Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing, page 11

The Official Rules on Head-Hopping

So you’re writing a novel and it’s a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but somebody told you head-hopping is a no-no, and now you’re worried because you like head-hopping. What’s the deal?

Agata posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy,

I’ve been reading your blog and it’s amazing. I’m planning/writing a novel and your posts are incredibly helpful in organizing everything. I’m writing here because I have a dilemma about the POV characters.

I have two POV characters, sometimes they have their own scenes and sometimes they are together. In that case, I don’t always know which one should be the POV. Is it acceptable to go from one character’s head to another? Like here (I’m just making it up, but it shows the structure of my scenes):

Emily looked up when the door opened.

“you’re late” she hissed. God, he was so irritating.

“what do you want from me?” he snorted.

“to act like an adult” she left the room, slamming the door behind her.

Josh stood there, wondering how to apologize to her this time.

 

So Emily is the POV when she’s alone and when Josh comes in, but then she leaves so he has to be the POV. Is that ok? If so, can I swith POV when they’re both in the room as well, or should I adapt the “God’s eye” approach throughout the story and not show anyone’s thoughts?

Hopefully my question makes sense, I’m just not sure what I should stick to.

Thanks a lot

Agata

Randy sez:  Let’s define terms. “Head-hopping” is the practice of switching point-of-view characters within a single scene. This is not the same as the omniscient point-of-view, which would allow your narrator to know things that none of the characters know.

If you want to start a war among fiction writers, a golden way to do it is to tell everyone that they can’t hop heads. Or tell them that they can.

Why Head-Hopping Is Said To Be Wrong

Those who oppose head-hopping make their case this way.

The purpose of writing fiction is to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience. You do that by putting your reader inside the skin of one character in each scene. The reader sees only what that character sees. Hears what she hears. Smells what she smells. Feels what she feels. Your reader becomes that character for the scene.

Then in the next scene, your reader may become some other character. The reader is never confused. The reader is always having a Powerful Emotional Experience.

This is the one and only way to write fiction.

Why Head-Hopping Is Said To Be Right

Those who believe in head-hopping make their case this way.

The purpose of writing fiction is to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience. You do that by putting your reader inside the skin of one character at a time. The reader sees only what that character sees. Hears what she hears. Smells what she smells. Feels what she feels. Your reader becomes that character for a part of a scene.

If you need to transition to another character in the same scene, you do that in a way that cues the reader that you’re about to hop heads. And just like that, the reader becomes that other character. The reader is never confused. The reader is always having a Powerful Emotional Experience.

This is the one and only way to write fiction.

Randy Settles The Argument Once And For All

So who’s right? The hoppers or the non-hoppers?

Randy sez: Personally, I’ve never hopped heads. That has worked for me, and I’ll bet that 99% of my readers don’t know or care that I’m a non-hopper. Readers just care about whether the story is working for them.

But I have plenty of friends who hop heads all the time. So far as I know, they all write romance, and in the romance category, head-hopping is accepted. Why? Because in a romance novel, the relationship is the most important character in the story. Not the hero. Not the heroine. The relationship. So the reader likes to know what both the hero and heroine are thinking in each scene.

As far as I can tell, this works for my head-hopping friends. I’ll bet that 99% of their readers don’t know or care that they’re head-hopping. Readers just care whether the story is working for them.

Po-tay-to. Po-tah-to. What really matters is how it tastes in the soup.

What do you think? Leave a comment and tell me your opinion.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

The post The Official Rules on Head-Hopping appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Agents in the Indie Age

So you’re an indie author writing fiction and you’ve been thinking of writing a novel for a traditional publisher and you need an agent. How do you make that work? What are the rules for working with an agent in the Indie Age?

“Jane” (not her real name) posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy,

I recently made a connection with a literary agent who is willing to represent me. I wasn’t seeking an agent; this happened through recommendations from a small press who is publishing my next series. I did all my due diligence and this agency totally checks out positive, but I need some advice from you.

A little about me: I have two ebooks indie published (one available in print), a contract with a small press for a digital serial style series with the option of print on demand copies later, and more ideas and drafts then I know what to do with other then publish them one at a time myself.

I looked over the contract and the exclusive clause gave me pause. They did say they could include an addendum that would allow me to continue indie publishing if I wanted, but made it clear they want access to all my writing since they will be putting work into my success as well now.

I’d love to have an agent, to be a “hybrid” author, but I’m not sure how realistic that is. The publishing industry has changed dramatically, yet lots of people are still in the same routines as before. Would signing with an agent be detrimental to me at this point?

I highly value your advice. Thanks for any input you can offer.

Randy sez: Well, I’m hesitant to give advice when I don’t know you and your work well. And I’d be hesitant to give advice even then. So consider this blog post to be “Randy’s thoughts” rather than “Randy’s advice.” I’ll tell you how I run my own life. That may or may not apply to how you should run yours.

You only need an agent if you’re working with a traditional publisher. That is, if you’re completely indie, then you don’t need an agent.

My opinion is that if you’re working with a traditional publisher, even a small one, you need an agent. Publishing contracts these days are complex, and you need somebody to explain the nuances of each contract and fight for you on the clauses that are important. The word I’m hearing is that contracts are getting less author-friendly, so you need all the help you can get.

In my experience, virtually all agents want to work with you exclusively–meaning they don’t want you to have two agents. If you happened to be working in two wildly different categories, it might make sense to have two agents, but that’s rare.

In my opinion, it’s reasonable for you to give an agent exclusivity on your traditionally-published work. An agent puts a lot of work into each client, and that effort needs to be rewarded.

Some agents are a lot more indie-friendly than others. The important thing is that you have an agreement with your agent on what your indie activities are going to be. Your agent is your business partner. You must keep them informed on what you’re doing, if you’re doing any indie work at all.

If you and your agent don’t agree on your indie publishing, then that’s a serious problem. It sounds like this agent is happy, in principle, with your indie publishing. The addendum to the contract sounds like a good idea to me, but you should also discuss it  verbally to make sure that you both agree on the meaning of the addendum.

Some agents, in my experience, are just not a good fit for indie authors. Indie authors typically believe that the more books they produce, the better, because each book promotes the others. Some agents just plain don’t buy that reasoning. (And it looks to me like most publishers don’t buy it either.)

If you believe that your indie titles help promote your traditional books, and if your publisher insists on a strict non-compete clause that keeps you from producing indie books during some long window of time, then you have a serious conflict. You need to have an agent who agrees with you on the issue. And not all agents do.

If you’re going to work with an agent, you need to have roughly the same set of assumptions. Some of the points where indie authors disagree most with traditional publishers are the following:

Life of the contract. Should it be limited to a set number of years? Should it terminate when sales volume gets “too low?” What does “too low” mean? Or should the contract go for the life of the copyright?
Option clause. Should the publisher get an option on your next book? Or your next TWO books? If so, can you live with the terms of that option?
Non-compete clause. What is the length of time that you’re willing to NOT publish any indie material that might compete with the traditionally-published book? How broad is the clause? Who decides what “compete” means?

You need to be on the same page as your agent on all the important questions. Any decent agent will of course be working in what he believes to be your best interests. But if the two of you can’t agree on what your best interests are, then you’re working with the wrong agent. And it’s best to figure that out before you start working together, rather than after.

Publishing is more complicated than it used to be. The trend is for more and more traditionally-published authors to do a bit of indie-publishing on the side. The trend is for more and more agents to help them with this. The trend is for more and more traditional publishers to pursue contracts with successful indie authors.

Because of these trends, I’m guessing that ten years from now, all authors will be hybrids or indies, and there won’t be ANY authors who are solely traditional. I can’t prove this. It’s just a guess based on what I see, and so it could be wildly wrong. But ten years from now, if I’m right, then I’ll say I told you so.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

The post Agents in the Indie Age appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Smashing The Fiction Writing Bottleneck

So you’re writing about six different novels all at the same time and none of them are getting done and you just can’t decide which to work on next. What do you do?

Katya posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I am 22 year old college student. I am immensely in love with creating my own characters and worlds. Currently I have six projects, most of them more than one novel. The trouble I am having is picking the right one to work on. Sometimes I work a bit on this one, a bit on that one, but that does not help me finish any of my projects. I want to sit down and just finish one crappy first draft so I can polish it and be proud of finally finishing my first novel.

Do you have any tips when you are stuck with several projects and do not know which one to go with?

Thank you for your time,

Katya

Randy sez:  Katya, the good news is that a lot of writers would pay to have your problem, which is that you have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to ideas.

The bad news is that you have a bottleneck in your writing process. That bottleneck is strangling your production. You are spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.

The good news is that you can break that bottleneck right now.

But first you have to identify it. 

Let’s start by identifying what you’re doing well. You’re generating ideas. Lots of ideas. So many that they’re competing for your attention, and you’re afraid that if you don’t work on them all right now, you’ll never work on them.

That’s an illusion. The reality is that by paying attention to all of them all at once, you are preventing ANY of them from ever getting published.

The Fiction Writing Bottleneck

That creates the biggest problem most novelists have: the fiction writing bottleneck.

What’s the solution?

Let me tell you a little story. About 15 years ago, my buddy John Olson had that same problem. I asked him what he was working on and he gave me a list of 10 different books he was working on. All at the same time.

I pointed out that he was working a full-time job and writing in his spare time. Even if he had 40 hours per week to write, he’d only be able to spend 4 hours per week on each book, and he was competing with professional writers who had 40 hours per week to commit to a single book. So John didn’t have a chance.

So I told John he had to pick one, any one of the ten, and commit to it. He picked one and agreed to make a firm commitment to write it, but only if I’d coauthor it with him. As it turned out, I really liked that idea, so I agreed to work on it. The result was our award-winning novel Oxygen.

Breaking the Bottleneck

Now how do you commit, Katya? There are two things you need to do, and these have to be firm decisions that you won’t back down from under any conditions:

Pick one novel–any one of them. If you can’t decide, then flip a coin. Seriously. It truly doesn’t matter which you choose now, because ultimately you will choose all of them.
Join the 500 Club. That means you commit to writing at least 500 words on that novel EVERY DAY until it’s done. No excuses. No rollover words from yesterday. Every day you have to put down 500 new words on that novel. You can write more words, but under no circumstances are you allowed to write fewer. You can edit some words from previous days, but that editing time doesn’t count. The only thing that counts is new words.

How does this solve your problem?

The answer is simple. At 500 words per day, minimum, you will finish that novel in just a few months. You can afford to set aside everything else temporarily because you are guaranteed to be done in a few months and then you can pick up the next project. And the next, and the next.

The fact is that just about every commercially successful novelist on the planet has a word count quota. Some of them have a time quota, but word count seems to me to be better, because you can waste 30 minutes staring at the screen, but you can’t write 500 words staring at the screen.

The Magic of the 500 Club

There is nothing magic about 500 words, by the way. Maybe you want to join the 250 Club instead. Maybe you can join the 1000 Club. Or even the 2000 Club. But whatever club you decide to join, make it a hard commitment. Absolutely no excuses unless you’re unconscious or giving birth or at the top of Mount Everest. And even in those cases, some writers would drill out their 500 words.

The magic comes from being totally committed. The bottleneck for most writers is the actual production of first draft copy. They don’t spend enough time on that. Which means they don’t have enough to edit or sell or promote.

Stephen King used to tell interviewers that he writes every day except Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. But he notes in his book On Writing that this was a lie. Because he writes every day including Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. And he’s in the 2000 Club. That is part of the reason he’s successful.

First draft copy is your number one priority as a writer. If you get that habit right, everything else will tend to fall into place.

The Fiction Writing Challenge For You

Katya, I challenge you to join the 500 Club for one month and then report back to me. Leave a comment here on this blog.

And the rest of my Loyal Blog Readers, I’ll give you the same challenge. Try the 500 Club for 30 days and report back to me in a comment here.

If you do that, one month from now you’ll have AT LEAST 15,000 words, and possibly much more. And 15,000 words per month, every month, is two full-length standard-size novels per year. Every year, for the rest of your life.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

 

The post Smashing The Fiction Writing Bottleneck appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Are Flashbacks Allowed in Your Novel?

So you’re writing a novel and you really, desperately need to put some flashbacks in. But all the experts tell you that writing a flashback is a greater crime than torturing puppies. So what do you do?

Paul posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I am attempting to write an historical novel in which half of it is flashback – I know, that is just not done. It is a true bit of history; 2 set of fascinating characters interact for the current time with plenty of drama; One of the characters is trying to impress the others (and has their interest) with the story of his adventurous past (flashback) – both the current and the flashback scenes are equal in length and importance in the story I want to tell. Any thoughts?

Randy sez: Let’s be clear on why the experts create “rules” for writing fiction. It’s because the rules generally work. Not always, but generally. Those pesky “rules” have an element of truth in them. They guide us in our main goal, which is to give our reader a Powerful Emotional Experience. (If you need convincing that this is the main purpose of fiction, then please read my book Writing Fiction For Dummies.)

But let’s also be clear that the “rules” of fiction writing are much like the Pirate’s Code (in the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean.) They’re not rules, they’re guidelines.

The fact is that if the story works better by breaking a rule than by following a rule, then you must break the rule. (This is Randy’s Rule For Resisting Rules. And technically, it’s a meta-rule.)

Now the reason all the experts caution you about flashbacks is because it stops the main story cold in order to tell some backstory.

But if the backstory is just as important as the front story, then this rule just doesn’t make sense.

I can think of plenty of stories that skip all around in time.

One of my favorites is The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. This is a brilliant novel, and it’s hard to know where the backstory ends and the front story begins.

Another example is Neal Stephenson’s ubergeeky novel Cryptonomicon, which takes place partly during World War II, and partly in the late 1990s. The story skips between the two time periods and the reader is never confused. The reader wonders what the devil is the point of all the skipping until quite late in the story, but the payoff at the end is huge, and the story works. Technically, Stephenson isn’t using flashbacks here, but he’s most definitely mixing backstory and front story in a wild and happy mix.

If you must tell backstory, I would argue that flashbacks are the best way to do it, because flashbacks are shown, rather than told. They just interrupt the normal time sequence to do that. But nonlinear time sequences are fine. Readers are smart. They can handle it.

So Paul, the bottom line is this. If it works to have your story skip around wildly in time, then do it. If it doesn’t work, then don’t do it.

If somebody tells you that you aren’t allowed to do that, ask them why. And if their reason doesn’t ultimately come down to giving the reader a Powerful Emotional Experience, then my opinion is that they’re wrong.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

 

The post Are Flashbacks Allowed in Your Novel? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

A Home Run For Apple

When somebody gets it right, it’s important to say so.

So I’ll say it straight out—Apple’s iTunes Connect just hit a home run with its new reporting tools for indie authors. (iTunes Connect is the web site for managing your account as an indie author.)

Gack, who cares about reporting? That sounds so … dull.

Indie authors care about reporting. They care when they want to know how many books they’ve sold in the last day or week or month or year or lifetime. They care when they need to know how much they’ve earned.

Let’s be clear, those are the two main numbers indie authors care about:

How many books did I sell?
How much did I earn?

You’d think that all the major online retailers would make those two numbers easy to get. You’d think those would be the first thing the online retailers tell you.

Well, no, most of them make it hard to get that information. Some of them make it impossible.

But before we go complaining about who gets it wrong, let’s talk about what Apple has done to get it right. (And until last week, they were getting it horribly wrong.)

How Apple’s New Reporting System Works

You log in to the iTunes Connect web page and you see a page with a number of options. Click on the first one, “Sales and Trends.”

A page immediate appears that shows a graph of your sales over the past week. You see the total number of units you moved in that time period and you see the proceeds, in US dollars. (You can choose what currency you want for the proceeds.)

Scrolling down the page, you see a list of each book you’ve published, with the number of units of each one that you’ve sold in that time period. If you click the “Proceeds” tab, the graph changes to show your total earnings each day, and the list at the bottom changes to show the total earnings for each book. Simple and easy.

You may want to change the time-period for the report. No problem. You have several convenient ways to do that:

Click one of the links: “Last 7 Days”, “Last 30 Days”, “Last Year”, “Lifetime”.
Click on the calendar icons for the starting date and the ending date to manually set the reporting period.
Adjust sliders to change the starting date and ending date graphically.

If you want to see how you’re doing in various territories (the iTunes store currently lets you sell your e-books in 51 different territories), you can click a tab to display your results by Territory.

If you want to see how your different categories of books are doing, there’s a tab to break out the results by category.

You can also see results for preorders.

It’s hard to see how the system could be simpler or better.

If you want your results in a spreadsheet, there’s a link to click that will take you to a page where you can choose the reporting period (annual, monthly, weekly, or daily). Then you just click the download button and you’ll download a text file with a table of data that you can load into a spreadsheet.

Authors tend to be obsessive about their sales numbers. Many indie authors log in every day to check their sales on various online retailers. Knowledge is power, and knowledge about your sales numbers gives you extraordinary marketing power. You can try a marketing tactic and measure in real-time whether it works or not. This is a huge advantage that indie authors have over traditionally published authors.

Apple’s new system is so simple and obvious, you’d think that every online retailer did something similar. But tragically, they don’t.

Let’s look at some of the other online retailers to see how they handle reporting.

Amazon’s Reporting System

Amazon makes it easy to view on the Reports page the total unit sales for the current month for each of your books for each of the online stores where your books are sold. This is nice, as far as it goes, but there are a number of shortcomings:

You don’t see the revenue you’ve earned.
You don’t see the total units sold for today (or yesterday or any day). If you want to know how many you sold today, you have to subtract the total sales for the month yesterday from the total sales for the month today. And if you didn’t write down the total sales yesterday, you’re out of luck.
You don’t see the total units sold on all the retailers. There’s a combo box you have to change so you can see the different retailers in various countries—the US, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, India, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia. It’s a major hassle to manually click on each of these and write down the totals for each so you can get a grand total.

Amazon also provides you with the ability to download a spreadsheet with the results for previous months. These are not available until 15 days after the end of the month. And they give you the numbers, but they’re extremely inconvenient.

Sales are broken out into groups of rows, where each group of rows contains results for a given country.
There will be a row for each book with sales at the 35% royalty rate, and another row for that same book at the 70% royalty rate. But there’s no row that shows the total sales.
Each row ends with the revenue to the author, using the currency of the retailer. But there is no exchange rate given, which means you can’t convert to one common currency.

The bottom line is that you can laboriously add up the various rows to determine the total number of units you sold for each book. But you can’t add up the rows to determine your total revenue. You don’t have enough information.

The Smashwords Reporting System

Smashwords gives you a dashboard where you can immediately see the total lifetime sales of each book. But it doesn’t show the total lifetime revenue.

If you want more detailed information, you can get it, but you’ll have to download it. And the time period of each report is a full quarter—three months. You can choose which retailers and which books you want a report for and click the download button. Then you get a large spreadsheet with numerous columns. With some work, you can find the columns you want, sort them by book, and then add up the results to get a total for unit sales and revenue for each book. It’s clunky, but it’s possible to get the results, which is better than Amazon’s system.

Barnes and Noble’s Reporting System

Barnes & Noble’s system has a Sales tab that shows you a bar graph of total units sold by month. The graph shows total units for all your books, so if you want to know the results for a single title, you’re out of luck. You can also see total units and total revenue for this month and last month, but this is not broken out for each book. You can also see yesterday’s sales, both in units and in revenue—but you can’t see today’s.

If you want more information than that, you can click on the “Monthly Sales” button to see sales data for any given month. There’s a table that shows sales for each day of month, broken out by title. But the totals at the bottom are for all your titles summed together.

You can download the same information for any month to a spreadsheet, but if you want total units sold and total revenue, you have to do some manipulation in the spreadsheet to get it. B&N only sells in the US and UK, and they do the currency conversion for you. It’s a hassle to get the total units and total revenue for each book, but it’s possible to get the information if you do some work.

What About Kobo?

I’ve not used Kobo directly (I get my e-books onto Kobo through Smashwords), but it appears that they’ve done a very good job of reporting sales to authors. I can’t tell exactly how good the system is. The info page on their web site displays an example page showing total units sold and total revenue earned all-time for all books. It appears that you can break that out by book. If you can break that out for any given time period, then that would be truly useful to authors.

I’ll probably create a Kobo account and upload my books to their store soon. Their system looks to be very author-friendly.

The post A Home Run For Apple appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Questions About Hugh Howey’s Results

In my last blog post, Hugh Howey and the Tsunami of Cash, I talked briefly about the recent results posted by Hugh Howey and his collaborator “Anonymous Data Guy,” who analyzed in detail the sales of category best-sellers on Amazon. (The first study looked at about 7,000 books and the second study looked at about 50,000 books.) See all their results at AuthorEarnings.com.

These results had been criticized by a number of people, so I thought it would be useful in my blog post to try to estimate the broad spectrum of indie author earnings using the 80-20 rule.

I was able to make rough estimates of the number of units sold by indie authors from the very top earners all the way down to the very bottom earners.

Hugh left a comment on that blog post, and so did Chip MacGregor, a well-known literary agent. Chip is a “no-BS” kind of a guy, and his comment was quite long and had some good questions (but also a couple of clunkers). Chip is a long-time friend of mine, and was my agent for several years, and I consider him one of the good guys. I didn’t want to simply bury my response to Chip in a comment.

I’ve decided to do a whole new blog post today just to answer Chip’s questions.

First, just to set the context, here is Chip’s entire comment, which I’ll answer line by line in the rest of this post.

As a guy who is supportive of authors self-publishing, I find Howey’s work interesting, but not earth-shaking, For the record, he looked at one day of sales, at one company, and admittedly guesstimated many of his numbers based on what friends told him. Um… Would your PhD program have accepted that, Randy? Do you think his sample size is adequate? Would you allow him to create a trend line from that? The two big questions that stick in my head after reading this report: Can we rely on Amazon marketing info to be accurate? And if so, why isn’t Amazon sharing information with him?

I know the people who are raising questions about the validity of the study are being hammered as Luddites, but I tend to think this needs a bit more study before it’s declared as gospel. I like your idea of applying the principle of factor sparsity to the data, but your suggestions seem pretty optimistic. Out of more than a million authors, the average number sold is about 300. (Nothing wrong with selling 300 copies, mind you, and if they were charging a couple bucks, they made themselves about $400, which is better than a kick in the head… but it’s not the windfall you seem to make it out.) I’m not sure why you state that “the average and median sales are not very useful,” Randy. Seems as though those are very useful to give context — as in, “There are more than a million authors on Amazon, and last year 150 of them sold more than 100,000 copies.” On the one hand, I celebrate the successes. On the other, you have to admit those are fairly long odds. Again, I hesitate to say  that, because everybody WANTS this to be true, and to have discovered the secret to making a lot of money at this crazy business.

I notice Hugh came on your site to say he personally knows “several others who sold multiple millions last year.” Um… this is the sort of thing that makes me wonder about his veracity. I guess I tend to doubt that he knows “several” who sold “multiple millions.” Several? Really? Even your quick data analysis doesn’t support that, Randy. Look, I’m a guy who has self-published books and done well, and who encourages the authors I work with to self-pub… but I don’t like the Amway-like atmosphere being promoted by people who want to make it sound like there are publishing fairies out there, waiting to sprinkle hundred dollar bills onto everyone. My two cents.

Randy sez: Now that you’ve seen Chip’s comment in full, I’ll repeat it line by line and respond to each logical unit.

Chip wrote:

As a guy who is supportive of authors self-publishing, I find Howey’s work interesting, but not earth-shaking,

Randy sez: I find it both interesting and earth-shaking. Here’s why. I knew that indie authors were doing well. I know many of them. I’ve seen the difference indie publishing makes in their lives. I know the kind of sales numbers they’ve been getting.

What I didn’t know is that indie authors (as a group) have just about reached parity with the Big 5 authors (as a group). That is, the set of indie authors Hugh and Data Guy analyzed are moving just about as many copies and earning just about as much money as the Big 5 authors they analyzed.

I don’t think anybody knew that. That’s why it’s created so much excitement.

Chip wrote:

For the record, he looked at one day of sales, at one company, and admittedly guesstimated many of his numbers based on what friends told him. Um… Would your PhD program have accepted that, Randy?

Randy sez: He’s now looked at two days worth of sales, and the two sets of results are in very reasonable agreement. The company he looked at was Amazon, which is by far the biggest player in e-books. But he’s now doing a study on B&N, and I think we’re all looking forward to those results.

As for his method of analysis, it’s more sophisticated than guesstimating based on what his friends told him. Hugh and other indie authors have been compiling data for years that allow them to accurately correlate a book’s sales rank with its actual sales. This is approximate, but it’s a very reasonable approximation, and the Law of Large Numbers tells us that statistical fluctuations will wash out pretty quickly as you get more data. And 7,000 books is a boatload of data. 50,000 books is even more.

As for whether my Ph.D. Program would have accepted that, let’s not be silly. I got my Ph.D. In quantum field theory at UC Berkeley. That’s a high standard of rigor, and it’s far beyond what people normally try for in real life.

From what I can see, Hugh’s calculations are well above the usual standard in the book industry. I’m looking at the BookScan report for my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES right now. For the last royalty period, BookScan underestimates paper sales by about 30% and it has no estimate at all for e-book sales.

So the real question is whether Hugh’s data increases our knowledge of author earnings. My judgment is that it does.

Chip wrote:

Do you think his sample size is adequate?

Randy sez: Yes, even for the first data set, which looked at about 7,000 books. For the second data set, it’s an embarrassment of riches, with around 50,000 books covering all categories, fiction and non-fiction. This is good stuff.

Chip wrote:

Would you allow him to create a trend line from that?

Randy sez: No, of course not. Chip, that was a bad question. Hugh isn’t analyzing the rate of change of things. He’s analyzing the state of the industry right now. In any event, you can’t create a trend line from one day’s worth of data. (Now he has two days’ worth, but he’s doing a static analysis, not trying to predict changes, so a trend line is really beside the point.) And of course, Hugh didn’t create one.

Chip wrote:

The two big questions that stick in my head after reading this report: Can we rely on Amazon marketing info to be accurate?

Randy sez: I didn’t understand this first of the two questions, so I emailed Chip to ask what it means. He emailed me back to restate it:

Since the bestseller lists at Amazon are largely seen to be a marketing tool, do we want to rely on them as a database for research?

Randy sez: OK, I see now. Chip is saying that many people believe that the sales rank for books isn’t strictly correlated to actual daily unit sales. Most people believe that Amazon uses other factors to determine the sales rank, and some of those factors might be Amazon’s marketing needs.

This means that it’s possible that the daily sales rank for a book would not be a good predictor for its daily unit sales. In that case, Hugh’s calculations with Anonymous Data Guy would be incorrect.

Fortunately, that is a testable question. Here’s how to test it mathematically:

All you have to do is look at the raw data for a large number of books. Each day, you look at the sales rank (which is public information) and you look at the actual units sold (this is private information that Amazon only tells the publisher). Since indie authors are publishers, they can easily compile this raw information and then any math person can model it.

I would model it as a Pareto distribution curve, S = C/(R**E), where:

S = daily unit sales
C = some unknown constant to be determined by the data
R = the sales rank on the given day
E = some unknown exponent to be determined by the data

So the mathematical solution is to do a least-squares fit to the data to determine the best values for C and E. Then do a chi-squared analysis of the fit to see how well the theory fits the data. This is easy to do. We could also compute variations from the best-fit. This would tell us the uncertainty in the calculations presented by Hugh and Anonymous Data Guy.

I don’t know if Anonymous Data Guy has done this calculation, but it’s not hard and it would answer Chip’s question. I have sent Hugh an e-mail about this issue.

Chip’s second question:

And if so, why isn’t Amazon sharing information with him?

Randy sez: You’d have to ask Amazon, but my understanding is that they hardly ever share any info with anyone. One thing indie authors like is that Amazon does give them up-to-the-minute sales information, which is a welcome change from the hassle it takes to get info from traditional publishers.

Chip wrote:

 I know the people who are raising questions about the validity of the study are being hammered as Luddites, but I tend to think this needs a bit more study before it’s declared as gospel. I like your idea of applying the principle of factor sparsity to the data, but your suggestions seem pretty optimistic. Out of more than a million authors, the average number sold is about 300. (Nothing wrong with selling 300 copies, mind you, and if they were charging a couple bucks, they made themselves about $400, which is better than a kick in the head… but it’s not the windfall you seem to make it out.)

Randy sez: Well, as I said in my post, the average and the median are pretty useless because they’re both dragged down by the great mass of unpolished writers. Two things are important:

How well are the top-performing indie author compared to the top-performing traditional authors?
Roughly how many indie authors are at each pay level?

So my blog post was aimed at guessing the answers to these questions. The answer is that about 10 indie authors are moving more than a million copies a year. That sounds pretty cool to me. Look at the other numbers in my post! There are opportunities here for a couple of thousand indie authors to be moving more than 10k copies per year. That makes it clear that the whole “outlier” thing is a myth.

Chip wrote:

I’m not sure why you state that “the average and median sales are not very useful,” Randy.

Randy sez: The reason is simple. We’re used to that pesky “bell-shaped curve” when talking about results. We know that the average man is about 5’9” tall, and the standard deviation is about 3 inches. We know immediately from this data that a 7 foot man would be exceptionally tall and a 5 foot man would be quite short. Note that both of those extremes are reasonably close to the average (and the median). So the average and median are useful numbers for understanding bell-shaped curve distributions.

But the Pareto distribution is wildly different. The top-selling author in my estimates was selling 7.5 million copies. The average author was selling just under 500.

If the top-selling author were as tall as he is rich, he’d be almost 17 miles tall!

That is the sense in which the average is not very useful for a Pareto distribution. The average gives us no information at all on what we should expect from peak performers.

I won’t belabor this, Chip, because I know you’re familiar with the Pareto distribution. You blogged about it recently on your own blog, in your article The Pereto Principle. (Aside from misspelling “Pareto,” it was a good article.)

Chip wrote:

Seems as though those are very useful to give context — as in, “There are more than a million authors on Amazon, and last year 150 of them sold more than 100,000 copies.”

Randy sez: No, the average does NOT give the correct context for a Pareto distribution. When you have a bell-shaped curve, you typically report two pieces of information–the average and standard deviation. Anyone who understands the bell-shaped curve then immediately understands the complete spectrum.

With a Pareto distribution, you also report two pieces of information, but they AREN’T the average and standard deviation! The two pieces of information you report are the earnings of the top-performer and the critical exponent (in my calculations I used .8613, which is the exponent for the 80-20 rule). Anyone who understands the Pareto distribution then immediately understands the complete spectrum.

Chip wrote:

On the one hand, I celebrate the successes. On the other, you have to admit those are fairly long odds. Again, I hesitate to say  that, because everybody WANTS this to be true, and to have discovered the secret to making a lot of money at this crazy business.

Randy sez: Everybody agrees that the odds of a major success are long. I said this in my blog post in October of 2012, Liars and Outliers in the Publishing World. Joe Konrath has said this many times, most recently in his blog last Friday, where Barry Eisler did a guest post and then Joe chimed in: Eisler – Publishing is a Lottery & Konrath – Publishing is a Carny Game. I don’t know of anyone who claims that every indie author is going to get rich.

Chip wrote:

I notice Hugh came on your site to say he personally knows “several others who sold multiple millions last year.” Um… this is the sort of thing that makes me wonder about his veracity. I guess I tend to doubt that he knows “several” who sold “multiple millions.” Several? Really? Even your quick data analysis doesn’t support that, Randy.

Randy sez: Actually, my analysis is consistent with Hugh’s statement. My calculations estimate that there are four indie authors who moved more than 2 million copies last year and ten indies who moved more than a million. I can think of several off the top of my head who sold more than a million last year, and at least two of them I’ve met in person. I’m sure Hugh knows a lot more of the heavy-hitters than I do. I don’t know who he has in mind, but it sounds plausible to me.

Chip wrote:

Look, I’m a guy who has self-published books and done well, and who encourages the authors I work with to self-pub… but I don’t like the Amway-like atmosphere being promoted by people who want to make it sound like there are publishing fairies out there, waiting to sprinkle hundred dollar bills onto everyone. My two cents.

Randy sez: I’m also opposed to the Amway mentality, and I’ve consistently pointed out on this blog that only a few authors will ever get super-rich. But let’s remember that with a Pareto distribution, we’re interested in the expected earnings of the top performer. The expected earnings of everyone else follows from that. So it’s REQUIRED that we talk about top-performers, even though this misleads people who want to think in terms of bell-shaped curves.

The blunt truth is that most authors won’t do very well. What I’m interested in is the spectrum of author earnings from the very top all the way down to the very bottom—how many authors are at each income level. That tells authors how to plan their careers (and it might keep a few people from quitting their day jobs prematurely).

My Pareto calculations are a first cut at answering that question. I hope to show more data soon.

Chip, thanks for your questions. It’s important to ask questions, because the issue of author earnings is important.

I think that we’ll get a fuller picture as Hugh and Anonymous Data Guy continue to analyze more data. I don’t think we’ll see a radically different picture as we get more data.

I think we’ll continue to see that indie author earnings are spread across an enormous spectrum, with a very few authors earning millions per year and hundreds of thousands who earn only a few hundred per year.

The key thing is that a couple of thousand indies are earning some tens of thousands per year. That’s the “broad shoulder” of the Pareto distribution, and it’s where most professional novelists will find themselves.

The post Questions About Hugh Howey’s Results appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Hugh Howey and the Tsunami of Cash

Bravo to Hugh Howey and to his collaborator, “Anonymous Data Guy,” for their recent series of articles at AuthorEarnings.com.

Hugh and Data Guy have done a remarkable series of calculations that work as follows:

Data Guy wrote a program to crawl through various best-seller lists on Amazon.
Hugh already had data from many indie authors allowing him to correlate a sales-rank to an actual number of sales.
Data Guy then used Hugh’s data to estimate author earnings.

You can read all the results at AuthorEarnings.com. We can summarize their results  as follows:

Indie authors as a group are selling about as many units as the group of authors published by the Big 5.
Indie authors as a group are earning about as much money as the group of authors published by the Big 5.

Edward W. Robertson has also done some recent interesting work to see what percentage of indie authors are doing well in various genres. 

 The Tsunami of Cash

We have been warned for years that indie publishing was producing a “tsunami of crap.” Indie books were supposed to be a vast wasteland of drivel, with perhaps a few “outliers” who were earning a lot of money. But most indie authors were claimed to be struggling along, earning on average just a few hundred (or possibly a few thousand dollars) per year.

Instead, the facts are now clear. Indie publishing is producing a “tsunami of cash” for indie authors. Yes, there are plenty of bad indie books, but the good stuff is easily found by readers. And good writing gets rewarded with money.

What Amazon Really Said

In this blog post, I’d like to look at a single data point that Amazon gave us on December 26, 2013. You can find it buried in this post on Amazon.

Here’s the data point, which has been widely misinterpreted:

“150 Kindle Direct Publishing authors each sold more than 100,000 copies of their books in 2013.”

Virtually everybody has read this to mean that a good indie author is moving about 100,000 copies per year. Which is good, but not great. After all, a good trad-published author moves millions of copies per year. So what’s the fuss about 100k copies? This would mean a total of 15 million copies sold for those indie authors.

The answer is that the top indie authors are moving a lot more than 100k copies per year, and those 150 authors are probably moving nearly 4 times as many units—around 58.5 million copies.

How do I know? I’ll explain how I know in the rest of this article.

The 80-20 Rule and Amazon

Most people have heard of the 80-20 rule, which says that roughly 20% of the people earn roughly 80% of the money.

The 80-20 rule is an example of a “Pareto distribution,” which you can read about on Wikipedia if you’re mathematically adept. I have discussed the Pareto distribution on this blog and in my e-zine in the past. (For a summary, see my blog post Liars and Outliers In The Publishing World.)

In my previous posts and articles, I’ve made a slightly different set of assumptions. I’ve worked with the so-called “Zipf Distribution,” which is a very simple version of a Pareto distribution. In this article, I’m going to work with the 80-20 rule, a slightly different version of the Pareto distribution which I think is closer to the real world.

The 80-20 rule is a good approximation to a lot of situations.

Let’s apply the 80-20 rule to the single data point that Amazon gave us and see what we can learn.

Mathematical Assumptions

Skip this section if you hate math.

We’ll make the following assumptions to create a very simple mathematical model, and then we’ll see what that model tells us. Please remember that we don’t claim this model represents reality perfectly. But if it approximates reality, then the model should give us valuable insights into the “Amazon economy” for writers. I am going to have to get a little mathematical here, so if you hate math, skip down just a bit.

Assumption #1: Unit sales of books follow a Pareto distribution: sales of an author are inversely proportional to the author rank raised to a certain exponent. The equation for this is S = C/(R**E), where:

S is the unit sales of a given author
C is some unknown constant to be determined
R is the rank of the author among all the other indie authors
E is some unknown exponent to be determined
The operation R**E means to raise R to the power E.


Assumption #2: We can use the 80-20 rule to compute the exponent E. The result is very well known:  E = log(4)/log(5) = .86135.  (Here, “log” means the natural logarithm.)
Assumption #3: Indie author #150 sold about 100,000 units in 2013. We can use this to estimate the unknown constant: C = 7,488,300 units.

Estimates For the Top 10 Indie Authors

Now we can use our formula to estimate the unit sales on Amazon for ANY indie author. Let me emphasize, I’m talking here only about indie authors, so the rank we’ll use is the indie author rank. Note that some authors are hybrid authors—they work for trad publishers and they do some indie work. My model is just a simple model and it doesn’t account for this splitting of effort. So we can’t draw incredibly precise conclusions. But we CAN make some simple estimates that can guide our thinking.

I wrote a simple program to use our formula to estimate the sales for each of a large number of indie authors. I chose the number 600,000, because I know there are at least that many authors on Amazon’s Author Central. The exact number is not all that important, except when you try to calculate the average income or the median income for authors. (But neither of these is a very useful number to calculate.)

Here are the estimates for the top ten indie authors on Amazon:

Rank: 1, Sales: 7488296
Rank: 2, Sales: 4121828
Rank: 3, Sales: 2906786
Rank: 4, Sales: 2268803
Rank: 5, Sales: 1872074
Rank: 6, Sales: 1600000
Rank: 7, Sales: 1401055
Rank: 8, Sales: 1248831
Rank: 9, Sales: 1128348
Rank: 10, Sales: 1030457

 Holy cow! Do you see that? This model estimates that the best indie author is moving almost 7.5 MILLION units. That’s a lot more than 100k units. Yes, it’s just an approximation. But it shows us what the 80-20 rule is telling us, if we take the 80-20 rule seriously.

The model predicts that about 10 indie authors are moving more than a million units per year on Amazon.

 Estimates for the Top 150 Indie Authors

Now let’s estimate sales of selected indie authors in the top 150 (the folks selling more than 100k units):

Rank: 10, Sales: 1030457
Rank: 20, Sales: 567201
Rank: 30, Sales: 400000
Rank: 40, Sales: 312208
Rank: 50, Sales: 257614
Rank: 60, Sales: 220174
Rank: 70, Sales: 192798
Rank: 80, Sales: 171850
Rank: 90, Sales: 155271
Rank: 100, Sales: 141800
Rank: 110, Sales: 130624
Rank: 120, Sales: 121192
Rank: 130, Sales: 113118
Rank: 140, Sales: 106123
Rank: 150, Sales: 100000

This is telling us that about 30 authors are selling more than 400k units per year. If we add up the sales for all those 150 authors, we find a total of 58.5 million copies, for an average of about 390,000 copies per author. You can see how misleading it is to assume that all 150 of them were selling 100,000 copies. The Pareto distribution is strongly distorted toward the top sellers.

 Estimates For The Rest Of The Pack

Finally, let’s look at sales of selected indie authors farther down in the pack:

Rank: 200, Sales: 78052
Rank: 300, Sales: 55044
Rank: 400, Sales: 42963
Rank: 500, Sales: 35450
Rank: 600, Sales: 30298
Rank: 700, Sales: 26531
Rank: 800, Sales: 23648
Rank: 900, Sales: 21367
Rank: 1000, Sales: 19513
Rank: 2000, Sales: 10741
Rank: 3000, Sales: 7574
Rank: 4000, Sales: 5912
Rank: 5000, Sales: 4878
Rank: 6000, Sales: 4169
Rank: 7000, Sales: 3651
Rank: 8000, Sales: 3254
Rank: 9000, Sales: 2940
Rank: 10000, Sales: 2685
Rank: 20000, Sales: 1478
Rank: 30000, Sales: 1042
Rank: 40000, Sales: 814
Rank: 50000, Sales: 671
Rank: 60000, Sales: 574
Rank: 70000, Sales: 502
Rank: 80000, Sales: 448
Rank: 90000, Sales: 405
Rank: 100000, Sales: 370
Rank: 200000, Sales: 203
Rank: 300000, Sales: 143
Rank: 400000, Sales: 112
Rank: 500000, Sales: 92
Rank: 600000, Sales: 79

Notice that the top 300 indie authors in this model are all moving more than 55,000 copies each.

And more than 2000 indie authors are moving more than 10,000 copies each.

Of course, the model also shows that there are at least half a million writers who are moving 370 units or fewer per year.

The 80-20 rule says that most people don’t sell very much. And it says that a certain select few sell incredible amounts.

My program computed a few other statistics of interest:

Total units sold:  about 292 million copies

Average sales per author:  about 486 copies

Median sales:  about 143 copies

The Amazon Economy

So the “Amazon economy” for indie authors is wildly different from Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average. In the Amazon economy, most authors are below average. For this set of numbers, about 88% of all authors are below the average.

Notice that the median and the average depend on how many authors there are. If we increased our estimate to a million authors, then the average would sink to 317 copies sold and the median would drop to 92 copies. But the sales of those people at the top wouldn’t change.

For some reason, many advocates of trad-publishing like to latch onto the known fact that average indie sales are low. This is true, but it’s inevitable if there are a lot of indie authors. There is only so much money to be made. The more authors you have, the lower the average gets sucked. The same is true for trad-published authors.

The average and the median sales of authors are not very useful numbers. What is useful to know is the sales of the top earning authors and the value of the exponent E. Once you know those, you have a very nice way to estimate the earnings for all authors at all ranks.

One clear result is that all those sales add up to a lot. Several hundred million units. There is a “tsunami of cash” coming to indie authors.

Some Cautions

Let’s be cautious here. The Pareto distribution is just an approximation to reality. The Pareto distribution is not reality itself. But it is probably a pretty good approximation, and once we make that approximation, we can make exact calculations. Those calculations are plausible, but of course they don’t correspond exactly to reality. That’s why we call it an approximation.

Furthermore, let’s be clear that we have made a model for unit sales of books, not for revenue. You have to work with what you have, and I’m working with just a single data point from Amazon—their statement that 150 indie authors each moved more than 100k books in 2013.

That’s not a lot of data, but it’s enough to get an approximate picture for all indie authors. If and when we get more data, it’ll be interesting to see how well the model holds up. I expect that the broad shape of the model will prove accurate, but there will probably be some surprises at both ends—for the top performers and the lowest performers.

 The Broad Shoulder

There will always be a few big winners and a large number who don’t earn very much. There is a “high head” and a “long tail.”

But the important point is that there is a “broad shoulder”—a set of writers who are not at the very top and yet are earning substantial money (thousands of dollars per year, or tens of thousands per year). For most of them, this is not enough to live on. But it’s enough to make their life better. That’s cool.

If we had more data, of course we could make a better model. We will always need models, because we will never have all the data.

The calculations we’ve done here would be similar for trad-published authors. The numbers would change, but the same sort of reasoning applies, and the economy is shaped in roughly the same way. There is a high head, a broad shoulder, and a long tail. 

The Future is Bright

As I have said many times, I’m not pro-publisher and I’m not anti-publisher.  I’m pro-author. And the good news is that the future is bright for indie authors. Bright, and getting brighter.

The post Hugh Howey and the Tsunami of Cash appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Publishing Your Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

So you’ve finished your novel and it’s a heart-breaking work of staggering genius. You’ve revised it several times, polished it, perfected it. Now you want to unleash it on the world. How do you do that?

McKenna posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How do you get started in the marketing end of things? I understand writing, but when it comes to finding an editor and getting published, I’m hopelessly confused. Thanks in advance.

Randy sez: McKenna, you’re not alone. Hundreds of thousands of novelists every year face this same question. It’s a big question, and a full answer would take a book. So I’ll give you the big picture and then try to point you in the right direction.

You have four basic options in publishing your novel:

Big or mid-size traditional publisher: you get an advance and they cover the costs
Small publisher: you get very little advance and they cover the costs
Vanity publisher: you get no advance and you cover the costs
Indie publishing: you are the publisher

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Big or Mid-size Traditional Publisher

These publishers will publish dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of books per year. They have many employees, including editors, marketers, publicity people, sales people.

If you’re looking for a large advance, these publishers are the only game in town. That isn’t to say you’ll actually get a large advance. You’re more likely to get an advance well south of $10,000. But you will get an advance and it’ll represent the publisher’s estimate of what your book will earn in roughly the first year. The publisher will pay you royalties—a percentage of each book sold—and the advance is basically a loan against those royalties. After the advance “earns out,” you’ll continue to get royalties for the lifetime of the book.

Generally, these publishers will do a print run of at least a few thousand copies, as well as producing an e-book edition. They’ll do all the work. You just provide the manuscript and then do whatever revisions they ask for.

The advantages of working with a largish traditional publisher are that you get some money up front (although rarely as much as you imagined) and that you don’t have to hassle with production.

The disadvantages are that you are giving up quite a lot of control of your work (the publisher will own the rights to your novel for as long as they choose to keep it in print). Publishers are not in business to hold your hand. They’re in business to make money, and the contract they give you will be written to favor them heavily. You can shift things in your favor by hiring a literary agent to negotiate the deal, but agents rarely get everything they want.

In fact, if you go with one of these publishers, the odds are very high that you must have an agent even to have your manuscript considered. Publishers just don’t have the manpower to read all submissions, so they rely on agents to deal with the flood. If a manuscript comes to them from a trusted agent, then they’ll make time to look at it. Otherwise, probably not.

And how do you get an agent? That’s a big question. There are zillions of agents working, and not all of them are good. How do you know who’s good? You have to rely on their reputation. Word gets around on who’s good and who isn’t.

Most agents have a web site and you can find out exactly how to submit your manuscript to each one by checking his or her site for submission guidelines. Be prepared for a long wait. Agents often take months to make a decision.

One of my favorite places to meet agents is at writing conferences. You can make an appointment with an agent, spend 15 minutes pitching your novel, and the agent will tell you if she’s interested in seeing more. She probably isn’t, and even if she is, that’s no guarantee that she’ll take you on as a client.

If this sounds discouraging, it is, but the process is fair—in the sense that the odds are heavily stacked against everybody. Every writer starts out knowing nobody. It’s a horrible playing field, but it’s a level field. And if you’re one of the few who get published, you have a chance for glory. It’s not a big chance, but it’s a chance.

For more information on how to get an agent, see Rachelle Gardner’s blog. Rachelle is a very widely read blogger and literary agent and she’s also a friend of mine, so I know she’s honest and good.

All of my own books were originally published with large to mid-size publishers. It took me a long time to break in to this market, and I’ve had some ups and downs. But these publishers are the traditional way to go, and it’s possible to do very well with them. It’s much more likely that an author will have mediocre sales, but that’s the nature of publishing—there are a very few huge winners and then there’s everybody else.

Small Publisher

You may decide that it’s just too hard to get published in traditional big-corporate publishing. In that case, there are quite a number of small, specialized publishers who have sprung up. Typically, these have staffs with just a few employees. They may not pay much of an advance, but they may also offer somewhat higher royalties than a traditional large publisher.

This kind of publisher will pay all the costs of producing the book. This is critical. If a publisher asks you to pay any of the costs of publishing, then they are a vanity publisher (see my comments on these below) and you should be very wary. But a small publisher who bears the costs of publication themselves is usually honest.

A small publisher may do an initial print run or they may release your book as a “print-on-demand” issue, which means that books are printed only as they’re ordered. This costs more per book, but it means that there’s no big up-front cost to the publisher for doing a large print run of books that might never get sold. POD books aren’t printed until they’re sold, so there’s less risk.

You generally don’t need an agent to work with a small publisher. You can usually submit your work directly to the acquisition editor (who may also be the publisher, the typesetter, the mail boy, the marketing team, and the sales staff, all rolled into one.)

The contract for a small publisher is usually shorter and easier to read than the contract from a large publisher. If you have any doubts about it, you should ask somebody who really knows contracts. And you should most definitely find out the reputation of the small publisher. Many of them are honest and very competent, but you don’t want to risk your book on the possibility that they aren’t.

Most small publishers have a web site that will explain how you submit your book.

I would strongly advise you to check out the reputation of a small publisher first. Talk to authors. Talk to agents. Talk to anyone who actually knows the publishing industry. If somebody is a fraud, word gets out. If they’re first-rate, word also gets out.

My friend Jeff Gerke ran a small niche publisher like this until recently, and I worked with him to produce the paper editions of the revised second editions of my novels OXYGEN and THE FIFTH MAN. Jeff had worked at several large publishers as an editor, and I knew he’d do an honest job for me. Jeff very recently sold his publishing house to literary agent Steve Laube (also a friend of mine, and one I trust), and I expect that Steve will continue to do an excellent job of publishing in that particular niche.

Vanity Publisher

I’ll define a vanity publisher as any publisher whom you pay to publish your novel. Most often, there are absolutely no quality requirements to get published by a vanity publisher. No matter how horrible your novel, a vanity publisher will be happy to publish it for you.

And that’s the problem, because if your book is lousy, then nobody’s going to buy it. If you’ve fronted the costs for publishing, then it’s no skin off your publisher’s nose if the book doesn’t sell. The skin comes off your nose.

It’s possible for a vanity publisher to be honest, but the word on the street is that very few of them are. And how do you know which ones are honest?

An honest vanity publisher will team you up with a competent team of editors to do a macro edit, line edit, copy edit, and several rounds of proofreading. They will allow you to take the book out of print at any time. They will not charge you for spurious “marketing opportunities.” They will not charge you outrageous shipping fees when they mail you your books. They will not require you to buy a certain number of books from them.

The problem is that if you’re a novice to publishing, you’ll have a hard time knowing whether the editors you’ve been assigned are competent. And you may be confused by the legalese in the publishing contract. You may even be snookered by completely false claims on the publisher’s web site.

There just aren’t very many honest vanity publishers, from what I can see. If you’re considering a vanity publisher and if you know a good literary agent, you can ask him about the publisher’s reputation. Don’t be surprised if he says they’re crooks, because most agents think the great majority of vanity publishers are crooks.

Before you sign on with any vanity publisher, Google around to see what you can learn about them.

Look at the list of recent books they’ve published. How well are they selling on Amazon? (Amazon shows the “sales rank” for any book. The best-selling book on Amazon is ranked #1, the second-best is ranked #2. If a book is ranked in the top 10,000 then it’s selling pretty well. If it’s ranked 50,000 then it’s selling two or three copies per day. If it’s ranked 1,000,000, then it hardly ever sells a copy.)
Have the publisher’s books won any awards? Are those awards prestigious awards?
Are there lawsuits filed against the publishing company? If so, do the lawsuits look like they have any merit?

If you’re satisfied that a given vanity publisher is not a crook, go to your local bookstore and ask them if they’ve ever ordered any books at all from the publisher you’re interested in. If the store tells you they would NEVER order a book from that publisher, that tells you a lot about your chances of ever seeing your book in actual stores.

I strongly, strongly, strongly urge you to avoid vanity publishers if you are trying to earn money from your book. (If you are just trying to write up your family history so you can make a few dozen copies to give away to family members, that’s a different story.)

But the fact is that you can get published much cheaper and easier by being your own independent (“indie”) publisher. We’ll talk about that next.

Indie Publishing

Indie publishing has become huge in the last few years, and it’s going to get bigger. Here’s how it works:

You write your book and edit it yourself (or hire an editor).
You create the cover art for your book (or better, hire a professional graphic artist who understands book covers).
You format the book as an e-book (or hire somebody to do this for you).
You create an account on Amazon  and at Barnes & Noble and maybe also at Smashwords and maybe at Kobo  and possibly also at the Apple iTunes store.
You upload your e-book to Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Kobo, and Apple. (They aren’t exclusive, so you can upload to as many as you like.)
They sell your e-book for you and they give you most of the money. (Amazon pays you 35% to 70% of the sale price, and the other online retailers give you similar royalties.)
If you want your book in paper, Amazon also provides its CreateSpace service to create Print-On-Demand copies for you.

Of course, this is going to take some work, but the benefits are huge. You control the entire process. If you want to remove your book from any of these online retailers, you can do it whenever you want. You set the price. You get most of the money. The online retailers give you worldwide distribution with no upfront cost.

Currently, hundreds of thousands of indie authors have published e-books on Amazon and/or the other online retailers. Most of them don’t make much money—that’s just the reality of publishing. There are a few big winners and then there’s everyone else.

The important point is that the online retailers are not going to cheat you. They won’t hit you with huge upfront charges. They’ll pay you monthly. They’ll give you an accounting of your earnings anytime you want it.

And the remarkable thing is that some authors are doing incredibly well as indie authors. Earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. In some cases, millions of dollars per year. Some well-known indie authors are Barbara Freethy, Bella Andre, Bob Mayer, Joe Konrath, Hugh Howey, Colleen Hoover, and Russell Blake.

Will you earn millions per year as an indie author? The odds against it are long. You’re more likely to earn hundreds per year, or maybe thousands. But that would be hundreds or thousands more than you’re likely to earn anywhere else.

If you go with a traditional publisher, you may spend five or ten years learning the craft before you earn a single dime, and you may never find a publisher willing to publish you.

If you go with a small publisher, it’s the same story.

If you go with a vanity publisher, the most likely case is that you’ll spend thousands of dollars upfront which you will never recoup.

So indie publishing is a good deal. And it’s no secret that I went indie a couple of years ago.

You may be thinking that indie publishing sounds too good to be true. Please be aware that if you write crap, then it will sell like crap. But if you write good stuff and if you promote it intelligently, readers will discover you and you can reasonably expect to earn at least a few hundred dollars.

And possibly much more.

This week, indie author Hugh Howey released some data on how well indie authors do financially, as compared to authors who publish with large publishers (the “Big 5”). The results have shocked the publishing establishment.

Hugh teamed up with a web programmer to extract large amounts of data automatically from Amazon. You can read their results on Hugh’s new site about author earnings.

Prepare to be stunned. Indie authors are doing well. Incredibly well.

You Have Options

The great news here is that authors have options.

You can go with the large, traditional publishers and hope to become a famous author like James Patterson, Nora Roberts, John Grisham, or Sue Grafton.
You can go with a smaller publisher that gives you more personal attention and may be a bit easier to break in at. Tom Clancy published his first novel with the Naval Institute Press, a small publisher who had never done fiction.
You can be an indie author and take your shot at glory.

Any of these might conceivably be a good option for you.

What is almost always a bad option is to go with a vanity publisher.

Well, McKenna, I’ve only begun to answer your question, and I’m all out of words for the day. I hope this will get you rolling in the right direction.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

 

The post Publishing Your Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

What If Your Friends Don’t Support Your Fiction Writing?

What if your friends don’t support your fiction writing? What if they sorta kinda vaguely support your fiction writing? What if they hate your writing? Does that mean you’re lousy?

A girl anonymously posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Dear Randy,

My friends are always really supportive of my writing. One of my friends in particular, let’s call her Juliet, always loves my books and writing in general, but lately hasn’t been showing the enthusiasm she had before.

My other friends seem to like my work, but they aren’t as experienced with writing and I really appreciate Juliet’s opinion because she’s blunt and would tell me if my work sucks. I’m not some sort of I-Think-I-Am-Perfect or I-Can’t-Take-Criticism type of person, I’m open to it. She’s not bashing not praising my work, which confuses me and makes me leave my work after the first chapter. Granted, I sometimes send her fragments that are only a page long and don’t entirely make sense.

~Please help me on what to do, I don’t want to keep hating my books and never finish one. My writing has started to look so awful to myself.

-Thanks

Randy sez: Your letter was anonymous, so I’m going to call you Miss No-Name in this blog post. From the context and from your e-mail signature, I’m going to guess you’re in high school.

If that’s the case, then it’s very likely that none of your friends are capable of giving you a useful critique of your work.

Please, let’s be clear what I’m NOT saying here:

I’m not saying that high school students are stupid.
I’m not saying that high school students have unimportant opinions.
I’m not saying that high school students don’t know what they like.

By the time a person hits high school, their intelligence is right at the peak of what it’ll ever be. And many high school students are voracious readers, so of course their opinions are important. Furthermore, by the time a person reaches high school, they know very definitely what they like.

The problem is that it takes years of full-time effort to become an expert in anything, and high school students simply haven’t lived  long enough to become an expert in critiquing fiction.

Miss No-Name, what you need at this point is an expert opinion. You need someone who can tell you whether your writing is good, even if it’s not the kind of writing she likes.

Some of your friends like what you write. Your friend Juliet seems to be neutral about your writing.

But you really shouldn’t care what any of them think.

This is a lesson that every fiction writer needs to learn. I had to learn it. Every professional novelist I know had to learn it. Stephen King and John Grisham and Nora Roberts had to learn it:

Be careful whom you listen to.

If you want to know whether a car is any good, you shouldn’t care whether your friends think it’s cute. You should care whether an expert mechanic says it’s in good shape.

Let’s remember one key thing. When you’re writing fiction, you are writing for a certain “target audience.” Your target audience is the set of people who would love your book, if only they knew it existed.

When you’re writing fiction, the ONLY people you need to please are the people in your target audience. Nobody else matters. Nobody.

Maybe there are a thousand people in your target audience. Maybe a million.

But there are seven billion people on the planet.

This means that the odds are low that your friends happen to be in your target audience.

So there’s no reason to think that your friends will love your book.

If they’re kind, they’ll say nice things about your fiction writing. If they’re snarky, they’ll say mean things.

But either way, their opinion isn’t really all that useful. Their opinion tells you more about whether they’re naughty or nice than it tells you about whether your writing is excellent or horrible.

This is true, whether your friends are in high school are middle-aged or live in an old-folks home. Most people don’t know enough about the mechanics of writing to tell you whether your work is at a professional level. How could they? Most people know what they like. But they don’t know what your target audience will like.

Professional writers and editors and agents have studied writing enough to guess how a novel will fly with its target audience. And even with all their years of experience, they sometimes guess wrong, so it’s usually a good idea to get several professional opinions.

So Miss No-Name, you asked me what you should do. Here’s what to do:

Keep writing, but stop showing your work to your friends. That’s just asking for trouble. They might like it. They might hate it. But they almost certainly won’t know how it’s going to work with your target audience. You can’t hold your fiction writing career hostage to the whims of your friends.

To whom should you show your work?

Your English teacher, possibly. A lot of English teachers studied English literature in college. The only problem is that English literature majors may like the classics more than they like the kind of fiction that’s selling NOW. So even your English teacher might not be qualified to give you a useful opinion. (Again, this is not to imply that they’re stupid. The problem is just that they probably haven’t been trained well enough in modern creative writing. Five years of full-time training is about what it takes.)

So it’s better if you can get an opinion from a professional novelist or an editor or an agent. Better yet if you can get more than one opinion.

Please remember that nobody writes great fiction when they just start. You might have a few athletes in your high school who are good enough to play college football, but it’s almost certain that they’re not good enough to play for the NFL. But give them a few years and they might.

Give yourself time to learn the craft. Write a lot. Study the craft of writing. Get a critique from an expert.

But don’t worry about what your friends think.

And this is true for writers of any age, so I’ll say it again:

Don’t worry what your friends think about your fiction writing.

If you do that, then you risk letting them kill your dream.

For Further Reading

Here are some recent blog posts on related topics:

How To Find Your Novel’s Target Audience

What If You Hate Your Own Writing?

My #1 Tip For Teen Novelists

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

 

 

 

 

The post What If Your Friends Don’t Support Your Fiction Writing? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Is Amazon The Big Bad Wolf?

So you’re an indie author and you’ve published your novel on all the online retailers, but now you’re wondering whether you should have gone exclusive with Amazon. Is Amazon the Big Bad Wolf? Is it wrong to leave all the other retailers out in the cold?

Mark posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Howdy!

First off, I just want to let you know that I LOVE your blog, and read each post as soon as it comes out. You have a lot of great knowledge and information, and I’m really thankful that you’re willing to share that with the world.

So, my question is about KDP Select. (Being an indie author, I’m sure you’ve heard of it before.)

What are your thoughts on it? There’s a lot of conflicting opinions out there, and I’m wondering what yours is. I know that you currently publish with smashwords, so that means you’re not presently enrolled in KDP Select, but would you consider jumping aboard in the future? Why, or why not?

I currently have several non-fiction books out (and am planning on self-publishing some fiction pretty soon) and all of them are enrolled in KDP Select, but I’m considering withdrawing some of them.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!

Randy sez: That’s an excellent question, Mark.

First, let’s talk about what “KDP” and “KDP Select” are, to make sure everybody’s on the same page with us.

“KDP” is “Kindle Direct Publishing.” It’s a web site at kdp.amazon.com, run by Amazon which allows anybody to publish their book online as an e-book at no charge.

KDP is a great program for authors. You can upload your e-book, set the price you want, and Amazon will create a sales page for you, collect the money, and pay you a percentage every month (either 35% or 70%, depending on the price and certain other factors).

KDP has several competitors. Here are the most prominent:

NookPress.com, run by Barnes & Noble.
The Apple iTunes Store, run by Apple using their free iTunes software.
KoboBooks.com, run by Kobo.
Smashwords.com, run by Smashwords.

The great thing for authors is that you can work with ALL of these at the same time. This gives you more places to sell your book, and that’s good for you. It’s also good for readers, because different readers like to shop in different online stores.

“KDP Select” is a special option within KDP. If you choose the KDP Select option, you agree to work exclusively with Amazon. This means that if you choose the KDP Select option, you CAN’T also publish your e-book with B&N, Apple, Smashwords, Kobo, or anyone else. You work only with Amazon.

Why on earth would any author agree to do that?

Because Amazon offers you several perks if you choose the KDP Select option. Here are some of them:

You get paid when people borrow your book from the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library.
You earn higher royalties for books sold in certain countries (currently, Japan, India, Brazil, and Mexico, but this list is constantly changing).
You can list your book for free for 5 days during each 90 day period.
You can run a Kindle Countdown Deal, where your price is temporarily lowered and a countdown timer shows when the deal will expire.

These have value to you as an author, and Amazon gives you these perks in exchange for giving up the right to sell your e-books on other online retailers.

A lot of people believe that Amazon is evil, that they’re the Big Bad Wolf and they intend to eat up their competition and then jack up prices when they have a monopoly.

My own opinion is that Amazon would definitely like to eat their competition. But I can see no evidence that they intend to raise prices, should they ever get a monopoly. So I don’t consider Amazon evil. They’re just a very strong competitor.

Competition is not bad. Competition is good for readers and for authors. Competition keeps prices low for readers. Competition keeps options attractive for authors.

I won’t tell you what to do, Mark. I think that the markets work best when readers and authors do what’s in their best self-interest. This keeps competition working correctly. It’s a free market and you can do what you want.

My own choice, so far, has been to refuse the KDP Select option. I’d rather work with multiple retailers, because I want my readers to have as many options as possible. Not all my readers want to buy from Amazon. I’ve posted my e-books directly on Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Smashwords.

Smashwords is not just a retailer–they’re also an aggregator, which means that they can get you distribution into other online retailers. So you can use Smashwords to put you onto Amazon, B&N, Apple, Kobo, Sony, Diesel, Oyster, Scribd, Library Direct, and more. So I use Smashwords to put my books into all the places that I don’t deal with directly.

For the last couple of years, some authors have done very well using KDP Select to promote their books for free for 5 days each quarter. This gets them lots of downloads (sometimes tens of thousands of downloads in a single day), which makes their books visible. And some authors have then gotten sales traction because of that visibility. However, the word on the street is that this isn’t working as well as it used to.

In fact, the biggest lure of KDP Select that I can see is this ability to make the price free for 5 days each quarter. Because this is no longer as effective as it used to be, there is less and less appeal to choosing the KDP Select option.

I’m looking at my sales spreadsheet right now for my novel Oxygen, which was the first e-book I released, so I have the most data for it. Here are the percentages of units sold for the various retailers that I can track:

Amazon: 84%
B&N: 13%
Smashwords: 3%
Apple: I don’t track sales on Apple because their accounting is such a pain in the ***. Note to Apple: Please clean up your act. Your accounting tools suck.

Why work with Smashwords, if sales are so low there? Several reasons.

Smashwords lets you price your e-book free anytime, all the time, with no restrictions. (Amazon and B&N don’t let you do this.)
Smashwords is international, and the price they charge is the SAME anywhere in the world. (Amazon sometimes adds a surcharge to certain countries, and you have no control over that. This can be horribly embarrassing when you run a promotion at a special price, and then learn that people in some countries are having to pay a higher price.)
Smashwords will sell your book in ANY format, including Kindle, ePub, PDF, RTF, Sony, text, and a web-readable format. (Amazon sells only the Kindle format, and most other retailers sell only the ePub format.)
Smashwords lets you create coupons so you can easily give away copies to friends and family by giving them a coupon code.

Why work with Apple, if their accounting tools are so bad?

You still get paid, even if it’s a pain to learn which books earned you the money.
You can set the price to free on Apple, and Amazon will usually match that price. This is called the “permafree” strategy, because it lets you make your book free ALL the time. I’m told it’s much harder to get Amazon to match a free price on Smashwords. Permafree is a nice marketing tool for the first book in a series, because it gives readers an easy way to try before they buy.
Apple sells in most countries and you have complete control over the pricing in each country.

I will note that all of the online retailers do a poor job at making accounting information available. Sure, you can easily find out how much they’re paying you total. But the real numbers you care about are these two:

How many copies did each individual book sell?
How much did I earn in US dollars for each individual book?

The number of copies sold is important for marketing purposes. If your book has sold 100,000 copies, you’d like to be able to brag about that in your ads. But you can’t do that if you don’t know the number. And none of the retailers lets you easily find this out. They do make the information available, but it’s fragmented.

The number of dollars earned is important if you have a co-author. You need to know how to split the money.

It is bizarre that NONE of the online retailers lets you easily get these two crucial numbers, and two of them make it impossible. Smashwords does the best job, but you still have to manipulate a large spreadsheet to get what you want. Amazon gives you all the data, but not all in US dollars. If the book was sold in Europe, you’ll see a line-item for sales in Euros, and they don’t tell you the exchange rate. And ditto for books sold in the UK, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, etc. This makes it impossible to do an accurate split if you co-author some of your books and write others on your own. B&N provides the data you need, but you have to manipulate a spreadsheet. And Apple is simply crazy to work with, so I’ve given up trying to get data out of them.

Well, Mark, I hope that helps. I’ll repeat my advice–do what makes the most economic sense to you. If you believe that KDP Select will earn you more money, then go with it. If you believe you’ll do better with multiple online retailers, then work with them all. The choice is yours.

Mark, you asked if I’d consider going with KDP Select in the future. Yes, possibly. For me, a major concern has been what’s best for my readers. More options for them is better for them, and this outweighs in my mind the advantages of KDP Select. But I might consider a test of one book on KDP Select to see how it works out. Every author would like to get the word out on their books, and one way to do that is to use the 5 days of free pricing on KDP Select.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

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