Scalzi is right, here, but in a way completely unrelated to how I was thinking about KU earlier this week:
Amazon Tweaks Its Kindle Unlimited System. It Still Sucks For KDP Select Authors.
Tag: independent authors
On Openbooks.com and who should be using it
(Actually, first, a confession of a rather embarrassing math issue I should have noticed on my own: in that Kindle Unlimited post a couple of days ago, I didn’t check the math and rolled with another author’s suggestion that Amazon was implying you’d get $10 a page. That’s per page written, not per page read. Amazon’s suggestion is $.10 per page read. I still think that’s ten times higher than you’ll actually get, but it’s still a misreading of what the email says. I hate it when other people pass on that sort of stuff uncritically and I apologize for doing it myself.)
I have had– by my standards, as always– a really good couple of months as an independent author. Today marks two full months since I have had a “zero day”– a day where no one downloaded or purchased any of my books. I had a signing in May where I sold nearly 60 books in a day, and June is on pace to be very close to or actually pass May’s numbers without the bump from the signing, which is really remarkable.
My numbers across the board are trending upward, which is a good thing. But the single best source of downloads for my books so far in 2015 has been a site that I’ve talked about a couple of times but haven’t really devoted direct attention to: Openbooks.com.
(Actually, let’s do this right now, because this post is gonna come off as a little shilly: they didn’t ask me to write this, and I’m not being compensated for it. The model has some weaknesses and I’ll be discussing those. This post is my opinion as a user of the site; it’s just gonna turn out to be a pretty positive one.)
Right now my only book on OpenBooks is The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1. BA has been downloaded, as of this exact second, 223 times since January. There was a point where it was in the top 10 for their entire site; it’s still performing relatively well in the Fiction category and is the second-highest Science Fiction book. For comparison’s sake, BA has been on Smashwords since July 2014 and has 247 downloads. Openbooks will pass that this month.
Here’s how the site works: All of the books on OpenBooks are initially free. The site operates on a “pay what you want” model (rather annoyingly called “pay what it’s worth,” a phrase I have some linguistic quibbles with) and you are prompted to pay some recommended amount (the author sets that amount) when you finish reading the book. You can freely share any book you download as well, and folks you share it with are also prompted to pay if they like. Other than that, it’s a typical book site– you can review what you read and all that.
(No one’s reviewed BA over there yet, although the site itself did a great review of the book. I keep trying to fix that and haven’t gotten anyone to bite yet.)
Here’s what they’re good at: the site is young and doesn’t have a huge number of books yet, so they’re doing a really good job right now of helping their authors. They monitor Tweets and blogs and RT stuff that they find interesting and they seem to do staff reviews of books at a fairly fast clip. It may be just that I’ve hit a lucky patch, but right now my book is getting downloaded from the new, lesser-known site several times more often than every place Smashwords feeds combined.
What they do less well: right now, as I said, the book’s been downloaded 223 times. Three of those presumably 223 people have decided to pay me for it– a conversion rate of 1.34%. That’s better than the site’s overall conversion rate of 1.08%. And those three payments have added up to less than three bucks. So nobody’s getting rich off this site right now. Including, I think, them.
However.
If you are an author who is following the plan that I am– of having a perma-free book that you’re hoping will drive sales to your other work, you need to have your book on OpenBooks.com, because then the low conversion rate basically amounts to occasional free money since the book isn’t supposed to cost anything anyway, and these guys will help to push your book. The site is still young and so getting in on the ground floor is a good idea. The staff claims in the forums that they’re working on ways to drive up the conversion rate, and I believe them; it’s just not working super well right now. I wouldn’t recommend putting pay books on the site just yet because the conversion rate is so low. Then again, most of your volume is going to come from Amazon anyway– BA is 99 cents at Amazon because I can’t price it free, and despite me making it as clear as I can to everyone that you can get this free everywhere else it still sells several copies a month. It may be that if the book is free in one place that it wouldn’t hurt sales very much, but that would be an experiment for someone else to do.
So, yeah. You should check the place out.
(Back to Kindle Unlimited: you may be asking what’s the difference here? and that would be a fair question. I’d be perfectly happy to put BA 1 on Kindle Unlimited, because I don’t care about how I get paid for that book. OpenBooks is also a lot more open about their numbers and their process than Amazon is. If I want to be in Kindle Select, I have no choice but to be in KU as well. I don’t like that. I would rather have an honest this book is free for everyone except people who choose to pay for it than we’re gonna rake in a bunch of money for your books, and then pay you a very small amount of that money according to a formula that only we have access to and will change anytime we want.)
Review: DARKNESS CONCEALED, by D. Emery Bunn
As I said a couple of days ago, I am a terrible friend to my fellow independent authors. However, I’ve been doing my best to curtail that tendency lately and making myself read on my Kindle. Surprisingly, it hasn’t had the same weird sleep-preventing effects on my wife that it was having when I first bought it. So maybe I can keep this up for a while. At any rate, the second book that I’ll be reviewing (of at least three; there will likely be one more review this weekend) is of D. Emery Bunn’s Darkness Concealed. You’ll have heard Emery’s name around here once or twice before; he’s a Twitter buddy and I interviewed him here when the book first came out.
Bunn bills Darkness Concealed as a dark fantasy, and… well, yeah. Right on the nose, that. This is not for the faint of heart, kids; the book starts with a family being massacred by demons in their house, and while the violence is never gratuitous, at least by my standards, that event sorta sets a bit of a tone for the rest of the book. And seeing as the rest of the book revolves around the four main characters trying to find a) a reason for and b) a way to prevent a recurring near-apocalypse that regularly slaughters a fair chunk of the human populace… so yeah, it’s a bit on the dark side.
Darkness Concealed is book one of a trilogy, and it shows; there are a number of weird little bits here and there that are never explained (one of the characters has somebody else living in her head, for example) and there are plenty of questions and plot points left dangling for the sequels. That would be a weakness in the hands of a less skilled author; here it just makes the world look bigger and avoids the dodge of “self-contained first book then a duology makes a trilogy,” a phenomenon I’ve kinda gotten tired of. There are clearly more answers coming and more story here, so if you’re the type who wants everything tied up nice and neat with a bow on it when you close the book (or, uh, exit the Kindle app?) this may not be the book for you.
Why is this a book for you? Worldbuilding. Bunn has big ideas for how the word of Telthan works, and some of the settings that the characters visit, including a ruined city, a magical library tower and a damn-near-literal castle at the end of the world, really made the book for me. These characters are searching for answers, and they’ll go wherever they need to to get them; the author clearly has no shortage of cool locales for them to visit along the way, and one of the joys of the book for me was seeing what they would encounter next.
Three dolla ninety-nine cent at the Amazon. Check it out, you shall.
How to Launch Your New Book: Everything I Know
(I’m going to be presenting these as Unquestionable Rules that Must be Followed. Argue with me anyway. Sometimes I’m very strident and wrong at the same time, especially if I think a general tone of Absolute Authority is funnier. I am scheduling this to pop while I’m on the road, so feel free to yell at me in comments.)
So!
You have written a book. Congratulations! I am proud of you. You have done something that you have probably wanted to do for a very long time and that many, many people have tried to do and failed.
Here is what to do next, so that when you publish your book, you have the greatest chance of your book making an impact. Note my phrasing; it’s intentional: when YOU publish your book. You’re not submitting your book to an agent or to a publishing company and waiting a year to get a quarter of a sheet of paper in an envelope as a rejection notice. You’re going to do it yourself.
STEP ONE: THREE OR FOUR YEARS PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
Have already written and published three other books. At least.
That’s only sort of a joke.
Understand something: your first book? No one has heard of you, and no one cares. Your mom might buy a copy; she won’t read it. Your dad will pretend to read your mom’s copy, and your little brother will openly laugh at the idea of reading your stupid little story. Your friends will think you’re joking about this whole “author” thing. You need to go into your first book expecting that it will sell ten copies and then no one will ever see it again. Shoot for the stars, but plan to faceplant. It’s okay if you do! If I know one thing about writing beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is this: do not expect instant success, and plan for the long game. The trick is, once you have a handful of books out and you actually have some fans, the hope is that people will read your new book, like it, then go find the other ones. Your first book, they read, enjoy, and then forget about you when it takes another six months for #2 to come out.
Alternatively, if this is the first book you’ve published, wait until you’re close to having a second one done before you publish the first, so that you can stagger them four to six months apart. This doesn’t mean rush through something and make it garbage. I am assuming you’re good at what you do; you want to give people something new from you without making them wait so long they forget who you are. The good news about the first book is that no one will be yelling at you to get it finished.
STEP TWO: A YEAR OR SO PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
Have a presence online. Again, you want to be able to market to beyond your family and friends, because they don’t believe you yet. Folk online didn’t know you when you were pooping yourself and have never held your hair back while you puked, so they are more likely to believe you when you give them your word-extrusions and tell them to pay you money for them. There are a lot of people who will tell you that blogs and Twitter are useless for marketing; in the right circumstances, I’m even one of them. They are useless for HAY BUY MY BOOK RIGHT NOW COMPLETE STRANGER PERSON. That’s not going to work. They’re great for building relationships with people, who you can later convert into readers. Also: Goodreads. Get a Goodreads account, and start rating what you read. You’ll need an author picture, too. Resist the urge to post something from Facebook; if you don’t do an actual sitting for it, at least dress nice and have somebody else take a headshot.
You do read a lot, don’t you? Start, if you don’t.
STEP THREE: IMMEDIATELY AFTER COMPLETING THE FIRST DRAFT, AT LEAST THREE MONTHS PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
Find some alpha readers– at least three or four. Do you have a blog? Hit up your commenters, the people who seem to actually think you’re entertaining and smart for some reason. Someone will probably bite. Note that these folks are alpha readers. Make sure that they are aware that they’re getting a first draft, and if you can, try and focus what they’re reading for. In other words, if you want grammar help, mention it. If you’re curious about whether a subplot is necessary, ask.
It is okay to think that a part of your book is broken and needs help at this point. If that is the case, say to them “I think part of this book doesn’t work,” but don’t specify what that part is. See if your readers tell you that that same bit is broken.
Give them at least a month to read through your book. During that time, under no circumstances are you to read, edit, look at, or even think about your book. In fact, work on something completely different.
When your alphas come back to you with comments, take them seriously. Unless they are idiots, and then why did you ask them to be alpha readers? That was dumb.
STEP FOUR: TWO MONTHS PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
Get your cover nailed down. Do not half-step on the cover. At the very least, head yourself over to SelfPubBookCovers.com and see if something over there works for you. I wrote an entire story in my first novella specifically so that I could use the cover I chose. Entertainingly, people regularly tell me it’s their favorite story in the entire collection.
Very important: Unless your job title is “graphic artist,” do not design your own cover. You suck at cover design, goddammit, and if your cover sucks no one will read your book. Get someone who knows what they are doing to design the cover, and yes, this will probably involve spending some money. Bleed for your art, dammit.
(NOTE: I am literally in pain because of the effort it is taking me to link to terrible book covers by people who were presumably serious in wanting you to read their work. I don’t want to call anyone out. But please: don’t do your own cover unless someone else has paid you for graphic art work before.)
This goes for the text on the cover, too. Shut up, you don’t know how to do it right and it’s going to look stupid. Get someone who knows what they are doing.
Incidentally, you are getting the cover as early as you can so that you can do a cover reveal on your website or on Twitter, to drum up interest in your book.
STEP FIVE: RIGHT AFTER YOU GET THAT BOOK COVER.
Create a page on Goodreads for your book. You already have an author account at Goodreads, right? If not, do that first. Once you have the cover and the page is done, start regularly pointing people at the page. You want to get as many people as possible putting that book onto their bookshelves and, hopefully, talking about it. Hopefully you’ve already got a presence over there and you’ve got people on your friends list. Go ahead and “recommend” the book to them– but do not overuse this power. Do it once, right after the book’s page is created, and maybe once more when the book is actually released. No more than that.
STEP SIX: ONE MONTH AFTER SENDING THE BOOK TO ALPHA READERS.
Reread your book. Do not read the comments yet. Just reread your book, taking notes as necessary.
STEP SEVEN: RIGHT AFTER YOU FINISH THAT REREAD.
Read their comments. Take them seriously. And take one month to fix the book, based on your own notes and their comments. Now, this commandment is one that’s going to get me flak because a lot of people’s Process simply doesn’t work like this, but to my mind the second draft should take much less time than the first. If you need to take longer, fine; adjust the other timeframes as necessary here. My second drafts are generally lightning quick even when school is in session, so a month is enough time for me. Your mileage may vary.
STEP EIGHT: ONE MONTH PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
Send the book to your beta readers. Ideally, you have a handful more beta readers than you did alphas. Betas can be the same people as your alphas, but it’s useful to have a few who were not alpha readers. Make something clear to these people: by this point, the book is done. They are not reading it to provide you with commentary. They are there so that there are reviews available on Amazon and on Goodreads for your book on the day of release. Writing that review– and, critically, being honest about it— is their job. They are not to point out problems with the book unless it’s something 1) easily fixable and 2) egregious, like, say, claiming that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Tarzan. (Sigh.)
Make it clear to your beta readers that you want honest reviews– but keep in mind that you get to pick these folk, so choosing people you think are likely to enjoy your work is probably a good idea. Folk can smell fluff reviews a mile away, and they won’t do you any good at all.
(Note: again, this is variable due to your own process. I’ve never written anything that needed more than two full drafts. There are plenty of people massively more successful than me who use many more drafts than that. Again, adjust other dates as needed.)
(Note also: every ebook should have a page at the back with links to your blog, your Twitter page, and every other book you’ve ever published ever. Be careful with this, and don’t link to Amazon versions on the edition you’re sending to Smashwords– you can also link to the page on your website that you created for your other books, which is probably safer.)
STEP NINE: TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
Submit your book to Amazon, and to any other service that you can that allows pre-orders. Amazon, I know, will allow you to set up pre-orders for your book so long as they actually have an uploaded manuscript file for it. I don’t know off the top of my head if Smashwords does. Note that you’ll probably need two separate properly formatted files because Smashwords has a couple of specific requirements to them. KDP Select may also be an option for you if you want your book Amazon-exclusive; that’s up to you.
STEP TEN: DURING THE TWO WEEKS PRIOR TO PUBLICATION.
Several things:
- Stay in touch with your beta readers. You want those reviews up and readable by the day the book launches, if not a day or two in advance.
- Do you have friends who write for different circles of folk than you do? See if you can get them to interview you about your book on their website.
- Create a separate page on your site for your book. Include at least your short pitch and the cover and a link to the pre-order page.
- Post an excerpt or two. Note that it’s possible that Amazon might squawk that they found a portion of your book somewhere on the Internet– but when they do this, they seem to be amenable to the answer “Yes, I posted an excerpt to this site.”
- If you’ve got a blog or a Facebook page, change your header image to part of the cover. Make sure to include the name of the book, the release date, and where it’s available– and if you can make it a clickable image, that’s good too.
- Push the pre-orders. Amazon counts all pre-orders and all first-day sales as sales on the first day, and the higher your search ranking goes on Day 1 the better job Amazon’s algorithms will do in pushing you even higher. Every pre-sale counts.
- Work on something else. Resist the temptation to change the release date because it’s done and you want it out now now now. That temptation is stupid. Squash it.
- Threaten to abandon everyone you’ve ever known and everyone who loves you if they don’t both buy your book and convince a stranger to buy it.
- How close are you with your local bookstore owner or comic shop? See if they’ll let you run a little promotion or a flyer or something like that.
- If you have the resources for print ads of some sort, do it. Do not pay anyone on Twitter for anything. Or Facebook. Facebook advertising is completely useless.
STEP ELEVEN: THE DAY OF PUBLICATION.
Reload the KDP Reports page, over and over, every five minutes, and spend the day crying, giggling maniacally, or both. Note that it is okay to be a spamming Twitter monster on the day your book is published. Update folks on sales every hour if you want. People will forgive you. Just don’t expect it to last too long.
STEP TWELVE: THE DAY AFTER PUBLICATION.
Continue promotion efforts, but keep in mind that vomiting onto Twitter going ARGLE BLARGLE BLAAH BUY MY BOOK won’t work very often.
And start working on the next book.
The end.
In which I die trying: book sales blogwanking
(Note: I’ll provide a free copy of the book of your choice to the first person who figures out the terribly clever joke I’m making with the picture on this post.)
I just took a few minutes to sit down and figure out exactly how my books have done this year. I’m going to put the take-away right up at the beginning so you don’t have to wait for it: I have indisputably lost money playing at writer this year. Lost a lot of money, actually. Now, the good news is that most of the money that I’ve lost wasn’t actually mine, since the grant I got last year paid for everything, but that money would still be in my pocket had I not spent it on writing-related stuff. (Well, actually, no, it wouldn’t, because I got the grant specifically so that I could play writer this year.)
Do I care? Actually, no, I don’t, but I won’t be hiring professional artists to do book covers again anytime soon until I figure marketing out. At any rate: here is all the data I can pull together on how my books did this year, and some musing on what works and what doesn’t. The long and short of it is, I think I’m probably pretty good at getting people to download stuff for free. I’m less good at getting people to spend money on my books. That’s the part I ought to work on.
I released two books this year: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 released on Amazon on May 10th and everywhere else a couple of months later, and Skylights released everywhere on September 29th. I have high hopes that the BA novel will release in the first quarter of 2015– I’m hoping for mid- to late March– or very early in the second quarter, and I have a fourth book in the works for later in 2015. Vague plans exist for the next BA installment in early 2016, with a possible follow-up to Skylights coming after that. So I’ve got plans. We’ll see how they work out.
Anyway. We’ll start with pure sales. The Benevolence Archives has, as of today, sold 56 copies, all but two of which were through Amazon. The other two were through the iTunes bookstore. Skylights has sold 36 copies– two through iTunes, ten through Smashwords, and the remainder through Amazon. It is possible that there are sales that I don’t know about through non-Smashwords or Amazon distributors, because of the way they report sales to Smashwords, but it’s unlikely that that amounts to more than one or two. If I include my payment from the story I sold to the World Unknown Review, I’ve made… wait for it… $215.89 from my book sales in 2014. This, as I’ve already said, doesn’t come close to representing profit. Nowhere near it. I’m not telling you how much I’ve spent. I might next year when I’m spending my own money.
Free downloads have been a bit more interesting. I have given away four copies of Skylights, all through Smashwords, and 550 copies of The Benevolence Archives. BA has done well at Smashwords; it’s responsible for 102 of those free downloads. 91 people have downloaded the free chapter of Skylights through Smashwords; that chapter is available just about everywhere but only Smashwords lets me know the number of downloads. I really wish Amazon gave me access to that number but they don’t. My books were downloaded, one way or another, 646 times in 2014.
People go back and forth on the value of having a free book out there. As you can see (and this will surprise no one) my books move a lot more copies when they’re free. It’s possible that BA is just that much better than Skylights, but I think it’s the price. Very soon I will have the novel available, and my hope is that the free novella will drive sales to my other (non-free) books, especially the ones that are sequels. I don’t know if this is a wise decision, but comparing sales of BA 2 to Skylights will be very interesting. For now, I’ll take the exposure over the money– I feel like it’s more valuable in the long run at this time. And considering that Skylights has had four and a half fewer months to sell and costs 166% of what Benevolence Archives does, I think there’s some evidence that I’m on the right track here. It’s hardly conclusive, but it’s evidence.
Here’s my Amazon author rank, by the way. My best day? My first day on the market:
For those of you who don’t know this– a single sale can make the difference between an author rank of #650,000 and the high six figures. Two sales in a day will usually break you into the top 100K. A day of no sales will lose you 30-40K in ranking or so. There’s an enormous amount of volatility built into those rankings, and I suspect most Amazon authors are selling no more than one or two books a week. Remember something: I’ve never had a day of double-digit sales. Not once. Even the day BA launched. And that day was good for #35,792. My high day of free giveaways was 290 downloads, which had me briefly at #1 in the world for free science fiction books.
Here’s the thing: I can easily imagine someone looking at these numbers, particularly that $215.89, and thinking “Man. That was not worth the effort.” And… well, I can understand that. My perspective, on the other hand, is that in April of 2014 I had never convinced anyone in the world ever to pay me money to write words and as of right now there have been ninety-three instances of human beings deliberately giving me their money for my writing. And not at gunpoint or anything! My mom can’t be all of those people. My books have been downloaded six hundred and forty-six times. This is insane! I don’t know 646 people! I cannot pretend that this is bad news. Now, do I hope I do better next year? Yes, definitely. But for my first seven months as an author? I’m not complaining at all.
I was going to muse about marketing a bit, but this sentence is going to push this post over 1000 words already, so maybe I’ll save it for later this week and call it “How to Sell Books Online,” like I know what I’m doing.
Indie authors: how am I doing? How are you doing?
Another!
This is the second day in a row, and the third out of the last five, that I’ve gotten mail from these people. This one was addressed to both my real name and my pen name. Honestly, I wouldn’t have mentioned it this time around, but 1) they cunningly dodged my new “don’t even bother opening their mail” policy by sending me a postcard this time and 2) they include numbers that give some insight into just what a shitty deal their original “Ultimate Publishing Package” is.
I won’t be mentioning them again unless it’s really entertaining. But nonetheless:
Here we learn that they want to charge you $237 to print a hundred copies of a fifty-page book. The original cost, remember, was $1600, less a $601 “discount,” to $999. Of course, no one anywhere actually writes fifty-page books, and if I were to self-pub Skylights through them it would cost me an additional $746 on top of the not-actually-$999-it’s-really-$1118.40 cost that their “Ultimate Publishing Package” entails.
In other words, $1864.40– nearly two thousand damn dollars— for a hundred physical copies of a book that I’ll never be able to move and a bunch of other services that I can either a) do for myself because they’re free or b) when bought in bulk, which this company is certainly doing, are minimal in cost.
That is a lot of profit, kids.
Then again, they spend a lot on postage.