Business End

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

A Sentimental Education: Sex and the Literary Writer

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This post, by Julia Fierro, originally appeared on The Millions on 3/27/13. NOTE: this piece contains explicit language.

In writing my first novel, Cutting Teeth, when I got to the first scene that demanded dramatized sex — action, sound, smell, taste, the works — I paused. The word that made me lift my fingers from the keyboard was “clitoris.” Was it okay to use this word? What would my fellow literary writers, my former teachers and classmates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop think of me? I laughed at my insecurity, although part of me loathed my hesitation. Of course it was okay. It’s just a body part, I told myself. I had the same reaction in the other sex scenes I wrote — most involved a man and a woman, one two women. Nipples. Cock. Dick. Balls. Even typing these words now gives me a shiver of fear, as if the literary gods will strike me dead, or brandish me with a scarlet S for writing not only bad sex, but any sex at all.

Today, sex is everywhere — on TV, our computers, even our phones. But in the last two years, since Fifty Shades of Grey became the fastest-selling paperback of all time, the jaws of literary writers have dropped, their shock over the book’s success, despite its unliterary style, echoing over the Twitter-waves. Part of me wants to say I was one of them — if only to be included in their elite ranks — but I wasn’t that surprised. I haven’t forgotten the lusty attraction of my grandmother’s paperback romances, which, as a pre-teen, I had secreted away to read at night by flashlight.

Long before I thought of myself as a writer, I was a reader. I grew up in a house of few books — my father’s set of encyclopedias in his native Italian and a handful of history books left over from my mother’s college education. My mother has a Masters in Education, but she hasn’t read a book in decades. My father was hungry for knowledge, but struggled to read our middle school science and social studies textbooks, the basic English too much of a challenge.

As a child, books were a magical distraction from my anxiety — what, 20 years later would be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. At school, every real-life, real-time decision — who to befriend, who to avoid — carried an infinite possibility of catastrophe, but I was safe when living inside a book. The day came when it seemed as if I’d read every book in our small school library, and the librarian was at a loss for suggestions that were age-appropriate. This was the mid-1980s, years before the YA market exploded. I needed the imagined life books gave me — without them it seemed as if real life lost its luster.

I stole one of my grandmother’s Danielle Steel novels. I don’t remember the title, only the pearlescent cover’s gold-embossed cursive that promised diamonds, high heels, and Farah Fawcett-hair — a glimpse into a dramatic adult world. What I do remember are the sex scenes. I replaced the book the next week and stole off with another, and so on, until I had read all in my grandmother’s collection. Those books taught me so much — that you could have sex standing up or even underwater in a pool! Along with the sex came emotion. These men and women were brazenly sentimental, confessing passion, hatred, and envy, and that melodrama kept me glued to the page.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Millions.

A Perspective On Early Success in Publishing

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I was talking to a friend who was becoming frustrated by all these authors who seem to have only one or two books out and their books are selling like crazy. Or friends of hers [whose] debut books are getting these really big deals with major publishers. And she’s feeling down about it.

So I wanted to talk about this topic because I know a lot of my fellow writers feel this way, and I’ve felt like this too before. I’m not immune to the frustration.

So here we go:

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: strong language after the jump]

You do not know another author’s history. You don’t know how many books they wrote before they published one. You also don’t know a debut author is really a debut author. They may have 50 titles out under other pen names. Whether readers know it or not, and they have the finances from other books to help them launch this one. They have more contacts to help them promote their book. They know what works and doesn’t work for them to get the exposure they need. They know their pricing strategy. They are bringing a LOT to the table that they’ve learned from their previous pen name incarnations.

Most people who “hit big” have put in the time. They have their million words under their belt. They’ve practiced. They’ve learned their craft. In short, they have earned their success.

However, some people will inexplicably hit big with the first book they ever wrote. It may even have a ton of typos. You may think it sucks. But for whatever inexplicable reason it seems to sell like gangbusters.

Everybody thinks they want to be this person. But unless you are E.L. James and become literally rich over a few books, and movies are gonna get made, you do not want “early success” as an author.

One of the worst things that can happen to your career is to sell the shit out of book 1. I know that sounds crazy to you, but let me explain why.

The general public is fickle, they are forgetful, and they have a constant barrage of “bright shiny” in front of them 24/7. (Which explains the other two things.)

If you have one book out, readers who love you right now may or may not even remember you when book 2 comes out.

Early success, unless it is epic is rarely a great thing. And if it’s epic… and you had early success before you put in your million words or 10,000 hours for mastery, then the pressure of continuing to please your readers on book 2 or 3 is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Unless YOU feel you’ve reached some level of mastery/competence, it’s going to be hell writing all those other books with so many eyes on you waiting.

Margaret Mitchell never wrote another book after Gone With The Wind because she said she “couldn’t top the damn thing.”

Now you know why there are so many “one hit wonders”.

So… what do you want? What do you really want? Here is the best possible scenario in my personal opinion. Your mileage may vary, this is just how *I* see the world:

You write a ton of books, each getting better and stronger than the last. You build a consistent and loyal fan base. Your 20th or 25th book hits BIG.

And then?

All your new slobbering fans have 19-24 other books to read. They will not forget you. You can actually retain those readers.

How many readers do you think you retain if you hit big with book one or two and it takes you 8 months or a year to get the next book out? You can’t write fast enough to keep their attention. Trust me.

Not in the Twitter age.

Think about it.

I speak as someone who had a little bit of “too early success”, but not enough to tip me over into the super safe nearly famous zone.

It makes it more difficult when things slow down a little and you have to start building that net underneath you of backlist.

In fact, today it occurred to me… if I don’t count my short story and I don’t count individual novellas but instead just count the omnibus since it’s “book 1″, I only really have 5 titles out for Zoe. And only 6 for Kitty.

I have a LOT of work ahead of me. Because when I do write that book that mass quantities of people slobber over and miss meals and bathroom breaks for… I want them to have PLENTY of other books by me to read… so I can retain them as a fan for life.

I’m in this for the long haul, and I’m in it to win it. But it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Are African Writers And Readers Ready For The eBook Revolution?

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This guest post, by Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima (with an introduction by Joanna Penn), originally appeared on Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn on 3/23/13.

This week, the “father of African literature’ Chinua Achebe died, leaving behind a legacy for Nigerian authors. Today I welcome another Nigerian author Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima to discuss the outlook for ebooks in Africa.

Ebook sales are stabilizing in the US and UK, but the rest of the world is out there waiting for our books!

Those of us who can price reasonably, to take into account exchange rate differences, can potentially build a fan-base in countries that may be surprising to some.

Nigeria is one of the fastest growing emerging economies, and with the prevalence of cellphones in Africa it may become a fantastic new market in the next few years, even though there are still challenges right now.

Ebooks are outselling paperback and hardcover books in America and Europe, but not yet in Africa.

Today, Nigerian author and blogger Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima will tell you why the story is different in Africa.

Ebooks are not popular among writers and readers in my country Nigeria, and the rest of Africa, even though millions of people have been using email over the years and are now engaging in daily conversations on popular social network sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The majority of Africans are still living according to the standards of the last century, writing long hand and either paying for word processing or slowly doing so themselves on their desktops or laptops. The exception would be the African writers based in the U.S., UK and other developed societies who have to use the tools their peers are using in the 21st century. South Africa is ahead of Nigeria and other African countries in using smart phones and tablets but only got her first ebook store, Kalahari, in 2010, but the ebooks are overpriced for the rest of the continent.

Why is the penetration of ebooks challenging right now?

Generally, from South Africa to Nigeria, the two main challenges of ebooks are:

  • low level of bandwidth and the low capacity of the data cables making the access to broadband expensive and unavailable to the majority of the populations.

But in spite of the low internet penetration in Africa, there is only one choice left for the majority who are still crawling and lagging behind, if we cannot beat them, we have to join them.

And that is why I give a thumbs up to David Risher who has launched Worldreader to take “1 million e-books to children in the largely English-speaking countries of Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya” and has raised a total of $1.5 million to fund his digital literature revolution in sub-Saharan Africa.

“David is pushing a fundamental conversation: How do you create a culture of reading in a place that hasn’t had one?” said Anne Marie Burgoyne, Managing Director of Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation that supported Worldreader with $300,000 last September.

Is indie publishing the future?

 

Read the rest of the post on Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn.

Does Your eBook Need an ISBN?

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This post, by Kristen Eckstein, originally appeared on her Ultimate Book Coach site.

An ISBN, International Standard Book Number, has been the standard in the publishing industry for eons to track title listings, multiple editions, book formats, and sales. Knowing this definition alone might make you instantly jump to the conclusion that you do, in fact, need an ISBN for all formats of your book, including the eBook format. But for eBooks the ISBN rule gets confusing, especially with the rise of Amazon’s popular Direct to Kindle program.

The question: Does your eBook (Kindle, Nook, iBook, etc.) need an ISBN? The short answer: It depends. There are several factors involved in applying ISBNs to eBooks, not the least of which is price. According to Bowker, the ISBN agency, every format of every book should have its own unique ISBN for tracking purposes, including multiple eBook formats such as PDF, MOBI, etc. This guarantees publishers are paid the correct amount for book sales, customers know exactly what version of what title they are purchasing, libraries can file eBooks and stock physical books once rather than mistakenly buying the same title twice, and retailers list books correctly in their databases.

However, there is also the price factor to consider. Some eBooks sell only a few dozen copies. In the United States, Bowker (the ISBN agency) charges $250 USD for a block of 10 ISBNs, and you can burn through them in a hurry and never sell enough eBooks to make up the investment for the ISBN. Not to mention the cost of proper eBook formatting, professional cover design and retailers’ required discounts. This may make you re-think applying an ISBN to every eBook you publish. When might your eBook not require an ISBN?

Short answer: If you’re only publishing on Kindle or your own website and nowhere else, Amazon’s Direct to Kindle program has its own internal tracking number assigned to each eBook. Since your eBook is not sold anywhere else, Kindle tracking is all you need and you don’t need to concern yourself with “wasting” an ISBN on that listing. If you publish a lot of Kindle books from interviews, blog content or transcripts, it’s best not to apply ISBNs to those titles.

Which begs the question, when do you want an ISBN assigned to your eBook?

 

Read the rest of the post on Kristen Eckstein’s Ultimate Book Coach site.

Facebook Followed You To The Supermarket

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This post, by Farhad Manjoo, originally appeared on Slate on 3/20/13. While it focuses on consumer products like detergent, authors who use, or are considering, Facebook ads should read it.

Even if you never click on Facebook ads, they are making you buy things.

This is a story about advertising on the Web. Specifically, it’s about ads on Facebook, a hugely popular free service that’s supported solely through advertising, yet is packed with users who are actively hostile to the idea of being marketed to on their cherished social network. Considering all of this, the best place to start is with your primary concern about Web ads. This is what I hear from readers every time I write about the online ad economy, especially ads on Facebook: “I don’t know how Facebook will ever make any money—I never click on Web ads!”

And that’s not all. You’ve checked with your friends and relatives. No one you know has ever intentionally clicked on a Web ad. OK, once, years ago, a co-worker told you about a guy who knows a guy who tapped an ad on his phone. True story! But don’t worry. People close to the situation dismissed it as a one-time deal. The guy wasn’t trying to tap the ad; he just had really fat fingers. He felt really bad about it afterward, too.

So, the question persists: How does Facebook expect to become a huge business if most people you know never click on ads?

The answer is surprisingly obvious. It’s a fact well-known to advertisers, though it’s not always appreciated by people who use Facebook or even by folks in the Web ad business: Clicks don’t matter. Whether you know it or not—even if you consider yourself skeptical of marketing—the ads you see on Facebook are working. Sponsored messages in your feed are changing your behavior—they’re getting you and your friends to buy certain products instead of others, and that’s happening despite the fact that you’re not clicking, and even if you think you’re ignoring the ads.

This isn’t conjecture. It’s science. It’s based on a remarkable set of in-depth studies that Facebook has conducted to show whether and how its users respond to ads on the site.

 

Read the rest of the post on Slate.

Socially Awkward – Why Your Online Friends Don’t Buy Your Book

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This post, by Catherine Tosko, originally appeared on The Self-Publishing Review on 3/19/13.

I have, apparently, 539 friends. Facebook tells me so.

I have a fan page for my book, with over 1000 likes. My Twitter is a healthy 600 odd and I have over 50 mentions on Google for the title. But you see, I know that not everyone rushed over to Amazon and picked up their copy the day it went on sale. I know this because I sold 23 copies on the first day. That was it.

So how the heck do I get every single one of those people to buy a copy of my book? Glibly “liking” my book page seems to be the done thing, a nod to my efforts, and a polite if awkward obligation by passers-by, as if I am at a cocktail party handing out flyers, a scenario something like this:

“Hey guy, do you know about my book? Here’s a flyer!” I cry, with my Facebook page.

This person, an acquaintance from 1997, who mostly likes kittens and memes about feeling positive, is kind of hampered to have to respond, but takes the flyer based on me two years ago, “liking” his band page (terrible band), and says simply ” Um, I’ll check it out.”

This is how my Facebook Likes seem to manifest. They are not what you call ” convertible” , i.e. they do not equate to a sale.

In the same effort, I respond to others. I write them encouraging messages, using emoticons. I hate emoticons. But if someone I think may buy my book, even out of sympathy, if I use them, I am all for the smileys.

Then I have my real life friends and family. Probably about 100 people on there.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Self-Publishing Review.

Authors Unplugged: Smart Book Marketing Includes Going Offline

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Most of us who sell our print books through CreateSpace or other print on demand vendors, and our ebooks through Kindle Direct Publishing or other ebook retailers and distributors, usually focus our marketing online.

This make sense. A lot of business and marketing happens online these days. Many of us are also bloggers with territory staked out in the digital world, and with lots of connections on social media.

In fact, social media marketing is often the beginning and end of authors’ marketing plans. From blog tours to Facebook contests to Pinterest pin parties to online press release distribution, we digital authors attempt to fully exploit the domain in which we operate.

But are you missing something?

Going Offline for Book Marketing
If all the marketing you’re doing is online, you may be missing out on lots of excellent opportunities to market your book.

Remember that our biggest effort in marketing is simply getting our books in front of enough people to give them a chance at success. You can’t get people talking about your book and, hopefully, referring it to other people in true word-of-mouth promotion, if they don’t know it exists and have never seen it. So awareness and exposure are really our biggest goals when we launch a new book.

But there are still lots of ways people get together, network, and learn about new things in the real world.

To help you think about this and get started, here’s a brief list of offline opportunities that might work for you. Even if you only use one of these suggestions, you’ll see results you couldn’t have gotten online.

8 Ideas for Offline Book Marketing for Indie Authors

  1. Print books vs. eBooks—While it’s difficult to sell ebooks at an event or book signing, many people will buy a print book if they see them stacked up in front of them. After all, a book is something you can pick up and handle, and that’s often a powerful buying incentive. Print books also act as mementos of the occasion, or a way to further explore a topic that has ignited your interest.
  2. Social media vs. in-person contact—I love social media and use it every day. But it’s really quite different to have a conversation with a colleague or a reader or a prospective client in person, where the centuries-old conventions of human interaction come into play and the levels of communication are much deeper. If your aim is building trust in your readers, interacting with them at events will be helpful and instructive at the same time. For instance, just recently a friend told me about something that needed to be fixed in one of my products. But I doubt she would have taken the time to write to me about it because messages like that usually seem like complaints. In person, she could deliver the message with exactly the right intonations, smiles, and gestures so the communication was nuanced and effective.
  3. Giving presentations to build your platform—If you become a subject-matter expert, you’ll start to get invitations to speak to groups within your industry or field of study. These are terrific platform-building opportunities. Not only do you get to meet people you may not have known about before, you also get the implicit endorsement of the group that’s putting on the program, as well as the positive expectations attendees at your event will bring with them. Combined with this is the name recognition and awareness you’ll get from the promotion for the event that will reach many more people than will actually attend. (Check out my own appearance schedule.)
  4. Back-of-the-room sales—Did I mention you can sell books at many of these in-person events? Well, you can, and these sales may be your most lucrative. In some cases, you can sell your books for the full retail price, so a $15 book might yield you $12 profit. In other cases, event organizers or bookstore hosts will want a 40-50% discount. But they will handle the sales transactions for you, and people at these events often buy books written by speakers as a way to remember the presentation or the overall experience they had at the event.
  5. Writing for print—Remember newspapers and magazines? They are still out there, and they still have an unending need for good quality content to fill up those pages. For many people, reading an article by you in a respected industry magazine may carry a lot more weight than reading the same story on your blog. Since you’re developing content, submitting story ideas to editors at local papers or trade magazines can only multiply your readers and your exposure.
  6. Offline review media—You undoubtedly included those local papers and trade magazines in your review program, right? You didn’t just rely on bloggers and online media for reviews because you know millions of people rely on these print media to make critical buying decisions and to learn about new trends in culture. Don’t overlook them.
  7. Repurposing your expertise—Some authors have found running live events to be highly profitable. You might write about a subject that lends itself to workshops, where you can teach the same ideas you’ve written about, or try out new ideas to see how they work in the real world. Fiction authors do this, too, leading trips abroad and organizing writing workshops in vacation destinations.
  8. Developing media contacts—Part of your job as an indie publisher is establishing media contacts, too. For fiction authors, this might involve the local papers, where you can expect to find some natural interest. For nonfiction authors there are niche publications or media outlets related to your topic, and if you write on their topic, they’re likely to be open to an approach.

Notice that I haven’t mentioned book launch parties or book signings, traditional events many authors include in their launch planning and which happen offline. But I knew you would think of those yourself.

Where would your offline marketing fit in to your book promotion plan? Or do you have some suggestions I haven’t included? Leave a note in the comments to share it with other authors.

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

What Should I Do About a Bad Review on Amazon?

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It’s frustrating to get a bad review, but it happens to most authors sooner or later.

My advice for authors is to try not to take it personally and to remember that books (especially fiction) are subjective – some people will love your book and others won’t. And many book buyers realize that most books will have some negative reviews, even if most of them are positive.

If a review contains factual errors (for instance stating that a nonfiction book was missing important information) you can click the “comment” button on the review and leave a note. But be very careful not to sound defensive – just state the facts. (e.g. Perhaps you missed chapter 6 where I discussed that topic in detail.)

If you think a review was really unjustified, you can also click the “no” button next to “Was this review helpful to you?”

If a review violates Amazon’s terms you can ask Amazon to remove it. Amazon will not remove a review simply because it’s unfavorable or you think it’s unfair, but they sometimes remove reviews that are reported for violating their terms.

Also focus on getting more good reviews to offset the bad ones.

And finally, take an objective look at negative reviews and see if there are any legitimate comments that you might use to improve your writing.

For in-depth advice on getting book reviews and profiting from them, see How to Get You Book Reviewed, available in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and PDF format.

 

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

Atomization: Publishing as a Function Rather Than an Industry

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on the Idealog blog on 3/19/13.

The announcement of what amounts to the first book publishing program spawned by Google demonstrates a paradigm we’re seeing repeatedly. It suggests a sweeping change in publishing from how we’ve known it. The bottom line is that most people employed publishing books perhaps as soon as 10 years from now won’t be working for publishing companies.

The trade publishing business over the past twenty years has been transitioning from what it was for a century. The Internet, which so many of us said two decades ago “changes everything” is ultimately responsible. Amazon.com has been the primary catalyst, with print on demand technology (especially Ingram’s Lightning Source) and ebooks (mostly Amazon, but others too) as supporting players. With so many more books to choose from and really available than there ever were before, the function of gatekeepers, which trade publishers and booksellers clearly and proudly were, becomes an anachronism.

The big question — at least for me — is what is trade publishing transitioning to? What does the trade publishing world look like when it doesn’t primarily reach readers through bookstores anymore, a day which one could say has already come in the past five years.

Overall trade sales today outside of special outlets, catalogs, and what remain of book clubs divide into three big chunks: one is printed books sold in stores, one is printed books sold online, and one is ebooks. The latter two are sold without stores, and far more than half of that is sold by Amazon. And that is the way it is most helpful to think about sales because it is only print-in-stores that requires (or benefits from) a big publishing organization.

What the latest Bowker information has to say, lumping ebooks into “online commerce”, is that 44% of sales are online, 32% through physical retail, and the remainder through book clubs and warehouse clubs (physical retail to me!) and “all other channels”. But they also report that 30% of sales are ebooks, which would mean that they’re only calling 14% of the remaining 70% online. There are a lot of ways to count these things, and the resulting calculation of 20% of print sales being online feels very low to me.

It all depends on what kind of book we’re talking about, of course. I visualize the market breaking into thirds among the three chunks. Certainly, one-third ebooks is an understatement for fiction.

However we view the current division of sales, the trade book business was built in a completely different environment. Indeed, the central proposition that all publishers offered all authors is ” we put books on shelves.” The companion reality was “you can’t do this by yourself”.

As recently as 2007, before Kindle, there were no ebook sales and upwards of 85% of print was sold in stores.

 

Read the rest of the post on the Idealog blog.

The Benefits of Running a Goodreads Ad

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This post, by Jean Oram (introduction) and Judy Croome (post) originally appeared on Jean Oram’s The Helpful Writer on 3/9/13.

Last week I introduced you to Judy Croome whom I met while working on “The Fall: Tales From the Apocalypse.” When “The Fall” was released, Judy rocked a Goodreads giveaway, getting “The Fall” added to many Goodreads reader’s shelves. Curious about the ins and outs of holding Goodreads giveaways as well as the Goodreads ad she ran at the same time, I asked Judy to share her knowledge with the readers of The Helpful Writer.

Last week’s post was about the how, why, and benefits of holding a Goodreads giveaway. This week, Judy Croome is sharing the benefits of running a Goodreads ad at the same time as your giveaway. I wasn’t completely convinced that running an ad alongside a giveaway made sense, but after talking to Judy I am a believer. Here’s what she had to say:

Interview with Judy Croome on Running a Goodreads Ad with Your Goodreads Giveaway: How to Reach the Right Readers
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I’ve heard Goodreads ads help create awareness for Goodreads giveaways. Would you run a Goodreads ad again?
Definitely! I did my first Goodreads giveaway without an ad running concurrently and the number of entrants was a significantly reduced, compared to later ads that I ran at the same time as a giveaway.

You ran an ad on Goodreads at the same time as your giveaway of “The Fall: Tales From the Apocalypse.” Can you tell us a bit about why you decided to do that?
An advantage of running an ad at the same time as the giveaway is that you can target specific audiences with Goodreads ad campaigns. If someone enters the giveaway from the ad link, the chances are increased that the free books have a higher chance of going to a reader who is actually interested in the genre, rather than someone who just enters every giveaway irrespective of whether they’re really going to read the book or not.

What else do you feel authors can do to boost their visibility – either on Goodreads, or other places online?
Marketing and promotion is a voracious beast – as much as you do, it’s never enough! There’s always one more trick or one more tip you can follow to boost your visibility. When I first started promoting my books, I was so busy running myself ragged trying to make myself as visible as possible, I lost valuable writing time and exhausted myself for little visible return.

Read the rest of the post on The Helpful Writer.

Don’t Panic: KDP Select Still Works, You Just Might Have To Work It A Little Differently

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I haven’t posted for awhile on any topic, including on indie publishing, but that is because I have been working steadily on writing Bloody Lessons, the third book of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series (if you want an update on my progress go check out my Facebook page.) I also felt I had pretty much exhausted what I had to say on the ins and outs and pros and cons of using KDP Select.

However, with the change in Amazon’s rules for Associates, a whole discussion has erupted about what this means for indie authors. See this balanced review of some aspects of the discussion. See, in addition, this good overview of the issues around free as a selling strategy and Amazon. One result of this change and subsequent posts about it is I have had a number of requests to comment on whether or not this means that free promotions and KDP Select won’t work as well any more.

The short answer is, how in heaven’s name do I know? But that isn’t very helpful so what I am going to do is remind people what I have written on this subject already, do a brief recap of how my last free promotion went, and try to predict some of the ways in which the most recent changes might require tweaking of my own (and other’s) strategies for using KDP Select. I also decided it was time to publish a list of Promotional Links, which I will try to keep up-to-date.

Posts I have already done:

If you want to know everything I have written on this subject––put “KDP Select” in the search bar at the top of my website. Otherwise, go ahead and click on these posts I have done on selling on Amazon, the importance of Categories, and an update on this post, how to have a successful KDP Select promotion, and factors you should consider when deciding whether or not to enroll in KDP Select.

Update on my most recent KDP Select Promotion:

I put the first book in my series, Maids of Misfortune up for free through KDP Select for three days, February 23-25. This was two months since the last promotion, which was December 29-30 (where I put both of my books up for free). This time I didn’t put Uneasy Spirits up for free, although I did pay for a Digital Book Today 7-day promotion for this book for the week after the Maids of Misfortune promotion was over.

I signed up with eleven sites that promote free books (only two cost anything, Book Goodies and BookBub.) I have been trying to rotate through the free promotion sites with each promotion so as not to saturate their specific markets. Maids hit the magic top 100 Free List by noon the first day at #73. By the end of the first day I had reached #26 in the Free List and had over 8,000 downloads. On the second day, by 3:15 pm, when the BookBub email went out, the book was at #11 In the Free List and already had 22,000 downloads. By the end of day two it was #3 and had 28,000 free downloads. It stayed at #4 throughout the third day, and the total number of free downloads for the promotion was 37,086.

As you can see by the data below––the promotion was successful––in boosting my sales and borrows, even of the book that wasn’t promoted.

Maids of Misfortune / Before / After

Average sales per day (over two weeks) / 7.9 / 77.4

Overall Rank / 20,000s / 2,000s (18 days after)

Uneasy Spirits / Before / After

Average sales per day (over two weeks) / 6.1 / 22.3

Overall Rank / 26,000s / 6,000s (18 days after)

Average Borrows per day (over two weeks)

Both Books combined / 16 / 59.9

The Future of KDP Select:

While I am not clairvoyant, I often pretend I am (something I share with my protagonist in my Victorian San Francisco mysteries), and I will say with some authority that KDP Select will not go away anytime soon, and Amazon will continue to work with and encourage self-published authors. While Amazon may have turned to indie authors (first with KDP, then with KDP Select) because they realized that depending on public domain books and traditional publishers wasn’t working, it was the indie authors themselves who proved to Amazon that they were both an outstanding source of the product Amazon needed and nimble innovators in the rapidly changing world of publishing.

Indie authors not only began to produce books at an amazing rate (as backlists were republished, manuscripts like my own were taken out of drawers, and genre writers began to pump out 2-4 books a year), but we also proved leaders in the changes that were going on in publishing, proving the viability of new short forms of fiction (novellas, short stories, serialized novels) and experimenting with new marketing techniques (using discounts, free promotions, blog tours, giveaways, twitter, facebook author pages, etc). Our books and our innovation helped fuel the heady growth of ebooks in a short period of time.

For example, from the beginning, Amazon’s royalty structure, which gave the 70% royalty rate only to books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, was challenged by indie authors like Amanda Hocking, who proved that the volume of sales you could make at 99 cents could make up for the lower 35% royalty rate. Amazon made money (and kept a bigger chunk of the money), and Hocking got her traditional contract (and paved the way for the idea that traditional publishers––including the new Amazon imprints––might find their next bestselling authors from among the ranks of the self-published.)

Then came KDP Select. If you will all remember, when Amazon introduced its first Kindle Fire, one of the selling points was that if you were a member of Amazon Prime you could download one free book a month. Initially Amazon had targeted traditional publishers (who––as with the whole ebook thing––ran away, screaming bloody murder), so once again they had to turn to indie authors to provide the product they needed to make the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) effective. However, while this is pure speculation on my part, by the end of 2011 (when KDP Select was set up) they were beginning to be concerned by the way that other booksellers (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, etc) were tapping into the ebook market so they came up with the exclusivity clause. If a book is in KDP Select it can not be sold anywhere else.

They needed a way to induce indie authors to go exclusive, and, besides creating the pool of money to be shared by KDP Select authors whose books were borrowed, they threw in the 5 free promotion days, having learned from indies that free promotions could sell books. In fact, a growing number of authors who had now published their back lists (or were very prolific in self-publishing lots of books a year) had discovered that if they made their books free on Smashwords, Amazon would price match. They had also proven that a free book that was the first in a series, or a free short story, could drive up sales for their other books. No doubt, seeing this trend, Amazon thought that the chance to put up your book for free, for a limited time for promotional reasons, would be a good inducement to get indies to sign up. Which we did, to great success in the first months of KDP Select’s existence.

But there was an unintended consequence. New kindle owners loved free and were gobbling these free books up at an amazing rate. And, since initially a free downloaded copy counted as a sale, the books that had been free dominated the best-seller categories, pushing the traditionally published books into invisibility. I am sure the traditional publishers complained, and I suspect that since indie books are by-in-large cheaper than traditionally published books this was not seen as a good thing in terms of profits for Amazon. The truth of the matter is that KDP Select and free promotions pushed the ebook environment from a level playing field for indies to giving them an unfair advantage within the Kindle store. Hence the changes to the algorithm counting downloads as sales and other tweaks to the formula that determined where a book is ranked on the popularity lists.

This was not the first time that some indie authors rent their garments and claimed that Amazon had turned its back on indies, and it certainly discouraged some authors from using KDP Select. However, while it became more difficult to translate your free promotions into high enough visibility to sustain sales afterwards, indies and those who supported indies again innovated, and a whole bunch of facebook pages, book bloggers, and websites popped up to advertise free promotions. The data above, from my last promotion, shows that KDP Select promotions remained a viable way of improving visibility and sales.

Again, however, unintended consequences caused Amazon to make the changes to their Amazon Associates because they were shelling out substantial amounts of money to websites that were primarily promoting free books. Again, the goal wasn’t to discourage indie authors, or even free books, but to direct the Associates program back to its original goal, encouraging people to go to Amazon to buy things.

So what does this mean for the future? First of all, a few of these promotion sites will go away, a larger percentage will start to charge for promotions––like BookBub.com does (to make up the revenue loss if they stop using Associates links), and others will begin to promote primarily cheap and discounted books rather than free.

If you look at the Promotional Links I have listed, you will see that there are still a significant number available, even after the Amazon change. And, one of my friends just put her book, A Provencal Mystery, up for free in KDP Select (breaking through into the top 100 by noon the first day and getting over 24,000 free downloads in two days) so I think we can safely say these promotional sites are still doing their job.

However, I do think that as indie authors we need to continue to innovate. Here is what I plan to do––I would love to hear from the rest of you what your strategies are.

Have free promotions less frequently. I had already noticed a growing tension between my reliance on free promotions to keep my books visible (agonizing when 30 days from the last promotion had passed and my books began to drop in the rankings and then lose sales) and the law of diminishing returns (if I offered the book free too frequently, the promotions were less successful.)

Then the success of BookBub.com (as the promotion site that has been delivering the highest number of downloads) forced me to make a change since they won’t feature a book more than every 90 days or an author more than every 30 days. Because of these limitations, my most recent promotion of Maids of Misfortune came two months after my last promotion (and three months after my last BookBub promotion.) I don’t think it is a coincidence I had more downloads than ever, with the strongest post sale bump since last March (and the infamous Amazon algorithm change.)

Longer promotions are safer. I used to suggest that authors not put their books up for free for longer than two days at a time (based on the idea of doing several promotions in the three-month contractual period under KDP Select.) But now that you need to get more downloads to achieve a post sales bump (see the amusing post by Elle Lothlorien), you need to consider how long it is going to take your particular book, in its specific genre, to reach enough downloads. I would do at least a two-day promotion if you have been able to get accepted by BookBub, three days if you don’t but have your book in categories that do well in free promotions and have a strong number of reviews, and maybe the full five days if your book is new, doesn’t have a lot of reviews, or is in a tiny niche market.

Schedule promotions near the end of a month. I started to notice that my borrows are always the strongest the first few days of every month so it is helpful to have my books as high as possible in bestseller lists at the beginning of the month. March 1-3 (three days after my last promotion ended) 394 of my books were borrowed. This helps maintain visibility as well since the borrows appear to be counted as sales.

Do more 99 cent promotions. For awhile, 99 cents was considered ‘dead’ as free books began to dominate as the main method of promotion, but just last week, for the first time, a self-published book hit #1 on NYT Bestseller list (with a 99 cent book). What I plan to do is experiment more with combining a 99 cent sale with a free promotion, or doing a 99 cent promotion to help maintain visibility during those longer times between free promotions.

Experiment more with promotions that are not tied to free or discounting my books. I don’t know for certain whether or not having a week-long promotion of Uneasy Spirits on the heels of the Maids free promotion has helped keep its sales up, but as more of the sites on the list I have compiled switch to non-free promotions, there will be certainly some of them that will turn out to be successful. BookBub can charge high rates they have demonstrated that they consistently deliver enough post promotion sales to more than make up for their cost. I expect that new marketing strategies will emerge in the next few months that are not dependent on free promotions.

Write more books and short stories. I know, I know, this is not a new strategy. But I know that the time I was taking to do free promotions every month was taking away from my writing time. The launch of a new book or short story (like a free promotion), if done correctly, can bump up sales and visibility of your other books, and it can take the sting away from those months between free promotions when your sales drop.

In short, I predict that as long as free promotional days in KDP Select deliver increased post promotion sales and borrows, Amazon has no reason to get rid of them, particularly if this is the main way to get authors to sign an exclusivity contract. And, as long as indie authors continue to produce books and stories that sell and provide new innovative ways to promote those books, the partnership between KDP Select and indie authors will continue.

What do you think?

 

This is a cross-posting from M. Louisa Locke‘s site.

Readin’ o’ the Green: the Anatomy of a Free Book Promotion

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This post, by Elle Lothlorien, originally appeared on Digital Book World on 3/14/13.

Welcome! This is an informal blog that will chronicle a book promotion for my novel The Frog Prince taking place March 14 and 15, 2013. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to read my blog “THING 3. Prostitute Your Book: The Art and Science of a Becoming a Successful Free Book Pimp on Amazon.” A lot of this will make more sense if you do.

Feel free to post questions, make comments, or just poke around to see if you can find anything useful. I will be reporting numbers and rankings and commenting on the other various aspects of the free promotion as it is ongoing.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

Beginning Saturday, March 16, 2013, I will provide a post-promo analysis to let you know how things look once the book is moved back into the Kindle Paid Store. Let’s get started. First a few entries of backstory…

February 28, 2013: Contacted Bookbub via email:

Can you tell me what availability you have for March for The Frog Prince?

Settled on March 14th ad placement and a promo to run two day through midnight, Friday the 15th.

Filled out and submitted online forms for both Pixel of Ink and eReader News Today, asking if they’d be willing to feature The Frog Prince on March 14th. Received a verification of receipt email from Pixel of Ink:

Thanks for telling us about your upcoming promotion! Please note: Due to the high volume of submissions, we may or may not be able to feature your book during the time it is free.

March 1, 2013: Received Bookbub invoice in the amount of $190 for 190,000 subscribers. Paid it.

March 13 8 PM: Designed logo and tagline for promotion Since it is so close to St. Patrick’s Day and the Frog on the cover is green, I decided to superimpose the frog lying across a shamrock. Named promo “Readin’ o’ the Green.”

Author FB screenshot9:45 PM: Posted first notice of promotion on both personal-ish” Facebook page and official Author Facebook pages. Noticed Author Facebook post immediately going viral (see red circled portion of graphic on the right).

March 14

1:30 AM: Total books downloaded: 2. Whoo-hoo! Going to bed. See you tomorrow!

8:45 AM: Reposted promotion information on Facebook. Received notification from Twitter that BookBub had tweeted about the promotion as well.

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Digital Book World.

Kickstart This Book! What I Learned About Crowdsourced Publishing

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This post, by Clinton Kabler, originally appeared on Paid Content on 3/16/13.

Summary:
Last fall, Book Riot successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign to publish a book. But it was grueling and not very financially rewarding. Here’s what you need to keep in mind if you decide to publish via Kickstarter.
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So, you want to Kickstart a book? In August 2012, our company Book Riot successfully funded a $25,000 Kickstarter campaign for ”Start Here: Read Your Way Into 25 Amazing Authors,” a survey of works from a wide range of genres, from classics to contemporary fiction to comics(you can buy it here!). It was a learning experience, and one that Book Riot will certainly repeat.

That said, lest anyone think crowdsourcing is the path to instant publishing fame, dust off your business, promotion, and logistics skills and read on for our experience. The bottom line is that you better prepare to get scrappy.

Step 1: The Business

One of the primary advantages of Kickstarter is that it provides a platform to test the viability of a project with nominal upfront cost – the marketer in me loves this. But more than testing viability, Kickstarter also gives you the freedom to offer intangible rewards that aren’t easily monetized through traditional or self-published avenues. However, it all costs. And unlike a traditionally published project, there is no imprint with deep pockets to cover cost overruns: it all falls on you. So, budget.

To start, determine your rewards. Will you just distribute an ebook? What about a printed edition? Decide what they will cost in dollars and assign a value to your effort (don’t forget your effort!). We chose to do both print and digital to provide additional reward tiers and got a quote from Book Baby for both (we aren’t affiliated with them, and other companies offer similar services). Their digital conversion services were $249, and they agreed to print and fulfill 500 paperback copies for just under $6,000. (Having recently experienced a USPS station in Brooklyn, I’m glad we paid them to send the paperbacks to our backers.)

Kickstarter emphasizes keeping the rewards to the product, and we included a couple of “related” rewards. In retrospect, they didn’t add much value, and they ate margin. The extra rewards sound fancy, but backers aren’t backing the project for the fancy rewards. They are backing the project for the project.

Our project took the form of an anthology, so we had chapters written by multiple people. This required attorneys’ fees to secure the legal rights to what they submitted to the tune of nearly $1,500. And then we paid the people who weren’t employees of Book Riot to write the chapters for another $2,550.

 

Read the rest of the post on Paid Content.

On The Business Of Literature

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This post, by Richard Nash, originally appeared on The Virginia Quarterly Review site.

The following piece by Richard Nash will appear in our Spring 2013 issue, as the lead in a portfolio focused on the business of literature.

ONE OF THE REMARKABLE deficits in contemporary accounts of both book publishing and Internet business is sociohistorical awareness.

That it should be so with the Internet is unsurprising, prone as so many popular tech commentators are to triumphalist or progressive teleologies—one technology replacing another, one company killing another, IBM’s dominance unquestioned, then Microsoft’s unquestionable, followed in turn by AOL, MySpace, Facebook, etc. The implacability of Moore’s law is extrapolated from processing power to the social order. Similarly, most current discussions of the book economy rarely reach back earlier than the Golden Era of American publishing in the 1950s, the British one dating back perhaps a little farther, to the 1930s.

While many histories of the book incorporate serious empirical research—Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is an epic example—three have arguably done the best job in applying that rigor to contemporary publishing: J. B. Thompson’s The Merchants of Culture; Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print, a series of case studies with particular focus on retail; and Laura Miller’s Reluctant Capitalists, which was almost purely about the retail side. Most other accounts of the contemporary business of literature are autobiographical, hagiographic, or histories of literature, avoiding the business and economics of it all. So why study a business that is sui generis, that isn’t even really a business—that, like America, is exceptional?

It is the Exceptionalists, the ones who claim the mantle of defender of the book, who undermine the book by claiming that it is a world unto itself, in need of special protection, that its fragility in the face of the behemoth or barbarian du jour (Amazon, the Internet, comic books, the novel, the printing press, illiteracy, literacy, to name but a handful of purported sources of cultural decline) requires insulation, like the skinny kid kept away from the schoolyard and its bullies. Who are these Exceptionalists? I think we’ve all read them, so I’ll restrict my strawhorses and offer as an example Sven Birkerts, who, in his introduction to the reissue of The Gutenberg Elegies, writes that “fiction is under assault by nonfiction”—this despite all the data that demonstrates fiction is disproportionately flourishing in the digital format. More problematic, though, is his characterization of the book as “counter-technology.” One may counterpose the book to many things, but technology shouldn’t be one of them. The book is not counter-technology, it is technology, it is the apotheosis of technology—just like the wheel or the chair.

Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the “business of literature.” Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we lose good books. Yet what we have right now is a system that produces great literature in spite of itself. We have come to believe that the taste-making, genius-discerning editorial activity attached to the selection, packaging, printing, and distribution of books to retailers is central to the value of literature. We believe it protects us from the shameful indulgence of too many books by insisting on a rigorous, abstemious diet. Critiques of publishing often focus on its corporate or capitalist nature, arguing that the profit motive retards decisions that would otherwise be based on pure literary merit. But capitalism per se and the market forces that both animate and pre-suppose it aren’t the problem. They are, in fact, what brought literature and the author into being.

THE STORY OF THE book as technology—the book as revolutionary, disruptive technology—must be told honestly, without triumphalism or defeatism, without hope, without despair, just as Isak Dinesen admonished us to write. A great challenge in producing such an account is the “availability heuristic.” This is a model of cognitive psychology first proposed in 1973 by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky, which describes how humans make decisions based on information that is relatively easy to recall. The things that we easily recall are things that happen frequently, and so making decisions based on a large sample size would seem to make sense. The sun rises every day; we infer from this that the sun rises every day. A turkey is fed every day; it infers that it will be fed every day—until, suddenly, it isn’t. Heuristics are great until they aren’t. A person sees several news stories of cats leaping out of tall trees and surviving, so he believes that cats must be robust to long falls. These kinds of news reports are far more prevalent than ones where a cat falls to its death, which is the more common event. But since it is less reported on, it is not readily available to a person for him to make judgments.

Read the rest of the post on VQR.

Big Publishers Forming Imprints With ASI: You're Doing It Wrong. Here's How To Turn The Titanic Around

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I have been VERY vocal in my criticism of the many mainstream publishing outfits who’ve decided to form new, vanity publishing imprints in partnership with Author Services, Inc. (also known as “ASI” and “Author House”, among many other aliases). This begs the question: if those vanity partnerships are so wrong, what should publishers be doing instead?

I have the answer, and it’s pretty damned simple. You’ll see for yourself when I lay it out below: there’s nothing terribly Earth-shattering or insightful in it, it’s all just plain old common sense. But no plan, no matter how sensible, will ever get any traction with big publishers unless they can accept some attitude adjustment first.

Note that in this post, where I refer to Big Pub, I’m talking about the Big Five mainstream publishing houses.

Partnering With A Vanity Press Will NEVER Work

What you’ve decided to offer via your various partnerships with ASI is such a transparent ripoff of authors, you really ought to have known better. It’s painfully obvious to everyone (other than Big Pub, apparently) that this is a facile money-grab undertaken by outfits that are desperate to get a piece of the growing indie market share, but are so unwilling to invest anything of value or meaning in the endeavor that they’ve outsourced the entire enterprise to a disreputable vanity press.

ASI has been in the business of overcharging would-be authors for “publishing services” while also stripping them of their intellectual property rights for decades. Do you really have so little respect for writers that you thought we wouldn’t realize inserting yourself between us and ASI can only accomplish one thing: to further increase ASI’s already excessive fees to cover Big Pub’s cut?

Readers Are Your Customers

For many decades publishers have viewed booksellers as their customers, not readers. Publishers sold their books to booksellers, who in turn sold them to readers. This business model makes readers the customers of booksellers. It’s a business model that is now failing in the face of so much technological and cultural disruption, yet big, mainstream publishers seem at a loss to shift their focus from booksellers to readers. They’ve made careers of knowing what bookseller purchasing agents want, they’ve never had to give much thought to what readers want. That’s always been the booksellers’ job.

Well guess what? Amazon, the biggest bookseller of them all, is eating your lunch precisely because it has only ever focused on what its customers—in this case, readers—want. Its in-house imprints are informed by reader tastes and wants, and if you want to survive, your imprints must be similarly informed.

Authors Are Your Lifeblood

It’s not just aspiring authors who are going indie in droves. Increasing numbers of well-known, mainstream-published, bestselling authors are jumping their mainstream publishing ships in pursuit of the greater control and profit afforded to indies. When JK Rowling decided to take her ball and go home, it should’ve been a wakeup call to your entire industry.

Popular, established authors don’t need you anymore. There is nothing you can offer the Rowlings of the world that they cannot obtain on their own more cheaply, more efficiently and faster than you can provide any of it.

And this is why continuing with business as usual is a slow suicide march for Big Pub: you turn away from anything you feel appeals to anything less than a NYT bestseller -sized audience for fear such books won’t earn enough to keep you afloat, yet authors who do succeed in scaling such lofty heights are as likely as not to ditch you as soon as they’ve gained a foothold with readers.

And your ill-advised partnerships with ASI have given authors and aspiring authors good cause to look at you with a very jaundiced eye. What more proof do any of us need that you don’t view writers as your partners, but merely as profit centers to be exploited?

When an author or would-be author asks you (as they are starting to do with regularity), “What can you offer me or my career that going indie can’t?” you better have a good answer. Because right now, what you have to offer most first-time authors is ridiculously slow publication schedules, unfair contract terms, laughable efforts at promotion, and advances so small that they may not even cover one month’s expenses for a writer who toiled months or years on the manuscript you hope to profit from.

Either that, or the “opportunity” to have the bones of their dreams picked clean by ASI.

You DO Have Something To Offer, But It’s Not What You Think

Up until recently you’ve done a great job of convincing writers that what you have to offer is an odds-on opportunity for fame and riches, and that without you fame and riches are impossible things for any author to achieve.

When you lost your stranglehold on the distribution piece of the bookselling business, it was time to come out from behind the curtain and dispense with this Great and Powerful Oz shtick. Thanks to several well-publicized instances of indie authors reaching sales figures to match those of your strongest authors, and MANY well-publicized (within indie author circles, at least) instances of indie author earnings FAR exceeding those of authors who’ve signed with Big Pub, the cat’s out of the bag and authors are paying very close attention to the man behind the curtain.

The good news is, enough writers have become self-publishers that as a group, they’re pretty well informed about the harsh realities of publishing and bookselling. They know from firsthand experience what’s involved in producing a book and bringing it to market, both in terms of effort and expense. They know it’s not free and they know it’s not easy.

The bad news is, they’re no longer buying what you’re selling because they also know it’s a myth: signing with Big Pub guarantees nothing in terms of a book’s success or failure. All that it does guarantee is that the book will be mired in Big Pub’s outdated, slow, inefficient production, distribution, sales and marketing processes.

Your Commodities Are Administration, Experience, Expertise And Connections

Your business model is in desperate need of a radical overhaul, to display what you bring to the table in sharp relief for would-be author-clients. Big Pub needs a Public Relations facelift too, to rebuild the trust between yourselves and writers: something it seems you’ve greatly undervalued, judging by how quick you were to squander it on the likes of ASI. Fortunately for you, acting on the former may ensure the latter takes care of itself—but only if you do it right.

I have blogged here before about the necessity for any indie who’s going it alone to have an entrepreneurial spirit and approach, if she hopes to earn a living on her book sales alone. Guy Kawasaki echoes the same opinion in his book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book. But I’ve also acknowledged here that many, perhaps even most, writers have no desire to be entrepreneurs. There are plenty of exceedingly talented writers out there whose strengths in plotting and characterization far outstrip their skills in bookkeeping, administration, design, production or marketing.

You have people on your payroll right now, as I write this, who are seasoned experts in the very things those authors can’t, or don’t want to, do by themselves. These are the things you have to offer and you’ve come by them honestly, so stop trying to hide them like so much stagecraft.

How To Capitalize On Indie Authorship Without Being Evil

Here are the broad strokes of how, were I in your shoes, I would attempt to turn the Titanic around.

(Any Big Pub representatives reading this who’d like to fly me out to New York for some paid consulting time to have me fill in the details, I can be reached at indieauthor at gmail dot com.)

Up until now, in recent decades your business model has required Big Pub to be interested in only two kinds of books: easy moneymakers, and status symbols. Any book that came your way and didn’t appear to be either a likely bestseller or winner of a major literary award would be rejected, regardless of any other appealing qualities it might have.

This is why you haven’t published a Great American Novel in generations, yet have created a market environment in which the Snookis and Honey Boo Boos of the world will never have much difficulty signing a six- to seven-figure book deal. It’s time to let go of your self-assigned role of gatekeepers and arbiters of taste, because you’ve been exclusively in the business of selling product at a profit far too long to keep denying it. There is no shame in this; you’re businesspeople after all, not philanthropists. So own it.

Writers aren’t bowing and scraping to you anymore. You can no longer afford to sit on high like so many Pontiffs of Publication, reaching down to bestow your magical favor on the select few while brusquely relegating all other supplicants to the nearest exit.

You need to start PARTNERING with authors, forming business relationships that put the parties on more or less equal footing. You can no longer survive merely as book publishers, you must also become book producers.
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Step One: Retool The Factory

If I can find freelancers to provide quality editing, cover design, interior layout and ebook formatting services for under $2500 total, and with turnaround times of 2-3 weeks each (or less), you should be able to acquire these same services at a comparable cost and within comparable timeframes.

If you haven’t got the in-house staffing to do it right now, establish a stable of trusted freelancers to whom you can subcontract the work at the same rates they’re already getting from individual indie authors. Alternatively, pay them higher rates in exchange for the right to keep them as dedicated resources, taking jobs only from you, to ensure they will be available when you need them.

There are PLENTY of skilled editors, designers and ebook conversion experts out there (many of whom were laid off from fulltime positions with magazines, newspapers and other publishers) who would welcome the chance to have a fully-booked work roster, as well as the opportunity to add the business relationship to their resumes.

You also need to keep some social media / web communications experts on staff. Their job would be to engage in social media and web communication on your brands’ behalf, and to train / mentor your author-clients in the most effective uses of social media and web communication. This approach is considerably less expensive—and more effective!—than throwing money at the usual, old-school book promotion methods.
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Step Two: Overhaul Distribution

Re-negotiate your contracts with booksellers to eliminate returns. Indie authors and small, independent imprints aren’t subject to those impossible terms, and now that chain booksellers are no longer the powerful rulers over your domain they once were, you are no longer subject to their unworkable demands.

You should get the same deal producers of every other product known to man get in the world of retail: the seller orders as many units as they think they can sell in advance, and none are returnable. The seller can discount any unsold product as he sees fit, holding monthly or end of season clearance and 2-for-1 sales, if need be. Once the product has left your warehouse, it’s no longer your problem.

Since brick-and-mortar, chain booksellers are an endangered species, MOST of your print book production should be managed with a Print On Demand system, which would eliminate the big chunk of your current overhead expense that goes toward large, upfront print runs.
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Step Three: Overhaul Advances

Establish an acquisitions model that doesn’t require you to essentially sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into lottery tickets in the hopes that just a couple will pay off each year. Instead of acting as treasure hunters, ever on the lookout for the next blockbuster and willing to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars or more at a single title, acquire a wide range of titles that can respectably clear the net profit threshold, and acquire them at lower cost to put that threshold within easy reach.

There’s no reason for ANY advance to ANY first-time author to EVER exceed six figures, and even six figure advances should be so rare as to be newsworthy. Historically, the great majority of books acquired in bidding wars have not earned out; but acquiring them has prevented publishers from spreading their capital (and risk) across many more titles with potential.

Get out of this downward monetary spiral and let your rivals take a bath on those bidding war gambles; it won’t be long before all of the Big Five stop acting like they’re on a bender in Vegas. A typical advance for a very promising book should be in the mid- five figure range, and many other books could be acquired with far more modest advances. Just think how many more titles you could acquire if you never paid any advances higher than $125k, and the great majority of your advances averaged out at less than $20k.
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Step Four: Pluck The Low-Hanging Fruit

Successful indie books are hiding in plain sight all over Amazon, Apple’s iBookstore, Smashwords, Goodreads and elsewhere. These are authors who’ve already proven they know how to write and they know how to grow a readership all on their own; imagine how much MORE successful they might be with your help. They are a proven quantity too, so your investment in their books is very low-risk, nothing at all like acquiring a previously unpublished title you think may hold promise.

Acquiring previously self-published, successful titles allows readers to tell you in advance which books they want to buy. You should be seeking out the authors of bestselling and best-reviewed indie books and offering them contracts—but not in the way you’ve done it in the past.
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Step Five: Overhaul Acquisitions

For every manuscript or self-published book that comes to you for consideration, rather than the simple math of your current thumbs up, thumbs down system, you should consider one of four possible outcomes.

1. Possible Bestseller / Award Winner – Offer the typical, negotiable contract from one of your flagship imprints, with a sizeable up-front advance and back-end profit split. The book will be published in both print and ebook formats, and the author will receive training and support from your social media expert team.

2. Possibly Respectable Seller, Midlist Type Title – These are manuscripts you’re currently rejecting on a daily basis, because you can’t see a way for these books to recoup the costs you must invest to produce them. Yet countless indie authors are turning modest to impressive profit on books that sell only in the mid-thousands of copies. After you’ve retooled the factory and made the other changes outlined above, your overheads should be considerably less than they are at present, bringing the bar for profitability within reach for far more books.

Offer these authors the typical, negotiable contract from a new, boutique imprint, with a modest up-front advance and the typical back-end profit split. The book will be published in ebook formats only to minimize upfront costs, and the author will receive training and support from your social media expert team. Any book in this track that proves to be a hit could also be offered in print formats later, with terms either negotiated at the same time as the ebook deal or later/separately.

3. Modest Seller, Quality Work, Motivated & Social Media Savvy Author Who Could Grow – Offer these authors a negotiable contract for an ebook only release from a new, boutique imprint with no upfront advance, and a back-end profit split that’s higher than for acquisitions made under items #1 and #2 above. The author will receive the same training and support from your social media expert team as all your other signed authors.

For this type of book, you would essentially be taking what you would’ve paid as an advance and investing it in the production costs of the book. The backend profit split begins with sale #1 since there’s no advance to be repaid. You’re partnering with the author in a way that helps him to cultivate a larger following while minimizing your upfront investment and risk.

4. Unpublishable, For Whatever Reason – Reply with an honest rejection, do not offer to sell any professional services.
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Step Six: Open A Totally Separate Author Services Division

Open a new business, totally separate from your publishing business, to serve indie authors who wish to remain indie. This business would offer paid pro services from the same stable of in-house or freelance / contract experts you employ on all other books. The key is to ensure your service offerings are priced only slightly higher than what those authors would have to pay if they sought out and contracted for the services themselves.

Your slightly higher price points can be justified on two counts. First, you would be offering a one-stop shop of pre-vetted service providers, saving authors the time and trouble of locating and vetting individual service providers themselves. Second, you could provide a certification seal to service division clients, allowing them to place a seal on their book covers certifying the book has been professionally produced by the experts at [insert company name here]. This certification would be buyers’ guarantee that at the minimum, the book they bought has been professionally edited and designed.

Unlike your current ASI clients (if any), these authors are being allowed to remain completely independent and you would merely be offering services they would have to acquire on their own anyway if they intend to stay the course of top-tier indie publication. With this model, the author retains all rights to the work and there’s no backend split – you are offering ‘for hire’ services only.

To eliminate even the appearance of any conflict of interest, anyone to whom you offer ‘for hire’ services cannot resubmit the book for later publication consideration under items #1-4 above. No writer should be led to believe that if he invests in the for-hire services you have to offer, a publication contract will be forthcoming.

Step Seven: Lather, Rinse and Repeat. Class Dismissed.

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton’s indie Author Blog. April L. Hamilton is the founder and Editor in Chief of Publetariat.com, founder and Editor in Chief of The Digital Media Mom, and Editor in Chief of Kindle Fire on Kindle Nation Daily.