indie publishing – Page 7 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

U is for Uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

P is for Pricing

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

My book is worth more than a cup of coffee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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.
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.
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.