Business End

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

When You Can't Hack It As An Author

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This post, by Michelle Davidson Argyle, originally appeared on her The Innocent Flower blog on 8/31/12.

So this morning when I sat up in bed, I pulled a muscle between my shoulder blades. I probably slept wrong, or something, but this has happened to me before. I was literally in pain for four solid weeks. This time, it doesn’t feel as bad, but it’s still painful. I can’t move my head much. Bending over hurts. Even just sitting still hurts. I know from experience that nothing will help except time and rest. But, crap, I have things I have to get done! 

Oh, well. Pain or no pain, I’ll be writing today. I’m procrastinating at the moment, however, and just spent the last hour and a half browsing through blog links and reading things that make me feel like a terrible marketer, author, and person. You may be asking why, and I’ll tell you it’s because of noise. Constant noise on what we should be doing and not doing.

Elana Johnson wrote a really great post today about focusing on what you do well and letting yourself work productively because of it. After Elana’s post, I browsed around some other posts. There was one about how to write an effective blog post. There was one on how to use Twitter hashtags better. There was one on how often you should blog. The list goes on and on. Every post was effective and helpful, but after awhile, I started to panic.

I’M NOT DOING ANYTHING RIGHT!!!!!!

And this is why I don’t blog much anymore, why I avoid Twitter like the plague, and why I keep posting pictures on Facebook instead of actual status updates. I get into this spot where I feel like I’m doing everything wrong, people are judging me, or they’re annoyed I’m just trying to sell them something, or they think I’m full of myself, and on and on and on. And honestly, I think it’s because of all the posts out there telling me how to do things the right way. They all end up sounding like noise. If I don’t follow certain rules, my career will crumble before my eyes.

#1 – It’s a tough balance writing and selling a product so intimately tied with who you are. 

 

Read the rest of the post on The Innocent Flower.

Victorian San Francisco in 1880: Social Structure and Character Development

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Publetariat Editor’s Note: In this post, historical fiction writer M. Louisa Locke shares some of her research findings about Victorian-era San Francisco. This is an informative post for any author who writes historical fiction, as it reflects the level of detail to which such an author must go to create realism in her work.

I have embarked upon writing Bloody Lessons, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series that features Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, which means I am creating a whole new raft of secondary characters. And, as I have done in previous books, I am carefully considering the specific social make-up of San Francisco as I do so.

What follows is a brief summary of the social structure of San Francisco in 1880 (primarily from my dissertation, Like a Machine or an Animal) and how this has influenced some of the choices I have made in developing my characters in Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, the first two books in my mystery series.

Brief Summary:

“In 1880 San Francisco, with a population of 233,959 residents, was the ninth largest city in the United States. Located at the end of the peninsula that separates the Bay of San Francisco from the Pacific Ocean, this city of hills, sand dunes, fogs, and mild temperatures had been only a small village called Yerba Buena less than forty years earlier. This small village was one of the chief beneficiaries of the incredible influx of    people into the region after the discovery of gold to the north in the winter of 1847-48. In the early years of the Gold Rush, the town grew by over 1000 percent. Even in the 1860s San Francisco still grew at a rate of over 160 percent, but into the next decade the rate of growth slowed considerably to 57 percent, and the city would continue to grow at ever slower rates throughout the century.

“High sex ratios (more males than females) have traditionally accompanied high rates of growth, and this was particularly true in the Far West where so much of the initial growth in population was due to the in-migration of young single men searching for gold. San Francisco followed this rule, although it consistently had a more balanced ratio than did the state as a whole. Nevertheless, by 1880, as the city increasingly became the destination of families or as the earlier settlers either married or sent for their wives and children to join them, much of the imbalance in the sexes had disappeared. Most of the remaining imbalance reflected the large number of Chinese in the city, since most of the Chinese who immigrated to America at this time were males. In fact, among some groups in the city, the Irish for example, women now outnumbered men.

“As the number of women in the city grew, the proportion of families and children did as well. The percentage of adult males who lived in family households rose from fifteen percent in the 1850s to forty percent in 1880, and the average number of children per family rose as well. In addition, the city’s residents were now more likely to have been born in the Far West, and by 1880 over sixty percent of the city’s native-born population had been born in California.

“A significant number of the parents of these California born city residents were immigrants who had traveled to the Far West. In fact, from the beginning of San Francisco’s development, immigrants were more likely than the native-born migrants to be married or to bring their families with them when they moved to the city. In 1880 nearly 45 percent of San Francisco’s population was foreign-born, and if those native-born persons with foreign parents are considered, the proportion of residents with foreign parentage rises to over 74 percent.

“Reflecting national patterns of immigration, the foreign-born population of San Francisco consisted primarily of immigrants from Ireland (29.5%) the German Empire (19.1%) and Great Britain (9.6%). People from these three areas comprised over half of all the immigrants living in the city in 1880. However, the ethnic composition of San Francisco at this date did deviate from the ethnic composition of cities elsewhere in the nation in one substantial way. Chinese made up the second largest number (20.3%) of the foreign-born in the city; this was a proportion that was vastly greater than could be found anywhere outside of the Far West. In addition to the Chinese, Irish, German, and British immigrants that comprised the bulk of San Francisco’s foreign-born population, smaller numbers of French, Canadian, Scandinavian, and Mexican immigrants gave San Francisco an exceptionally cosmopolitan flavor. One Eastern visitor in 1880 felt that the city appeared even more cosmopolitan than New York City, commenting that when she asked a question on a San Francisco Street, it was ‘answered in a dozen different tongues.’ (Dall, My First Holiday 1881)

“The inhabitants of San Francisco did not share equally in the economic opportunities of the period. A foreign birthplace or a specific ethnic heritage clearly influenced entry into certain jobs and the possibilities of advancement. As a result, different groups clustered on different rungs of the city’s social ladder. Native-born residents of both sexes were much more likely than immigrants to hold white-collar jobs, while they were much less likely to work as semi-skilled or unskilled laborers. Native-born males in the city showed a greater degree of upward mobility as well.

“On the other hand, within the foreign-born population of San Francisco the occupational patterns of specific ethnic groups differed significantly, and some groups had better success at achieving or maintaining a higher occupational status than others. For example, among both males and females, the tendency of German immigrants to fill jobs within the lower white-collar ranks, particularly as petty merchants, meant that the occupational pattern of Germs did not deviate substantially from the pattern of native-born workers.

“Many of the young men who came to America from German in the nineteenth century first set up as peddlers on the east coast and then moved to the Far West to take advantage of the boom engendered by the Gold Rush. There they often worked first in the interior mining of farm towns until they could get enough capital to relocate in San Francisco as retail or wholesale merchants or manufacturers.

“By 1880 these Germans represented 34 percent of the merchant population of the city, comprising a much higher fraction of the merchant class than they did of the total city population. These German merchants concentrated in clothing and dry goods, and in the cigar trades, and they had a high degree of persistence in the city. Because Germans, including German Jews, played such an important role in the city’s merchant community, this group occupied a unique and favored position in the social hierarchy of San Francisco. While ethnic and religious prejudice against the Germans did exist in the city, and although Germans were not totally integrated into the ranks of the native-born elite, German Jews seemed to experience much less discrimination in San Francisco than they did within any comparable city in the nation in this period.

“While the backgrounds and eventual occupational success of the Germans and English permitted these two groups entrance into the social elite of the city, the Irish faced much greater obstacles. Their backgrounds of rural poverty and inadequate education constituted a handicap in employment, even though many of the Irish had settled on the east coast before traveling west. As a result, the Irish in San Francisco were under-represented in the white-collar or merchant occupations of the city, and as many as a third of them worked as common laborers in 1880.  However, the Irish in San Francisco were upwardly mobile, for not only were Irish males increasingly more likely to work in white-collar jobs between 1850 and 1880, but their native-born children gained in occupational status.

“Native-born children of the Irish found that their greater experience with urban life and their greater access to education offered many of them a chance to escape from the ranks of unskilled labor into skilled, semi-skilled and white-collar jobs.

“Although proportionally fewer Irish climbed to the top of the business elite in San Francisco, this group was certainly not excluded from the bastions of power within San Francisco. As Burchell has pointed out, ‘The Irish in San Francisco fought their way up the political ladder in the usual fashion and met with the normal nativist response. But their success was more complete by 1880, even by 1870, than that of their group in other major cities.’ (Burchell The San Francisco Irish 1979) Partly because of their sheer numbers and partly because of the unusual degree of fluidity within early San Francisco, the Irish found relatively greater political and economic success in this city.

Social Structure and my character choices

The main protagonists in my mystery novels, Annie Fuller, a widowed boarding house owner, and Nate Dawson, a lawyer, represent the dominant group among the middle and upper classes of San Francisco residents living in the city 1880 because they are of native birth and parentage. Annie was born in the city, and Nate moved to California with his family as a young boy. While both live in boarding houses, (San Francisco was famous for hotel and boarding house living for all classes) Annie’s boarding house, containing a mother and child, a married couple, two unmarried sisters, a single woman, and two single men, reflects a city that was no longer the boom town of only young single men it had been thirty years earlier.

The servants working in Annie’s boarding house, Beatrice O’Rourke and Kathleen Hennessey, are of Irish heritage, (as is Nellie, the Voss parlor maid in Maids of Misfortune,and Biddy, Kathleen’s friend and a servant in the Frampton house in Uneasy Spirits) because the Irish not only made up the largest percentage of working class residents of any ethnic group in the city, but domestic service was the occupation held by a majority of women of Irish birth.

At the same time, as mentioned above, the Irish were extraordinarily successful in achieving political power in San Francisco, one result being the large number of Irish found in city employment, including the police force. Hence my decision to make Beatrice O’Rourke’s deceased husband and her nephew, Patrick McGee, be Irish police officers.

However, when I was looking for a non-Irish immigrant to hold the job of cook in the Frampton household, it was easy to decide that the uncommunicative cook, Mrs. Schmitt, should be German since German immigrant women were almost as likely to hold domestic service jobs as were the Irish.

On the other hand, while Irish and German servants would have been common in any middle class household in any American city outside of the South during this time period, Chinese males servants like Wong, who worked in the Voss home in Maids of Misfortune, would have been rarely found in any city outside the Far West. In later posts I will elaborate about the unique pattern of Chinese migration to San Francisco.

Finally, while I haven’t been explicit about the ethnic heritage of Annie Fuller’s prize boarders, Herman and Esther Stein, their names represent their German heritage. I chose this background for them because I wanted to provide an example of that interesting group of San Francisco residents, wealthy German merchants, bankers, and manufacturers.

In the book I am working on, Bloody Lessons, a good proportion of the minor characters are going to be teachers. I will need to keep in mind that the majority of teachers in San Francisco, as was true for the nation, were females, and that the men who did teach dominated the higher grades and administrative positions. I will also need to keep in mind the unusually important role of immigrants and their offspring in San Francisco.

The ethnic composition of San Francisco teachers reflected the fact that nearly two-thirds of San Francisco’s residents were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. As a result, 60 percent of the young women who taught in San Francisco in 1880 were native-born with immigrant parents, and another 12% were foreign-born. The percentage of female teachers in San Francisco who were of foreign birth or heritage was actually double that of the percentage found in either Portland or Los Angeles in that year.

These are just some of the ways I try to ground my mysteries in an accurate portrayal of the past, and I hope you found it added to your enjoyment of the series.

For those of you who haven’t yet read either Maids of Misfortune or Uneasy Spirits, you might check out the promotional offerings below.

Maids of Misfortune will be FREE on KINDLE Monday-Tuesday August 20-21 and

Uneasy Spirits will be FREE ON KINDLE Tuesday-Wednesday August 21-22.

AUDIOBOOK Maids of Misfortune

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.

The Business Rusch: The End of the Unprofessional Writer

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This post, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, originally appeared on her site, The Business Rusch, on 8/22/12.

On July 24, 2012, Canada’s The Globe and Mail published an article titled, “There Will Be No More Professional Writers in The Future.”  The article cites a number of writers, from the ubiquitous Scott Turow to Ewan Morrison who, The Globe and Mail thoughtfully tells me, is “an established British writer.”

Morrison says that the advances he’s received from traditional publishers have been slashed to the bone. He says traditional publishing has started to use “ominously feudal economics” to maintain its empire. He then goes on to denounce the digital revolution, saying it will destroy “vital institutions that have supported ‘the highest achievements in culture in the past 60 years.’”

And as if matters can’t get worse, he predicts, “There will be no more professional writers in the future.”

Here’s the thing: Viewed from a certain perspective, Morrison is absolutely right. A decade or two down the road, the model that we once called “professional” for writers will disappear.

That model depended on writers writing on spec until they sell something. Those writers need a day job to support themselves. Those writers once they sell something then hire an employee with no legal training who negotiates their contract. Then that same employee, who usually has no literary training, vets all of the writer’s future works.

For this single sale, the writers will get an interest-free loan that they do not have to pay back if their book fails to sell well. If the book does sell well, then that interest-free loan will be paid off and the writer will receive a percentage of the book’s cover price (in theory) for each copy sold. Of course, cover price might be subject to discounting (at which case the percentage paid to the writer goes down) and the definition of sold might include free copies given away in hopes of goosing remaining sales, but hey, who is counting?

Wait. The answer to that is no one. Because accounting programs at most traditional publishers are so behind the times that they can’t handle e-book royalties in any sane way. In fact, an intellectual property attorney tells me that in a recent contract negotiation with a traditional publisher, the publisher’s attorney removed a phrase the lawyer added. That phrase? That the publishing house was to provide “true and accurate” royalty statements. “True and accurate” is a legal phrase generally put in other business contracts in which one party fills out an accounting for the other party. But traditional publishers…well, apparently, they don’t want to do what other businesses do.

But I digress.

Morrison is right when he calls traditional publishing a feudal economic system. What he fails to see is that it has always been one. And that the economics are simply getting  more rigid as time goes on. The writers are getting less of the pie than they did before, and seem to have no way to combat that.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site, The Business Rusch.

Amazon Should Do What’s Best for Indie Writers & Readers

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This post, by K.W. Jeter, originally appeared on SteamWords on 8/27/12.

Here’s the background: Indie e-publishing phenom John Locke, famous for being the first indie writer to sell a million ebooks on Amazon.com, has been outed in the New York Times for having bought a large number, if not most, of the positive reviews that propelled his success:

The Best Reviews Money Can Buy

If this were just a scandale that concerned John Locke alone, I wouldn’t care about it, and I doubt if very many other people in the indie e-publishing scene would, either. But the problem is that it casts indie ebooks in general, along with their writers, in a bad light.

You only have to scroll through the comments to the New York Times article to find a lot of people piling on, saying that incidents such as this demonstrate that indie ebooks are crap, that authors have to pay people to say nice things about, and that’s why they don’t buy them. But not just there; Salon.com chimed in with a painfully accurate assessment:

“…employing a service that dishonest and cynical demonstrates a bizarre contempt for the reader. It casts the writer as a producer of widgets and the reader as a sucker who probably won’t complain if the product doesn’t live up to the hype, because hey, at least it was cheap. Books, in this scenario, become flea market trash…”

And how’s the Twitterverse discussing the matter? Here’s a couple of typical comments:

John Locke paid for positive reviews, according to NY Times article. Now, my question is: How many other authors pay?

and

John Locke, self publishing success, paid for over 300 reviews. I have no doubts many huge self pubs use this service.

 

Read the rest of the post on SteamWords.

'Tis The Season To Plan Book Promotions

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We may still be sweltering in summer heat, but now is the time to plan your fall and winter book promotion schedule.

How can your book tie into upcoming events like back to school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah or the dawning of a new year?

Keep media lead times in mind when planning for book publicity. Daily media like newspapers and blogs have shorter lead times, while monthly magazines may be working six months in advance.

Other possibilities include virtual book tours, social media campaigns, school visits, and discount promotions. If you are doing free ebook promotions through KDP Select, holidays can make great promotional hooks.

So set some goals for what you’d like to accomplish over the next few months, grab a calendar, and start working on timelines and to do lists for your fall and winter book promotions.

To learn more about how to develop a book marketing plan, download my free report, Create a Book Marketing Plan That Sells Books.

 

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

Storytelling Is Us

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Author Henning Mankell, writing in the New York Times last year related how he came to live much of the time in Mozambique. Listening to old men sitting on a bench talk, he speculates:

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination (name) for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats–and they in turn can listen to ours.

Now, Homo sapiens means loosely “knowing person.” Homo narrans would be “storytelling person.”

Certainly we are differentiated by our intelligence, but I found Mankell’s idea magnetic.

No matter what realm we operate within, no matter what discipline we’ve learned or invented, storytelling has a central place.

For instance, it’s how we transmit the news of our discoveries, how we describe who we are and where we want to go, how we account for what we’ve become. In each case a personal narrative in involved. A collection of stories that taken together create a personal history all our own.

How did you meet your wife? Where did you go to school? Why did you decide to start that business? How are you different from the person you were when you graduated high school?

Each question evokes a story, or a chain of stories that weave into a narrative.

We vary widely in how compellingly we tell these stories, both to others and to ourselves. Some stories we tell internally, in our own minds, are always accompanied by feelings, justifications, memories, the bits and pieces left with us from our own experience and the way we’ve processed that experience over the years.

Some of these narratives are truth in the sense that the events described really did happen. Many many others are interpretive accounts, colored by the passing of time and the agendas and assumptions through which we filter our experience.

Some of the narratives are fanciful, intentionally or not. Fables, fantasies, speculations, imaginative wanderings, all those stories have their place too, and that’s why we have those other storytelling magicians, the novelists.

Storytelling and Story-selling

When I watch a really accomplished marketer at work, I’m always looking at the stories they are telling. It might surprise you to know just how much even the most dedicated pitchmen rely on stories to reach their audience.

Everyone loves a story, everyone wants to know how they end, what happens next: “Tell me more!”

The serialized novel, the never-ending soap opera, even the little 3-panel comic strips in your morning paper, they all rely on story and the narrative arc to teach, entertain, to amuse.

  • First panel, the setup.
  • Second panel, the conundrum.
  • Third panel, boom, the punchline hits from an unexpected direction.

The storyteller, no matter what her medium, knows how to surprise, to delight, to put a twist or a bend in the road that we didn’t expect. It’s all about keeping the attention of the reader.

Think how storytellers in the thousands of years before literacy became widespread had to be able to hold the attention of the crowd with only their own words.

A lot of that is still in our language and our expectations every time we realize there’s a story to be had. Every year we tell the iconic stories; the three wise men; the early settlers and the native peoples; the salvation of the world.

Most religious texts are, after all, collections of stories used to amaze and teach us.

Today’s Storytellers—You and I?

Because story is at the base of our civilization and runs throughout human endeavor, you would think that artful storytelling would be one of the most highly respected occupations a human could aspire to.

This isn’t true, of course, although our best storytellers who also capture the popular imagination—like movie makers, novelists, songwriters and playwrights—become stars.

But you and I, writers who unspool our stories for far smaller groups of people, are participating in an age-old and uniquely human activity.

Whether they are used to sell, to persuade, to inform, to entertain or to enlighten, our stories in a way define us. And in that sense, I guess I would agree with Mankell. Man truly is the “storytelling person,” Homo narrans.

Finding the stories you need to tell, and telling them as best you can, are things all writers learn. Heard any good ones lately?

 

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

Measuring Achievement By The Olympics. How Much Can You Achieve In 4 Years?

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The London Olympics are almost over and the closing ceremony will finish off what has been a glorious few weeks. (Britain seems to have done really well in the medal table too!)

At the opening ceremony I shared 10 lessons writers can learn from the Olympics, but I have also been thinking a great deal about time and achievement during the competition. I have been learning about establishing professional creative habits in the last few months and the discipline of the athletes has really brought it home for me.

 

Warning: This post contains homework!

I do yearly goals, I also do daily To Do lists and any number of other goal setting activities. But it’s August already and it seems that the time flies by and I haven’t achieved everything I set out to do.

And yet, I also look back to the last Olympics in 2008 and see how far I have come.

It is hard to measure achievement in just one year, and 5 years often seems too far to see. But the Olympics are a great milestone by which to measure our creative lives. Not too short and not too long a period. I’m being open and honest in this post so I hope you will be too. Let’s do this together …

Where were you on your writing journey in August 2008? (Beijing Olympics)

First, write down what you had achieved on your writing journey by August 2008 and anything else that might be pertinent to what you have achieved. Please do share in the comments if you would like to, but definitely keep this written down somewhere. I use Moleskine journals these days.

By August 2008, I had written my first non-fiction book, How to love your job or find a new one. I had self-published it but it had only sold ~100 copies. I had started learning about marketing from books, audio CDs and online courses. I was working full-time as an IT consultant for a large multi-national mining company. I didn’t know any authors. I had not seriously considered writing fiction.

I had a new blog but it was about my non-fiction book. The Creative Penn didn’t exist and I didn’t have a business at all. I wasn’t on any social networks and I didn’t know anything about them at that point. The Kindle hadn’t been released outside of the US and ebooks weren’t mainstream. I didn’t even know what ebooks were. There was no KDP or Nook PubIt or Smashwords or BookBaby (or I didn’t know they existed if they were there). Print on demand existed but wasn’t mainstream. I didn’t have a podcast and I had never made a video before. I basically had no online presence, no email list, no way to connect with anyone.

I was living in Australia and just about to get married. I read only print books and owned over 1500 physical books, many of which I had shipped from the UK, to New Zealand and then on to Brisbane, Australia.

Where are you now on your writing journey, in August 2012? (London Olympics)

Again, write this down in a notebook and add to the comments if you would like to share. I hope we can all look back at this so please be honest. You can see where I was 4 years ago!

I have 2 thriller novels out, Pentecost and Prophecy, in the ARKANE series. They have sold ~40,000 copies. I have finished the first draft of the third book in the series, Exodus and I’m working on 2 other fiction books. I have signed with a New York literary agent to represent my fiction. I have 2 non-fiction books available, including a re-release of my career change book, How to love your job or find a new one. I have a fiction website and blog at JFPenn.com.

TheCreativePenn.com has been voted one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2 years running and has monthly visitors of ~ 40,000. The Creative Penn podcast has over 130 episodes, over 70 hours of free audio on writing, publishing and book marketing. It has had over 60,000 downloads. My YouTube channel has had over 102,000 views. I am on multiple social networks, primarily twitter @thecreativepenn where I have close to 30,000 followers.

I am a full-time author-entrepreneur. I make a living from writing, speaking, selling multimedia courses and consulting on internet marketing.

I have been happily married for 4 years and now live in London, England. I read 90% of the time on my Kindle or my iPhone and we left 99% of our print books in Australia.

Reading this I am pretty happy with the progress of the last 4 years, even though the route here has been a twisty one. Building the business and starting writing fiction have been my main aims. My next focus will be seriously building my fiction brand and backlist.

Where will you be in August 2016? (Rio Olympics)

This is the tough one. You need to be visionary for this. I can also guarantee that whatever you write, the reality will surpass it (if you put in the Olympic training). Who said your writing goals have to be insignificant?

By August 2016, I want to have 10 thriller novels available and be a New York Times bestselling author. I will combine my books between traditional publishing houses and self-publishing. My print and ebooks will be available in multiple languages and I will have an email list of over 20,000 readers who are keen for my books. Financially, I will be earning 6 figures from my fiction.

I’ll still be happily married, but I won’t commit to a physical location, since I have moved every few years all my life! I love London but I won’t rule out more traveling :)

Yes, I plan on revisiting this post and seeing how we all did. I fully intend to still be blogging in 2016.

Again, write this down in a notebook and add to the comments if you would like to share.

Will you commit to the writer’s Olympic training program?

I’m all for visualization as one aspect of peak performance but you actually have to put in the physical effort as well. So, your writer’s Olympic training program for achievement by Rio 2016 should include:

(1) Practice.

Writing – first, last and always. If you don’t do this every day, or week, you won’t make your goals. If the athletes don’t show up, their muscles just get weaker. It’s the same for writers. Show up on the page and get writing. Do you see any of the Olympic athletes making excuses?

(2) Perform and test yourself.

For athletes, they need to test themselves by turning up for championships or competitions. For us, it’s about publishing. Whether that is self-publishing to a professional standard, or querying a traditional publisher, you have to get your books out there if you want to be a pro writer. The only way to test yourself is by having others read your work. Writing for pleasure is fantastic but it is not a professional career. It wouldn’t be an Olympic sport. So get your work out there.

(3) Skills development.

Athletes have coaches and go on training camps. They research techniques for cutting off an extra 0.001 second off their time. They are always improving. We need to focus on that too. Buy some books, pay for a manuscript critique or a developmental editor, go on a course, do an online multimedia program. Write in a different genre. Invest and keep improving your skills.

(4) Brand building and marketing

Usain Bolt has a brand and marketing manager. He needs to run but he also needs to pay the bills, now and into the future. He only has a few years at the top of his game, whereas we have a lifetime career to manage. Yes, we need to write more books but I also believe you need to invest time in building your brand, connecting with your audience and looking after your business. If you do this, you will be earning money for the long term and you’ll be able to write for your (may it be long) lifetime.

If you want to kick it up a notch for the next Olympics, this is what I recommend. What about you? Please do leave a comment below.

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Expectation, Reality, and Serendipity

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I think I’m almost a walking/classic example of “we don’t know what the public wants or how to anticipate it” that seems to be the battle cry of the entertainment industry, particularly books. Publishers take risks every day on things. They think “Oh this will be big” and then it isn’t. Or they put a book out there and it does way better than they ever expected.

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

That’s about where I am right now. When I started the Zoe pen name and the paranormal romance and then started the Kitty pen name with the erotica, the idea was as follows: I was going to market the hell out of Zoe, and really build that. It would be my more “commercial” name. Kitty would just be a niche passion project, written for love, not money.

The reality turned out to be the opposite. I have spent thousands of dollars marketing and pushing Zoe. I’ve spent probably thousands of hours toward the same goal. In the beginning when there wasn’t much in the Kindle store, Zoe books sold well. If I’d had a lot more books out (i.e. if I’d stopped arguing on the Internet and kept my eye on the prize), I would have been able to lock in more long-term fans who would REMEMBER me and keep coming back.

But I didn’t do that.

Now, a few years later, the paranormal romance market is glutted and it’s starting to go a little out of fashion. i.e. while there will always be hardcore PNR fans and you can always probably do pretty decently there if you’re at the top of the pile, except for your hardcore fans, it’s just a harder sell now.

Likewise, YA dystopians are probably on the way out, too. People just get so sick of seeing the same shit over and over. So I probably won’t be doing YA dystopians. I might do some YA, but not dystopians, probably. This isn’t me just letting the market dictate to me. If I had a really well-developed idea that I LOVED and that kept me up at night thinking about it, I’d write it and publish it and just let the chips fall wherever. It’s always possible to write that book in a glutted and largely on the way out market that just grabs people anyway.

I mean YA dystopians have been slowly falling out of favor and then we had The Hunger Games happen. So there will probably be another little surge of it. Just like there was another surge of PNR after Twilight.

So what does this mean? Life Cycle has been out three weeks. And this is generally the point where if a title of mine is going to have a good upswing in sales and ranking, it happens now. I’ve got a huge cross-promo thing going with Kimberly Kinrade. We have thousands of entries. I’ve got major paid promo with a company whose name I won’t mention since the results are lackluster and I know some people swear by the company… All this is going on CURRENTLY and is in progress. I’ve spent more money promoting Life Cycle than any other title I’ve written for either name and it’s had the most disappointing sales so far. It has only 2 Amazon reviews in all of that time. While I may love it and those who love everything I write may love it… it obviously doesn’t have enough interest in the general marketplace and people aren’t passionate enough about it to really talk about it. (This isn’t me whining or crying or bitching or boo hooing, this is me facing reality.) Though it does make me pretty sad given how much I LOVE Cain and wanted to share him with a larger audience.

Zoe has a MUCH larger visible social platform than Kitty. But doesn’t sell as well. So all this crap about building your ‘platform’ with a billion twitter followers and facebook followers and newsletter subscribers and on and on is just that… crap. 5,000 Twitter followers isn’t 5,000 core fan base. I would LOVE it if all my kitty fans were on my newsletter because frankly it feels wild and out of control to not have direct access to everybody who loves my books to make sure they know about them when they come out. But that’s part of the wholesale model, when you deal directly with an intermediary company instead of directly selling to your audience. It’s a trade off. On the one hand bad: you lose direct access to everybody. On the other hand good: you have more access to people in general.

Kitty has 150 newsletter subscribers. But every single person on that list is a SERIOUS fan. Zoe has over 2,000 newsletter subscribers and yet 25% or less even open their newsletters from Zoe. I used to have a much higher open conversion rate for Zoe. It dropped because I started giving away Kept for free to entice people to subscribe to the newsletter and also doing newsletter drives and promotions where people subscribe. Most of those people just delete the emails when they come. They don’t CARE about my work. They just wanted free stuff. (Obviously there are exceptions but they aren’t the rule.)

Back to Zoe:

I LOVE Life Cycle. I really thought it would break out. But I think part of the problem is… it’s book 4 in the series. And I think it just doesn’t matter how much I scream that it can work as a stand-alone, most people want to read books in a series in order. And Blood Lust is not my strongest book. It’s not “weak”, but it’s not break-out-able. So I can’t expect readers–except for a small core following–to push through all those books to get to Life Cycle.

I think I can wrap up this series in 7 books, so that’s what I’m going to do. Hadrian and Angeline’s book (book 5) is next. That will tie up their storyline started in Dark Mercy. Then I have 2 more to wrap up the series. I’m not going to continue to try to resurrect something that just isn’t giving me the results I want. But by the same token, I’m not going to betray the fans of the series by not finishing what I started. (and FYI, I only had 7 books with full PLANS. I was going to put in an extra book assuming I could figure out something to go in that slot, but I’m not going to do that now.)

Not when Kitty does so much better. With Kitty I have done NO major promos or giveaways (nor will I ever.) I’ve come to understand that if your selling point is giving away a Kindle or signed free books you are mainly attracting people who want free things, not a fan base. They may say: “Oh, that book sounds good!” but they will add it to their TBR pile (maybe) and then never bother to buy it or read it. Some will, but most won’t. This is 4 years of experience with all this crap talking. (And 4 years isn’t massive experience, but it’s enough to note a trend and stop doing stupid things.)

When I think of all my favorite authors and favorite books, the selling point that brought me to those authors was THE BOOK. It wasn’t a giveaway of any stripe. So all this expensive and time consuming promotion just doesn’t work. IMO. Maybe it works for other people and if so, great. But I’ve seen the difference in how Kitty and Zoe sell and the crazy amount of work I have to put into Zoe for mediocre sales

Zoe is also harder for me to write. It’s more work for the writing, more work for the editing, more work and money for the marketing… lackluster results. Kitty is easier to write, less work for the editing, no major marketing… better results… sells better over the long haul even with many months of no new release. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what I should be focusing most of my attention on, here.

Writing is my career. It’s what pays my rent and puts food on my table. Without writing, I’d have to go out and get a real job. So, while I can’t write something I hate just to please/feed a market… (i.e. I can’t just ‘write what’s hot’ if my heart isn’t in it)… I also have to focus on what makes the most sense to focus on.

I said I would write and publish as long as I could make enough money to sustain me doing it. That applies not just to my writing in general but to specific pen names/genres and how much energy I assign to things based both on my passion for it as well as reader passion for it.

There is a lot of ego tied up in Zoe. When I was this scrappy little indie not making any money I was all over the Internet running my mouth. I had something to prove. By pulling away from Zoe some, it feels like failure. It feels like all those people will go: “What the fuck happened to that loud-mouthed indie? I haven’t seen anything from her in awhile. Guess she didn’t have the goods.” Well, I think I ‘have the goods’, but the issue is, I either don’t have them enough in this genre, or I’m trying to fight an uphill struggle in a glutted market and it’s just me being stupid.

There is a lot of ego death involved in letting Zoe fade off more and more people’s radars. There was so much of a “I’ll show them!” attitude going on. And frankly I just don’t think ZOE is going to show anybody anything, except how to keep doing the same stupid thing over and over when it is like banging my head against a brick wall.

I’ll do more Zoe stuff after this series, probably. I’ll probably be shifting more into urban fantasy with romantic subplots. But I won’t put giant energy into it until and unless I see it’s got a real market/readership potential. It’s a close enough neighbor to the PNR that I think I can keep most of my readers. But at least until I finish the Preternaturals series, I’ll probably be doing one Zoe book a year and focusing most of my energy on what’s selling right now and what I’m most passionate about and have the most active ideas for and excitement… the kitty stuff.

And I’m sure I’ll get “kittied out” and need to write some Zoe, or maybe perhaps a third pen name, which I probably won’t share. Because it gets to be too much pressure. Anything tied into Zoe is too much pressure. If I’d just QUIETLY done my thing, it would be one thing… but I was not quiet. And so… whether or not anybody really notices or cares I feel like I have to “live up to something” and that’s too much fucking pressure.

I’m also pretty much finished expecting anything. I frankly don’t know what the fuck people want, and I’m tired of pretending I’m some kind of fictional oracle. For Kitty, I didn’t really think much about The Auction. I mean I enjoyed writing the book as much as all of the other Kitty books, but I didn’t think it was going to sell great. It got to the highest ranking of any of my Kitty books. People LOVED those alien dragon guys. Who knew? Several people want some more sci-fi type kitty stuff, and I do have some ideas of that nature.

Comfort Food still sells strong after over two years. Sometimes someone will rave about it with a big following and it will get a huge uptick. like a few weeks ago it got back into the top 2k of the Kindle store. (And you know what, Guys? I GET that Amazon is not the only market out there, but it is the biggest one and how you are doing there in sales ranking is a pretty good indicator of how your name/book is doing overall in terms of popularity side-by-side with others. And yes, you shouldn’t compare yourself to others… blah blah blah… but… really… you need to have some inkling on how you rank. If I didn’t pay any attention to that stuff, I wouldn’t know Kitty does so much better than Zoe.)

But… then The Last Girl, which I LOVED, didn’t do as well. It still does better than all my Zoe books, but for a Kitty book it didn’t exactly explode the charts.

But the bottom line of what I’m trying to say is… I’m done trying to “make people interested” in stuff they aren’t interested in. Advertising is next to useless. It’s word of mouth that sells books. The theory is that you need enough advertising to get enough word of mouth started, but honestly if a book is THAT gripping, it doesn’t take that many readers for word of mouth to really get started. (Kitty stuff is a prime example of this.) Advertising only really pumps up books that are already going. It’s hard to get people’s attention with stuff they’ve never heard about. And I’m really starting to believe that the kind of brand-building advertising that seems to “work” (as much as advertising ever does), is really more for the big boys, or people who are in a very limited niche where they have access to much of that audience over and over.

If you’re writing/making/doing something that has an audience you can’t reach all at once, then it’s pissing in the wind at a target you can’t even see. For something that costs thousands of dollars and tons of angst, it’s not how I want to be spending my time or money.

In an interesting twist of serendipity, today while I’m thinking about all of this, this post was Freshly Pressed on wordpress.

The only thing I don’t fully agree with is: “Let money dictate what you do”. If you are an ARTIST and that is IT and you don’t rely on your art as your livelihood, then yeah, feel free to ignore that. But if you ARE reliant on the money to live, then ideally you want to find something you love that other people love and will pay for (like for me: the Kitty work), but it’s not feasible to keep doing something that isn’t giving you the results you need/want.

That’s just reality. I have to do what I love that pays the bills. Zoe doesn’t do that for me nearly as much as Kitty, so I’m done waiting for something of Zoe’s to “break out”, or for it to “catch on and build up a following” etc. I’m just done. I’m still writing Zoe, I’m just not putting all my hopes and dreams in it or the bulk of my energy into it. Likewise, I’m not going to start having tons of expectations for Kitty, either, because it’s the expectations that lead to the disappointment. I’m just going to write what I love and am passionate about and let the chips fall wherever.

If I hadn’t been trying so hard to push Zoe and make Zoe “work” on a larger scale I probably naturally would have drifted to 1-2 Zoe titles a year as a break from Kitty and most of my focus on Kitty. I feel like if I ignored this instinct, 4 years from now I’ll be talking about how I had an opportunity to really make Kitty work, but was focused too much on Zoe. (Like I did with regards to Zoe vs. Internet arguing.)

And I swore I wouldn’t make that same stupid mistake twice.

 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters. Also see this follow-up post.

What Offer Does Your Author Blog Make?

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It seems that authors fall into two categories when it comes to author blogging:

  1. Authors who are blogging regularly
  2. Authors who think they should be blogging regularly

If you read blogs you come to the conclusion that there are lots of reasons authors are blogging. But sometimes I wonder whether authors have thought about the reason they are blogging—why their blog exists.

 

Now, admittedly there are lots of kinds of author blogs.

There’s a big divide between fiction authors who blog and nonfiction authors. And within nonfiction, there’s a big difference between the kind of blog you can develop if you write literary criticism or medieval history, or if you write about how to get rid of the weeds in your garden or how to make great vegan dishes.

So every author is different, and our subjects and audiences are infinitely varied.

But having some clarity about what purpose your blog serves can really help you achieve your goals. Even better, being able to sum it up in just a few words—why readers would bother to stop there and read it—is one of the best early exercises for new bloggers.

The Magic of the Tagline

When you decide to start a blog, you have to right away come up with a name for it. Or you can blog under your own name, on the “domain-name-of-your-author-name” plan.

No matter what domain name you end up with, you’ll notice that most blogs have a tagline, a bit like a book’s subtitle.

For instance, here are some taglines from blogs I visit:

  • The Creative Penn: Helping you write, publish and market your book
  • The Passive Voice: Writers, Writing, Publishing, Disruptive Innovation and the Universe
  • Writer Unboxed: about the craft and business of fiction
  • Copyblogger: Content Marketing Solutions for WordPress that Work
  • Social Media Examiner: Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
  • We Grow Media: Helping Writers & Publishers Make an Impact and Build Their Legacies

In each case, the blogger has tried to sum up the value of the blog to the reader.

Creating the Tagline for Your Blog

Doing this exercise was a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I already had the name of the blog—thebookdesigner.com—so that wasn’t a problem.

But it took several hours and a lot of thought before I arrived at the tagline. But going through that work was also very valuable, and I recommend this exercise to every author who is setting up, or reviving, a blog.

You can see my own end result in the masthead: practical advice to help build better books.

And no matter how far afield the articles here have wandered, this statement hasn’t changed, because my offer has never changed.

If you think about it, how well you fulfill the promise of this statement will have a lot to do with the success of your blog. And if it does succeed, it can become a vehicle capable of supporting your writing and publishing efforts, the ultimate foundation of your author platform.

We blog at the permission of our readers, and the exercise of creating a tagline for your blog is one of the best ways to focus on exactly what your offer is to your readers.

And it gives you the chance to see how well you’re fulfilling that offer.

What offer do you make to your readers through your blog? Have you thought about that?


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

In Conversation with Gillian Polack

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Gillian Polack is a fine writer, a fine person and a good friend of mine. You may remember that I reviewed her novel, Life Through Cellophane, a while back. Sadly, the publisher of that book, Eneit Press, fell victim to the Red Group/Borders debacle and went under. It seemed that Gillian’s book went with it. But, a literary phoenix from the ashes of corporate foolishness, it has found new life with the Pan Macmillan ebook imprint, Momentum. Now called Ms Cellophane and with a cool new cover, the book is back.

I got to talking with Gillian about the book recently. She was particularly pleased with my original review when I said:

I must admit that I felt a bit weird reading it. It was like I was hiding out during a secret women’s business meeting, hearing about things I shouldn’t know.

Mirror 6e 225x300 In conversation with Gillian PolackOn hearing this, Gillian said, “It’s a good reaction. You read lots, and this is the only book that gives you that sense. I get a lot of female readers saying to me, “This is my life, I read this and am looking into a mirror.” It makes me wonder why you haven’t encountered other books that give you the same sense. What sort of boundaries are out there and what sorts of restrictions do they put on us without us knowing?”

Alan: I think it’s largely to do with the types of books I read. It’s not that I don’t read books by women. In fact, on checking Goodreads, recently I’ve read:

Felicity Dowker’s Bread & Circuses
Jo Anderton’s Debris and Suited
Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine
Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts
Joanna Penn’s Prophecy
Lisa L Hannett’s Bluegrass Symphony

That’s just this year, which is a year where I haven’t read nearly as much as I usually do. But while these are excellent books by women, all with strong female protagonists and/or supporting characters, they’re not as much books about being a woman as yours is. So I wonder if I just don’t choose to read other books more like yours.

Gillian: My book was all about the type of invisibility that many women feel so yes, it wasn’t about a strong protagonist so much as about a very particular aspect of life. Can you pinpoint some of the things that made you feel as if you were entering a foreign universe – and maybe talk about how they differ from the approach you take to your own female characters?

Alan: I have a very simple, perhaps overly so, approach to writing female characters. I basically approach all characters as neither male or female, but simply as people. Of course, I will try to get inside my character’s heads and they’re all very individual people, but gender is only ever a small part of that, never a primary consideration.

Reading Cellophane, I felt as though I was getting an insight into the day-to-day miniutiae of being a woman. You do a good job of putting the reader in Elizabeth’s mind and it almost feels, to me at least, as though we shouldn’t be there. Of course, that’s a sign of great writing – feeling like we’re inside a character rather than simply watching from outside. And, equally, my male-ness is showing, simply because the process of reading your book came as such a surprise to me.

The best thing about it is that none of it was uncomfortable in any way – it was simply fascinating.

To go back to my own writing, I deliberately don’t try to make my female characters “feminine”. I use quotes there to indicate the insufficiency of the word. I don’t know what it’s like to be feminine. I know what it’s like to be around women. I’ve been married a long time and have many great female friends. I know what it’s like to interact with women and I know how they might respond to various situations. My author’s eye is always studying people and scenarios, subconsciously filing it away for later story use. All writers have to be great observers of the world around them. But I can never observe what it’s like to be a woman. Until reading Cellophane, that is. Because that’s something which gave me an insight I couldn’t get on my own. And while I read a lot of female authors – in fact, my favourite Australian spec-fic writers are all women! – I guess I don’t read very much stuff about women. So perhaps I need to know what I could read that would help me with that.

Of course, that also leads to a small problem. I hate “chick flicks”. I have little to no interest in reading books aimed at a purely female market. But Cellophane seemed to transcend that issue, so I guess I need advice on more books like yours!

Gillian: I don’t know where there are more books precisely like mine! There must be. Cellophane can’t be sui generis. I wrote it though, because I wanted to read books like it and I wanted the books to be speculative fiction. One of my publishers suggests that I’m like Anne Tyler, someone else suggests that the female-ness of my world is a bit like Alice Hoffmann, while Sophie Masson suggested that my first novel reminded her of A.S. Byatt. They’re all women writers who often put women in the centre of the story and are capable of working quite inwardly (though don’t always), so I’d start from them, I think, and work out. Ursula le Guin does the same inwards-out approach in Always Coming Home, but she’s more concerned with place and culture and change than with domestica.

There’s a lot of literary fiction written in a character’s head, where the internal view is key to the novel. There’s not, however, much speculative fiction that both takes this approach and focuses on the mundane. Kaaron Warren’s Slights does that, of course, but in such a different way! She wrote about someone quite terrifying and had me accepting, as a reader, that this was quite normal until we realised that this person we had accepted into our headspace was someone we wouldn’t ever want to meet. I really wanted to communicate the everydayness of lives and that these lives can be wonderful, and that magic doesn’t have to be the stuff of adventures and quests.

Alan: Slights is a great example of character, but you’re right, certainly not a particular example of womankind. More an example of arsehole-kind.

I think you hit it on the head when you say that you “wanted to communicate the everydayness of lives and that these lives can be wonderful, and that magic doesn’t have to be the stuff of adventures and quests.”

Is that something you’ll be exploring more? The street-level magic of the everyday wonder rather than the “big story” wonder? Will you write about Elizabeth again?

Gillian: I won’t write about Elizabeth again, but I will definitely be exploring the everyday wonder. In fact, I have a novel out there… It’s one of those hard-to-categorise novels, like Cellophane. Publishers are both loving it and not willing to publish it. This is a problem I face regularly, for there is no general sub-category for what I do, and so it’s hard to fit into a schedule. Personally, I can’t see what’s hard to categorise about a magic-wielding feminist divorced Jewish Sydneysider who is not speaking to her father. In fact, the short story that’s set after the time of the novel was published years ago (in ASIM), for short story markets are more flexible. It was listed as recommended on an international Year’s Best, and I have a recording of actor Bob Kuhn reading it, just waiting for the right moment to appear. People ask me about Judith, and I have to say, “Still no home.”

The cursed novel (The Art of Effective Dreaming – due to appear some time ago) is about dealing with the mundane world, how to escape it and what the implications are of such an escape, but of course, the novel is cursed (and contains dead morris dancers). It was supposed to appear several years ago, but the most extraordinary life events (hurricanes, earthquakes, computer failure, near death experiences) keep getting in the way. I find it rather ironic that a novel about an ordinary person should be doomed to adventures and not be seen, but right now, the story of the The Art of Effective Dreaming’s delays would make a rather good disaster novel.

Alan: Sounds like you need just the right small press for the Judith novel. I’m sure it’ll find a home eventually. I hope it does, because it sounds very cool.

And The Art Of Effective Dreaming will eventually see the light of day, right?

Gillian: From your mouth to God’s ear (to use a Jewish expression I did not in fact grow up with!). You want to read about the dead morris dancers… Actually, The Art of Effective Dreaming also gently takes the mickey out of quest novels, so I rather suspect you might like it. I hope you get to read it soon!

Alan: As far as I’m concerned, the only good Morris Dancer is a dead one, so yes, I’d love to read it.

As Gillian once said to me in an email: “One of the messages I wanted to get out there about my writing is that it’s not bad despite not fitting categories. So many people look for categories and assume that a novel is not readable, simply because they haven’t encountered its like before… for there is a public perception that there’s a gender divide and that women read men’s books but that men don’t read women’s. I’m beginning to think that it’s being reinforced through being assumed and would love to break it down.”

So get out there and have a read of Ms Cellophane. It might change your perceptions a little bit. It’s available now from Momentum.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

The Future of Publishing 2020: John Reed | Publishing Perspectives

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Publishing Perspectives takes a reflective look over the past ten years of publishing through the eyes of John Reed, a books editor at Brooklyn Rail and also an esoterical US author of a number of novels during this period. His current novel, Snowball’s Chance, was published by a little-know literary press in 2002 and this year was republished by Melville House Books. Reed, in his article for Publishing Perspectives—Publishing in 2002 vs 2012: Better, Worse or a Stalemate?—goes as far as drawing up a chart to try and evaluate the changes. Reed’s conclusions – if you want to call them that – are of course somewhat subjective and based upon his experiences of the publishing world and the journey of one book through a passage of ten years.

 

The short article by Reed piqued my interest because I’ve been writing a series of extensive articles this year on The Future of Publishing 2020 and you cannot look forward into the coming ten years of publishing without continually glancing over your shoulder into the past. What struck me most about writing the 2020 articles is the realisation that it is a precarious business to label what is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ now and then.

PP’s Editor-in-Chief, Edward Nawotka, summaries Reed’s chart with the following:

Better in 2002: Big Presses, Distribution, Democracy of Literature, Book Coverage, Literature in Education and Copyright.


Better in 2012: Small Presses, Online Book Sales, The Writing Itself, Readership, Self-publishing, Literary Culture and Parody.

Stalemate: Editorial, State of Narrative, Economy of Writers.

While I am in broad agreement with this summary, there are a few things that could be highly debatable. Reed himself says that the kind of editing work carried out on Snowball’s Chance in 2002 is not something we would see from a small or big press today. Therein is at least one reason why I would argue that editing is probably—on the whole—worse today than it was in 2002. The scales weighing curation and nurturing talent against commercial investment, speed to market and success has long tipped in favour of the latter. Publishers’ sales and marketing departments have a greater say in what leaves the front door of the house more than ever before, but it still holds firm to a production proccess with a twelve to eighteen month span. The growth in cottage and small presses and self-publishing has attempted to counter the balance of the scales, and this has led to basement rooms filled with literary champions, cultural zealots, and authors taking a turn in the editorial and publishing chairs. They all beaver away into the twilight hours—some content to smother their lack of publishing know-how with sheer passion. But this is the price of opportunity in the new publishing landscape.

The next part in my series on The Future of Publishing 2020 will focus on discoverability. Is readership better today than it was ten years ago and will it grow in the next ten years? Readership and audience reach for an author are tied inevitably to discoverability. How do you define what readership is? I think there are more people reading today than ever before, but we need to understand what it is they are reading and why they are reading it, rather than assuming readership is about books alone. Only then can we truly evaluate what it is we mean when we talk about readership and how much books have a role to play. This may ultimately prove to be the greatest challenge for publishers in the years ahead—moving from simply being producers of books to content managers.


Reed describes Amazon as being ‘a book and crap bazaar’ in 2002, and despite the millions of dollars Amazon has poured into investment in algorithms, search and marketing tools, the more cynical might argue what has really changed in the intervening years. What has changed is that the reader—faced with a greater sea of choice—now has the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff with whatever discoverability tools are to hand.

"In 2002, you went to the bookstore and looked around. Now, people make their choices, and their choices are influenced by what they see online. Those who are able to resist the constant temptation of propaganda and idiocy are able to employ the internet to inform themselves on subjects of interest and personal aesthetics. It’s that population of people—among the what? six million writers?— that has raised the overall quality of U.S. creative writing. With distribution as is, however, there’s not much evidence of that in the marketplace."

I would add one caveat to Reed’s Publishing Perspectives article, and perhaps it touches on what he calls ‘the economy of writers’—and that for me is a case of quantity over quality. Reed sees the economy of writers as a stalemate right now, but I think we will see this get worse. Just as readership has grown—whether you define it as reading a book or no more than reading the daily news on your iPad every evening—more readers are becoming writers in the new publishing landscape of opportunity. The pie is not getting any bigger in relative terms.

"In 2020, more than 80% of authors will operate independently and will control and manage their entire writing output with less than a quarter earning a full time living. The remaining 20% will be a combination of writers from national writing academies, independent publishing cooperatives and publishing houses owned by media /agency companies." 

From: The Future of Publishing 2020: Control or (Jeff Bezos stole all my books and ate all the hamsters!)  

 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s The Independent Publishing Magazine.

Somebody Please Tell Me The Path To Survival For The Illustrated Book Business

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files.

My eye was caught at the end of last week by a story in The Bookseller that acknowledged that ebooks just haven’t worked for illustrated books. It appears that the publishers of illustrated books they spoke to for the piece think that situation is temporary. The Managing Director of Thames & Hudson, Jamie Camplin, is quoted as saying “you have to make a very clear distinction between the situation now and the situation in five years time.” And Dorling Kindersley CEO John Duhigg emphasized that his team is being kept up to date with digital workflows and innovations, so they can “be there with the right product at the right time.”

But maybe, except for an opportunity that will arise here and there, for illustrated book publishers trying to exploit the same creative development across both print and digital, there won’t ever be a “right time”. There certainly is no guarantee there will be.

Duhigg characterized what he called “the black and white digital business” (but which I think would more accurately be described as “the immersive reading digital business”) as “flowing along” while admitting it is “very different” for the companies with “fully-illustrated lists”.

That’s accurate. Expecting that to change could well be wishful thinking.

Illustrated books in printed form depend on bookstores more than novels and biographies do. If the value in a book is in its visual presentation, then you might want to look at it before buying it, and the view you’d get of it online might not be doing justice to what you’d see if you held the book in your hands.

Camplin sees that optimistically. He has an aggressively modernist view of what will happen with novels. “I don’t see why print should survive at all for fiction, beyond the odd bibliophile” which he apparently believes could open up more bookstore display space for illustrated books.

But if the buyers of Patterson and Evanovich and 50 Shades of Gray aren’t visiting bookstores to make those purchases anymore, will there be any traffic to look at the illustrated books, however prominently they are displayed?

This problem has been nagging at me for a while. Books are illustrated for two reasons: beauty or explanatory purpose, more the latter than the former. When they’re illustrated to better explain, such as showing you how to knit a stitch or make a candle or a piece of jewelry, wouldn’t a video be a better option most of the time? If the illustration is a map, isn’t it likely that being able to manage overlays digitally (for the movement of the weather or the troops on the battlefield or the adjustment of borders over time) will deliver more clarity than whatever stills were in the book?

Of course, these things can be done by book publishers for the digital versions. But they require creating or licensing and then integrating new content assets and rethinking and redesigning the presentation. And that’s not even accounting for the work involved in adjusting the content to multiple screen sizes, a problem that just keeps getting more challenging as more different tablet and phone screen sizes are introduced.

One major publisher I know really endeavors to make ebooks of all their new title output, which includes some imprints that do a lot of illustrated books. Like everybody else, they frequently see ebook sales of 50% and more of their fiction, and 25% or more on immersive-reading non-fiction. But the illustrated books are in the single-digit percentages most of the time, with some of the more successful categories in the very low double-digits.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

My Brief Experiment Going Off KDP Select: At Least I Got This Nifty Blog Piece Out Of It!

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So…

I lasted only a month off of KDP Select. It was an eye-opening experience. I knew that I would lose sales on Amazon without the borrows and KDP free days to keep my books visible on the historical mystery bestseller lists, but my hope was that I would be building enough sales on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and the Smashwords affiliates, to make up for these lost sales. I even told myself I was willing to accept lower overall sales for 2-3 months in order to test the idea that having my book on multiple sites (even if the sales on those sites were lower, on average, than on Kindle) was a workable alternative to exclusivity on Amazon, which is what KDP Select requires.

But this was predicated on being able to figure out how to get my books, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, discovered on these other sites, because my experience is that if readers find my books, they will buy them.

But I was not able to figure out how to do this for Barnes and Noble or Kobo and I didn’t see any evidence that this was something I would be able to solve in a short period of time.

As I have written about before, there are primarily two ways a person ends up buying a book (from a brick and mortar store or estore).

They either:

1) come to the store looking for that book (or books by a certain author) or

2) find the books in the store while browsing.

For authors who are independently published and who sell most of their books in on-line stores, social media (blogs, twitter, facebook, pinterest, etc) can play an important role in getting people to go looking for their books. When a potential reader discovers the title of a book through reading a review or an interview with an author on a blog, or reading a tweet or a facebook post from a friend, they may decide to go looking for this book. The more frequently they run across that author’s name or the title of the book, the more likely they are to do so. In addition, social media usually provides direct links to the product pages of estores so that the impulse to look for the book can lead immediately to the decision to buy the book, which increases the effectiveness of this form of marketing.

Social media also has the benefit of costing less money and requiring less clout than the methods traditionally used by authors to market (reviews in print media, book signings, talks at conventions, interviews on radio or tv, mass mailings, etc).

While I don’t believe that the majority of sales I have made have come through my social media activities, I did understand that I might have to work harder to drive people to look for my books in the Barnes and Noble and Kobo stores because they initially wouldn’t have much visibility in these stores. What I didn’t expect was to have difficulty finding places on the internet that specifically targeted Nook or Kobo owners. If an author wants to connect with Kindle owners there are the Kindle Boards, literally dozens of Kindle oriented facebook pages, book blogs and websites that target Kindle owners, providing free and paid methods of promoting your book. I couldn’t find any similar sites that focused on Kobo beyond their official facebook/websites, and the small number of sites that focused on Nook ebooks generally didn’t have many followers. So beyond tweeting using the #kobo or #nook hashtags, I discovered few ways of reaching out and alerting these specific readers that my books were available on their devices.

Which brings me to the other way people find books–browsing. Whether it was in the libraries of my youth, the bookstores of my middle years, or Amazon in my senior years, I discover new authors primarily by looking on the “shelves,” being intrigued by the cover picture and the title, looking at the short description of the book and blurbs, maybe scanning the first pages, and then deciding to take a chance. This is what I want to have happen with my books, and while Amazon’s browsing experience isn’t perfect, for my books, it turns out Amazon is much better than the other two major ebook stores at helping potential customers find my books on their shelves.

I had some hopes for Barnes and Noble because my books had been in this store before and had done moderately well. While I had been disappointed in the total number of my Nook sales, I thought that if I could figure out how to get my books visible in the right browsing categories I could increase these sales. I was particularly encouraged by the fact that Barnes and Noble gives you 5 categories to put your books in (Amazon now only gives you 2), and that they had some smaller sub-categories that Amazon didn’t have where I knew my historical mysteries would shine (like historical romances in the Victorian/Gilded Age, or American Cozy mysteries.) I also know a number of people who sell well on the Nook, although most of them have at least 5 books for sale, usually in a series, and they have been able to take advantage of either the NookFirst program or have used the first book in their series as their loss leader by making the book 99 cents or free (through price matching.) But they also seemed to have their books in the right categories.

However, my plan to make my books be more visible through better category placement in the Nook store failed completely when I couldn’t even figure out where my books were showing up after I uploaded them through ePubit, much less how to get them into the right categories.

Side note: all the Kindle/Nook/Kobo self-publishing systems have the same problem in that the categories you get to choose from when uploading your book aren’t identical to the categories that show up when browsing. See my discussion of this in my post on Categories.

Both the Amazon and Kobo product pages lists a book’s browsing categories, not so Barnes and Noble. When I went to the categories and subcategories I thought my books might be in and scrolled through, looking for my books, either my book would be missing or the pages would freeze before I got through the hundreds of pages, so I could never determine if they were there. Arggh. (And of course this means a potential customer wasn’t going to find them either.)

So, I did what I had done to get my books properly in the right categories on Amazon when I was first figuring out how browsing worked in that store, I wrote the Barnes and Noble/Nook support staff, first asking what 5 categories my books were in and next asking how I could get them into the 5 categories I wanted.

And got no reply. Not even an automated, “we have received your email and we are working on an answer.” Nothing. So I resent my request a week later (mentioning that this was the second request and that I would appreciate some response.) Nothing. So then I wrote the Director of Digital Content, asking if she could direct me to where I could find out the answers to my questions and asking if she could give me advice on how to better market my books for the Nook. No reply.

Bangs head.

I do believe that if I got my books into the right categories that I would begin to have decent sales on the Nook. I am assuming the books I did sell were primarily to those people who went into the bookstore looking for them (based on my tweets and facebook postings), but I don’t think it makes sense to go another month or two hoping I will finally get an answer, and that my books will finally start showing up where I want them to be. I am leaving my short stories up in this store, and maybe I will eventually get these stories into the right categories and begin to get more sales. If this happens and my sales of these stories increase enough on the Nook, I may try again with the full-length novels.

I also had high hopes for Kobo, after reading about their new self-publishing initiative, WritingLife. What was particularly attractive was that they are letting indies price their books at free, without an exclusivity requirement or time limit. But, despite the promise that they had been consulting with indie authors in beta testing, Kobo’s WritingLife is not yet ready for prime time when it comes to browsing categories or free promotions.

I was pleased with the ability to designate three categories on Kobo and my books actually showed up in the categories I put them in. The problem was that these categories are currently very limited. Most distressing from my perspective, there is no historical mystery category (which is the subgenre that is most aligned with my books). Also, if you put “historical mystery” in as a keyword search there were 51,000 books (many which didn’t appear to be historical mysteries), which says to me the search function isn’t very useful as an alternative way for readers to find this kind of book.

The categories my books do show up in the Kobo store (mystery-women sleuths, historical fiction and historical romance) contain a lot of books, with none of the sub-categories that the Nook has, which also makes it difficult for a book by a relative unknown such as myself to become visible in them. I was facing the old chicken and the egg problem (how do you get a book up high enough in a category for people to find it without sales, but how do you get sales if no one ever sees your book?) This is where I hoped Kobo’s free option would help––as it has helped so many authors who have used the KDP Select free promotion option.

However, when I put my short story, Dandy Detects,up as free on Kobo, I found that Kobo has a very ineffective method of making free books visible. While I don’t know how the Kobo ereader itself works, if you are using the Kobo ap there is no way to find free books because there is no way of finding out what books within a category or subcategory are free. This is true for the on-line Kobo bookstore as well.

For example, in Barnes and Noble’s Nook ebook store, if you click on the mystery-women sleuth category, you find 2338 books, and you can order these books by price, with the free books showing up first (15 of them). By the way, my short story Dandy Detect, which should be in this category as a 99 cent book, isn’t there (sigh).

For Kindle, if you look on the device at the best seller list under the “mysteries-women sleuths” you can look at the free list separately for this subcategory, and in the online store you can see the paid list to the left and the free list to the right in this category. Today the free list for this category is 53 books––so it is easy to have your book visible if it is in the midst of a free promotion. Visible not just to people who are looking for free books, but visible to people who are looking at books that are for sale––maybe the newest Anne Perry––and just glance over to the right and notice a free book that looks intriguing.

In the Kobo store, the mystery-women sleuth category (3303 books) can be sorted by price, but the lowest price is 99 cents, so no free books are visible. Instead, you have to click on the free books link on the home page of the estore, a link that is not available on the ap (I don’t know if it is on the Nook itself). Then there are two options. The most straightforward––on the surface––is a link to one of 6 categories, one that is called “Free Mysteries.” But when you click this link only 20 books show up, most of them public domain, and none of them Dandy Detects. Dead end, and frankly if I was a consumer I would try this category once, and never again.

The second option Kobo gives you is to follow these 3 Step instructions

Step 1: Perform a search using any keyword

Step 2: Filter your results by “Free Only” from the pull-down menu

Step 3: Select your download from the search results

This does work, and Dandy Detects did show up under key words like mystery, historical mystery, fiction historical, but the separation from paid books and the browsing categories means that this method isn’t going to produce the traffic that it would get in either the Kindle or Nook stores where there is a connection between the paid and the free listings. In addition, the Kobo method depends on the consumer to come up with the right key words.

I suspect that these problems (no way to find free books through the Nook ap, limited free books under the Free Mystery link, and the lack of connection between paid and free books) have meant that Kobo readers aren’t accustomed to looking for free promotions the way Kindle readers have become since the introduction of KDP Select.  Even more frustrating, when I downloaded a free copy of Dandy to my Nook ap I discovered that the dashboard for WritingLife doesn’t report free book downloads so I had no way of knowing if anyone is finding it.

The only evidence I have that a few people eventually found the story (probably because I have been tweeting about Dandy being free) is after a few days a small number of other books started to show up in the “You Might Like” listing on Dandy’s product page. But I don’t know how many copies have been downloaded, I don’t know when they were downloaded (so I can’t connect up with my marketing), and, so far, putting Dandy up for free hasn’t translated into anyone buying either of my full-length novels or even the other short story. I also haven’t seen any movement in the total ranking of Dandy in the categories––so I don’t know if I put it back to paid if it would show up any higher in these categories. In short, at this point the Kobo option of putting a book up for free doesn’t seem to help sell books.

While I imagine that the Kobo techs, who have responded to my questions (unlike Barnes and Noble), will try to solve some of these problems, until they do and Kobo readers get used to looking for free books, I don’t anticipate free promotions being as successful as they are currently on Kindle.

Again, as with the Nook, I will keep my short stories in the Kobo store, keep Dandy free, and see if over the next few months some of these problems are resolved. But I don’t want to continue to let my sales on Kindle stagnate on the promise that the conditions for selling in either the Barnes and Noble or the Kobo stores will improve dramatically in the short term.

So…Back I will go to KDP Select next week, when my books have been successfully unpublished in the other stores, and then I can get back to writing and doing an occasional KDP promotion.

Obviously, I would love to hear if any of you have tips on how to get books in the right categories for the Nook, or have had better success with selling on Kobo. But meanwhile, if any of you are Nook or Kobo owners, my novels will be available for these devices until Sunday, August 12, and my short stories will continue to be there indefinitely.

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.

Kindle Lending Library vs Lending Kindle Books (Hint: They’re Different)

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This post, by Moira Rogers, originally appeared on her site on 8/10/12.

Most of my corners of the internet have been ablaze over the piracy witch-hunt that shut down legal lending website LendInk.  I have seen pitchfork-wielding mobs gather many times in the past, but this one was fast, vicious and amplified by careless RTing and a lot of authors who seem to know nothing about ebooks or how they actually work.  This is terrifying to me on so many levels: that people agreed to the Amazon ToS without understanding them, that people jumped to the worst assumptions without taking time for research, and then that they went and made “legal” threats based on those assumptions.

But that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about a misconception so common I’ve seen it on both sides.  I think Amazon is to blame in some ways for not giving two completely different functions slightly more distinctive names.  There are two types of “lending” on Amazon–one that is Amazon-to-Prime-Customer and one that is Paying-Customer-To-Non-Paying-Customer, and people seem really confused over what they both mean.

Kindle Lending

How it Works

Kindle lending (like Nook lending) is a customer-to-customer transaction.  Someone who has legally purchased an eligible kindle title can lend that title to anyone else with a kindle account.  The option shows up on eligible books:

The LOAN THIS BOOK text as seen on a product page on Amazon.com

Ebook lending is meant to mirror the act of physical lending–the book “disappears” from the lender’s account and “appears” in the lendee’s account. The lending period is restricted to two weeks, and a book can only be lent once.  In many ways, it’s far more restrictive than its physical counterpart, even if the internet allows you to easily use your one lend on people outside your immediate geographic area.

Which books are eligible?  For larger publishers, that’s their call.  Lots of the Big Six books are not eligible. Anyone using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), however, is automatically opted in to this lending service if they select the 70% royalty option.  (Note: this is NOT related to KDP Select. This is just about 35% vs 70%.  To receive the 70% royalty, you have to do many things that make your book more useful to Amazon, including opting in to lending and agreeing to stay within a set price range.)

This is the option LendInk was using to arrange book lending.  User A would say, “I have a copy of Cipher by Moira Rogers that I am willing to lend” and User B would say, “I’d like to read that book!”  LendInk would give User B’s e-mail address to User A, and User A would go to Amazon, click the “Loan this book” link and the standard (legal) transaction would occur.  If User C wanted to borrow Cipher, too, they would be out of luck. User A can only loan that book once.  However, User C might click on the “Buy this Book” link and purchase the book.  That would give the author royalties and give LendInk a small referrer fee.  That was the business model in play.

Royalties

 

Read the rest of the post, which also explains the Amazon Prime Lending Library and author lend compensation, on Moira Rogers’ site.

Do Readers Of Different Genres Have Specific Craft Preferences?

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Okay, I’m taking off my crankypants now to write a rare post about craft. Let me open by saying this post will contain some gross generalizations, and I know such blanket statements can’t possibly cover all situations and will certainly be untrue in many cases. I’m only working with blanket statements here to address a larger topic, so please try to bear with me on them and focus on the larger topic.

I have a writer acquaintance who writes hard-boiled detective, murder mystery novels. He will often post excerpts from his work as a promotional gambit (as opposed to looking for feedback), and just as often will post about his disappointment with his sales. I read some of his excerpts, and concluded that to my mind, what’s wrong with his work is that it’s overwritten.

He seems never able to write something like, "She was exhausted," when he could write something like, "The weight of the day, the hopeless yoke of overwork, enveloped her in a fog of somnambulant fatigue." And he doesn’t employ these kinds of sentences sparingly, virtually every line appears to have been laboriously massaged, tinkered with, and obsessed over.

Some people reading this will actually prefer the second, lengthier sentence to the first. Some will also think it’s just fine if most of the sentences in a given book are like the second one, and will admire the craft that went into them. Other people—people like me—, not so much. It got me thinking about reader tastes, and whether it might be possible to predict them.

And here’s where those gross generalizations enter the picture. It seems to me that readers who favor certain genres may also favor certain writing styles.

I am a near-textbook example of the Type A personality. I am most definitely a "bottom line it for me" type, a chronic multitasker, and a very busy person who values efficiency in most aspects of my life. It should come as no surprise that I don’t have much patience for flowery prose and lengthy descriptive passages. I’m not saying that style of writing is necessarily bad, just that it’s not a good fit for me, and I suspect it’s not a good fit for most Type A people.

I have a friend who’s much more laid-back. She can spend a half hour contemplating a painting in a gallery, and days on a road trip with no particular destination or schedule in mind; she may not even bring a map. She’s the type of person who will savor every word of the kinds of passages that I find irritating.

Now, getting back to that writer acquaintance…what if *most* of his target audience shares my sensibilities? What if the type of person who’s most likely to seek out a detective story is Type A? Considering that some of the defining characteristics of Type A people are that we’re very goal-oriented, organized, attentive to details, and love solving puzzles, it doesn’t seem like such a leap to imagine that most of us enjoy a good murder mystery; a murder mystery is essentially a written puzzle, after all. It may not be such a leap to imagine the inverse is true, too: that most people who enjoy murder mysteries are Type A.

If that’s true, then my writer acquaintance is turning off the bulk of his target audience with his verbose, highly stylized prose. We Type A people only want to be given relevant, or possibly relevant, pieces of the puzzle so we can try to solve it. Anything more feels like a waste of our time and energies.

My laid-back friend has plenty of patience for stylized prose, but for her, most murder mysteries are little more than empty exercises in tricky plotting and misdirection. She wants to read books that she feels feed her soul, not just her intellect. She very well might enjoy my writer acquaintance’s work, since it strives to rise high above plot mechanics and even be somewhat philosophical, but she’s not likely to ever find it since she’s not one to seek out murder mysteries or detective novels in the first place.

So for those who write in specific genres or combo genres (e.g., supernatural romance, supernatural thriller), and for whom maximizing sales is a priority, maybe give a thought to the most likely type of person to seek out your books in the first place, and what that person’s preferences might be. I’m not trying to suggest you totally engineer your prose to match some kind of external template, just that appealing to a commercial audience is always a balancing act between pleasing the audience and pleasing yourself.

I have nothing but respect for the writer who follows his vision regardless of whether or not it will lead to commercial success, but for those like that detective novelist, who spends as much time worrying over his sales as his art, writing with the eventual reader in mind may give better results.

 

 

This is a reprint from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.