Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

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.

 

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.

 

Common Ground in the Debate of Self v. Traditional Publishing

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This post by Jack W. Perry originally appeared on Digital Book World on 2/21/14.

A storm was created last week in response to Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings post. It was widely criticized by many but also praised. It started a lot of discussion.

Having read most of the back and forth, I did notice a few commonalities.

Some issues all sides generally agree upon:

1) Digital has demolished the distribution barriers to entry for self-publishing. Before digital a self-published author would have to pay to print and distribute books. That was an outlay of cash and inefficient. The author then went to indie bookstores to get distribution one book at a time. Hoping to eventually break through and signed a major deal. Today an author can upload their book and get instant distribution to the entire country. Sales can happen immediately. The goal may be to remain independent or to gain negotiating leverage with traditional publishers.

2) The data is incomplete and there is a definite need for more transparency. Amazon, B&N, Apple and Google don’t publically release sales data. There is no “Bookscan for ebooks” although Nielsen is working on it with PubTrack Digital. Self-published and the Amazon proprietary titles are generally felt to be under-reported if at all. This feeds into the debate of the size of self-published ebooks. By withholding the Kindle data, Amazon has created a massive hole in any analysis. Perhaps a company like App Annie could fill that void and be a resource of data and analytics.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes four additional points of discussion, on Digital Book World.

 

Impatient Readers Lead to Rapid-fire Series Release

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This post by Sadie Mason-Smith originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 2/12/14.

On-demand services have not only changed the way we watch television shows, they’ve affected our expectations of all media. Instant gratification and binge-watching have affected the consumer model, and the publishing world is taking notice. Julie Bosman reports in The New York Times on a new trend in the industry: publishing release dates for series are getting shorter. Editors like Farrar, Strauss & Giroux’s Sean McDonald are catering to the ravening hordes of but-I-want-it-now readers by shrinking the release dates between installments from a year to a few short months.

According to McDonald, these readers are more than just Veruca Salt imitators—they’re scared. “You can end up with angry and perplexed fans,” he said. “I think people are more aware of series storytelling, and there is this sense of impatience, or maybe a fear of frustration. We wanted to make sure people knew that there were answers to these questions.”

That sound you hear in the distance is George R. R. Martin laughing diabolically. Probably while killing a beloved character. Fans of serials have long been subject to the perfectionist whims of their favorite authors. Who can forget J. K. Rowling’s extra months of work as each successive Harry Potter book took an incrementally longer time before release? Who, even now, is on the edge of their at-this-point-worn-down seat for the last installment in Robert Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson biographies, a five-book project that has been in-progress since 1982?

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

Guide to AWP for People Who Don't Know What an AWP Is

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This post by Peter Mountford originally appeared on The Stranger on 2/26/14. Note that it contains strong language.

It Stands for Association of Writers & Writing Programs— Just Say “Book Nerd Fest”—and It’s in Seattle This Weekend

If you notice a slight uptick in the number of verbose, bedraggled, and socially inept people in downtown and Capitol Hill this week, it’s because about 13,000 aspiring and no-longer-aspiring writers are collecting at the convention center for the 2014 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference (February 26–March 1). As someone with an MFA degree (Master of Fuck All), and an attendee of most of the last decade’s AWPs, I’m here to tell you that this should be fun if you like reading and writing. Actually, even if you don’t care about reading and writing, it should be at least amusing.

 

INSIDER TIPS

So where’s the action?

The hotel bars closest to the conference center will be a constant seething humid throng of acne-afflicted nerds with low-grade alcoholism. These bars are the main attraction for most.

Off-site events are listed on the AWP website and The Stranger’s readings calendar, and there are scores of these. At their best, off-site events are fucked-up, inspiring, and brilliant (see page 17 for prospects). At their worst, you walk out with only minor injuries to your opinion of the human animal. Either way, they’re free. Sometimes it might feel like the Mardi Gras of literary nerds, which is annoying, but you’re less likely to have a jock vomit into your hair than at the actual Mardi Gras.

 

Should I pay for a pass?

I might anger the AWP gods by saying this, but no, probably not. Most of the fun happens outside the conference itself (see above), and at $285 for the tote bag and a lanyard that grants you access to the conference proper, you have to REALLY want to spend a few days walking the book fair, and also you need to REALLY want to see some of the official events/panels/readings.

Also, if you’re a writer, AWP is just not a great place to advance your writing career. It’s a big boozy gossip with smart people, but for some reason, very little business takes place. The conference was originally just for people interested in the pedagogy and administrivia of universities’ creative-writing departments. It’s not exclusively for academics now, but at the end of the day, the community in question is still decidedly not-for-profit (very few literary agents, almost none of the major New York publishers or magazines will be there, etc.). On the upside, almost everyone is there because of a shared love for reading and writing, rather than for love of filthy lucre.

 

I want to bag a writer, any advice?

No problem!

Recite Matthew Dickman’s poem “Slow Dance” into the ear of a poet, and you will end up with a hickey on your neck (even before you get to the chandelier part!). Also: Be kind to poets, they’ve made peculiar life decisions, and bear in mind that these people are inexplicably excellent in bed.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Stranger.

 

Does What You Paid For A Book Affect How You’d Rate It?

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This post by Jane Litte originally appeared on Dear Author on 2/23/14.

When I first started buying my own books some twenty plus years ago, I had very little money. My favorite authors were starting to come out in hardcover (Julie Garwood, for example) and unless I wanted to wait to be the 80th person at the library to read the book, I had to fork over $22.00 or more which, at the time, was a lot of money for me. It basically meant I wasn’t going to be able to buy another book or maybe even eat anything but ramen and macaroni for the month.

Most of the time, however, I bought my books used at the Half Price Bookstore or some other used bookstore that sold romances for $0.10 or $0.25. And when I bought the hardcover, I knew that I was sacrificing at least four other reads for that one book.

As I got older, I was able to buy more books but my reading habit got to be really pricey so I instituted a book budget of no more than X amount of dollars to be spent a month. Because I read three to five books a week, I was only able to purchase about eight titles a month new and the rest would have to be library lends or used book store purchases. During the heydey of chick lit, I was really struggling!

Price has always been a big thing for me when it comes to books and from what I’ve heard from industry professionals, mass market purchasers are very price sensitive. Most romance readers are mass market purchasers although the new readers coming in to the market after Fifty Shades are probably not.

There’s an interesting concept called anchoring. Anchoring is the tendency of humans to rely on the first piece of information offered. In economic terms, anchoring means that the first price a consumer encounters for widget A is likely the price that the consumer believes she should always pay for widget A. (Widget is an official economic term. No lie.)

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Dear Author.

 

20 Lessons I’ve Learned on My Way to Selling 500,000 Books

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This post by Christy Heady originally appeared on her site on 1/9/14.

1. You don’t need an agent, but having the right one is absolutely the best investment you can make.

2. Co-authoring a book is a great idea.

3. No matter what the publishing house offers in terms of publicity, you are your own publicity machine.

4. That means you must need to know personal PR and have a game plan.

5. Speaking in soundbytes is imperative. Too much dribble means no more interviews.

6. Create a competitive analysis spreadsheet that shows you where the bullet holes are among your competition.

 

Click here to read the full post on Christy Heady’s site.

 

A Victory Against Author Solutions

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This post by David Gaughran originally appeared on his Let’s Get Visible site on 2/14/14.

It should be clear to everyone now that Penguin Random House has no intention of cleaning up Author Solutions.

The only development since Penguin purchased the company for $116m back in July 2012 is that Author Solutions has aggressively expanded operations (see here, here, here, here and here).

I’ve been covering the Author Solutions story for a while now – particularly since the Penguin purchase, which was met with disbelief in the author community. It’s a frustrating beat, especially when faced with a wall of silence from the many companies and organizations in traditional publishing who have links to Author Solutions and its subsidiaries.

Documenting the links between Author Solutions and the rest of the publishing world is depressing work. The list reads like a Who’s Who of traditional publishing. Getting them to discuss their links to Author Solutions has been near-impossible, let alone taking any action with regard to those links.

One exception has been The Bookseller.

Click here to read the full post on Let’s Get Visible.

 

Are You Legit?

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This post by Andrew E. Kaufman originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 2/18/14.

So lets say you decide to write a book.

You’ve always been a fan of the things, had a few ideas swimming around in your head, and have wanted to take a stab at it for as long as you could remember. Now, here you are, finally connecting with the courage needed to commit those hungry fingers to keyboard, passion to dream.

After X amount of time, your novel is finished, and then, BAM! Away you go, uploading your book to the KDP platform, ready to take on the world and be the next Nora Roberts or Stephen King or whoever you think is the bomb.

First question: are you an author?

Well, technically speaking, yes, because you’ve:

A. Completed a novel.
B. Published it.
C. Can call yourself whatever the hell you want.

And really, in this era of self-publishing, that’s how a lot of established authors got their start (myself included).

Next question: are you a legitimate author?

 

Click here to read the full post on The Crime Fiction Collective blog.

 

2014: The Year Of Reading Women?

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This post by Zeljka Marosevic originally appeared on the Melville House Publishing site on 1/24/14.

Sometime last year, I pinned a sheet of paper above my desk with the title “Women Writers” and began forming a list of names of female writers that I had read whose novels I enjoyed, admired or found important. I did this because I had too often found myself reading literary criticism or having conversations about books in which every author mentioned was male. A communal, easy forgetfulness seemed to spread over the article’s writer and his reader, or over those taking part in the conversation, a coercive amnesia where we forgot that women had ever written books, that they might even be good, and that they could be discussed alongside books by men —and would hold their own— rather than in separate fenced-off conversations.

Last year was a bad year for women in literature. As we covered on MobyLives, figures were revealed that showed how male reviewers and authors vastly outnumbered their female counterparts across UK publications; only 8.7% of books reviewed in the LRB were by women. In the US, the New York Review of Books flaunted a boy’s-only bumper summer issue when, out of twenty seven contributors, only one was a woman (April Bernard reviewed Frank Bernard, and we mustn’t forget an archive piece from Joan Didion).

2014, the Guardian reports, is being declared the “Year of Reading Women”, owing to a few small but important examples of how readers and critics are considering their next read.

 

Click here to read the full post on Melville House Publishing.

 

On the Issue of Misogynist Writers and Readers

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This post by Paula D. Ashe originally appeared on Dust and Shadow on 2/18/14. Note that it is intended as satire.

It’s important as a writer (or artist of any kind, really) to celebrate your successes. No matter how large or small. Seriously, the more I write and publish and talk to people about writing and publishing, the more I realize that there are so many people out there who are just livid at those of us who are brave enough to create something and be proud of it.

There’s been a lot of vitriol about Women in Horror Month after some insecure dudes on Facebook and elsewhere attempted to degrade the celebration. They said we women use our sexuality to gain success, that women writers of horror don’t write as well because we’re women, they violated the WiHM logo by including a clinical diagram of a vulva and analogizing the organ to a woman’s mouth, they made sexually violent and objectifying comments about women writers, and many of them said all this by prefacing it with “I love women but…”.

Obviously, those statements about women writers are totally true. For example, if you stare at the texts of my fiction and then slowly push it away from your face after about thirty seconds some titties will materialize on the page like those holographic 5-D posters they used to have in the mall. I do that because otherwise no one will read, let alone buy, my work. Also, as a woman, I’m very concerned about my fiction being too dark because nothing about being a human being, let alone a woman, is rife with existential or concrete horror. In fact, every time I write a death scene I imagine a unicorn emerging triumphantly from the corpse to calm my delicate feminine sensibilities.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dust and Shadow.

What You Love Is Where Your Writing Platform Lives

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This post by Christina Katz originally appeared on her The Prosperous Writer site on 2/14/14.

Do what you love and write what you love — sounds like a pretty good plan, right?

But what if I also told you that doing what you love and writing what you love leads to growing a platform you love?

Even better news!

But wait, here comes the punchline.

The challenge is that precisely what a writer loves is almost never apparent…unless the writer has already done a lot of writing.

In fact, I’d say 99.9% of writers I have worked with personally have to write their way to a successful platform.

Rare is the writer who can accurately predict what her platform is going to look like ahead of time without some writing to predict it.

 

Click here to view the full post on The Prosperous Writer.

 

How to Promote a Book with Video

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This post by Dana Lynn Smith originally appeared on her The Savvy Book Marketer on 5/15/13.

Videos are hugely popular online, from grumpy cats and music videos, to breaking news and movie trailers. In fact, YouTube (owned by Google) has become the second most popular website worldwide.

Today I want to share with you practical, actionable information on how to create and use video to promote your book and yourself. First, here are a few of the ways that authors can use video:

• For nonfiction authors, content-based videos (where you discuss the book’s topic) can be very effective. You can even do a series of videos dealing with different aspects of your topic. Options include “talking head” video where you are filmed speaking about the topic, demonstrations of how to do something, a slideshow with voiceover, or a combination of these. Be sure to promote the book at the end of the content-based video and include your website link. You can also work in mentions of the book earlier in the video (“Here are some of the top tips for _____ from my new book ______.”) but be sure to provide useful content rather than just promotion.

• Video trailers (short commercial-style videos, similar to movie trailers) work best for novels, narrative nonfiction, and children’s books. Usually these include a series of images and text with music or voiceover in the background, with a promotion to buy the book at the end. Don’t forget the link to your website or a short link to your Amazon page.

• Children’s book authors can post videos of book readings or related activities for kids.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

 

Self-Publishing – 102

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This post by Rob MacCavett originally appeared on The Editorial Department on 2/6/14.

And so as the sun slowly set over the peaks and valleys of composing a first book, I bid a fond farewell to creative writing as I prepared to travel through the shadowy and murky land of self-publishing. I found this part of the journey to be challenging too, my creative side forced to give way to the business world of production, marketing and sales. Some of this I did not like. I mean, why should I have had to tote this lumbering commercial baggage? I was clearly an accomplished author now!

One of the first of those bags was the legality and proper identification of my efforts. The Editorial Department’s Morgana Gallaway (I told her that her name sounded like that of an Irish flutist) led me through the maze of copyright, to ISBN’s, to forming my own publishing company—Whooping Crane Publishing. Why did I name it that? No, I’m asking you: why did I name it that? Never mind.

This might be a good place to mention the notion of using friends and family to help with chores your book has generated, like proofreading or editing. It might work for you, but it didn’t for me because (a) it’s a big, big job that (b) requires a certain expertise, plus (c) they don’t want to hurt your feelings—I paid TED to do that. Something to think about.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Editorial Department.

 

Anne Rice Owns the Bullies

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This post originally appeared on STGRB on 1/26/14.

We’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Sorry we are so late in doing it.
In our last post on Anne Rice, we showed you how she has been lighting up the Amazon fora with her wisdom and advice for authors. We also mentioned her unfortunate encounter with the bullies:

Note her Warning to Authors at the bottom. Unfortunately, like everyone else who has braved the discussion threads of Amazon, Anne too has noticed the hostility and general contempt that the AFT (Amazon Fora Trolls) have for authors. In fact, we published some of her comments on this topic in our post, Words of Wisdom From Anne Rice.

So… do you think she got attacked for her warning? You bet.

Has she stopped posting and offering her advice to authors? Nope.

In fact, she has responded to the trolls with such sophistication and eloquence, it seems they don’t really know how to respond to her. She’s too smart and trolls tend to be … well … not so smart.

In our post today we’ll show just how smart she is. She was immediately able to see right through the Amazon bullies and make intelligent observations that get right to the heart of the matter and reveal these nasty people for who and what they are: internet trolls. What’s more, she managed to isolate all of the most well-known trolls who stalk authors and their books simply because they have nothing better to do with their time.

First we’ll show you her general view of the Amazon bullies:

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes many screenshots of exchanges between Amazon reviewers and Anne Rice, on STGRB.