Really interesting take on the publishing industry. This is politically incorrect, but I think it’s related to the way that publishing has become dominated by liberal women. The Nonsense-Free Editor has a lot of great videos about that.
There are lots of great books in the indie publishing scene that are not “Potempkin villages,” as this BookTuber calls them… but how is one to find them? When we finally solve that question, there will be a resurgence of great writing and great art.
Last week, Kris Rusch wrote an interesting blog post reflecting on 2014 and things she observed that indie writers learned, so I thought I’d do something similar and reflect on some of the things that I learned last year about the business and the craft. Here goes!
Readers of SF&F want longer books.
I did a lengthy blog post about this earlier, but the basic gist of it is that readers in my genre want longer, more immersive books. There’s a place for the short stuff, especially for high concept sci-fi, but most readers of speculative fiction want worlds they can get lost in with characters that become their best friends. It’s practically impossible to do that in a story that takes less than an hour to read, so to satisfy those readers, you’ve got to write long.
You can’t have a healthy career with only one income stream.
Between 80% to 90% of my income in 2014 came from Amazon. Times were good in the spring and summer, but then Amazon launched their ebook subscription service (Kindle Unlimited). None of my books were enrolled in KU, but because of the way that Amazon skews the rankings to favor KU books, my Amazon royalties took a huge hit.
I knew back in 2011 when I started that I needed to cultivate multiple income streams if I wanted to have a steady career, but I’d gotten complacent. Since my Amazon earnings were paying all the bills, I figured I was doing all right. But you can’t measure the healthiness of a career in just the revenue it’s bringing in right now; you’ve got to look at contingencies for the future, including the worst case scenario.When most of your revenue comes from a single client, that makes your career far too brittle.
So looking to the future, I can’t say that I have a healthy, steady career until I’m earning at least as much from all my other income streams as I am from Amazon.
I’ve been relying far too much on Amazon’s algorithms.
Related to the last point, I learned that I’ve been relying far too much on Amazon to sell my books. In fact, I can say that the Amazon algorithms were the linchpin of my marketing strategy (inasmuch as I actually had one, heh).
Amazon has the best book recommendation engine in the industry by far. It’s done a lot for my career, connecting my books with many readers who have gone on to become fans. But what the algos give, the algos can take away. To build a career with staying power, you have to constantly work to find new readers in a variety of different ways.
I’ve always believed that cream rises to the top. That said, if you’re starting at the bottom of the ocean, you’ve got a long, long way to rise. Up until now, I’ve been operating under the belief that readers will find me without me making much of an effort to find them. I learned this year that you’ve got to meet in the middle. You don’t have to hand sell every book (thank goodness!), but you do have to make an effort to make your books visible somehow.
A well-articulated negative review does more to sell books than a blasé positive one.
This one surprised me. When I published Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers: Book I), it garnered a fairly painful two-star review on Amazon about a week or two after launch. The review had some positive things in it, but it also had some negative things that were pretty spot on. Being the angsty writer that I am, I thought my chances had tanked. Instead, sales of the book immediately shot up, and stayed fairly high for about a month.
Readers aren’t stupid. They understand that not everyone has the same tastes in books, and parse their reviews accordingly. A negative review that is articulate and well-reasoned will lend a lot more credibility and cultivate a lot more interest than a string of positive reviews that lack any real substance. It sounds counterproductive, but it’s often the negative reviews that sell the book.
Sometimes you actually can get the best results by doing it yourself.
When I redid the covers for the first three Gaia Nova novels, I decided at first to hire a cover designer. For various reasons, though, that didn’t work out, so I decided to do them myself. I’d done the typography myself on the old ones, and let’s just say they left something to be desired.
The reason I wanted to hire the work out was because I didn’t think I’d get the best work if I did it myself. I figured that if I hired someone who was an expert in it, it would turn out so much better. Instead, when I did it myself, I discovered that my own skills had improved to the point where I could produce really good work myself.
It is possible, especially in self-publishing, to become so skilled at every aspect of the production process that you can do it all yourself and still produce a quality book. The learning curve is so sheer that it’s practically a cliff, but you can do it. And even if the work that you produced at the start of your career wasn’t all that good, you can improve to the point where your work is on par with that of professional designers.
The trouble is, it takes so much time and effort to get to that point that you may be better off hiring the work out. It takes a certain type of personality to DIY everything and produce a quality product without feeling overstretched. I’m pretty sure that’s my personality type, though of course I still have a lot to learn. But just because it’s DIY doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be of an inferior quality.
There are other things I learned in 2014 about the craft and business of writing, but this post is starting to get long so I think I’ll table it for the next post. Take care!
I’ll take a quick break from formatting and uploading to do today’s A to Z post. Since B was on blurbs and C was on cover art, I figure it’s only natural that K should be on keywords. Cover art and book blurbs are definitely important in making a book stand out in all the right ways to a reader, but what good is that if they can’t find it? That’s where keywords come in.
In the Author Earnings Report, Hugh Howie and an anonymous data analyst took a snapshot of the top 7,000 genre books on the Amazon kindle store (romance, mystery, thriller, and science fiction & fantasy) and found, among other things, that the self-published books received better reviews on average than the legacy published books. There was a lot of hooplah about this in the indie world when the report came out, and while it’s just speculation, the most convincing reason for this that I’ve heard is that indies are generally smarter with their metadata, such as categories and keywords.
“Metadata” is data that’s about your book, as opposed to its actual content. In an ebook, there’s an xml file that ends with the extension .opf which contains the book’s metadata, as well as its organization and a guide to help your reading device navigate it. Within the metadata, there’s a tag called dc:subject, which is where the keywords go. For example, here’s a screenshot of the .opf for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I), with the keywords highlighted:
Okay, so maybe that’s more than you needed to know. What can I say? With all the ebooks I’m reformatting, I’m knee deep in the stuff.
If all of this sounds too technical, don’t worry–all of the publishing platforms, including Amazon KDP, automatically overwrite your .opf file with whatever you put in the keyword field when you publish (On KDP, that’s on the first page with the book details, just under the categories). So even if you don’t know how to format an ebook, you can still add keywords pretty easily.
But what words should you actually put there? That’s the thousand dollar question. For the first two years, I just threw the first few words about the book that came to mind. Needless to say, that’s not the best way to do it.
Keywords are important because they help people who are searching for books like yours to find it. For example, if you search the kindle store for “romantic space opera,” Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I) comes up on or near the top (I’m not sure if an Amazon search will show different results for different people, based on reading preferences–it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if it did). That’s because “romantic” and “space opera” are two of my keywords. All the other books in the series have the same keywords, so if you scroll down the search results you should be able to find them.
But it goes a lot further than that. There are actually a bunch of smaller subcategories which you can only get into through careful use of keywords. The book details page on KDP allows you to choose two categories for your book, but if you look on the page for Outworlder, you’ll find it listed in the following categories:
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!
If there’s one thing that indie writers like to talk about when they talk shop, it’s “discoverability”–how to make their books stand out so that readers can discover them. You don’t have to spend much time on author blogs or writing forums to find some pretty intense discussions about this topic. For those of us trying to make a living at this gig, it’s something we constantly obsess about.
So what’s the best way to boost your discoverability? What works, and what doesn’t? If I had the answers to those questions, I could probably make a lot more money writing “how-to” books! However, here are a couple of books I’ve found that do an excellent job answering this question.
Let’s Get Visible is the other book on discoverability that I’d recommend. For this book, David Gaughran collaborated with a number of other indie writers from KBoards to figure out the best ways to work with Amazon’s algorithms. It’s an excellent book that explains some of the best practices for free giveaways, price pulsing, and choosing keywords and categories.
Those are the two books I’d recommend. There are other good ones I’m sure, but there are also a lot of scammy marketing books that are just out there to take your money. These ones aren’t scam books at all. Without getting any benefit from the authors of these books for saying it, I can vouch from experience that their advice is pretty solid.
So what’s worked for me personally? I can point to a few things:
And of course, there’s the most important thing of all: write a damn good book. If your book sucks, all the discoverability in the world isn’t going to save it.
When you’re an indie writer, it often feels as if publishing a book is like tossing a message in a bottle out into a churning sea. You have no idea where your book is going to end up, and the marketplace is as wide and as menacing as a stormy ocean. Lots of books sink to the bottom of that ocean, where no one ever finds them. But plenty of other books stay afloat, selling a copy here or a copy there–just enough to stay up at the surface. And eventually, the winds of the marketplace cast it up on a distant shore, where it’s discovered by a fan.
But here, the analogy breaks down. Because unlike a beachcomber who finds a message in a bottle, a fan doesn’t have to wait for your next book to come to them–they can go out and find them directly. So the more books you have out there, the greater the likelihood that they’ll eventually be discovered. And if they’re out in the marketplace for long enough–out where the potential fans can discover them–then eventually they will grow into their natural audience.
That’s been my experience, at least. There are a lot of other things that I’m experimenting with now, but these are the things that I know work for sure–at least for me.