Outworld Trilogy – Page 8 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

X is for Expectations

What sort of expectations should or shouldn’t you have when you start self-publishing? What is plausible, and what is unrealistic?

Honestly, it’s probably a good idea to go into it with expectations that are fairly low. Most books don’t sell more than a handful of copies, and there’s no way to tell what will and will not take off (if there was, publishing would be a whole lot more lucrative). There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, but it will save yourself a lot of trouble and heartbreak (not to mention, money) if you go in expecting things to be kind of rough for the first few years.

When I started out with “Memoirs of a Snowflake” and a couple of other shorts, they didn’t hardly sell at all. Then I published Genesis Earth, and while I saw maybe 50 sales in the first three months, after that they fell off to single digits for the next two years (and yes, zero is a digit). I made my shorts free for a while, and they got tens of thousands of downloads, but that didn’t really translate into sales.

I didn’t expect to be a runaway bestseller right out of the gate, so I wasn’t too disappointed, but still it was kind of a blow. It was worse when Bringing Stella Home only got about ten sales in its first month before falling off to single digits just like Genesis Earth. I suppose things could have gone differently if I’d promoted a bit more aggressively, but that seemed like such a crap shoot that I channeled that energy into writing instead.

And it paid off eventually. When Star Wanderers took off, it generated some interest in all of my other books–not as much as I was expecting, but enough to bring them up to double digits every other month or so. My Star Wanderers books are all selling in the double and triple digits, and I couldn’t tell you why other than that the story just seems to strike the right chord with enough people. Those books would probably be doing better if I promoted them more, and since it looks considerably better than a crap shoot now, that’s something that I plan to be more aggressive about.

I think there’s an important difference between dreams and expectations. Dreams can suffer through setbacks considerably better, and help to maintain a sense of optimism that is perhaps one of the most important things an indie writer can have. Expectations, though, are much more practical and down to Earth, and can provide a useful yardstick for measuring progress. They can also provide an anchor in the face of uncertainty. Those are important things for an indie writer to have as well.

Expectations can be negative, though. If you don’t expect a book to do well, then perhaps you won’t put as much effort into it, sabotaging and self-rejecting your own work to the point where it really can’t do well. If you expect a book that hasn’t been selling at all to continue not to sell, you may lose sight of important opportunities to put it in front of the people who are most likely to fall in love with it.

Every genre is different, every book is different, and every writer is different. Because of this, no one can tell you exactly what to expect–including me. Like me, you might be stuck making nothing but pizza money for the first two years–or your books might take off fantastically well right from the start. There’s no way to know what will happen until you get your feet wet.

W is for Writing the Next One

If you want to make a living as a writer, you’ve got to write a lot of books. One book is not sufficient to make a career, unless you’re the exception that proves the rule. But that’s okay, because writing is probably the thing that made you want to do this as a career in the first place. I mean, if writing is the thing that you love, wouldn’t you jump at the chance to do it more?

Sadly, I think a lot of writers put way too much pressure on themselves to produce the next book, and too often that takes all the fun out of the writing process itself, turning it into a miserable slog. I’ve certainly been there myself, and I have to say, the whole thing was just ridiculous. As soon as I regained my own confidence, I abandoned all those silly rules and metrics and just decided to write my own way, no matter whether it was right or not.

I used to keep a detailed spreadsheet where I tracked my daily word count, making all these pretty graphs to show how much work I was producing. Then I went overseas for a year, and the stress of living abroad made it difficult to keep up.

I found myself writing or revising stuff just to boost my word count, and abandoning projects at the first sign of a snag just because I knew that if I didn’t keep my momentum, the stresses of living in a foreign country would force me to take a break. It actually threw me into a funk for a while–not because I wasn’t creating stories, but because I wasn’t keeping my word counts.

So I decided to toss all that stuff out the window, and in the last 2-3 weeks before I went home for the summer, I wrote Star Wanderers: Dreamweaver (Part V) from start to finish. Once the pressure was gone, the story practically wrote itself.

Some writers thrive on external pressures like word counts, timers, and the like. Others think that they thrive, but they really don’t. They cling to writing rules and writing metrics out of habit, or because they’re familiar, or because someone with more experience told them that they should. The truth, though, is that every writer is different, and what works to keep one motivated might just get in the way of another.

It can change over the course of your career, too. The chief advantage of using these metrics is that it gives you a sense of progress, which can buoy you up substantially when you’re first starting out. It can be a real challenge getting through your first novel, or even your second or third, so having a way to measure your day-to-day work can be extremely helpful. But after you’ve written a few books and gotten your feet underneath you, those metrics can get in the way, especially if they make you feel guilty.

Of all the kinds of guilt out there, writerly guilt is probably the stupidest. There is nothing immoral or taboo about not hitting your daily word count. It does not make you a bad person or violate the laws of the universe. Why would you put that burden on yourself? It’s not like anyone else is putting it on you. Life is too short to beat yourself up for not writing.

Instead, learn to channel all the things that make writing fun. It can be, after all–that’s how we all got started in the first place! If you can learn to capture the thing that makes writing fun for you, and not lose sight of that, then even when the going gets tough and the writing becomes a slog, you can still get through it and come out with something that you feel proud of.

Not every part of the writing process is fun, just like not every process of climbing a mountain is fun. But taken as a whole, it’s exhilarating and awesome. I mean, check out this video of these two guys climbing Shkhara, the highest mountain in Georgia. There were moments in that expedition that were tough, but the challenge only made it more worthwhile. It’s the same with writing.

I love writing. I want to write more than a hundred books before I die, and I’m already well on my way. Writing an awesome story is its own reward, even though there are many other rewards that often come afterward. Having people read and enjoy your stories is the greatest reward of all, and it more than pays for all of the hard parts that come before.

On an episode of Writing Excuses, Tracy Hickman once said that no matter how many books you write, it’s important to believe that you haven’t written your best book yet. I’ve definitely found that to be true. That’s not to discourage you that the stuff that you’ve written is bad, but to encourage you that your next one will be even better. And more often than not, it will!

U is for Uncertainty

There’s a lot of uncertainty that comes with being a working writer. I’m caught up in the middle of it right now as I get ready to launch a new series, and it’s enough to drive me crazy.

First of all, I’m not sure whether this new series, Sons of the Starfarers, will do well or whether it will flop. It’s a spin-off series from my Star Wanderers books, but the story is very different–much more action/adventure, whereas Star Wanderers is more of a sci-fi romance. I hope that my readers will eat up both of them, but until I actually hit “publish,” there’s no way to know.

The uncertainty is harder for me to deal with because the stakes are a lot higher. When I published Star Wanderers, I did so on a shoestring budget as a sort of side project that I didn’t think would take off. For Sons of the Starfarers, though, I’m going all in, commissioning a cover designer and hiring a professional editor. I don’t anticipate the production costs to go much higher than $300 per book, but there’s going to be nine books at least. Those costs add up rather quickly, and at $2.99 it’s may take a while for these books to earn back their costs.

Still, the stakes could be much higher. I’m a young single guy with no dependents, living on his own in a rather inexpensive part of the United States. My health is good and I’m fortunate enough to have graduated college without any debt. At this stage in my life, I’m in a really good position to take some calculated risks. Pursuing this writing career has definitely been one of them, and so far, it’s paid off about as well as I could have hoped.

But things would be very, very different if I had a wife and kids to take care of. If it’s just me that I have to worry about, I’m perfectly fine with taking risks and committing to projects that may fail spectacularly. But if there were a possibility that someone else could be hurt by my failures–someone I care very much about–I’d be a lot more worried.

At least the nice thing about being an indie writer is that you get your royalty checks like clockwork every month. I can look at my sales reports for March and know exactly how much money is going to come in in June. With legacy publishers, I hear it’s not unusual for royalties and advances to come four or five months late, or to be wildly off when they do come. That’s one uncertainty that I don’t have to worry about because I’m an indie.

Another uncertainty that I don’t have to worry about is that something out of my control in the production process will doom my book. I’m totally in control of my book’s production–if the cover art sucks, I may have to scrounge up a couple hundred bucks to hire a new cover designer, but I can do that without having to worry about my publisher ignoring my concerns. There may be a lot of uncertainty, but as an indie there’s also a lot of flexibility and control.

Uncertainty is a fact of life, whether or not you’re a career writer. Generally, though, where there’s more uncertainty, there’s also more opportunity. When I took the plunge and became a self-published writer, I was under no illusion that my success would be guaranteed–but I also knew that the only limitations would be the ones I put on myself. And personally, I like it that way. The uncertainty might be enough to drive you crazy when you’re staring it in the face, but when the risks pay off, they pay off very well.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Follow the path of least regret.

P is for Pricing

One of the most contentious issues among indie writers is how to price our books. With self-publishing, the decision is left up to the author, which can lead to some wacky rationales for pricing. Here are just a few of them:

My book is worth more than a cup of coffee.

This is clearly a rationale that is driven more by emotion than by reason, yet most of us fall into it when we first start out. I know I did. The idea that people would spend more for a cheap hamburger than for a novel that took me months of agony to write was a blow to my ego, one that took me a while to get over. But I’m glad that I did, because this reason is just silly.

Books are so different from hamburgers or ice creams or lattes that comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges–no, like comparing apples to transistor radios. So what if people are willing to spend more for cheap fast food than for your awesome, amazing, life-changing book? That fact is irrelevant, because the two are not analogous. The quicker you can learn to suck it up and disconnect your prices from your ego, the sooner you’ll learn to treat your writing like a career.

I have to price my books low because I’m a new, unknown writer.

This is another rationale you may be tempted to fall into when you’re first starting out. It grows directly out of impostor syndrome–the fear that you’re really just faking it as an author, and that someone is going to call you out on it if you don’t first.

This also comes more from the emotional side than the reasonable side. Believe it or not, there are readers who have never heard of Stephen King, or James Patterson, or J.K. Rowling, or Brandon Sanderson. Tracy Hickman is fond of pointing out that there are whole provinces in China where no one has ever heard his name. Everyone is an unknown to someone, but that doesn’t mean that your fans will love your books any less–or not be willing to pay any more for them.

For most readers, I think price is just one factor of many, and not nearly as crucial a factor as we might think. When I released my first Star Wanderers omnibus, I priced it at $4.99 while the other parts were at $2.99, and priced myself for the fall in revenue as readers abandoned the individual parts for the omnibus. Instead, both the omnibus and the parts sold about equally, even though the omnibus was clearly a better deal. I have no idea why that was, but it told me that not every reader pinches pennies, at least at price points under $5.

If I price my books too low, I will devalue my work.

This rationale grows out of the idea that sometimes, people are more willing to buy something that costs more because the perceived value is higher. Starbucks does this with coffee, and Apple does this with their devices. The idea is that consumers are conditioned to attach a product’s value to its price, or at least to correlate the two.

I used to believe this, but I don’t anymore. Instead, I think this is the kind of thing that authors want to be true, but they want it so badly that they blind themselves to how things actually are. I recently dropped my prices across the board, and I not only found that my sales increased, but that my overall revenue increased as well. In my experience, readers attach value much more to things like blurbs, samples, and cover art than they do to price, and that “devaluing” your work is a great way to hook more readers with a great deal. In fact, I now believe that the best price is the one at which other writers scream at you to stop devaluing your work.

I need to price my book high enough so that I’m earning at least minimum wage.

Books earnings don’t work like wage earnings at all, and confusing the two will cause even more problems than confusing your book with a cup of coffee. Seriously.

Writing isn’t about getting paid for putting in your time, it’s about getting paid for the value that you create. If you create something that the market deems has value, it becomes an income stream that will continue to pay you for years, perhaps even decades. With a wage job, on the other hand, all you get is a paycheck.

The two paradigms are so dissimilar that I don’t even know where to begin in explaining how stupid it is to compare indie writing to a wage job. When you are a self-published writer, you are not an employee–you are the boss. You don’t merely have a job–you own a business. Your earnings don’t come from payroll, they come from revenue. At a certain point, higher prices lead to lower revenue, and sometimes that point puts you below minimum wage. It sounds tough, but that’s just how the market works.

You’re not entitled to a living wage just because you wrote a book. Write more books, write better books, and keep on publishing them until your revenue does exceed minimum wage. Pretty soon, you’ll be shocked to find that you’re still getting paid for work that you did years ago, and still making money even when you take a day, or a week, or a month off. I know that I certainly am.

There are other weird and wacky rationales for book pricing, but those are the biggest ones that come to mind. As for rationales that actually make sense, I can think of only two:

I want to maximize my revenue with my current books.
I want to build a following for my future books.

Once you’ve figured out which one you want to follow, the only rational way to figure out what prices work the best is to experiment with them, even if the experiments make you cringe. You have to be data driven, and not emotionally driven, if you want to find the sweet spot.

For the past few months, I have been experimenting with the prices of my science fiction books, collecting the weekly data from Amazon and watching the trends. Here is what I’ve found:

Perma-free — The best price for attracting new readers, but only if the free book leads directly to another book, such as the next book in the series. This is also the easiest and most effective price point to promote.

$.99 — The best price for building an audience, and the most effective way to create a sales funnel in conjunction with a perma-free book. When I dropped the prices of my Star Wanderers stories to $.99 from $2.99, I saw a marked increase in the percent of readers who went on to buy Part II after buying Part I. I also saw an increase in positive reviews, both on Amazon and Goodreads.

$1.99 — A dead zone. It really is. This price point has all of the drawbacks of $.99 and $2.99, with none of the benefits. When I briefly priced my Star Wanderers books at this price point, sales AND revenue fell below what they were at $.99.

$2.99-$3.99 — The best price points for maximizing revenue, at least in science fiction. At $2.99, you jump from the 35%-40% revenue rate to the much more lucrative 65%-70% rate. And even though $3.99 might seem low, I’ve generally found that I sell enough copies at that price point to more than make up the difference from the increased earnings per sale (but lower sales) at a higher price point.

That said, when the Star Wanderers books were all $2.99, they didn’t sell nearly as well, even with the first book in the series perma-free. And the fall in revenue when I dropped the price to $.99 was not nearly as dramatic as I had expected. Instead of falling to 1/6th of what it had been at $2.99, it fell to more like half, due mostly to increased sales of the omnibuses, which stayed up at $3.99.

$4.99 — I’m not sure what I think of this price point. I priced my Gaia Nova books at $4.95 for years, and never saw many sales come from it. Then again, those books have yet to really take off, so I can’t say with any authority that this price point is really bad. However, I will probably avoid it in the future, except possibly for omnibus works.

$5.99 — Again, I can’t really say that this point is dead, but I can say that my sales were much more sporadic here than they were at $3.99. At best, though, I’d generally earn as much revenue per week at this point as I would at $3.99. At worst, I’d earn nothing.

I can’t say anything about the higher price points because I haven’t experimented with them. As for print books, I don’t sell enough to really be able to say. Again, this is only for science fiction–pricing varies widely from genre to genre, so what works for what I write may not work for what you write. Even within science fiction, I’m sure there are some differences.

At the end of the day, though, I think it’s important to recognize that pricing is an important part of the author-reader relationship. You don’t want your readers to feel like they’re getting screwed–you want them to feel like they’re getting a good deal. For a long time, I think I priced my Star Wanderers books a bit too high, and generated a bit of ill-will among readers for it. Even though I want to earn a living, I hate it when price becomes an obstacle to readers enjoying my books.

As David Gaughran put so astutely in one of his recent posts, value is something that readers attach to a book, whereas price is something that we as self-publishers attach to it. If the price is lower than the value, readers will be satisfied enough to keep coming back for more–and that right there is the key to building a career.

M is for Marketing

Whenever indie writers get together to talk shop, the discussion almost always turns to marketing. How to sell more books and get more readers–that’s what everyone wants to know.

Honestly, I’m not much of a marketing expert. My approach to marketing can basically be summed up in one sentence: “figure it out later.” That is not a good long-term strategy! And yet, in a weird and crazy way, it’s actually kind of worked.

A lot of people say that you have to market your books–that if you don’t spend XXX amount of time on it, or do XXX number of things, or hit XXX goal, that you’re doing it wrong. And because most writers have this weird sort of guilt complex built around how we work, we absorb these “rules” into the list of other things we feel guilty about and beat ourselves up for not doing it–or worse, spend way too much time and effort doing things that aren’t really working, simply because we feel that we have to.

Right from the start, I figured that that mindset was just silly. Good marketing isn’t about following rules, it’s about doing things that bring results. When I first started out, I figured I didn’t have enough books out to warrant any sort of a marketing push. What good is it to bring a bunch of people to your store if the shelves are all empty? So for the first several years, I focused almost entirely on writing more (and better) books.

That’s not to say that I didn’t do any marketing at all. Here are some of the things I’ve tried out so far, and whether I decided to keep them or not:

Putting sample chapters at the end of each book — I eventually realized that doing this pads the end of your book and makes readers feel cheated when they hit the 85% mark and realize that the story is over. Instead, I now put a short teaser and a picture with the cover.
Exchanging short blurbs with other writers — I tried this out with my friend Kindal Debenham, where we both inserted book teasers for each other at the end of our books. I have no idea whether it’s worked or not, but it’s something I’d do again with my fellow author friends.
Making a couple of books permanently free — Free is an awesome way to move a large number of books very quickly, but in order for it to boost the sales of other books, I’ve found that 1) it has to be a complete story, 2) it has to be its own unique story, not just based on an excerpt, and 3) it has to be directly connected with the other books in some way, such as the first book in a linear series. Of course, that’s just my own experience–I’m sure there are people who manage to make it work doing it differently. Free is great because it takes off a lot of the pressure and makes your book a much easier sell, not just for you, but for your fans to share with their friends.
Going on blog tour — I did a couple of small blog tours for my first couple of books, and while I didn’t see a huge explosion of sales from it, it’s something that I would do again. In general, though, I think that blog tours are better for retaining existing fans and keeping you fresh in their minds than it is for acquiring new ones.
Ending every book with an author’s note — I’ve found that this is a great way to build relationships with your fans–to become more than just another name on a book to them. The fan mail I’ve gotten from readers who mention the notes is great, and I think it’s converted at least a few casual readers into genuine fans. That said, I have gotten some negative feedback too, so these days I try to keep them short and unobtrusive for those who don’t care to read them.
Being active on social media — When my Star Wanderers books first really started to take off, I was teaching English in a developing country where my internet access was limited. Consequently, I’m extremely skeptical of any marketing advice as it relates to social media. That said, I think it’s a great way to connect with your fans if it’s a platform that you enjoy. I’m not really keen on Facebook, but I do enjoy Twitter, so that’s a good place to find me (my handle is @onelowerlight).
Keeping an email list for new releases — This is one thing that other successful indies seem to encourage the most. My list is only about a hundred strong right now, which is not enough to lead to a huge explosion of sales, but the results are direct and measurable. It’s definitely something that I’ll continue to do.
Participating in a group promo with other authors — I’ve had mixed results with this. In 2012, I did one that resulted in several thousand downloads and boosted my Star Wanderers series to a whole new level. But in 2013, I did another one that completely fizzled. In general, if the group promo seems pretty well organized, I’ll participate in it, but if it seems that the organizers don’t really know what they’re doing, I’ll back out.
Advertising on a site/newsletter like Bookbub, Kindle Books & Tips, Ereader News Today, etc. — This is something I’ve just started to try out, and the results have been astounding. Some sites will give a much bigger boost than others, but the ones that do work can work extremely well. Of course, I’ve only tried this with Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I), which is free–I’m not sure how effective it would be at moving paid books.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that marketing doesn’t have to feel sleazy. In fact, when you’re doing it right, it almost never does. For every book that you write, there is someone out there who would love to read it–good marketing is about connecting those people with your books, helping them grow into their natural audience.

Marketing is definitely important, but it’s not something that you have to guilt yourself over or treat like a chore. In fact, it can actually be a lot of fun! I’ve certainly made my own fair share of mistakes, but I’m learning from them and trying out new things. So long as you base your marketing decisions off of measurable results and not a particular dogmatic position or someone else’s opinion, you’ll be in good shape–even if your plan is to figure it out later.

K is for Keywords

I’ll take a quick break from formatting and uploading to do today’s A to Z post. Since B was on blurbs and C was on cover art, I figure it’s only natural that K should be on keywords. Cover art and book blurbs are definitely important in making a book stand out in all the right ways to a reader, but what good is that if they can’t find it? That’s where keywords come in.

In the Author Earnings Report, Hugh Howie and an anonymous data analyst took a snapshot of the top 7,000 genre books on the Amazon kindle store (romance, mystery, thriller, and science fiction & fantasy) and found, among other things, that the self-published books received better reviews on average than the legacy published books. There was a lot of hooplah about this in the indie world when the report came out, and while it’s just speculation, the most convincing reason for this that I’ve heard is that indies are generally smarter with their metadata, such as categories and keywords.

“Metadata” is data that’s about your book, as opposed to its actual content. In an ebook, there’s an xml file that ends with the extension .opf which contains the book’s metadata, as well as its organization and a guide to help your reading device navigate it. Within the metadata, there’s a tag called dc:subject, which is where the keywords go. For example, here’s a screenshot of the .opf for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I), with the keywords highlighted:

Okay, so maybe that’s more than you needed to know. What can I say? With all the ebooks I’m reformatting, I’m knee deep in the stuff.

If all of this sounds too technical, don’t worry–all of the publishing platforms, including Amazon KDP, automatically overwrite your .opf file with whatever you put in the keyword field when you publish (On KDP, that’s on the first page with the book details, just under the categories). So even if you don’t know how to format an ebook, you can still add keywords pretty easily.

But what words should you actually put there? That’s the thousand dollar question. For the first two years, I just threw the first few words about the book that came to mind. Needless to say, that’s not the best way to do it.

Keywords are important because they help people who are searching for books like yours to find it. For example, if you search the kindle store for “romantic space opera,” Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I) comes up on or near the top (I’m not sure if an Amazon search will show different results for different people, based on reading preferences–it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if it did). That’s because “romantic” and “space opera” are two of my keywords. All the other books in the series have the same keywords, so if you scroll down the search results you should be able to find them.

But it goes a lot further than that. There are actually a bunch of smaller subcategories which you can only get into through careful use of keywords. The book details page on KDP allows you to choose two categories for your book, but if you look on the page for Outworlder, you’ll find it listed in the following categories:

Books > Literature & Fiction
Books > Romance > Science Fiction
Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Science Fiction
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Colonization
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Galactic Empire
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Exploration
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera

Now you can see why I used “colonization,” “galactic empire,” and “space exploration” as keywords. Those aren’t categories that you can choose from the drop down list, but you can get into them through keywords.

Finally, when browsing the science fiction section of the Kindle store, you’ll notice a bunch of options that readers can use to narrow the search. Under characters, this includes “pirates,” and under genre, this includes “romantic”–hence why I chose those as keywords. By browsing this way, readers can actually drill down to a tiny, tiny section of the store, where your book can really stand out. But the only way to make sure your books are in there is through a strategic use of keywords.

Since Amazon limits you to seven keywords when you upload your book, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. First of all, you shouldn’t include a word that’s already part of the title, subtitle, series, or author name. For years, I put in “Joe Vasicek” as a keyword, just in case someone did a search for that. Turns out, Amazon already listed me at the top of the search results since that data is included in my author name.

Second, you shouldn’t use keywords to describe data that’s nested in other data. For example, I don’t use “science fiction” as a keyword because that’s included in the FICTION > Science Fiction > Space Opera category, which I chose from the drop down list. Likewise, I didn’t use “science fiction romance” as a keyword because I figure the combination of “romantic” and my other keywords should cover that.

I’m still pretty new when it comes to keywords, and there’s a lot I have left to learn. For example, what’s the best way to do keywords across a series? Is it better to keep the same ones, to make sure that they’re all grouped together in the same categories, or to use different ones that are more accurate to each book? For Star Wanderers, I’ve used the same exact keywords for all the books, because they’re all direct sequels or parallaxes, and thus are much closer together. My Gaia Nova novels are more like loosely connected stand-alones, so for the books in that series I do different keywords.

Keywords are also something you have to keep an eye on, because the best practices change. For example, Amazon could restructure their subcategories, splitting or merging them into entirely new ones. They could also change the drill down options on the kindle store. Amazon is constantly experimenting with new ways of doing things, which means that we should be experimenting as well.

And that’s just Amazon. I don’t even know what the best practices are for Kobo, or Smashwords, or Barnes & Noble. That’s yet another thing on my long, long publishing to do list.

So there you have it. I hope that’s helpful, if you’re just dipping your toes into the world of self-publishing. And if you have any knowledge to add to this, by all means please do so in the comments below!

New STAR WANDERERS cover art!

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was getting some new cover art for the Star Wanderers books. Well, the art for the first half of the series is in–check it out!

A big thanks to Libbie Hawker, who did the cover art. I’m really pleased with how they’ve come out so far. We’ve been working on the proofs for the next four books, and they’re going to be really awesome as well!

I’ll reformat the ebooks and upload them to Amazon and the other retailers tomorrow. It’s probably going to take all day, but they should be up soon.

In other news, I finished the first draft of Comrades in Hope! The final word count clocked in at a little over 41,000, pushing it from novella-length into short novel territory. I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out, though it probably needs some work before it’s ready to go out. If all goes well, I’ll be publishing it before the end of June–a tight schedule, to be sure, but not an impossible one to keep. I’m totally immersed in the Sons of the Starfarers series right now, so it’s going to be really awesome when the first three books launch!

That’s just about it. A big thanks to everyone who picked up a copy of Star Wanderers: Outworlder on Amazon today! The book hit #203 in the Free Kindle Store, due in large part to an ad on Kindle Books and Tips. Needless to say, I am really shocked.

Take care, and thanks for reading!

G is for Genre

Are there certain genres that indie writers should write in if they want to be successful? Are there other genres that they should avoid?

This is one of those pieces of common wisdom that really irks me, and not just because I write in a genre (science fiction) that isn’t as mainstream or popular as others. I think it’s a myth that you have to write in a “hot” genre in order to have success, especially if you’re an indie author. Here’s why:

1. You don’t have to be a bestseller to be an indie success.

This is something that Hugh Howie repeats all the time: that the true success stories in self-publishing aren’t the mega bestsellers like him or Bella Andre or H.M. Ward or Amanda Hocking, but the thousands and thousands of little guys who are carving out a comfortable space for themselves in this new world of publishing. You don’t have to be a huge bestseller to make a living as an indie writer–you can do quite well for yourself with a small but dedicated fan base.

I’m sure there are some people whose personal definition of success includes the kind of fame and recognition that comes along with being a bestseller. That’s fine–everyone has to define what ‘success’ means for themselves, based on their own personal goals and dreams. But being a bestseller is definitely not the baseline, at least for an indie writer.

2. Ebooks and epublishing have opened exciting new opportunities for niche genres.

Before epublishing, you needed a fairly extensive infrastructure to bring a book to market. Besides designing the book, you had to pay for printing, pay for shipping, pay for distribution and marketing to bookstores, pay for returns and remainders … the list goes on and on. Consequently, it was harder for niche genres to really get a foothold.

With ebooks, the economics of publishing have been flipped on their head. The marginal cost of producing another ebook is zero–digital content can be copied endlessly at virtually no cost. Shipping costs are also zero, and global distribution is as easy as uploading the book to Amazon’s servers–again, at zero cost.

Because of this, there’s room now for niche genres with much smaller readerships to actually turn a profit. And that’s what we’re seeing–an explosion of all sorts of niche, specialty, and experimental new genres. Books no longer have to be just like the Latest Big Thing (only different) in order to earn back their costs. There’s room for everyone in the new world of publishing.

3. It’s better to write what you love than to write what you think will sell.

The two aren’t always mutually exclusive, of course. Maybe you love a variety of genres, so that you’d be equally satisfied writing romance as you would writing something more niche like Amish vampire steampunk. But if all you’re doing is chasing the money, chances are that your heart won’t be in it nearly as much as it would if you were writing what you love. And if your heart isn’t in it, you won’t be able to bring that creative passion to the project that readers really love.

When I wrote Star Wanderers, I was following my passion. It was a science fiction story unlike any I’d either written or read, but I followed it where it took me without worrying whether it would sell. The genre description that best fits that series would probably be romantic frontier space opera–definitely a niche. But because I was passionate about it, the books were able to find readers who share that passion and touch them in ways that other books hadn’t. And guess what? Those are my best selling books.

There is a business side to publishing, but there is also an artistic side. You’ve got to be true to both. If your inner artist thrives on the challenge of chasing the market, great–go for it. But if doing that feels like you’re being unfaithful to your creative vision, you’ll probably write a better book if you strive to be authentic. And ultimately, I think that authenticity has a lot more to do with a book’s success than the genre it’s written in.

Readers are far, far more diverse than we give them credit. So long as you can write well and tell a good story, you can find success no matter which genre you write in.

D is for Discoverability

If there’s one thing that indie writers like to talk about when they talk shop, it’s “discoverability”–how to make their books stand out so that readers can discover them. You don’t have to spend much time on author blogs or writing forums to find some pretty intense discussions about this topic. For those of us trying to make a living at this gig, it’s something we constantly obsess about.

So what’s the best way to boost your discoverability? What works, and what doesn’t? If I had the answers to those questions, I could probably make a lot more money writing “how-to” books! However, here are a couple of books I’ve found that do an excellent job answering this question.

The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success is an excellent resource for ebook marketing ideas that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. The book won’t cost you, either–it’s available on Smashwords for free. The author, Mark Coker, is the founder and CEO of Smashwords, and he wrote this book to help Smashwords authors succeed. Definitely worth giving a read.

Let’s Get Visible is the other book on discoverability that I’d recommend. For this book, David Gaughran collaborated with a number of other indie writers from KBoards to figure out the best ways to work with Amazon’s algorithms. It’s an excellent book that explains some of the best practices for free giveaways, price pulsing, and choosing keywords and categories.

Those are the two books I’d recommend. There are other good ones I’m sure, but there are also a lot of scammy marketing books that are just out there to take your money. These ones aren’t scam books at all. Without getting any benefit from the authors of these books for saying it, I can vouch from experience that their advice is pretty solid.

So what’s worked for me personally? I can point to a few things:

Writing in a series. If your books are grouped together by series, then readers who enjoy one of those books are more likely to try out another. They’re less likely to read one book and forget about it because all of the books are connected. In this way, each of your books helps readers to discover the others.
Give some books away. Readers love free books. They’re a lot more likely to try out a book by an unknown writer if it’s free than if it costs any money at all–even as little as $.99. I know a lot of writers don’t like giving away their books for free, but if you’ve got ten other books that readers go on to buy after reading the first one, it’s worth a lot more than having eleven full-price books that no one ever buys.
Make the first book in a series permanently free. That’s what I did for Star Wanderers, and the strategy has worked extremely well. Before that, I had a couple of short stories and non-series books that were perma-free, but none of them gave my other books much traction. But with Star Wanderers, it’s easy to see that the first book leads to the second book, the second book leads to the third book, etc.
Don’t let your price become an obstacle to new readers. The principle behind perma-free + series that makes it work is the sales funnel, where you try to spread some of your books as widely as you can in order to funnel people to your other books. But if your first book is free and all the other books are priced so high that price becomes an obstacle, readers are bound to get irked and drop out. I’ll say more about this in P is for Pricing, but one thing I’ve learned is that it really helps if you’ve got a lot of low-priced books that readers can move on to after picking up your free stuff and before moving on to the higher priced stuff.
Write and publish lots of books. It wasn’t until I had maybe fifteen books out that I started to notice that my entire catalog was working together. When my Star Wanderers books sold well, I saw more sales of my other books too. When you have enough books out, they work together to sell each other. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that on average, one person with fifteen books out sells more than fifteen people with one book each.
Book blurb, cover, metadata. That’s the trifecta–if you don’t hit all three of those, nothing else you do may ultimately matter.

And of course, there’s the most important thing of all: write a damn good book. If your book sucks, all the discoverability in the world isn’t going to save it.

When you’re an indie writer, it often feels as if publishing a book is like tossing a message in a bottle out into a churning sea. You have no idea where your book is going to end up, and the marketplace is as wide and as menacing as a stormy ocean. Lots of books sink to the bottom of that ocean, where no one ever finds them. But plenty of other books stay afloat, selling a copy here or a copy there–just enough to stay up at the surface. And eventually, the winds of the marketplace cast it up on a distant shore, where it’s discovered by a fan.

But here, the analogy breaks down. Because unlike a beachcomber who finds a message in a bottle, a fan doesn’t have to wait for your next book to come to them–they can go out and find them directly. So the more books you have out there, the greater the likelihood that they’ll eventually be discovered. And if they’re out in the marketplace for long enough–out where the potential fans can discover them–then eventually they will grow into their natural audience.

That’s been my experience, at least. There are a lot of other things that I’m experimenting with now, but these are the things that I know work for sure–at least for me.

C is for Cover Art

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but the truth is we all do. In fact, the cover probably sells a book more than the book blurb does. Whether in print or in digital format, it’s the first part of the book that readers see, and often makes the difference between “meh” and “hmm, what is this? I want to find out more!”

So how do you do cover art when you’re an indie? Is it better to make your own, or hire a designer? If you do hire a designer, how much can you expect to pay?

Honestly, when I started out, I think I invested a little too much into my covers. The first novel I published was Genesis Earth:

The cover art is gorgeous, and from an artistic view I’m very, very happy with it, but it took a long time for the book to earn that money back–far longer than the expense really justified. I would love it if all of my books could have awesome covers like this, but when you’re first starting, not every project justifies that sort of expense.

The thing to keep in mind when you do covers as an indie is that you can always change them. When you first start out and you don’t know how well a book is going to do, there’s nothing wrong with doing it on a shoestring budget and reinvesting those earnings later. There is a bit of a feedback loop, where a bad cover will hold a book back, but it’s not that hard to make a cover that’s not great, but acceptable.

Case in point, check out the first cover I did for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I):

The cost for this art was $0. I made it myself, using freeware fonts and public domain space art from NASA. It’s not nearly as gorgeous as the cover for Genesis Earth, but it says “space!” in a sci-fi sort of way, and that’s what I was going for. And even with a mediocre cover, this was the book that really started to take off.

Of course, as soon as those books were earning enough, I made plans to reinvest that money in proper cover art. Here is the new cover for Outworlder:

I’m working with a cover designer right now to redo all the other ones in the series along a similar vein. In the next couple of weeks, expect to see some cover reveals!

In general, I’ve found that there are three approaches to cover art: doing it completely yourself, hiring a cover designer to make an cover from stock art, and hiring an illustrator to paint an original illustration. The last is probably the most expensive, though it does depend on the illustrator–you can find good illustrators on sites like Deviantart whose rates are quite reasonable. But the quality varies a lot.

Besides the art itself, a key part of the cover is the typography. One thing I’ve learned from working with cover designers is that they can do amazing things just with the fonts and font effects for your title. That’s probably the biggest benefit of going with a cover designer as opposed to an illustrator.

In fact, if you can afford to commission an original illustration, you can probably find a cover designer who will give you a deal on the typography. It is something you can learn yourself, but the difference between you and a cover designer is often the difference between acceptable and awesome.

Like anything with self-publishing, cover design is something you can learn–perhaps something you can excel at–but you probably can’t excel at that and everything else at the same time. What I’ve found is that I’m okay at doing my own cover art, but not awesome. From here on out, I expect I’ll be hiring cover designers.

At the same time, my books are earning enough that I can justify that expense. If I were first starting out, I’d probably DIY it or barter with other writers who do their own covers. A cover isn’t static–you can always change it later.

Case in point, check out the covers for Bringing Stella Home:

I got a good deal on the illustration for the first cover, but frankly, it’s not that great. The second cover was more expensive, but I’m much happier with it. What I’m probably going to do next is find a cover designer who can redo the title/author typography, since I did that myself and it kind of shows.

So that’s been my experience with cover art. It’s important to get it right, but you do have to work to find the best solution that works for your budget. Fortunately, when you’re an indie, your cover is something you can always upgrade.