Christopher D. Schmitz's Blog

Excuses for my Lateness!

Embarking on a writing journey is both exhilarating and daunting for new authors. The path is fraught with challenges, from developing a compelling narrative to navigating the complexities of publishing. Without proper guidance, it’s easy to fall prey to common pitfalls, including scams that exploit inexperienced writers and mistakes that can hinder progress. This is where the value of expert coaching becomes evident.

The Working Writers Mastermind program offers a structured, nine-step model designed to transform your passion into a sustainable career. With weekly seminars led by seasoned professionals, including Christopher D. Schmitz (hey, that’s me!), Jeri Shepherd, T.R. Nickel, and A.G. Wedgeworth authors gain insights into essential aspects of writing and business, such as mindset, craft development, community building, book production, and marketing strategies. This comprehensive approach ensures that writers not only hone their creative skills but also learn the business acumen necessary to thrive in the industry.

Engaging with experienced coaches provides personalized feedback, accountability, and a roadmap tailored to your unique goals. By investing in such mentorship, beginning authors can confidently navigate the literary landscape, avoid common scams, and establish a solid foundation for a successful writing career. We’ve helped countless authors so far between our author coaching services and our appearances at conventions and conferences where the WWM has organized and taught all of an event’s author track.

If you’re serious about turning your writing dreams into reality, now is the time to take action. The Working Writers Mastermind offers one of the best-value coaching packages available, providing live coaching sessions, access to an extensive library of recorded lessons, and an invitation to join our thriving online community of writers. Heck, we’re even running our own retreat!

By joining, you’ll gain direct mentorship from industry experts, avoid costly mistakes, and fast-track your progress in both craft and career. Don’t navigate this journey alone—sign up today and take steps toward becoming a successful, professional author!

Also, I am still available for consult here and through my website, even if my blog posts have been less frequent. You can still book me independently, but the WWM is one of the best values available and most of my advice and mentoring energies have been pointed in that direction for the last year+ which explains my relative silence these last many months… as a full time author I’ve realized I can’t give everything away (I’ve gotta eat!) and so I invite you to check out that group.

More special releases!

Hard to believe it, but my last post was also a mention of a crowdfunding campaign (which went very well, I might add.) I’ve been wortking my kickstarter release game and found lots of success with it, Enough so that it’s likely to be a main part of my business nowadays.

I want to point out a little project I put together via TreeShaker Books: it’s a multi-author horror collection for the spooky season. It slipped my mind until now, the very last day of it being available, but I wanted to share it here with my followers on my blog site.

Check it out by clicking here!

I do plan to drop another blog this week about the boardgame I mentioned last time (the Winnie the Pooh versus Cthulhu one, which is currently available to back on KS as well!)

My new Kickstarter is Live!

We hit our funding goal in 20-30 min and have been going strong. Please please please back this! I would really love to earn a Project We Love sticker from Kickstarter.

If you think this looks like D&D, that’s because it is! kinda. This was originally an adjacent fantasy setting during the 1990s which I have licensed. The series is currently at 10 books, plus 4 novellas, 1 comic book, and 1 5E compatible game module! This campaign launches several new products and can be seen here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/feyduelist/the-esfah-sagas?ref=5u6ihp

also, since the new 1-shot RPG module moves me more firmly into the game creation world, I can probably mention my new project, The Call of Pooh-Thulhu, an upcoming co-operative game that pits the friends of the 100 Acre Woods against the terrors of Lovecraft’s nightmares (thanks public domain!) All physical backers of my current campaign will get a free promo card with their books!

mockups-design.com

Post-Show bump and Amazon Metrics

Something about conventions many authors see is the small sales spike they can track after a successful show. My paperback sales are up like 900% after a big weekend comic convention. All of those sales are on Amazon, even though I begged every person I talked with to buy on my site and provided a link and a QR code while explaining that Amazon takes a significant chunk. My line is, “Support creators and not billionaires. The cost is the same for you, but the difference is significant to me.”

Many people pledge lip service to the arts, but the math shows that buyers are more than comfortable ripping the author’s income in half and giving it to a 1%er eating wagyu on a rocket-ship. I’m actually not bitter about it, even if it sounds like I am; truly, I am thankful for every sale I make. However, I think most buyers/readers don’t understand how the math shakes out and have not entertained the idea of a customer arbitrarily giving half of their paycheck to a wealthy person they’ve never met. To that end, I made an explainer graphic.

I know the argument that pro-Amazon people are going to make is, “But shipping is free.” But is it? Really? Amazon covers the shipping costs by charging for Amazon Prime memberships, and remember that it just increased the cost of that (in 2024) by a factor of nearly 300% of the inflation rate. The cost is almost $150 per year and that offsets shipping fees—plus Amazon is privileged with dramatically lower shipping rates than authors have access to… even if we use media mail discount shipping (the lowest rate USPS offers).

Add on top of that the cost of Prime video (+$36 to revert to the ad-free streaming they used to include in Prime,) an Audible subscription ($180), and a Kindle Unlimited plan ($144) and you can see where Daddy Bezos is earning from streaming/digital and offsetting those delivery costs. So are you really getting free shipping? Not so much.

I’m not dragging anyone for using Amazon. I actually love my Prime membership because it gets me access to features like subscribe and save… but I’m aware that my shipping costs are being offset by the membership fees. Authors are businesses, certainly, but they are also creatives and artists, and it can feel a little insulting when readers will fall in love with something you created and then immediately cut your royalty money into 3 pieces and give 2 of those to a billionaire when they can be supporting the author (who is often trying to afford a pack of ramen and rent).

The fact that Amazon is competing over the artificial sentiments of “free shipping” has bearing on both her Etsy or personal store and also specialty things like her new Kickstarter. She’s got to charge shipping or she’ll lose money (I know I had one package on my last KS that cost me triple what the pledge was just to ship—plus I had to pay to produce the book, too.) Comparing shipping is not even a fair contrast since 1. Amazon is recouping money from customer services, plus over-inflating author charges to pay for shipping, and 2. Amazon is charged a rate low enough that the USPS refuses to disclose it and info is hard to discern because Donald Trump raised questions about it inciting a media frenzy and guaranteeing a partisan view of government waste spending… however an independent commission found the USPS lost about $1.50 per parcel! And Amazon sent 1,540,000,000 packages about the time of that study (late 20teens) which means taxpayers contributed about two and a quarter billion dollars to Amazon’s shipping bill. Susie Author in the suburbs can’t compete with that.

The contrast is more startling when you look at e-book and Audible. Many people prefer the convenience of Kindle as a reading platform and don’t understand that you actually get more options when you buy ebooks direct. You can still read an ebook sent via bookfunnel, Etsy, or payhip on your kindle! And even better, it won’t keep trying to upsell you on other goods and services and bog down your device trying to discern what other books it ought to try selling you. It’s faster, more portable, has fewer ads, no privacy intrusion, and you get to genuinely support the artist.

Here are charts for both ebook and audible vs a direct distribution and set at the non-exclusive rates at Amazon (since that is a general requirement to having non-exclusive agreements.) The ebook and audiobook are the same book as the paperback book charted above (it’s A Kiss of Daggers.) Not only are these numbers more lopsided since there is no printing cost—but there is also no shipping cost!

The difference when it comes to Audible credits is even crazier as I am in wide distribution (The average cost to have an audiobook produced is a little north of $3,000 and this expense belongs to the author. That amount can be reduced to nothing if a producer will do Royalty Share, but then your royalty rate is cut in half.) Below is my royalty earning per book on an Audible credit in my current rights agreement, which is nonexclusive. (It’s no wonder Brandon Sanderson completely rejected Audible as a platform and refused to let his books be available there.)

One final note out there for all the math junkies who may be wondering how my numbers make sense: Zon isn’t exactly honest in how they present data. On a paperback they only take 40% and give authors a 60% royalty, but they don’t talk about net vs gross and use language to obfuscate data. While they percentage, that is always off the top, and authors have to pay fees out of their end, which drives figure down…. That is why Zon’s 40% is earns them an extra $2.40 more than the author makes with a 60% earning in the example. They do this with ebooks as well, charging a delivery fee for digital goods. I understand that our current Indie author systems have had a significant investment by Zon which built the network… but also, at some point it all go out of hand and is now limiting the reach of indies, especially as they have built in pricing controls that don’t allow creators to compete with inflation (not to mention AI!)

I am convinced that people are so stuck on convenience and familiarity that they honestly do not understand how much buying author-direct changes the financial outlook of writers. Do you want to free a full-time writer from wage-slavery? Buy direct from their author site or from his or her event table.

Support Book-makers over Billionaires! Buy direct.

My direct sales portal is https://authorchristopherdschmitz.myshopify.com/

Fellow Authors… there is absolutely an ignorance issue at play. Our readers simply don’t know how much we pay to the almighty Zon—feel free to share this article!

A Caveat for being too deep with KDP/Amazon

If you followed my advice and looked at different models of publishing you’ll note I mention a few specific paths. It’s worth noting which path you are following so that you can properly focus your attentions on the sales and marketing side.

Because every single avenue to publishing includes using Amazon at some level, authors ought to be aware of some of the potential pitfalls. Amazon controls a massive amount of the bookselling market—the exact number is open to debate, but it’s at least 50% and possibly as high as 80%. With a system this large, there is certainly potential downsides…

One of the most common ways people find a readership is to write books in a series. If you put that series in the Kindle Unlimited program, you must agree to an exclusive arrangement with your e-book. That means you can’t sell or publish it on any other platform. Any readers who subscribe to Kindle Unlimited can read your book for free. While you don’t get paid for the direct download/purchase, you get paid for every page read out of a sort of community fund. Every month, Amazon issues a statement based on how many total page reads there were across all authors on the platform and in the system versus how much money came into the group fund. Unless you’re one of the hottest authors at that time (they can sometimes get a bigger piece of that fund) you earn a set amount per page read. It’s typically about 40% of one cent per page, sometimes as high as a half a penny. (They also calculate what a page is differently, and a 400 page novel is usually closer to 500 “KU pages.” That translates to about $2.50 as long as somebody reads every page of the book they downloaded for free. This is only slightly less than the estimated $3.15 a book that size would earn you if it was priced at $4.99. For people who writing genres composed mainly of binge readers (basically any romance subgenre, and certain others,) this is an excellent system as the monthly cost of a Kindle Unlimited membership is far lower than purchasing books—especially since many of those “whale readers” read a book per day!

So here’s the caveat. If you’ve invested a ton of time in building a business on Amazon harnessing the KU system and you suddenly get kicked off of Amazon, you can lose your entire income in a single moment. It happens pretty often and you’ll hear about it if you hang out in different groups of authors. Most of those people who lose their access or are kicked off the platform entirely have played fast and loose with Amazon’s rules at some point… But not all of them. With so many books being published every single day, the system does not use humans to do quality control checks. It’s all automated, and nobody really knows what kind of black magic Jeff Bezos has cooked up or how his systems work, (that’s all proprietary information.) But we do know that Amazon uses bots to police itself. A lot of times, those things don’t make the best judgement calls and you can wake up to find your amazingly successful series suddenly gone. It’s not common… It doesn’t happen to one in 100 authors, probably not even one in a thousand, but it does happen, and it is more likely to happen if you’ve solicited reviews, pushed something to another platform while it was still in KU—or even if someone else pirated your books in the past (that’s right, the system will sometimes act aggressive if there has been an infringement linked to your account… even if it was YOU defending your work.)

If you are on the path to writing sequential books that are tightly targeted to market and utilizing a page-reads payout scenario, then you stand the most to lose if you are suddenly de-platformed and kicked off the platform. If you have published in a more “wide” plan (which is what independent authors refer to as being a distribution in non-exclusive terms across multiple systems including BN/Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Google, and more) then you have less to fear, although Amazon’s KDP system has some of the cheapest printing rates around and losing access to that, even temporarily, can cause hiccups.

No matter which way you slice it, losing Amazon as a sales channel can cause a great amount of pain and heartbreak. Try to mitigate potential fallout from a misunderstanding or a rogue Amazon bought (most of the trouble seems related to AI quality control algorithms trying to combat scammers, hackers, thieves and general ne’er-do-wells who are trying to game the system and steal from the money through a variety of illegal means. A lot of us innocent people get caught in the crossfire.)

In the digital landscape of bookselling, this is just one of the potential natural disasters that exists. There are ways to escalate a concern or an inappropriate takedown, but those things take time. Just be aware that no business is safe and you should, as a wise business owner (because that’s what being an author is,) keep tabs on industry trends and happenings I also highly suggest that you join professional organizations that can help in the case of calamity. ALLi, or the Alliance of Independent Authors, does that sort of thing, in addition to providing member discounts for professional services and I’ve always found it a great value.

Omnibuses, Boxsets, and Amazon Price-Hikes

Near the end of June, 2023, Amazon changed the pricing structures for certain kinds of books. These were not small changes, and they had significant implications for my business. Ironically, the changes came right after releasing a supplement to my indie author’s publishing series of books where I talked about the speed of changes in the publishing world, and also the logic in optimizing your physical sales by creating omnibus editions.

Here’s the scoop…

I’ve been making omnibus editions for quite some time because Amazon had a price set per page—the size of the page didn’t matter, and I found I could take my 5.5×8.5 trim size trilogy of 1,200 pages into an omnibus edition of about 800 pages if I increased the trim to the common 6.69×9.61 size. The price for the purchase that was about $10.50 per omnibus. It cost me about $16 for the trilogy as individual volumes meaning I had about $5.50 of difference on the series and could offer a couple dollar discount and add a lot of value. I actually added to the omnibus an additional bonus story that I sell for $5 meaning that for $40 buyers got $56 worth of books. My cost on single volumes with the kicker is $19. I did a multi-book discount and my final net profit was $27 per set… or for $40 the buyers could save $16 and I actually net an additional $2.

I could offer steep discounts and get an extra couple dollars? Boo-yah.

But the Amazon increase made that go away. While all prices increased, some, anything larger than 6×9 increased a lot. Most of my books 6×9 and smaller went up by $0.20-0.50, and my prices were lower than standard norms anyway (it’s $19-20 sticker price on a standard book these days [i.e. not a mass-market trim size.]) So I adjusted my prices up from $15-18 to $15-20 which absorbs some of the increases—but everything is increasing, and it will literally pay to be ahead of the curve.

For a while, I was doing my most significant sales numbers in my omnibus editions. I had increased my size to slightly larger than 6×9 in order to gain a few extra lines and stay under the hard limit of 828 pages. KDP can’t print larger books than that (other services have slightly higher limits, but their prices are also higher, and that defeats the point of the larger omnibus to drive down production costs to pass on discounts.) In fact, right before the increase I was adjusting price to come in line with market rates and had just moved my omnibus price to $42 meaning I was going to make another $2 on the omni and adding a dollar to each of the other books in the trilogy widened the discount by creating an extra dollar of value (individual buy-through added $3 while the omni added $2, but I didn’t get to realize those benefits by the time Amazon hit us with the hike).

To recap: Amazon created a premium print tier, for lack of a better term, at all sizes higher than 6×9. That 800 page omnibus now costs me $14.25, almost $4 more. If I leave the pricing the same, my ROI drops significantly—I no longer made an extra $2, but lose $2, also my costs on the other books go up too. So what’s an author to do?

Get creative and play near the edge of the cliff!

If 6×9 is the MAXIMUM before the increase, then let’s do a 6×9. The previous dimensions were 6.69 by 9.61, and if we adjust the font sizes, headers, gutters, and line spacing, I can still produce a good-looking product that is readable and keep the size to 828 pages. Increasing to 828 puts a price on my new 6×9 omnibus at $10.94, which is about a half dollar increase, which seems to align with the new pricing structure.

Keeping a healthy ROI is a must for an authorprenuer (nobody tell Dave Chesson… I didn’t check to see if he trademarked the word!) Since I’m increasing all my costs, my new cost will be 42.99 for an omnibus that won’t cost me more than $11.75 after factoring in shipping earning me about $31.25 which is above $10 per book that you want to aim for as a general rule. Each of those books in the trilogy is now priced at $17.99, plus the bonus for a total cost of about $60 on a cost of 18.50 after shipping, with that same discount as before. I’m netting 31.50, so about the same. I plan to reduce the discount by a few dollars to reclaim that margin.

Amazon came in like a fat kid on the teeter totter and threw everything out of balance. It might wreck recess for a little bit, but it just takes a little adjustment and some counter-balance to bring the entire system back into line. I don’t have any answer to fix the problem of rising inflation (not any that won’t get me de-platformed or hunted down by government agents,) but it’s helpful to know that the rising costs affect all industries, so as prices go up, your adjustments will go largely unnoticed, and if they are spotted early, they’ll get swallowed up by gross political malfeasance within the news cycle. It’s a slight comfort knowing that while political elites set fire to the economy, we all get to burn together. Yay. I mean, they won’t be affected. They’ll actually come out ahead. But I’ve been told to mind my own business. I’m just saying, get out and vote. Follow policy instead of headlines and follow the money when you head to the ballot box. Until gross incompetence is punished and actual representation of constituents is honored, authors will have to keep a firm handle on their pricing models [soap box rant over.]

This whole exercise, using real numbers on an actual book, should give you an idea of how to price books to keep your profit margins healthy (which means you can actually make some money on your books and afford to eat all the ramen.)

Stay flexible my friends, and play on the edge of cliffs!

New Interview on Writing

A college student reach out to me recently with a few questions about writing as a career path. I figured I would share those answers here, along with the specific questions for clarity’s sake…

1 How would you describe your field and how did you get into it?
I’ve been a storyteller for pretty much all my life. That led pretty naturally into writing short stories and eventually novels. I started writing my first novel while I was bored at work and in college. That eventually was published with the traditional press many many years ago. That publisher, like so many others, eventually went out of business (actually, it was bought by another publisher and eventually merged). I kept writing. I did a couple deals with some of the publishers and eventually moved into the independent world where I act as my own publisher and do all of that minutia in addition to the creative stuff. I found that, unless you’re with one of the major publishers (I’m actually in talks with one of the few publishers I want to work with on my newest series) independent authors can actually make more money and retain greater control over their works this way. Working through the hurdles and road bumps while constantly searching for ways to improve my business has led me to being one of the top-selling genre fiction authors in the upper Midwest (at least when it comes to physical editions).

2 How does one become an author?
The expected answers to write a book and then began speaking with publishers or pursue independent tools available through Amazon, Ingram, and others. But that’s the wrong answer. The first answers to read a ton of stuff and become familiar with the storytelling process. Writing is just one path to telling stories. Some people write screenplays and do film and theater, others write code and develop video games or even board-games. The traditional author path, which is how I started, is one fraught with gatekeepers. You have to have a story that’s complete and highly polished enough to be published right now. Then you decide what publishers you want to send that to and research each of them. Some of them, and all the biggest ones with the household name authors, will not accept submissions from authors; they only take query letters from authors’ agents which mean you need an agent before you can get published. Agents are much more selective than publishers since they work on commission. Before you can send that letter to them, you will want to hire an editor and invest a great deal of capital into things like your platform. Publishers don’t want good books. They want books they can sell, and that means they want authors who already have a built-in social media presence, email newsletter list, and some sort of direct angle they can spin to sell something… You may be seen memes with all the spines turned in solidarity with female writers? That meme is horse crap. Right now in the industry there’s nothing more untouchable than books by cis-gender white males. It’s all about having an angle in the sales market. For that reason, the independent market has taken the book world by storm, even forcing one of the biggest 5 publishers out of business, further revealing that the old guard bastions of publishing have no idea what readers really want. As the disconnect between publisher and reader widens, more and more authors are alienated, even more publishers are going to go out of business over the next 5 to 10 years. For that reason, I am a fierce advocate of the independent publishing world where people can focus on good stories without preaching their pseudo-intellectual morality on people. I’m not saying you can’t share your ideals—in fact, you absolutely should, but if you lead with either pandering or pushing an agenda, you will alienate anybody listening by subconsciously othering them rather than drying them into a viewpoint. If you lead with a good story, you can draw people into a viewpoint and have them live the story through that lens. That’s how you write fiction that changes the world, whatever the viewpoint (and you’ll notice I have advocated for nothing specific, just made observations).

3 What are some of your day-to-day activities?
I try to write every day. Most days I do. My typical output is about twice what someone writes at daily to beat NaNoWriMo. I keep a tight schedule in order to juggle all of my tasks. Today I wrote several thousand words, checked in on my sales stats, sent emails, worked on some audiobook production, it’s in graphic design, produced a few pages for a comic book, checked in with fans on my Ream fan community (it’s like Patreon.) I also drank a ton of coffee and went to the gym. Stephen King wrote about maintaining some physical mobility in his book, On Writing. He’s not alone. I’ve had several chances to hang out with the top-selling science fiction author in today’s market—we’ve done several events together (he writes Star Wars, the newer Dune books, etc.) and he lives in Colorado; he writes most of his books by dictating them while he’s walking through the mountains. When I write, I use a combination of voice to text software as well as typing words. I tend to jump back and forth which keeps me engaged and keeps the words flowing. Now the words are good when they come out initially, but that’s what editing is for.

4 What are some values that are held by workers in your field and how are they viewed by ones in your field and others?
I’m not really sure how to answer this question. If you’re referring to values based on a morality said, this would span the gamut since there is practically an infinite number of viewpoints represented along the spectrum are writers. Most of us, however, at least those of us who are successful in the field as independence, treat this as a creative business. Some people overly compartmentalize the idea of “creative business.” I’ve worked with many authors, most of whom have failed, who start out saying they don’t care if they make any money at all and this is purely a form of art and they need to get it out into the world with the misguided belief that their art will be so pure and perfect that they will naturally be discovered. On the flip-side, there are people who are simply in this to make money. A lot of those guys pirate work, employ things like click farms to steal money from the KDP authors’ pool by “hacking” the ebook subscription service, write tons of small “junk books” and target keywords on book buying systems meant to harvest micro buys with nonfiction books (most of the content is pirated on these as well—often being copied and pasted directly from Reddit threads.) Of course, this is also where a lot of AI authors are coming into play as it’s allowing them entry into the fiction fields. I’ve read a lot of AI generated stuff. I’m not terribly scared by it. Not only can I tell when something is written by AI, is just so… Bad. People who are successful in this field understand the need to run it like a business which would involve things like scaling up, having a marketing plan, staying on top of what’s current in trending by reading lots of nonfiction books, attending conferences, networking with other professionals, paying your taxes, and having a marketing plan. The trick is to balance that with the creative also be reading and creating on a regular basis. Nothing sells your current books like a new book in those same series. Being able to understand the trends and position yourself in the market to capitalize best off of things like long series runs and page reads in KDP or capitalizing on series buy-through, or even writing content to market are all things successful authors are aware of before they launch a book.

5 What would you say are two major issues in your field?
Right now, there is a major uproar in the industry over the usage of artificial intelligence. Recently, I was at the largest professional conference for independent authors. People wanted to talk about it, and moderators kept trying to dispel that as it looked like battle lines were forming up in the community. Over the next two years, we are likely to see both some legislative regulation as well as certain levels of comfort or lines being drawn in the sand on the part of creatives over what is acceptable and what is not. It’s the single biggest hot button issue right now in the community. The second issue that’s major and ongoing is the idea of direct sales. The reason Amazon has had such a stranglehold on the bookselling community for so long as they have forced people into exclusivity agreements. Because the control so much of the market share, most folks don’t realize there are viable alternatives, especially when it comes to digital books—this is in large part because they have controlled the hardware, Kindle, which most people are familiar with reading on. They’ve also enforced almost abusive policies on authors trying to move into the audiobook market. The entire issue is one of buyer’s comfort level (when Amazon first began, most folks were mildly uncomfortable with purchasing things on the Internet as it was relatively new at that time) and also one of distribution. Amazon shaped the battlefield so that they could stand the best chance of winning this war, but tools have developed over the last several years which have allowed people to sell products direct. I’ve been doing this for years selling paperbacks at conventions and live appearances and very recently launched a new sales portal which completely bypasses the Amazon system. You can still read anything you buy from it on Kindle and I much prefer there audiobook software versus Amazon’s. The Amazon system continually tries to upsell you and harvester data to plug into an algorithm and squeeze that cash cow for all it’s worth. Not only do I resent that, but I think buyers (because my buyers are readers) are too smart to stay beholden to the almighty Daddy Bezos, and so I’ve invested significantly into that new system which launched around Christmastime and just recently began producing sales.

6 Is there anything else you would think would be relevant for me to know?
I coach and mentor other authors in a few different areas of their career. Because I talked to so many writers at the events that I do (whether teaching panels or live sales events) I have a couple of massive pieces of information that I tell people to focus on before they even begin trying to publish. The first is to write short stories. Mentees I work with on a publishing track often get homework for me, the first of which being to write five short stories between 5000 and 10,000 words. Following that, I have them write five more 500 to 1000 words. That allows writers to shift away from their magnum opus (everyone wants to write their life’s work straight out of the gate, but that’s simply wrong from a strategic viewpoint.) The second one is to develop their platform before they even launch the first book. The short stories actually factor into that and allows them to share those stories to hook new readers, connecting those people to the author so they can build a newsletter, engage with readers, and develop enthusiasm for the later body of work. My website is https://www.authorchristopherdschmitz.com/ and clicking the Books tab will take you to the sales portal I referenced.

Video Interview

Get your own copy in audio, ebook, or a physical copy at my website: https://authorchristopherdschmitz.myshopify.com/products/a-kiss-of-daggers

Unboxing Video Review. Amazon vs Ingramspark shipping!

@authorchristopherschmitz

comparison of POD book printer shippingnorms. #Amazon vs #Ingramspark #booktok #authortiktok #unboxing #printondemand #authorsoftiktok #printer #authortok #author #authorlife #indieauthor

♬ оригинальный звук – music23

Follow me on Tiktok where I often do author interviews. I’ve covered this topic a fair amount, but never with a side-by-side video unboxing. The Amazon package was pretty much par for the course: I’ve had better and I’ve had worse. the IS box was also very consistent for what I get from them.

Know your “Ratio of Death”

What’s great about Ingramspark is the ability to make books returnable, which some stores absolutely require. I briefly ran a bookstore with the intention of either 1) learning to better understand how they operate and what their needs are, and 2) making some money. There wasn’t the kind of traffic and visibility to make number two happened… But again, a lot of nuanced information for the first. I have other articles about this, but being able to send the book back for a refund makes carrying an unknown author’s books much less risky.

Let’s talk today about a rate of returns which can potentially wipe out all your earnings–and even put you in the hole…

Being less risky to the store does not mean there is no risk! It means that the author is assuming it, instead. It would be nice if we could just believe hard enough that our books to be a success. But belief and marketing are completely different things. Book sales aren’t magic. They come from paying attention to the little things. Even if you do all of those right, you still may get some returns from bookstores who have purchased through your distributor and send them back for whatever reason.

Yesterday I was at an event where I made an author appearance and soul books. Somebody asked me if they liked the first one in my series. They could purchase the next book at the local Barnes & Noble. I told him they could order it, but their real question was whether it would be on the shelf for immediate pickup. This person was asking author-related questions rather than reader ones, so I explained to them how hat it’s my preference to meet people and events for a variety of reasons, including being able to meet people and answer questions like she had. I also mentioned that I make about $10 if she buys the book now in less than a dollar if she buys it from B&N—but they could order it there if she liked (and then handed her a card to order from my website.)

Here’s the thing about being on a bookstore shelf: it’s a massive ego stroke and that feels nice. Seeing their book on a store shelf validates an author at a deep level, especially if it’s face out. But it is not very profitable unless you’re able to sell many thousands of copies that way.

A lot of authors who have not played with tools more advanced than what Amazon offers aren’t familiar with the setup, but a distributor sends books to different stores that they can have on their shelf. The stores act as the sales portal, much like an Amazon sales page, but featuring many, many books. Amazon acts as both a printer with KDP and also is the distributor. The distributor as a middleman, much like the KDP dashboard—it’s the delivery and housing mechanism connecting the sales portal to the product. The store, obviously, connects the product to the customer. If you use certain printers and distributors such as Ingramspark, you can control how much you sell your books for to the bookstore… Stores typically operate on a percentage basis and not on a hard number. It may seem foreign if you’ve only used Amazon because Amazon handles all that the backend and they do not let authors adjust the settings; also, they set them at the absolute worst possible minimums for the distributor’s network. They don’t allow books to be returned and they give only 40%. If you use an Amazon assigned ISBN, the block of numbers they use are easily identified as being sourced through Amazon—that means bookstores, already feeling vastly alienated by Amazon, will always know exactly when an author has done business with the devil.

Ingramspark sounds pretty great, right? You could just set the distribution terms as the best for bookstores and then get the book carried everywhere—sellers will be motivated to push your book above all others! Except that’s not how any of it works. Selling five books a day might be big to you. It’s not all that huge to bookstores, especially the chain resellers.

Still, it’s worth being in the distribution network. I’ve long advocated being Amazon with one of their ISBNs, and mirroring the ISBN with one of your own and published at Ingramspark. Yes, it opens up the opportunities to do book signings at different stores, and it also puts you in a broader distribution network. Side note on those book signings: they will not be as profitable as you think. Whether doing a local signing or requesting a store to stock your book on the shelf regularly, it’s worth asking them they can avoid returning your book. Offer to pay them what they paid for it rather than send it back, saving them work. Because you have committed to the risk, if you get a return, you are on the hook for money… Since your profit on a book is generally $0.27-1.50, and the books have a production cost, plus with shipping rates added in, you will lose money with each return far more than the tiny royalty just referenced. The production cost (which is about 10-20% higher than KDP), and shipping must be reimbursed (again) if you want the book sent to you rather than destroyed.

If it sounds confusing, it kinda is. But if you do one book signing and sell less than 80% of the books, the store manager ordered, you will have returns that cost you money, forcing you to issue a payment to Ingram. Once something hurts you in the wallet, you’ll start moving numbers around and figure out exactly how the entire system works.

I am mainly in distribution so I have the opportunity to work with small mom-and-pop bookstores. I also have a fan base overseas and in places where Amazon is verboten. In order to minimize my risk, I don’t have every one of my books set as returnable, and none are set as returnable in other countries besides the USA (regular postage is bad enough, a return from the UK might force me to sell a kidney.) Also, the only books I allow returns on are books I know I will be able to resell at my event booth. I do frequent live sales shows like comic conventions and other appearances. I rotate through a lot of stock, and adding a couple copies of my more popular titles is an easy enough risk to absorb… Returns on one of those titles simply means I have a couple with different ISBN’s that cost me slightly more money to produce, dragging down my ROI, but in relatively lower numbers.
On to the Ratio!

Recently I ran some numbers and played with the new IngramSpark sales dashboard (which is very pretty, but clumsy to navigate and will hopefully improve) and found a ratio of returns to sales that authors must exceed to have profits selling with returns enabled. If you dip below the margin, you’ll lose money as returns wipe out your income (and potentially create a deficit). If you exceed it the numbers with high sales vs returns, you should scale up your efforts in that sector, so kudos—but I’m talking about the floor and not the ceiling.

I looked at just my large fantasy series (The Esfah Sagas) over a selected period and noticed I sold 12 copies and had 3 returns come back. The 12:3 ratio meant I earned only $4.77 on all those books sold combined. If there had been one more return, I would have owed back another +$5 and be in the red on this series… that means I would have to pay Ingram money for retail stores to take all the royalties for my work (I’ve written elsewhere on how to mitigate this as much as possible by adjusting price controls). The moral is “Know Thy Ratio.” Your ratio may be very similar and needs to be calculated based on book specifics, but most of my books are around 90k words, are not color prints, and are standard novel trim sizes (think 300 page books at 6×9 and retailing around $18).
Author earnings are already small, and selling a dozen books with no return is not a long-term model for success, unless you can scale that dramatically, efficiently, and cheaply ($4.77 total profit divided by 12 is an earned $0.40 per book net.) I’ve found that a better way is selling directly to readers at live events. It’s enabled me to earn a livable wage from my writing and I scaled into it by starting small and then increasing what works for me until I’ve become an author fixture at some of the larger comic conventions in the upper mid-west. I teach people how to do that—even if they’re introverts. But you can also use your own ecommerce page such as shopify, square, payhip, or etsy, plus many others in order to make direct digital and physical sales. Your mileage may vary and success will largely depend on how much effort (read: strategy + action + money) you put into the marketing.

If learning to meet people and sell at live events interests you, I have many tips on that model in my book, Sell More Books at Live Events—and the only books that come back to me there are if the copy is misprinted or damaged (I sold between 3,000-5,000 copies to folks last year and had 3-6 come back and only because of physical defects.)