Uncategorized – Page 83 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Y is for Yog’s Law

Anyone who was trying to break into publishing before the ebook revolution should be familiar with Yog’s law, which states:

Money should always flow toward the writer.

The purpose of the law was to keep new writers from falling into one of the many writing scams. Places that charged writers to publish were almost all vanity presses, and those that weren’t didn’t give writers access to the distribution channels necessary to make their work widely available. If you wanted to have a career, you had to go with a publisher, and the best way to tell if a publisher was legitimate was to look at how the money flowed.

Nowadays, with self-publishing, the line between writer and publisher has been blurred. An indie writer can expect to contract out work, sometimes to the tune of several hundred or even thousand dollars, in order to produce a professional product. In these cases, money clearly is not flowing to the writer. So what does this mean for Yog’s Law?

Some people have attempted to reformulate Yog’s law by drawing a distinction between the writing side of the business and the publishing side. While I think that that’s instructive, I’m not convinced it’s entirely useful. The distinction is not always clear, and even where it is, in practical terms it’s basically meaningless. You can just as easily fall for a publishing scam with your publisher hat on as with your writer hat.

So is Yog’s Law obsolete? Is it a curious relic of a publishing era that is passing into the twilight of history? In its old formulation, perhaps, but I would like to propose a new formulation that is perhaps even more relevant to today’s publishing industry than the old one ever was. That formulation is as follows:

Control should always flow toward the writer.

In the old days of publishing, writers had virtually no control over their careers. Publishers decided which books would make it to readers, which writers would get the attention of the publishing establishment, and how many books those writers could publish in a year. Authors had almost no say in their cover art, marketing, or any other aspect of the production and distribution of their work. In such an environment, the only assurance they had that their publisher would do a reasonably competent job was by seeing whether they put their money where their mouth was–hence Yog’s Law.

But today, writers do have control. We have a variety of publishing options today, and money isn’t the only factor in determining whether a path is legitimate. In fact, it may be one of the worst factors. Not only have advances gotten worse in the last few years, but the rights grabs have gotten so bad that signing a traditional book deal today basically amounts to selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. Yes, money is flowing to the writer, but the writer is still getting screwed.

Control means being able to have the final say on the cover art, the editing, or on an other aspect of a book’s production. It means that important stuff like the metadata or book description is not left to an entry-level employee that the author has never met.

Control means that no contract should be one-sided. It means an end to non-compete clauses of any kind. It means that rights reversions should actually have meaning, and that no book should be tied up for the life of copyright.

Control means that the bulk of the revenue should go to the person who does the bulk of the work. Bringing a book to market is not a challenge in the digital age, but writing a book certainly is. Publishers exist to serve writers, not the other way around.

Control means that a writer should know exactly what services they are paying for. If they commission work from a freelance editor or cover designer, they should be the one who directs that work, not a third-party who doesn’t also assume some of the risk if the project doesn’t work out.

By the standard of control flowing to the writer, most of the contracts coming out of New York fail miserably. That is not acceptable in an age where the New York publishers aren’t the only game in town. If a writer can make a living by going it on their own, then anyone who pays less than a living wage is basically running a scam.

Control should always flow toward the writer. Money used to serve as a proxy for control, but now that we have the real thing it’s no longer the best measure. Control, not money, is what you need to build a career.

Next A to Z post tomorrow

Sorry, no A to Z Challenge post today. I moved to a new apartment, and when I wasn’t moving I was spending time with my girlfriend … so yeah, not a great day for productivity. On the plus side, though, Lindsey Stirling’s new album just came out, and it’s pretty dang awesome.

Did I mention that I have ADHD? About that

Don’t worry, I’ve got topics for X and Y, and they’re both good ones. But for now, I think I’m going to go sleep in a private bedroom for the first time in over a year.

V is for Vanity Presses

There is a HUGE, HUGE difference between self-publishing as an indie and publishing through a vanity press. So huge, in fact, that the two are not even comparable. An indie author is a professional and an entrepreneur. A vanity press author is a victim of a scam.

A “vanity press” is a publishing company that caters to the vanity of anyone who wants to see their name on the cover of a book. They make their money not by selling books, but by selling overpriced services to naive and starry-eyed writers. If you have any self-respect at all, you should stay as far away from these companies as possible.

I am not an expert on vanity presses by any means, but here are some things that strike me as red flags that a company might be one:

They claim to be a “self-publishing” company (an oxymoron if there ever was one).
They use the phrase “published author” anywhere in their sales pitch.
They offer to publish your book on Amazon (you can publish your own book on Amazon).
They offer a “publishing package” that costs upwards of a thousand dollars.
They offer a “marketing package” that costs even more.
They require you to pay for your own editing and/or cover.
They have any sort of affiliation with Author Solutions.
David Gaughran has written a blog post lambasting them.
They require you to buy X number of print copies.
Their sales representatives won’t stop calling you.
They claim that they can get your book on Oprah.
They claim that they can get J.K. Rowling to review your book.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. If you have any to add, please do so.

The scary thing is that the big-name legacy publishers are not only in bed with these crooks, they’re openly fornicating with them. When Penguin Random House bought out Author Solutions, the largest and arguably the dirties vanity press in existence, they did nothing to clean up the company–in fact, they gave Author Solutions CEO Kevin Weiss a seat on the board! And other legacy publishers like Simon & Schuster responded by contracting with Author Solutions subsidiaries like Archway to do exactly the same way.

Vanity presses are scams. They exist to exploit the dreams and vulnerabilities of new writers, robbing them of their money and their dignity. They are extremely good at giving themselves the appearance of legitimacy, which has been made all the easier by the fact that the traditional publishing establishment has embraced them. You will find them at large publishing expos like Books Expo America. You will find favorable articles about them in venerable trade publications like Publisher’s Weekly. Their poison has infected the very heart of the legacy publishing industry.

At the heart of the indie publishing revolution is the idea that no one should come between writers and readers. Vanity presses violate that principle in every possible way–they are blood-sucking parasites with no respect for writers or for readers. For the sake of your career, for the sake of your books–hell, for the sake of your own self-respect–you should stay as far away from them as possible.

T is for Thousand True Fans

How many fans does an independent artist/creator need in order to make a living? That’s the question that sparked the idea of the Thousand True Fans. As the original blog article mentioned, the basic idea is that

a creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Sounds fair enough. But what’s a “true fan”? As the article describes it,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

The article goes on to crunch the numbers, showing that if each of these thousand true fans spends, on average, $100 per year on the creator’s stuff, that this adds up to $100,000 per year. If the creator is able to produce all that stuff independently, cutting costs and keeping a large cut of whatever it is they sell, then that can very reasonably add up to a living (or so the theory goes).

So how does this apply to writing? I doubt there are many readers–even true fans–who spend $100 a year on their favorite author. Maybe for the ridiculously overpriced hardcovers, but even then, most readers are so voracious that they can’t afford to spend that kind of money very often, even on their favorite authors. Also, most of us indies tend to price our books pretty low, to the point where we probably don’t publish enough books in a year to add up to $100.

Still, the basic principle of the theory still applies. Lindsay Buroker has an interesting take on it:

The gist is that you don’t have to be a mega seller. You just need X number of true fans (people who love your stuff and will buy everything you put out), and you’re assured that you can make a living at your art, so long as you to continue to produce quality material.

I believe, for an indie author, the number is probably around 10,000 rather than 1,000 (we only make a couple of dollars on a sale, after all). This is a large number, but, given that we can so easily get our work into Amazon, B&N, etc. where millions of eyeballs await, finding this many loyal readers isn’t infeasible, especially when you realize you can collect them over years, maybe even decades, so long as you’re in this for the long haul.

She crunches the numbers like this: if you publish two novels per year and price them at $5, at the standard 70% royalty you will make $60,000 per year if you sell at least 10,000 of each of them.

Lindsay Buroker has more experience with making a living on her writing than I do (she’s basically been doing it since 2012 or so, whereas I’m almost there but not quite). However, I think it’s possible to make a living with a lot fewer than 10,000 true fans, and perhaps even less than 1,000.

True fans are the key, but not because they’re the only ones who buy your books. For every true fan, there are lots of casual fans, and perhaps even more readers who buy one of your books but don’t necessarily go on to buy all the others. However, the true fans are the ones who will rant and rave about your book to all their friends and help to generate word of mouth. Thus, your true fans will help to bring in a steady stream of new readers, some of whom may become fans themselves. It’s this constant process that keeps a book selling for years and years, even after all the true fans have already bought it.

I doubt that I have more than a hundred true fans right now. I’ve met a few of them, so I know that they’re out there, but there’s only about a hundred people on my mailing list and only about a third of them click on the links in the new release emails I send out. However, I’m definitely more than halfway to making a living off of my books. It’s not just the true fans who are making that possible, but everyone between true fans and casual readers.

However, I do think that the Thousand True Fans theory is a useful way to think about things when you’re an indie author. For one thing, true fans make your income more predictable. If you know how many true fans you have, you can guesstimate how many books you’ll sell in the first couple of months after release, which helps to make your earnings more predictable. It also helps to give you a way to measure your career.

And let’s be frank–a thousand true fans is not very many. Even ten thousand is still a pretty low number when you consider how many hundreds of millions of readers there are. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the Thousand True Fans theory is that you don’t have to be a rockstar mega-hit bestseller to make a living–you just need a modest but dedicated fan base. From there, it’s just a matter of consistently producing new stuff and connecting with the fans well enough that they know when you’ve got something out.

S is for Success

What are the markers for success when you’re an indie author? How do you know when you’ve “made it,” whatever that’s supposed to mean?

The implications of this question are more far-reaching than you might think. Just this last week, I visited with Howard Tayler (of the awesome webcomic Schlock Mercenary) up at Salt Lake Comic Con. Howard and I have been friends for a while, since both of us are part of the local writing scene here in northern Utah. As we were talking, he referred to me as an “up-and-coming writer,” then immediately apologized, figuring that I must hate it when people talk about me in such a condescending way. But when he tried to think of what else to call me, he struggled to come up with the right term.

When I first got to know Howard, I was an “up-and-coming writer.” But now, I’m something else. I’ve got twenty books out, a small but growing fan-base, and strong enough sales that writing is my primary source of income. I’m not a beginner, or an amateur, or an aspiring writer anymore–I’m a professional author. I’m living the dream.

At the same time, I don’t really feel like I’ve “made it” yet. I’m not quite making a living off of my books, though if things keep going the way they have been, I should be by the end of the year. I haven’t won any awards, I haven’t hit any bestseller lists, and none of my books are on tvtropes. Outwardly, I haven’t hit any of the obvious markers for success, and that’s what threw Howard off.

Then again, most of the outward markers for success in the book industry are flawed. The bestseller lists are mostly rigged, and even if they weren’t, they still only measure velocity–selling a high number of books in a short amount of time. There are companies that will put you on a bestseller list by buying up a couple thousand copies of your book and disguising the sales so that they look organic, so that even if you never sell another copy again, you can still put “New York Times Bestseller” or whatever on the cover.

As for the awards, they’re probably less rigged, though I suspect that the nomination process for most of them is all about who you know. In speculative fiction, the Hugos and the Nebulas set the standard. The Nebulas are juried, and I doubt I could ever get into them without first forming the right connections. The Hugos, however, are open ballot, and I could get onto them without too much difficulty if I had enough fans among Worldcon attendees to nominate me.

But are awards the best measure of success? Is it possible to succeed without winning any?

I definitely think it is. In fact, I believe that “success” is something that everyone needs to define individually, based on their own goals and aspirations. For some people, getting on a bestseller list is the ultimate measure of success. For others, the recognition that comes from an award is the standard. For me, my primary goal is to make a living as a full-time writer, so that’s how I measure my own success. That’s one of the main reasons why I decided to go indie.

At the same time, though, there is something to be said about the need for a standard. There’s basically two kinds of success: inward success, which is how you measure your own efforts based to achieve your goals, and outward success, which is necessary to put you on the map and get people outside your immediate fan base to take you seriously. The latter is the kind of success that I’m struggling the most with now–how to distinguish myself as a professional within the sf&f community.

But honestly, I’m not too worried about that. I’d much rather focus on pleasing my small but dedicated fan base than making a name for myself in the genre community at large. Perhaps that’s yet another reason why going indie appeals so much to me–there aren’t as many outward markers of success, but it gives you a lot more flexibility and opportunity to reach the inward ones.

To be fair, there are some pretty obvious outward markers for indie success. Every book on Amazon has a sales ranking that is updated in real-time, and every genre is broken down into a series of subcategory lists, each with their own top 100 list. But what all of that exactly means is still very much in the air. For some subcategories, you can hit the top 100 lists with less than 10 sales per day. Also, there are numerous ways to game the system, some of them white-hat (like buying a promotion or doing a giveaway) and some of them black-hat (like buying reviews or using sock puppet accounts).

Since the ebook world is still developing and changing, I don’t put too much stock in any of these new measures of success. In time, I’m sure we’ll figure out what they all mean. Until then, though, I’m going to focus my efforts much more on the inward measures of success and achieving my own goals. Maybe along the way, I’ll hit some of the outward markers by accident, but even if I don’t, the only person whose opinion on my success I care about is me.

R is for Reviews

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. That’s my cardinal rule.

I know that some readers love interacting with authors on their books’ review pages, and I know that some indies try to make it a point to respond to every review, but I’ve seen that sort of thing blow up so many times that I strictly avoid it. Just this past week, a spat between an author and a one-star reviewer turned so ugly, the author calculates that he lost $23,000 over it. Whether or not that’s true is anyone’s guess, but the author’s response to the reviewer certainly hasn’t made anything better.

Reviews are an inevitable fact of life when you’re an indie writer. If you value your sanity at all, you have to learn not to attach any emotional value to them. Sure, the positive reviews feel great and can really boost your ego, but the negative ones can really throw you into a funk if you let them. The sooner you can learn to shrug your shoulders and shake it off, the better.

But aside from the emotional dimension, so reviews have a practical effect on sales of your books? Probably, though I suspect that the number of reviews matters a lot more than the average star rating. Plenty of readers report buying a book after reading the negative reviews, and plenty of others say that they just ignore the star rating altogether. Also, having lots of generic five-stars can hurt more than they help if they all sound vapid or fake.

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. That means that I stay out of the review sections as much as I can. On some very rare occasions, I’ve popped in to clarify an obvious mistake, but I never stick around or engage longer than I have to.

For example, here’s one of my one-stars on Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I):

Boring in the extreme. No new ideas – just shooting up aliens. Big deal. I could have gotten the same watching my kid play his video games.

The book actually has nothing to do with aliens (or space battles, for that matter), so in order to clarify, I responded with the following:

Hi, I’m Joe Vasicek, author of the STAR WANDERERS books. I don’t normally respond to Amazon reviews, but I thought I should point out that you may have reviewed the wrong book in error. There aren’t any aliens or futuristic gun battles in this particular book. Perhaps you found it boring for other reasons, or perhaps you meant to attach this review to another of my books. I’m not opposed to negative reviews, but I thought I should point that out in case there’s been some sort of mistake.

Either way, thanks for giving one of my books a try!

The reviewer was actually quite nice and responded with an apology, saying that he would check out the book again and remove the review if it turned out to be a mistake. He hasn’t removed the review yet, probably because it’s slipped his mind, but I’m not going to push it. There’s really no way that I can graciously do so, and besides, the review probably isn’t going to do much harm anyway.

Every once in a while, I’ll receive a negative review that does bring up enough good points to make me wince. When that happens, I try to remember that reviews are subjective and that just because one person thought the book was horrible doesn’t mean that everyone will. No two readers are alike, just like no two books–thank goodness for that! And if the review stings because there’s an element of truth in it, at least I can take lesson to the next book.

I do read all my reviews, but that’s because I’ve got a thick skin and I’ve learned how to deal with it. I wouldn’t recommend that to everyone, since some authors really do get worked up over the negative ones. Personally, I’d get more worked up not knowing what people are saying about my books than knowing that they’re saying something bad.

As to whether I solicit reviews, I can’t entirely say that I don’t do it, because at the end of every book I include an author’s note where I encourage readers to leave an honest review if they liked it. But I never, NEVER pay for reviews, or participate in review exchanges, or do anything like that to game the system. Reviews are for readers, not writers–gaming the system is one of the worst possible ways to violate that. Besides, readers aren’t stupid–they can tell what’s real from what’s fake.

Reviews are for readers, not for writers. At the core of that rule is the principle that readers should have a safe-zone where they can talk about books without having to worry about any sort of blowback from the author. Towards that end, even positive, gracious engagement with reviewers can turn around and bite you. There really is no way to win this game–or rather, the only way to win is not to play.

Q is for Quitting the Day Job (or never having one to begin with)

Writing is one of those gigs where everyone expects you to have a day job, since common wisdom says that writers don’t make money. In traditional publishing, that may be generally true, but self-publishing is an entirely different game. It isn’t necessarily easy to make a living as an indie writer, but it is possible–much more possible than it is in the traditional industry.

I can’t speak authoritatively on when it’s right to quit the day job because I never really had one. I graduated in 2010, during the height of the “jobless recovery”–the soporific catchphrase invented by Washington policy wonks to describe the weird phenomenon where GDP was improving but unemployment was still in the crapper. For everyone outside of the Emerald City of Washington, we were still deep in the quagmire of the Great Recession.

I had just gotten back from an internship in the Emerald City that had severely disillusioned me to all things political. That rendered my degree in Political Science pretty much useless, and I found myself hitting the streets of Provo looking for something–anything–that would pay. I sold my body as a plasma donor, I sold my soul as a call center interviewer, and eventually I settled into that weird blend of mercenary prostitution that constitutes temp work. But even the temp jobs were scarce, and I found myself living from month to month, barely scraping enough to get by.

That’s when I learned about self-publishing. By this point, I already knew that I wanted to be a full-time writer. That was my plan A, and since it didn’t look like I’d ever land a steady day job, there was no plan B to fall back on. The stuff I was writing didn’t seem to be anything New York was interested in–not enough to pay a living wage, at least–so I jumped into self-publishing with both feet and never looked back.

When you first start out self-publishing, chances are that you’ll languish in obscurity for a while, barely selling enough books to make pizza money month to month. That was certainly the case with me. My economic situation wasn’t improving, so in 2012 I decided to go overseas and teach English in the Republic of Georgia.

GEORGIA | hyper – travel from Piotr Wancerz | Timelapse Media on Vimeo.

Besides temp work (which doesn’t really count), teaching English is the closest thing I’ve had to a day job. And while I loved the adventure of living in another country, the job itself wasn’t really all that fulfilling. It was really hard to balance writing with all the other stuff going on, even though the job took no more than 20 hours per week. It took up a lot of mental space, and that was enough to make writing really difficult.

So I came back to the States in 2013 and did my best to settle back in. Then, a weird thing started to happen. My books, which before had only earned pizza money, suddenly started earning grocery money. That soon grew to grocery and gas money, and before the end of the year, I was making rent money on top of that as well. My Star Wanderers books had started to take off, and even though they weren’t spectacular bestsellers, they pushed me up to the point where writing was my primary source of income.

Today it’s still touch and go, but I’m more or less making a living off of my books. I’m considering going overseas again, only this time, I’d live off of my royalties instead of getting an ESL job. Then again, there’s this girl I’ve been seeing, and she might keep me in this country for a while. If things work out, I have no idea how that would change things, but I imagine it would raise the making-a-living bar pretty substantially. With the way my book sales are growing, though, I’m confident that things will work out.

Back when I still planned on getting a day job, I thought that there would be some sort of magic threshold where, once I crossed it, I would make my entire living off of my writing career and would never work another job again. Instead, what I’ve found is that it’s more of a zone, where some (or perhaps even most) of your income is from book sales, but you still have to take on an occasional paying gig to make ends meet. There is no magic threshold at which you’ve “made it,” it’s more about just making it up as you go along.

All of this is made much, much easier by the fact that Amazon pays monthly royalties like clockwork. Barnes & Noble does too, and Smashwords and Kobo are also reliable, though a little less predictable as to when they’ll get their money to you (Smashwords seems to be holding onto my royalties until the end of this month, which is really annoying because usually they pay in the first week of each quarter). Since sales reports are instantaneous, I can look at how my books sold in March and know how much I’ll make in May.

It also helps that my earnings per book are significantly higher as an indie than they would be if I were signed with a traditional publisher. I don’t get an advance, but that’s okay because advances these days are pitiful anyway (seriously, $5,000 paid out over the course of two or three years? That’s less than I made as a volunteer ESL teacher in Georgia). And since I can publish as many books as I can write, I’ve been able to put out a lot more books as an indie, without the hassle of trying to run them past a committee of overworked editors in the bowels of some New York publishing house.

As for when it’s right to quit your day job, I have absolutely no idea because I never had one. But the fact that I (a nobody) am making it even without a day job says a lot. If you want to quit your day job and make a living as a writer, your chances of making it are a lot better if you take the indie route.

O is for Online Presence

When you’re an indie author, your business exists almost exclusively on the internet. Chances are that ebook sales make up the bulk of your revenue, and those are entirely online. And without the backing of a major publisher, you probably aren’t going to get many books into bookstores (although it is possible). Most of your print sales are going to be online as well.

So if the bulk of your business is online, it only makes sense that you should maintain an online presence or persona of some kind. But what sort of presence should this be? Do you need to be on social media, even if you don’t really enjoy it? What about blogging? What are the dos and don’ts of maintaining an online presence?

Honestly, I don’t think it really matters which platforms you use to build your online presence, so long as you’re accessible in some way. Marketing gurus say that you have to be on social media, but my Star Wanderers books took off when I was living in a developing country with very limited internet access, and hardly ever posted to Facebook or Twitter at all. Even now, my Facebook author page is kind of a ghost town–I post links to each blog post, and I respond whenever a fan drops in with a comment, but that’s about it.

In my opinion, the most important thing to keep in mind when building an internet presence is to do the things that feel the most genuine and authentic. Facebook has never felt very authentic to me, except when I’m interacting with people I know in real life. Twitter, though, had an in-the-moment format that I really enjoy. Even then, I don’t feel nearly as authentic on Twitter as I do on my own blog, where I can post my thoughts and observations without restriction. For that reason, the core of my online presence is my blog, and I use my social media accounts to funnel people here rather than using social media as an end destination.

Besides being authentic, I think it’s important to be gracious to your fans and to not insult or repel them. A handful of authors (such as John Scalzi and Larry Correia) have developed personas that are highly opinionated, controversial, and crude, but they do it in such a way that it draws a following and keeps them. You don’t have to be liked by everyone–indeed, if you’re being authentic you certainly won’t–but you need to be careful to show respect and basic decency toward your fans. They are your bread and butter, and if they find your online behavior repulsive, you’re going to have a very hard time making and keeping them.

When it comes to politics and religion, I try not to be too divisive. Those are certainly important parts of my life, so it wouldn’t be very authentic of me to ignore them completely, but I don’t want my political opinions or religious beliefs to get in the way of my fans enjoying my stories. I don’t write stories just for Mormons, or just for libertarians, or just for white men–I write stories for people who look up at the stars and wish that they could go there. For that reason, I try to be mindful that the people who enjoy my stories might not (indeed, certainly do not) all look or act or believe like I do. I may disagree with them on some issues that I personally find important, but I don’t have to let that come between them and my stories.

The author-reader relationship is a fascinating thing that I have much still to learn about. Right now, my approach is basically to keep from getting in the way as much as possible. Occasionally I’ll get a piece of fan mail that will gush about something they loved about a story but criticize something they didn’t. I never argue back against it, since arguing isn’t going to change the experience they had when they read the story. Instead, I thank them as graciously as I can for reading.

My goal as an author is to stay out of the way of my readers enjoying my stories. For those who do enjoy the stories and want to connect with me, I write author’s notes at the back of all my books and keep an online presence on my blog where they can reach me. But if they don’t want to do that, that’s fine too. I try to be as authentic as I can without alienating anyone who enjoys my stories, and the key to that is to always be grateful for my readers. Writers may create stories, but readers bring them to life, since without anyone to read them, stories are basically dead.

N is for Noise

With all the millions of books out there, and more coming out each year, is it getting harder for authors to market their books? Since anyone can publish a book now, is all that noise drowning out new voices?

It’s tempting to think that way, especially when you’re just starting out as an indie author. Everything is a big struggle, and you find yourself grasping for something–anything–to explain why you aren’t seeing the success that you want to see. With all of the millions of books flooding the marketplace, it’s easy to feel that your own books are getting buried.

Personally, though, I reject this idea that the noise is drowning us all out. You aren’t getting drowned out by all the other books out there. You’re not locked in a zero-sub competition with other authors. And readers who pick up another book in your genre aren’t overlooking yours–in fact, they’re more likely, not less likely, to find and enjoy your books.

A couple of years ago, I wrote three posts on this subject. The first one discusses self-publishing as it relates to traditional publishing, and why the ebook revolution is something for authors to be excited about rather than afraid of. The second one discusses how what the elites view as noise is actually the democratization of literature. The third one compares publishing a book with writing a message in a bottle–even though the ocean/marketplace is vast, if the bottle/book doesn’t sink to the bottom, it will eventually wash up somewhere and be discovered.

The idea that the noise is drowning out your book is based on a number of false assumptions, the first that all things equal, a reader is more likely to read your book if there are fewer options available. But for that to be true, 1) readers would have to be equally motivated to read all books, and 2) readers would have to devote the same amount of time to reading, no matter how many other priorities compete for their time.

No one reads a book for entertainment just because there’s nothing else for them to read. Perhaps that would be true if they were stranded on a desert island with just a couple of books, but boredom is a very, very low bar to cross and there are thousands of non-reading activities that can clear it as well or better than reading a book. Even for the voracious readers whose addiction to the written word is stronger than their need to eat, there’s an endless buffet of fanfiction and all sorts of other reading options made possible by the internet.

If someone reads your book, it’s not because there’s nothing else for them to read–it’s because they find your book interesting. And if someone reads another author who writes a lot like you, chances are that they’ll be more likely, not less likely, to pick up your book than someone who’s never read that kind of stuff before. Readers rarely tire of their favorite genres–the more they love a book, the more likely they are to search out another just like it.

Complaining about all the books that make it harder for readers to find yours is like complaining that girls never like nice guys. The people who complain the loudest never really seem all that willing to take a good, hard look at themselves and ask why it is that girls/readers aren’t interested in them. It’s not enough just to be “nice”–you’ve got to have some personality. If a book sinks, it’s almost always because something about it sucks. No author is entitled to success, just like no guy is entitled to a girlfriend.

I firmly believe that there’s room enough in the marketplace for everyone–provided, of course, that your book doesn’t suck. And even if it does, there are probably still readers out there who will love it. Beyond a certain point, literary quality is all subjective anyway. If you write good books, give them the proper mating plumage (blurb, cover, metadata), and put them out where readers can find them, they will–no matter how many other books are out there.

J is for the Joys of Self-Publishing

Brandon Sanderson teaches an English class at Brigham Young University, and I was one of his students back in 2008 and 2009. At LTUE this year, he asked me to come in and speak to his class about what it’s like to be an indie writer, so I prepared a short ten minute presentation on the things that I love the most about self-publishing. They are:

1. I have complete creative freedom.

As an indie, I don’t have to worry about agents, editors, marketing departments, interns, or anyone else who could kill my project before it has a chance to get out into the world. If I can write it, I can publish it. If I want to write something crazy like a story about Amish vampires in space, or steampunk Mormon airships, or orcs falling in love on the battlefield, I can do it without having to worry whether it will ever find a home outside my hard drive.

Of course, if I write stuff that’s more niche, chances are that it’s only going to find a niche audience. But that’s okay, because:

2. I don’t have to be a bestseller to find success.

With the way that the royalty numbers for indies work out, I don’t have to be a mega blockbuster bestseller to have a viable career. In fact, all I really need is to sell a thousand or so books per month–which seems like a lot until you realize that there are 1.4 billion English speakers in the world (over 300 million of whom are native). Plus, if I have thirty or forty books out, I can make a comfortable living selling no more than double digits on each one.

It’s the thousand true fans principle at work, and for indie writers, it really does work. I only started self-publishing three years ago, and I’m already making enough to keep my head above water. And to everyone except my small handful of fans (who don’t even come close to a thousand), I’m just another nobody.

3. I have the flexibility to reinvent myself and try new things.

As an indie, I’m not locked down by any contracts that I can’t get out of. That gives me a great deal of flexibility in how I can run my career. If I wanted to unpublish everything and start over under a different name, I could do that. If I wanted to try out a new genre, or dabble in something experimental like serials, I could do that. At any time, I can completely remake myself however I want.

That flexibility is crucial because of how quickly the market is changing. Publishers are consolidating and going bankrupt, bookstore chains are struggling, and new technologies and business models are opening the doors to all sorts of new opportunities. As an indie, I’m in a great position to take advantage of them.

4. I can connect directly with my readers and fans.

Not just in the sense of connecting through social media, but connecting through my books as well. If my fans are clamoring for a sequel, I can write it and get it out to them while it’s still fresh in their minds. If they have trouble finding my books somewhere, I can clear the problem up myself without getting tied up in the bureaucracy of a large publisher.

The two most important people in the book world are writers and readers. As an indie, I can make sure that no one comes between my readers and me.

5. I’ve learned to treat my career like a small business.

A lot of writers view this as a downside, or at least a hassle they’d rather not deal with. They decide not to self-publish because all they really want to do is write. After all, isn’t it better to get someone else–an agent, for example–to handle the business side of things? Isn’t it better not to have to worry about all that stuff?

For me personally, the answer is a clear and resounding NO. The business stuff isn’t a hassle–it’s actually kind of fun! Plus, the fact that I know exactly where all the money is, how much I’m getting paid, and how much I owe gives me much more peace of mind than trusting all that stuff to an agent ever would. Far from taking away from my writing time, it’s actually given me more time since the only real person I have to deal with is myself.

Besides, freelancing is just AWESOME. I love being self-employed! True, my boss is a jerk and all of my coworkers are boring, but that’s okay because

6. I have no one to blame for my failures, but my successes are all my own.

This, more than anything else, is what I love the most about self-publishing. If my books flop, it’s on me. If they hit the top 100 lists for their subcategories and garner dozens of positive reviews, that’s on me too. I’ve had books that have done both–in fact, I’ve got a book right now that’s currently #263 Free in the Kindle Store.

Yes, there are a lot of ways that I can screw up as a self-published writer. But there are a lot of ways that I can succeed, too. Like everyone, I have to deal with the fear of failure, but I don’t have to worry about not getting the credit–or the reward–for my success. As an indie, it’s all on me, and that’s exactly the way I want it to be.