group of researchers at the Center for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University in the U.K. has recently analyzed newspaper articles, court records, and a series of “off-the-record” interviews with informants “who have, or who had, direct knowledge of contract killings” in order to construct what they term a “typology” of British hitmen. For the record, these social scientists “define a hitman as a person who accepts an order to kill another human being from someone who is not publicly acknowledged as a legitimate authority regarding ‘just killing’.” The results of their detailed search of British cases that matched this description in the period between 1974 and 2013 only turned up 27 contracted hits or attempted hits “committed by a total of 36 hitmen” (there was only a single “hitwoman”), but the researchers used the sample to tease out the details and profiles of typical killers-for-hire.

The main thrust of the paper, which will be published in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, is that hitmen do not operate with the drama, professionalism, or glamour that mob films and spy novels afford them. In actuality, the majority of killers select jejune settings for their crimes, have occasionally bumbling performances, and are often hired by contractors with lame motivations.

Here’s the profile of an average British hitman, who seems more confined by the boxy restraints of reality than the undulating arcs of fiction:

 

Click here to read the full article on The Pacific Standard.

 

Scribd.com: Opt-in, Turn-on, Opt-out?

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This post by Rich Meyer originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 3/7/14.

For those of you who may have missed the news, Smashwords.com is now distributing their books to Scribd.com, an online e-book subscription service. If you’re not familiar with Scribd, think of them as the Spotify or Netflix Streaming of e-publishing: Subscribers pay a monthly fee and then can download and read as many books as they want. Authors will get a percentage of that, depending on how much of their book was read by the end consumer.

Here comes the first kick-in-the-pants for authors. If you compare things to, say, Spotify, the popular on-line music service, you’ll easily find references on the Internet to popular performers having their songs played millions of times and getting royalty checks in whole TENS of dollars. Supposedly, if Scribd is anything like the Oyster service, Smashwords authors will be getting 60% of the price of a book borrowed by a reader, as long as nearly 20% of the book is read. So unlike the great deal where an author using Amazon’s Kindle lending library through KDP might get $2 per lend for a 99-cent e-book, a Scribd book will net a writer 59 cents. And that’s only if the person reads 20% of it. Which is something I will come back to in a bit.

Scribd has actually said things will work out fine “if most readers read in moderation.” Umm … a reader who would consider a subscription service for books is more than likely not one that would read in normal “moderation,” whatever the hell that is. I consider myself to be a slightly-above average reader, and I’ve already read over sixty books since the first of the year. Imagine how many some of the power readers could do? Of course, if they read the whole book, then at least the author gets a bit o’ dosh for it. Unless … well, again, more later.

 

Click here to read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

Then, to get Smashwords’ side of the situation, please also see this post from Smashwords founder Mark Coker announcing the Scribd distribution deal and explaining the particulars.

 

Neil Gaiman on the Hugo Awards Controversy

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When Jonathan Ross was invited to host the Hugo Awards this year it caused a huge rift in the British Science Fiction community. Many felt the choice of Ross was totally inappropriate, as Ross is not involved in the community of Science Fiction authors and publishers, and some concluded it must be a cynical grab for more American attention.

A huge firestorm of criticism erupted on Twitter, with personal attacks being hurled not only at event organizers, but at Ross and his wife as well. In a post made to his Neil Gaiman’s Journal yesterday, Gaiman reveals that he had acted as the go-between for Hugo Awards organizers in reaching out to Ross in the first place, and goes on to comment on the whole mess. From Gaiman’s Journal:

Twitterstorms are no fun when people are making up things about you or insulting you for things you didn’t do or think or say. When scores of people from a group that you consider yourself a part of are shouting at you, it’s incredibly upsetting, no matter who you are. And these things spill over and get bigger — I was saddened to learn that Jane Goldman, Jonathan’s wife, one of the gentlest, kindest people I know (and the person who, with Jonathan, got me onto Twitter, back in December 2009) had deleted her Twitter account because of all this.

I was seriously disappointed in the people, some of whom I know and respect, who stirred other people up to send invective, obscenities and hatred Jonathan’s way over Twitter (and the moment you put someone’s @name into a tweet, you are sending it directly to that person), much of it the kind of stuff that they seemed to be worried that he might possibly say at the Hugos, unaware of the ironies involved.

 

Click here to read the full post on Neil Gaiman’s Journal.

 

13 Great Tools to Analyze and Measure Your Social Media Results

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This post by Frances Caballo originally appeared on The Book Designer on 3/5/14.

Many writers make the mistake of thinking that by being on Facebook and Twitter and other social media channels they’ve already accomplished the goal of using social media to market their books. They haven’t.

Furthermore, just being on social media and occasionally posting information isn’t a genuine outcome of your marketing efforts.

First, you need to define the purpose of your online activity, become clear on your purpose, and determine whether the outcomes you achieve will enable you to reach your overall goal of selling books, becoming better known as a writer, and receiving the recognition that you and your books deserve.

 

How to Find Your Online Groove

Let’s assume that you’ve been curating great content to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and perhaps even Google+. We’ll also assume that you’re scheduling your posts throughout the day and allocating time in the late afternoon to be social. In other words, you are perusing your news feeds, liking and possibly sharing some posts, leaving comments, and thanking your Twitter followers for retweeting your tweets.

There’s something else you need to start doing: analyzing your metrics. It’s important to spend few minutes every week analyzing your efforts to make sure that you are on your way to achieving your established goals.

 

Why Are Social Media Analytics Important?

Here are some examples of why you need to pay attention to analyses of your social media activity.

◾ What if you started to use an application that helped you discover that your Facebook posts were appealing to more women than men? Would that information prompt you to adjust your messaging?

◾ What if you discovered that your tweets were most often retweeted at five a.m. Eastern Standard Time? Would that information cause you to start scheduling your posts when East Coast residents are more likely to be online and using social media?

◾ What if you were to discover that a significant number of your Facebook fans were from Great Britain? Wouldn’t you want to schedule some of your status updates to the United Kingdom’s time zone?

The obvious answer to the above questions is yes.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

Books, Just Like You Wanted

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This post by David Streitfeld originally appeared on The New York Times Bits blog on 1/3/14.

Anyone can publish a book these days, and just about everyone does. But if the supply of writers is increasing at a velocity unknown in literary history, the supply of readers is not. That is making competition for attention rather fierce. One result: ceaseless self-promotion by eager beginners.

Another consequence is writers’ thirst for more data on how they are being read, so they can shape their books to please their readers more. This is something novelists have always done, using sources like fan mail, personal appearances, reviews and sales. Technology is starting to give them data that is much more precise, and thus potentially more helpful.

“If you write as a business, you have to sell books,” said Quinn Loftis, a very successful self-published writer for teenagers. “To do that, you have to cater to the market. I don’t want to write a novel because I want to write it. I want to write it because people will enjoy it.”

But my article last week outlining how the digital book subscription services Oyster and Scribd plan to collect and share data with writers like Ms. Loftis resulted in little enthusiasm, at least among potential readers. Nearly all the comments on the article expressed dismay about where the trend could go.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Bits blog.

 

L.A. Times Festival of Books Partners With Amazon

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This article by Wendy Werris originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 3/5/14.

When the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books unveiled its list of participating authors on Tuesday, the event caused a stir among local booksellers who immediately noticed the list featured buy links to Amazon. That the festival would partner with Amazon instead of the IndieBound affiliate program is not sitting well with the bookselling community that has long supported the literary event.

“Exhibitors at the Festival put an enormous amount of time and money into making this event a success for their stores,” said Mary Williams, events manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, “and for the authors who appear, while serving the hundreds of thousands of people that attend. Having sales siphoned away from that effort is disheartening, to say the least.” Williams hopes that the Festival staff will consider adding the IndieBound program, which allows customers to order through independent bookstores’ websites in advance of the Festival’s author events.

The Festival of Books launched in 1996 on the campus of UCLA and has grown considerably over time; for many Los Angeles bookstores it is the biggest event of the year. The L.A. Times successfully moved the location of the Festival to the University of Southern California in 2010, and it will be held there April 12 and 13.

 

Click here to read the full article on Publishers Weekly.

 

The Business Rusch: Addendums, Rights Grabs & Agents (Yet Again)

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This post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch originally appeared on her site on 9/25/13.

Recently, I got e-mail from another career writer, talking about a rights grab from a traditional publisher. I saw the document in question; it’s egregious. I do not have permission to talk about this particular document nor would I, since it’s proprietary, but it’s the kind of document I’ve seen at least six times in the last two years.

These documents are addendums to publishing contracts. Since the rise of e-books, publishers have issued the addendums frequently and often en masse.

Before I go further, let me remind you that I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV (or in internet videos, for that matter). I have opinions about legal matters as they pertain to publishing, based on thirty-some years in the business on almost all sides of the business, but I am not an authority on this topic nor does anything in this blog substitute for legal advice.

Got that?

Okay.

Once signed, addendums to contracts become part of the contract. All well-written addendums have language that explains the addendum’s relationship to the contract. For example, the addendum might say something like “nothing in this addendum will supersede the terms previously granted in the contract.”

Or, as I’m seeing in all these publishing addendums, they’ll have clauses that say things like “if there is a conflict between a term that is specifically defined in this addendum and a definition of the same term is in the contract, then the definition specified in the addendum governs.”

In other words, the addendum will not only become part of the contract; it will make parts of the contract null and void.

Some addendums I’m seeing are pretty straightforward. They grant e-rights to contracts so old that ebooks did not exist when the contract was signed. Those addendums generally add the ebook information, how the royalties will be calculated, how ebooks are defined—basically the same stuff that would be in a contract if it were signed in 2013 instead of 1983. I know a lot of you traditionally published career writers have signed addendums like these—and many of you have refused, keeping the e-rights for yourself.

That’s all well and good, and is typical business.

But the addendums I’m writing about today are rights grabs.

 

Click here to read the full article on Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site.

 

From Bestseller To Bust: Is This The End Of An Author's Life?

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This article by Robert McCrum originally appeared on the Guardian UK Books section on 3/1/14.

The credit crunch and the internet are making writing as a career harder than it has been for a generation. Robert McCrum talks to award-winning authors who are struggling to make ends meet.

Rupert Thomson is the author of nine novels, including The Insult (1996), which David Bowie chose for one of his 100 must-read books of all time, and Death of a Murderer, shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year awards in 2007. His most recent novel, Secrecy, was hailed as “chillingly brilliant” (Financial Times) and “bewitching” (Daily Mail). According to the Independent, “No one else writes quite like this in Britain today.” Thomson has also been compared to JG Ballard, Elmore Leonard, Mervyn Peake and even Kafka. In short, he’s an established and successful writer with an impressive body of work to his name.

After working seven days a week without holidays, and now approaching 60, Thomson, you might think, must be looking forward to a measure of comfort and security as the shadows of old age crowd in. But no. For some years he has rented an office in Black Prince Road, on London’s South Bank, and commuted to work. Now this studio life, so essential to his work, is under threat. Lately, having done his sums and calculated his likely earnings for the coming year, he has commissioned a builder to create a tiny office (4ft 9in x 9ft 11in) at home in his attic, what he calls “my garret”.

The space is so cramped that Thomson, who is just over 6ft, will only be able to stand upright in the doorway, but he seems to derive a certain grim satisfaction from confronting his predicament. “All I want is enough money to carry on writing full time. And it’s not a huge amount of money. I suppose you could say that I’ve been lucky to survive as long as I have, to develop a certain way of working. Sadly, longevity is no longer a sign of staying power.”

Thomson is not yet broke, but he’s up against it.

 

Click here to read the full article on the Guardian UK Books section.

 

Is #Indie Publishing Worth It? Would I Do It Again? A Tell-All.

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This post by Toby Neal originally appeared on her site on 2/13/14.

Perhaps because of the recent brouhaha in the blogosphere due to my hero Hugh Howey’s continued pioneering, this time in bringing full disclosure numbers via AuthorEarnings.com that paint a very different picture than traditional publishing would have us know, yesterday I heard from a talented writer who used to work in my former agent’s office. This person knew my writing from the get-go. She knew how hard the agency worked to sell my book series, and she had to find another job when my agent retired in frustration in 2011. She has continued to write herself, and watch my career as someone who has seen it from that very first version of Blood Orchids, that, while needing a complete rewrite, had enough promise to attract her boss. Spurred by the Authorearnings disclosure, and “on the fence” herself about which way to go with agent interest in her work, she wrote me a series of questions to help her decide whether to persist with the traditional route or make the leap to “author-publisher.”

The discussion was so good I thought I’d share it with other writers struggling with the same dilemma.

Writer-on-the-fence: Would you self-publish again?

As you know more than anyone, I was devastated when our agent retired in 2011 and I was left without representation. It had taken me two years to get an agent and 179 query letters! Then, we hadn’t sold the series in 9 months (well, we did get an offer, but it was too low and digital rights only.) Read more about my complex emotions here: http://tobyneal.net/2011/08/14/complex-emotions/

I felt after that much “lost time” I had to try self-publishing, and our agent’s comments on the market had been very discouraging, so I thought at least it couldn’t hurt to try. I did, however, go “high end” from the beginning, with a top-tier cover artist (Julie Metz) a publicist, and two rounds of professional structural editing… That first book cost me $12,000 to produce and market its first month. (Now I have my book development expenses whittled down to a mere $4-6,000.) However, Blood Orchids paid for itself within two months after debuting in December 2011, and last year alone I netted close to a hundred thousand in sales.

I think of my books as a start-up business, so I spent at least half of that on new book development and advertising. This has made my take-home income just replacing the middle-class amount I made as a school counselor, a job I was able to leave because my writing income had replaced the need for a 9-to-5. I choose to keep re-investing in new books because, as others have said, every title is a worker bee out there earning for me, and the model that works in indie publishing is capturing your readers and keeping them reading and engaged with a flow of new titles.

 

Click here to read the full post on Toby Neal’s site.

 

What Writers Can Learn From Reality Shows

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her site on 3/4/14 (Australia local time/date). Note that it contains strong language

Reality TV shows seem to be endlessly popular with the TV viewing audience. They pop up constantly, perhaps with a different name, different skills, but always they’re contests. Big Brother, Survivor, Master Chef, the Block, the Biggest Loser – and my all-time favourite, My Kitchen Rules.

Let me make it perfectly clear that I no longer watch these shows. I watched a couple of seasons of Master Chef because I love cooking shows and Master Chef actually had a few episodes a week where they went into the details of cooking. The rest of it, however, is a cooking contest. Which brings me to My Kitchen Rules. I imagine a similar show exists all over the world. In Australia, one pair of contestants, both amateur cooks, is chosen from each state in Australia. The couples can be married, gay, sisters or brothers, friends or whatever turns you on. The season starts with each couple hosting all the other contestants and the judges, for a dinner party in their own home. The contestants and the judges all score the meal. After all the ‘at home’ meals have been done, there’s an elimination process where some people drop out. Sorry if I’m hazy. You see, I loathe this show. Sure, I was sadly disillusioned to discover it wasn’t a cooking show. I hankered for Nigella, or the Cook and the Chef, Two Fat Ladies, the Naked Chef. What I got was a contrived game show.

In one of my biennial visits to the doctor I came across an article in a women’s magazine (I hate them, too – a doctors’ visit is the only time I ever look at them), a My Kitchen Rules tell-all. Well, gosh, Mouseketeers. Oh you thought the people cooked in their own homes? No. An awful lot of houses in Australia don’t have a separate dining room. We tend to prefer open living. But the home used for the set had to have a separate dining room so the couple cooking could be sequestered in the kitchen while the others talked about them. That, of course, but more pressure on the cooking couple. Unfamiliar kitchen, unfamiliar stove. And you know all that bitchiness and trash talk? The contestants are told what to say! Yes, it’s true. And, I have no doubt the fuck-ups are orchestrated, too.

 

So what does all this have to do with writing?

Everything, my friends.

I’ve already alluded to the importance of setting. Make sure your setting supports what will happen. Think about how the setting can aid some characters or put others on the back foot.

 

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s site.

 

The New World of Publishing: Can’t Get Books Into Bookstore Myth

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This post by Dean Wesley Smith originally appeared on his site on 2/14/14.

It Has Officially Hit Myth Status

When some of the biggest supporters of indie publishing and indie writers start going on about how they are giving up paper books to New York, I finally just shook my head and assigned all the silliness to myth status.

So, since I have the book Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing now out in both paper and electronic and available, I suppose it’s time I start into the next book: Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing.

And Sacred Cow (myth) #1 is that indie writers, with their own press, CAN’T GET THEIR BOOKS INTO BOOKSTORES.

A complete myth.

Of course indie writers can get their books into bookstores. It’s not magic, it’s not hard, and it’s not even expensive.

Yet it gets repeated over and over like “You need an agent” phrase by traditional publishers. And indie writers buy right into it without question, the same writers who fight against all the crap that traditional publishers toss out.

That shows a flat, head-shaking lack-of-knowledge of how this system of paper book distribution works. Kris just banged her head on the same wall a couple weeks ago in her blog, and had all kinds of readers surprised that their books were already in bookstores when they went and looked.

Duh.

So this quick post is just a warning shot across the bow, folks. I recorded an entire detailed lecture on this topic tonight that will be ready next week, and I will be back here shortly (or after the Anthology Workshop that we are holding here at the coast is finished) with the first of the new indie sacred cows to be led to slaughter.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dean Wesley Smith’s site.

 

From Pathetic to Professional: 8 Ways to Beat the First Draft Blues

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This post by Ruth Harris originally appeared on Anne R. Allen’s blog on 2/23/14.

You’re happy, even delirious. You’ve finished your first draft!

Then you read it.

OMG, you think, did I write that?

Yes, you did. 🙂

It stinks. It sucks. It’s so rancid it threatens to warp the time-space continuum.

Think you’re alone? Here’s Hugh Howey in a blog post: “I suck at writing. Watching a rough draft emerge from my fingertips in realtime would induce nausea.”

So remember, it’s not just you.

The first draft is just that—–a first step.

As a long-time editor and author, I’ve found 8 strategies that can help you shape, refine and improve your draft. (Actually it’s called editing and, yes, you can do quite a bit of it yourself.)

1. Embrace the power of the delete button.

Elmore Leonard advised taking out all the unnecessary words. Cutting almost always makes a book better, more readable, more exciting.

Specifically, that means delete all the spongy, weasely, namby-pamby words—the ones that aren’t crisp and precise, the ones that drag out a scene or a description without adding anything except length.

Get rid of the windy digressions, the pointless descriptions, the info dumps, the meandering philosophical musings.

Duplicate your document before you begin in case you get too enthusiastic but, with a safe back-up on hand, go ahead and hack away. Take out everything that doesn’t advance your story or define your characters. See if the resulting clarity doesn’t vastly improve the pace of your book.

Don’t just kill your darlings. Kill everything that doesn’t move the story forward. Save your gems in a “future” file and use them in another book where they pull their weight.

2. Sharpen dialogue.

 

Click here to read the full post on Anne R. Allen’s blog.