Tag: Blogging A to Z challenge (2014)

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.

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:

  1. I want to maximize my revenue with my current books.
  2. 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.

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.

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.

L is for Launch

How important is it to have a massive book launch whenever you release a new book?

I think the answer to this question varies from genre to genre. For the more mainstream genres where word of mouth is driven by general popularity, such as romance or thriller, it’s probably fairly important. For more niche genres like science fiction that are driven mostly by a dedicated core of fans, it’s not as crucial as you might think.

The reason most often cited for doing a big book launch is to try to get onto the rolling 30 day and 90 day new release lists on Amazon. When I published Genesis Earth back in 2011 before the publishing landscape flooded with indie books, I saw decent sales for the first 90 days, probably because that book was on the list. That happened more by accident than design, though, and it would be much harder to replicate now.

In general, I think that indies tend to overemphasize the importance of the new release lists. On forums like KBoards, I’ve even heard some writers go so far as to say a book is dead after the first 90 days. That runs contrary to my own experience–in fact, I doubt that it’s true even in the mainstream genres. Ebooks are forever, and there are all sorts of things that can give a book wings after months or even years from its initial launch.

That said, I do try to do a couple of things whenever I have a new release:

  1. Mention it on social media and here on my blog. I don’t generally send out those annoying “buy my book!” posts, but when I have a new book out, I figure it’s worth a mention since my readers are going to want to know.
  2. Send out an email to my mailing list. That’s the only reason why the list exists–to announce new releases. Typically, though, I wait until the book is up on multiple retail sites, so that I can include most if not all of the links.
  3. Put up the book on the sidebar of my blog. Ever since I got rid of all the typical blogging widgets (like calendars, tag clouds, archive lists etc) and dedicated the sidebar almost exclusively to my books, I’ve sent a small but steady trickle of traffic in that direction. The sidebar links aren’t comprehensive, but most of my books are up there.

That’s about it. As you can see, nothing too fancy. My book launches tend to be fairly quiet, and that works just fine for me.

At the same time, though, I kind of wonder what would happen if I tried for a more aggressive launch. When I was first starting out, it didn’t make much sense because I didn’t have much of a platform or very many books out. Now, though, I wonder if putting a bit more emphasis on a new release will yield measurable results.

When I release Brothers in Exile in May, I’m going to try out a couple of things to give it an initial boost. I already have it listed on Goodreads, and I’ll post a few short excerpts from it here on my blog in the days leading up to and immediately following its release. Beyond that, I don’t have any firm plans, but I would like to do a few guest posts and maybe run a couple of promos.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a huge expert on how to run a massive book launch. What I do know is that in some genres at least, you can succeed without going all out on them. Throwing a massive launch probably isn’t going to hurt you, but it’s not like that’s your only hope for ever breaking out.

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:

Screenshot from 2014-04-12 16:07:06

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:

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!

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.

I is for Indie

I first started self-publishing in 2011, when “self-published” was still a dirty word. Back then, we called ourselves indies in order to escape the stigma–or mitigate it, at least. And that led to a war between us and the publishing establishment over the meaning of the term “indie.”

If it sounds dumb, that’s because it was. “Indie” is short for “independent,” as in an artist who is unaffiliated with a corporation or large commercial organization. Trouble was, the establishment was already using the term “indie” to describe bookstores that weren’t affiliated with the larger chains (Border, Barnes & Noble, etc), or the small presses that hadn’t been gobbled up by the Big 6.

Also, I think the technological disruption of ebooks caught the industry with their pants down. Authors, publishing their books themselves in this newfangled digital form? Diving into the wilds of the marketplace without the nurturing patronage of a publisher? As if ebooks will ever become a thing! Don’t they know that self-publishing is the kiss of death?

And it was, in the old days when publishers held a monopoly over all the important distribution channels. For the greater part of the 20th century, signing with a traditional publisher was the only viable way to have a career. There were a couple of self-publishing success stories, but they were the exceptions that proved the rule. For almost a century, there was no real way to be a writer and go indie.

Because of that, those of us who have chosen this path are largely making it up as we go along. Unlike the film industry, where “indie” has a connotation of artistic purity, or the music industry, where “indie” has a connotation of hip, local, and unique, indie books and indie writers have had to build their own reputations largely from scratch. It has definitely been an uphill battle.

Back when I first started self-publishing, I was very particular about calling myself an “indie writer” and not a “self-published writer.” Now, though, I’m comfortable with either term. The self-publishing stigma is pretty much dead, and “self-published” describes what I’m doing just as well as “indie” does.

That said, I think it was a good thing that we claimed the indie label when we did. Our mode of self-publishing is very different from the modes of self-publishing that came before, and distancing ourselves from the vanity presses and self-publishing scams helped a lot of us to let go of our inhibitions and jump into the new world of publishing with both feet. That certainly was the case with me.

In the future, I hope that indie books gain the same reputation for artistic integrity and creative freedom that indie films and indie music now enjoy. I think we’re definitely on the way. Sure, there are lots of crappy self-published books out there, but there are also a lot of really excellent ones, and those are the ones that readers are going to remember. Hopefully, some of my own books will be among them.

 

H is for Hybrid Author

Is it worth seeking traditional publication if you’re an indie writer? Are there advantages to going with a legacy publisher after you’ve published yourself?

A lot of writer throw around the word “hybrid” as if that’s their ultimate goal–the thing that’s going to make their career. A hybrid author is an author with their feet in both sides of the publishing world: the legacy world, with corporate publishers or small but reputable houses, and the indie world with their self-published books.

This might be a bit controversial, but I’m going to throw down the gauntlet and argue that most of the praise of the hybrid path is either hype or wishful thinking. From what I’ve seen, most hybrid authors fall into one of three camps:

  • Veteran authors who are disillusioned with the legacy industry and are doing everything they can to self-publish everything. They still have contracts that they can’t get out of, though, so technically they are considered ‘hybrid,’ even though many would rather not be.
  • Indie authors who haven’t been disillusioned about traditional publishing yet and believe that a legacy publisher would carry some of the burden for things like marketing and promotion. In other words, indies who believe that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
  • Unpublished writers who have been submitting to traditional publishers for years, and have deer-in-the-headlights syndrome with all the new publishing options available to writers. They’ll dabble with self-publishing, but their heart is still set in the old world.

So would I ever consider signing with a traditional publisher? I’ve thought about it quite a bit over the last few years, and I’ve come up with four conditions that have to be met before I’d do so. Please keep in mind, though, that I am not a contract lawyer, and that the following is my opinion and not legal advice.

Three of them are deal breakers on my side. They are:

1. Non-compete clauses

This is absolutely non-negotiable. In fact, if I see any sort of non-compete clause in a contract sent to me, I’ll pull out of negotiations altogether since it shows to me that the publisher is negotiating in bad faith.

A non-compete clause is a contract clause that says something like “the author shall not publish or cause to be published anything that may compete with the work.” Basically, it’s a publisher’s way of clamping down on you and saying you can’t publish anything without their approval. There is no f****** way I would ever tie myself up like that–not only would it kill the self-publishing side of my career, but it would also be unfair to my readers who have come to expect regular releases from me.

Let’s flip this on its head and say that I put in a non-compete clause for my publisher. For example, suppose I signed a contract with Tor Books that said “the publisher (Tor Books) shall not publish or cause to be published anything that may compete with the author’s work.” Can you see how ridiculous that is? How insanely one-sided it makes the contract out to be?

A publisher would never sign one, and neither will I.

2. Rights reversion clauses

If I’m going to sign a contract with a traditional publisher, I want to know when that contract is going to end. Life of copyright is life of the author plus 70 years, and that is far too long for me. But a lot of traditional publishing contracts contain loopholes that keep the rights from ever reverting back.

There are reasons why a publisher would want to hold onto your rights without actually publishing your book. Copyright is an intellectual property, and shows up on a corporate publisher’s ledger as an asset. Just by sitting on your rights, they’re able to show an accounting gain. So if they can hold onto your rights, they probably will.

I won’t sign a contract unless it includes an explicit date when the rights will revert to me. The length of the term and the options for renewal are open to negotiation, but having an explicit date is not.

3. Any payment terms based on net

Right now, the industry standard for ebooks is 25% of net. What does that mean? It means “we’ll pay you 25% of the revenue from your ebooks, after costs.” What costs, you may ask? There’s the rub–they aren’t specified.

“Net” is how Hollywood screws people over. It’s how a rockstar can go on a multi-million dollar tour and end up owing the record label money. It’s a dirty trick of creative accounting that the large corporate publishers are now starting to employ. In the old days, they used to base royalty payments off of the list price of the book. Now, though, New York is becoming more like Hollywood and less and less author friendly.

The fourth condition is a deal breaker for most publishers, on which I don’t see myself giving any ground. It is:

4. Ebook rights

Ebooks are where the money is. Legacy publishers understand this, and they’re doubling down on them. Hugh Howie, who signed a print-only deal with Simon & Schuster, has since said that the publishers are not open to considering that sort of deal now–not even for a massive bestseller like him.

The thing is, what value does a legacy publisher bring to epublishing? In less than an hour, I can craft an ebook that’s formatted better than most of the ebooks coming out of New York. As an indie, I have access to all the same online bookstores and distribution channels as the big publishers. And by self-publishing, I have control over the critically important metadata–a ball that legacy publishers often drop by relegating it to the lowest employees on the corporate ladder.

When it comes to ebooks, I do not see a single item of value that legacy publishers can bring to the table. Rather, I see a host of liabilities, and for what? With self-publishing, I can earn up to 70%-80% for every ebook I sell. With a publisher, I’d be lucky to get 15%–and that’s if they’re being generous.

For novels and other book-length works, it simply does not make sense to me to sign with a traditional publisher. Not in today’s industry, at least. And with the way legacy publishers are clamping down and making rights grabs, I don’t see it ever making sense in the foreseeable future either.

HOWEVER …

For short stories, the situation for authors is much more favorable. The magazines have no inclination to tie you up with non-compete clauses, the rights to the story revert back to you soon after publication, the payment is usually based on word count and specified in the contract, and the ebook rights stay with you (the magazine might purchase non-exclusive digital rights, but that won’t prevent you from republishing it as an ebook on your own).

I can see myself going hybrid by publishing short stories through the traditional markets. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Besides the chance to refine my craft by working on my short game, I figure that getting picked up by the major magazines will help to draw new readers to my other books. I have no idea how much it will help, but I figure it’s worth trying out. Besides, science fiction is a genre where reputation can make a big difference to your career, and you can build a reputation a lot more effectively through traditional short story markets than through self-publishing.

At the same time, though, that’s more of a side project than anything. My bread and butter is self-publishing, and that’s where my feet are firmly planted. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.