Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 53

Should Indie Authors Have Ebooks (Or Paperbacks)?

Indie author guru Bryan Cohen runs something he calls the Five Day Author Ad Challenge every quarter. It’s a good experience for coming to grips with the basics of Amazon Ads, and I’ve recommended it to a lot of people who’ve had good results with it. I didn’t do it this year, but I’m still in the Facebook group and see the posts that come up every quarter.

One really caught my eye. A new author was resistant to the idea that she should have an ebook at all. She only wanted to sell paperbacks and not bother with ebooks.

Which leads to the obvious question. Should indie authors have ebooks?

Well, yes. Not to be harsh, but the answer will obviously almost always be yes.

For any kind of genre fiction, it will be far easier to sell ebooks than paperbacks. The Five Day Author Ad Challenge does have a lot of very new authors, and new authors not infrequently have a clear idea in their heads about how they hope it will go. Often they will talk about how they want to hold their paperback book in their hands, see it on the shelf of the local bookstore and local library, maybe have a table at the local book fair where they can sign books. Sometimes there will be a digression about the Smell & Feel Of A Paper Book.

However, this romantic dream then runs into the cold reality of economics – it’s very difficult to sell paperback books. Paperback books are expensive, and because of inflation and supply chain stuff with paper, they’re getting even more expensive. The day of the $5 mass market paperback is long past. And in the day of the mass market paperback, the author didn’t get all that much money – like $0.10 to $0.25 a copy, and sometimes less than even that.

Granted, nowadays the margins are better for self-published authors, but the economics still aren’t great. My most recent book, GHOST IN THE SERPENT, is $13.99 in trade paperback on Amazon. If the reader buys a copy of of the paperback on Amazon, I get about $3, and if they buy it through another platform, I get a little over $1. This is definitely better than the days of a $5 mass market paperback, but it’s still very expensive for the reader. By contrast, the ebook of GHOST IN THE SERPENT is only $4.99, and for every sale on every platform I get around $3.50.

Which is the point – it is much, much easier to sell a $4.99 ebook than a $13.99 trade paperback. And I get slightly more money from an ebook sale than I do from a paperback one.

So genre fiction will almost always be more profitable in ebook than in paperback for the indie author. (I really mean “always” but I said “almost always” to include flukes of fate and acts of God.)

Outside of genre fiction, it’s a little more varied, but it’s still a good idea to have an ebook. Certain kinds of nonfiction sell more strongly in paperback than in ebook. Children’s books, especially ones aimed at toddlers and younger children, sell way better in paper than in ebook. The reason for this is logical enough – toddlers and small children often like to throw things, and are you going to give a four-year-old a $399 iPad or a children’s book? There are also various specialty forms of nonfiction – cookbooks, technical manuals, and so forth – that do well in paperback. Or if you have a book that has a lot of interior pictures, which is often true of cookbooks and other speciality nonfiction.

That said, most indie writers will have an easier time selling ebooks than paperbacks.

Which leads to the next question – should indie authors have paperbacks? Especially the writers of genre fiction I just described above, the ones who will probably sell more ebooks than paperback?

The answer to that is: yes, if possible, and it’s usually quite possible.

It used to be quite a bit harder to make paperback books, especially the interior. You would need to copy and paste the chapters of your book into a specially prepared Word document, and formatting it was a serious pain. Now several software programs have come along than can automate the process for you. The one I use is Vellum, which automatically generates nicely formatted ebook and paperback book files for you. I believe you can do the same thing in Scrivener and Atticus, but I’ve never tried it. You can either make a wrap-around cover for your book, or use the automated tools include with KDP Print and Draft2Digital print to make a cover. Most indies use either KDP Print or Draft2Digital Print to make their paperbacks. You can also use Ingram Spark and several other services, but Ingram Spark has a way sharper learning curve and tends to be more expensive.

You almost certainly will not sell as many print books and ebooks, especially if you’re writing genre fiction, but paperbacks can be a nice bit of bonus income. Especially since it isn’t all that much additional work to set up a paperback.

But that leads to the next question. You’ve got an ebook and a paperback of your book. Should you have an audiobook?

The answer is “it depends.” You know how sometimes you ask an accountant or a lawyer a tax question and the answer is “no, except yes, but sometimes maybe?” The reason for that is that US tax law is so immensely complicated that the answer to any question about it can vary wildly depending upon an individual’s or company’s particular circumstances.

The same thing is true with indie authors and audiobooks.

If you want to sell an audiobook, you will almost certainly need to pay for a human narrator. At the moment, I think Google Play is the only storefront that allows the sale of AI-narrated audiobooks, so long as you do it with Google Play’s built-in tool. Which I’ve tested, and is actually pretty good. Amazon has also just started testing AI-generated audiobooks for sale, though they only just announced it in the first week of November 2023. That said, I suspect you realistically aren’t going to be able to charge very much for it (imagine the reviews along the lines of “I paid $13.99 for this computer voice! One star!”), and people generally don’t like AI-narrated audiobooks. My experiments with AI-narrated audiobooks on YouTube generated a lot of comments along the lines of “I like the story, but this voice sucks.” That will almost certainly be true for any AI-generated audiobook for fiction or nonfiction with a lot of emotion in it, like a memoir. It would probably work for something very dry, like a book about tax law or real estate licensure.

Realistically, if you want to make any money from a fiction audiobook, you will almost certainly need a human narrator, and I mean “almost certainly” in the same sense I meant it above.

So when I say “it depends” on whether or not you should pursue an audiobook, what it “depends” on is your financial status and business requirements. To get a good narrator, you can expect to pay in the $200 to $400 range. You can also get a narrator via royalty share, where you don’t pay the narrator up front, but then you and the narrator split any royalties from the book for seven years. If you do pay up front, depending on your business structure there’s a very good chance this will be deductible and may help you greatly at tax time (though, as always, for tax advice consult an accountant qualified for your taxing jurisdiction). It’s also important to note that self-publishing audio is a bit like regular self-publishing but on Hard Mode – the mechanics are the same, but everything is more difficult. Whether to pursue audio or not is a question that must be left up to the individual author and publisher.

So, to sum up, should indie authors have ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks?

For ebooks and paperbacks, definitely yes. For audiobooks, if your circumstances allow for it and it’s something you’re interested in pursuing.

-JM

 

weekly update

It’s Friday, so let’s check in on book progress!

I am currently at 109,000 words of CLOAK OF EMBERS, which puts me on Chapter 21 of 22. Almost done! I don’t know how much shorter it will be once I edit it, but I do feel confident in saying that it will either be the longest Nadia book to date or the 2nd-longest one after the current holder of the title, CLOAK OF IRON.

I very much hope to finish the rough draft on Monday or Tuesday, conditions permitting. Then I’ll write a short story currently entitled INSERT TITLE HERE LATER, and then it will be full speed ahead on editing.

In audiobook news, we’re almost done with DRAGONSKULL: WRATH OF THE WARLOCK, and recording will start soon on both DRAGONSKULL: DOOM OF THE SORCERESS and GHOST IN THE SERPENT.

I am also 9,500 words into the book I will write after CLOAK OF EMBERS is published. More about that after CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out!

-JM

100k words of CLOAK OF EMBERS!

I am pleased to report that I had my 9th 10,000 word day of 2023, which also carried the rough draft of CLOAK OF EMBERS passed the 100,000 word point!

In addition to the longest book of 2023, I’m pretty sure that CLOAK OF EMBERS will also be the longest book I’ve written since CLOAK OF MASKS back in 2022. So it’s good I’ve had four 10k word days with this book, because it soaks them up like a championship boxer taking punches.

If all goes well I am hoping I can finish the rough draft sometime next week.

-JM

 

Ad results October 2023

It’s almost the first of November, so let’s look back and see how my ads did for October 2023.

It was a pretty weak month for sales for a variety of reasons beyond anyone’s control. For one thing, the economy remains bad and inflation high. For another, the international news in October was very bad, which always puts a damper on discretionary entertainment spending like books. Amazon US was consistently glitchy throughout all of October and still isn’t working right. I can’t prove this, but I think the books category faced strong competition from video games in October, specifically SPIDER-MAN 2 for Playstation and SUPER MARIO WONDER for the Switch. (Full disclosure: I am playing WONDER, and it’s excellent.)

On the plus side, GHOST IN THE SERPENT had a strong start, and SILENT ORDER did very will on October on the strength of a Bookbub Featured Deal back in the first week of September and the lingering halo from PULSE HAND coming out. People are generally more willing to start a finished series than an unfinished one, especially in the SF/F space. And all my ads for October turned a profit.

Here’s how the Facebook ads did.

FROSTBORN: $5.44 back for every $1 spent, with 44% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

THE GHOSTS: $7.46 back for every dollar spent, with 8% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. (If you take out GHOST IN THE SERPENT, it comes to $2.95, with 20% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $3.19 back for every dollar spent.

SILENT ORDER: $4.45 back for every dollar spent.

For Amazon Ads, I advertised DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE.

SWORD OF THE SQUIRE: $3.41 for every dollar spent, with 27% of the profit coming from the audiobook.

So we see once again that audiobooks, once you have them, are usually a good addition of profit for series. (For some reason I can never really get the CLOAK GAMES or CLOAK MAGE audiobooks to sell.)

I think in November I’m going to do things a little differently. I’m going to try advertising FROSTBORN entirely on Bookbub Ads, which I haven’t used for a while. Facebook has been making some changes to the way targeting works on its ad platform, and I can see it rapidly becoming less useful for books. Additionally, Facebook has also begun testing a subscription service for an ad-free experience, which obviously would make Facebook way less useful for book advertising.

The advantage for Bookbub Ads is that some of the targeting has already been done for you. Like, with Facebook ads, one of the keys to success is to make sure you’ve targeted your audience correctly. With Bookbub Ads, everyone looking at a Bookbub email is already looking for discount books, so some of the work has been done for you already. Anyway, if Facebook is considering pivoting away from ads in favor of paid subscriptions, it will be good to have a backup ready.

And, as always, thanks for reading! I’m closing in on 100,000 words of CLOAK OF EMBERS and hope to have the rough draft done soon.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 173: Should Indie Writers Stop Writing Because Of Generative AI?

It’s time for a new episode of The Pulp Writer Show! In this week’s episode, we take a look at whether or not indie writers should stop writing because of generative AI.

You can find the episode here, along with all the back episodes.

-JM

Another 10k word day

I am pleased to report that I wrote 10,000 words of CLOAK OF EMBERS today, for my 8th 10k word day of 2023!

This now puts me on Chapter 15 of 22, so getting closer to the end. The final draft will definitely have more than 22 chapters, though, since some of the chapters in the first ten were long enough that I will need to split them up in editing.

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 10/30/2023

It’s time for a new Coupon of the Week!

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF ASHES as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF ASHES for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

OCTASHES

The coupon code is valid through November 18th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out soon, why not start with an audiobook?

-JM

weekend update

Closing out the week at 72,000 words of CLOAK OF EMBERS.

This only puts me on Chapter 11 of 22 of my outline. I haven’t even officially reached the halfway point yet, which means my prediction that CLOAK OF EMBERS will be the longest book I write this year is going to be accurate. I knew it was going to be long, but I hadn’t quite grasped how long!

I had hoped to have it out in November, but it might slip to December. We’ll see how the next few weeks go!

-JM

Officers, I Don’t Know How Those TVs Got In The Back Of My Truck, And Other Misadventures

I’ve written a lot about AI and the potential negatives thereof, but the inevitable march of technology has improved some things and eliminated other things that were downright unpleasant.

Let’s have an example that involves film canisters, shoplifting, and very poor reading comprehension! (In the spirit of new technology, the images accompanying this post were fake images generated by Adobe Firefly AI.)

Back in the 90s, I used to work in a Big Box Chain Store that will remain nameless for reasons that shall soon become apparent, and I spent a lot of time working in the Electronics Department.

Granted, I was not actually qualified to work in the Electronics Department, since you were supposed to have gone through some specialized training modules first. However, the Big Box Chain Store was the sort of place where “supposed to” had absolutely no bearing on reality. I think in the first two years I worked there in the 90s, the store went through four managers. One of them was fired for losing his temper and punching an employee. Another gifted a weekly pallet of charcoal to a nearby steak restaurant in exchange for a free dinner, a completely off-the-books arrangement that came to light when he was investigated for sexually harassing several female employees. Those were only the two most egregious reasons he was fired and prosecuted for embezzlement.

Working there was kind of like a neo-noir film, but one made by an absurdist German auteur with a penchant for low comedy.

Anyway! Even though I freely admit I was much dumber and more naïve in the 90s, I had the threefold advantages of 1.) punctuality, 2.) mostly being sane, and 3.) sobriety, which I concede probably put me in the top 15% of the employees at the time. The other employees who had those threefold advantages were most often students from the local semi-accredited Bible Baptist College. I got along well with them because they were usually the sort of sober and industrious people without whom society would screech to a halt. They tended to either get married young and remain sober and upright citizens while having lots of kids, or rebel and go off the rails in a truly spectacular fashion that ranged from tragic to frankly hilarious.

Once again that was a tangent, but Big Box Chain Store was the sort of place that had a lot of tangents, each of them stranger than the last! If the Raymond Chandler-esque mean streets of a noir city have a thousand stories, then the aisles of Big Box Chain Store have a thousand tangents, each weirder than the first.

Back to the main story. So I wound up working in the Electronics Department from time to time, and a big part of working at the Big Box Chain Store Electronics Department in the 1990s was dealing with the film dropoff.

Anyone born past 2000 probably has no idea what I’m talking about, but back then digital cameras were just beginning and hadn’t really entered the public consciousness. Like, in the 1990s, the average member of the public used analog cameras. The cameras had a canister of chemically treated light-sensitive film, and when you took a picture, the camera recorded the image on the film. How did you get the pictures from the film to printed photos? The typical way was to go to a place like Big Box Chain Store, fill out the information on a preprinted envelope, put your film canister on the envelope, and then drop it in the overnight bin. At the end of the day, a delivery guy would pick up the pictures and ship them to the processing center, and the next day the envelopes would return containing the film canisters and the printed photos.

As you can imagine, there were many, many ways this process could go wrong.

For one thing, someone had to remember to take the bin of dropped-off envelopes to the back of the store so they could get picked up by the overnight delivery guy. If someone forgot, that meant the process was delayed for a day, which it turn resulted in a lot of angry phone calls from customers. For a while, there was a nice, friendly employee who would volunteer to take the accumulated envelopes back every night. He also made sure to take a stack of twenty CDs or so back with him at the same time. When asked, he mentioned that he was going to inventory the CDs in the back of the store. Of course, by “inventory” he meant “leave them by the back door so he could pick them up in his car on his way out.” He got fired and prosecuted for shoplifting.

Granted, he was not quite as bold as the former employee who would pull his truck up to the back of the store with his brother and load it up with TVs while directly under the security camera in good lighting. Not criminal masterminds, but as I alluded to earlier, Big Box Chain Store did not exactly draw from the deep end of the talent pool.

CDs, for those of you born after 2000, were how music was distributed before streaming and MP3s but after cassette tapes. They used to be valuable, and the Electronics Department had aisle after aisle of CDs, all of them in those plastic security anti-shoplifting things. Especially country music CDs – a significant portion of Big Box Chain Store’s customer base loved country music CDs. Nowadays, the only place you can really find CDs is in thrift stores, and you can sometimes get like an entire box of them for a dollar. But back then they were worth money, and on days when I had to stock the toilet paper aisle, I would often find those broken anti-shoplifting things dropped behind the toilet paper. The toilet paper aisle was right next to the Electronics Department, so that was a favorite place for shoplifters to discard the broken anti-shoplifting things.

Another tangent! Told you there would be a lot of them.

Anyway, back to the ways photo development went wrong.

The most common problem was the numerous ways people would make mistakes filling out the form on the envelope. Like, you were supposed to specify your name, your phone number, and a few other options like how many copies of the prints you wanted and so forth. The number of people who simply popped the film canister into the envelope and dropped it in the bin without filling any information on it at all was simply baffling. Like, how were we supposed to know who the photos belonged to? Psychometric telepathy?

On occasion people would just leave their first name on the envelope and nothing else.  Just “Bob.” Nothing else, just “Bob,” with no other contact information. There wasn’t a field for an email address since email addresses hadn’t yet really entered the public consciousness.

So gradually a supply of unclaimed film envelopes built up. From time to time if a manager was feeling restless, he would have someone go through the unclaimed film bin and try to contact people, which was an exercise in futility, because the contact information was missing.

For all I know those unclaimed envelopes are still there under the counter, moldering away in the darkness.

But most of the envelopes eventually came back containing developed photos, which was where we reached the next stage of error – all the many ways the printed photographs would be wrong.

A big part of this was psychological. A common meme nowadays is that people are never as good of photographers as they think that they are. But this isn’t a big deal when you use a smartphone with 128 GB of storage. If you want to photograph something, you just need to take fifteen shots of it. Sheer probability indicates that at least one of them will be good enough, or at least adequate, and you can delete the rest. In fact, depending on your available phone storage, you might not even need to bother to delete the rest. This wasn’t an option back in the days of film, where you would get either 24 or 36 pictures per roll of film, depending on the film and the model of camera.

So, assume everything in the process actually worked. By some unprecedented miracle the customer filled out the envelope correctly, the film was developed, the pictures were printed, and the envelope came back and the customer picked it up. Sometimes there was a final hurdle where the customer would rip open their envelope and examine the photos then and there in front of the cash register. If the customer did that, it was time to brace yourself, because there was a good chance a bad conversation was going to follow.

“They screwed up my photos!” the customer would say. Or shout, or screech, or start crying, depending on the individual.

Sometimes they were right. But about 95% of the time, it was just a bad photo. Like, the flash had been off, or everyone had red eye, or the picture had been taken in bad outdoor lighting, that kind of thing. But if the customer was upset about the pictures, it wasn’t their fault, the processing place had clearly screwed up and made them take that badly lit, blurry picture. Usually, we just gave them the film back, and they left in a huff to be disappointed by a different Big Box Chain Store’s photo department. Granted, sometimes the processing place had really screwed up and sent back the wrong pictures.

One time a guy in a Mart Cart (those little electric scooters for customers with mobility challenges) came in, accompanied by his wife and grade school-aged children. He picked up his pictures, and then he also got a stack of country music CDs. Like, easily $200 worth of country music CDs. His kids asked if they could get some movies, and he said sure, and his wife and kids went to pick some VHS tapes out from the movie section, since this was still before DVDs came along. The Disney ones were always popular, and I suspect there were a lot of parents who got really sick of hearing some of the songs from THE LION KING or ALADDIN.

Anyway, I started ringing up Mart Cart Guy’s purchases, and his wife and kids wandered off to look at more stuff. While they did, he looked me in the eye and said, in a haunted voice, that he had been on disability for ages, that all his credit cards were maxed out, and he didn’t know how much longer he could maintain his lifestyle before the debt overwhelmed him.

But he still bought about $200 worth of country music CDs and almost as much in VHS children’s movies.

The memory of Mart Cart Guy’s dismayed, haunted expression as I handed him the receipt was not the only reason I’ve avoided debt as much as possible in my life, but it definitely was one of the reasons.

And that was another tangent, wasn’t it? But the point of this post was that the photo-development process at the Big Box Chain Store was an unpleasant experience for both the employees and customers.

Nowadays, if you want printed photos, Big Box Chain Store has a form on its website, and you upload your photos, select sizes and copies and whatever, put in your credit card, and that’s that. All the different Big Box Chain Stores offer it, and there are a thousand times more options available than there were back in the 1990s.  And Mandatory Fields on the website means that people can’t just type “Bob” for their name and forget their phone number and email address, since the transaction won’t complete unless the form on the website is correctly filled out. Such technology would have been a blessing from heaven back in the 90s.

No doubt the customers are still often insane and the photo printer breaks down regularly, but it’s still an infinitely better process than it was in the 90s. Granted, I got a lot of amusing and occasionally horrifying anecdotes out of the experience, but in hindsight, I probably should have quit after the first year there.

The inevitable march of technology has both good and bad qualities, but I don’t think the obsolescence of drop-off photo film development is much of a loss.

-JM

Heroquest Continues To Be Pretty Great

I am pleased to report that I finished the core game of Heroquest! The attached screenshot shows my barbarian, dwarf, elf, and wizard fighting the Witch-Lord and his minions at the end of the game. (Some minor Photoshop touches were applied.)

I talked about Heroquest back when I first played it, and six months later I finished the final quest in the core game. I quite enjoyed the experience. Video games can do everything a board game can, but there’s still something enjoyable about moving well-crafted game pieces on a board. For that matter, when I play chess, I prefer to use the fancy wooden set I got fifteen years ago and have been ferrying around as I move to different places. Computer chess just isn’t the same. No doubt this explains the success of WARHAMMER 40K and other miniature wargames.

Why did I like Heroquest so much?

My favorite genre of fantasy, deep down, is what’s sometimes called basic fantasy, or the Standard Fantasy Setting. My favorite kind of fantasy is basically a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard showing up and killing some orcs and goblins, preferably orcs and goblins led by an evil wizard. Heroquest lands right in that sweet spot.

It also helps that Heroquest boils down, say, D&D to its bare dungeon-crawling essentials. The game simply doesn’t have a lot of fat. No 15,000 word tragic backstory for your tiefling bard, just a dungeon with some traps and monsters to fight.

I am looking forward to starting Kellar’s Keep, the first expansion pack!

-JM