Hugh Howey's Blog, page 20

Wayfinder Update

Just spent a month in St. Francis Bay looking over the build of Wayfinder. Here’s the video I shot on the last day:

I’m now in Cape Town, and won’t be back to St. Francis Bay until early August. At that point, the boat should be close to going into the water. It still doesn’t feel real. I remember this feeling when I bought my first sailboat in Baltimore back in 1995. My friend Scott and I crawled through the boat, filled it with supplies and sailed down to Charleston with all kinds of crazy adventures along the way.

There’s something about living at sea that just feels right to me. I could have spent the same amount of money on a house, a car, property taxes, power bills, water bills, cable, internet, etc., and I wouldn’t be nearly as happy. With a boat, you are self-sufficient. You make your own water and power. You catch as much of your food as possible. And when you move from place to place, you take everything with you.

I look forward to taking you all with me on this trip, whoever wants to follow along. A lot of writing to do. A lot of reading. A lot of learning.

Christianity and Homosexuality

I have a Christian friend wrestling with the fact that his son is gay. He reached out to me on Facebook, remembering two posts of mine that dealt with this topic in the past, a topic I’m very passionate about. In speaking with him, another thought occurred, a frame of reference for those trying to square their faith with the fact that not all people are born the same. Before I got to that frame of reference, I recapped my earlier posts.

First, I pointed out that some people are born with both sets of genitalia. Not only is gender on a continuum (gender being whether we feel male or female), our physical sex is not even black and white (sex being a measure of our plumbing). People are also born incapable of having children, both men and women. Those of us who see the world through the lens of evolution and genetics have little trouble with nature’s grand menagerie. Those who see the world through a religious lens have a bit more mental calisthenics to perform.

The first of my earlier posts looked at homosexuality from a religious historical perspective. The gist is this: The Bible has different sets of rules in it. There are the rules of ethics, and the rules of survival. The rules of ethics deal with not killing, stealing, and lying. The rules of survival are there because life was tenuous in the past, and populations wavered on viability. This is why Leviticus is full of advice on how to care for dung shovels, what foods to not mix, and other questions of hygiene. And yes, violating these rules was punishable by damnation and death. Little distinction was made regarding punishment.

Whether you believe in god or not, you have to believe in gays. They’ve been around longer than the Bible has (Greek mythology is laced with homosexual relationships, as was Greek society). The fact that the Bible had to contend with homosexuality lets us know that humans were being their grand and diverse selves even back then. Either we evolved homosexuality or God makes a percentage of us gay. I find it interesting that roughly the same percentage of all studied human populations are gay (about 3% – 5%). This diminishes the possibility that being gay is a random choice or is culturally derived. A certain number are simply born (or created) that way.

My second post on homosexuality and Christianity posited evolutionary hypotheses on why a portion of the population might be gay. The assumption that we’re only here to procreate is not backed up by the fact that a good number of people can’t. Or the fact that other species have non-procreating members who are just as vital to the health and survival of the community. The more children a mother has, the more likely her later born sons are to be gay. One theory as to why this is has to do with how mothers’ bodies cope with having this foreign invasion in their bellies. In response to the presence of foreign DNA (the child is only half hers), the mother combats the fetus similar to how we combat transplanted organs. Over subsequent pregnancies, this warfare is ramped up, resulting in hormonal and epigenetic changes in the fetus. Youngest siblings are fighting their first skirmish against a battle-hardened foe.

This is one possibility. It’s also possible that the more kids we have, the less we need those kids to have kids of their own. Not only is nature full of cases of quite natural and God-made homosexuality (over 1,500 species engage in homosexual behavior), it’s also full of non-mating members of populations that are just as crucial to the survival of the species. We don’t rail against the confusion of drone bees. But of course, there’s a reason we care more about our own kids being gay than we care what bees do or need. It’s a selfish reason. My friend doesn’t just want kids of his own, he wants grandchildren too.

Which brings me to the frame of reference that I offered him, one that looks not at the historical religious perspective or any scientifically plausible reasons for homosexuality to persist in all cultures at roughly the same percentage, but a frame of reference for those with a deep and powerful faith in one true God while wrestling with their child’s sexual orientation.

What if being gay is not God’s challenge presented to your child? What if your child is blessed, and God is instead challenging you?

Whose feet did Jesus wash? What was his repeated example throughout the New Testament? The answers to coping with the wide menagerie of the human experience is right there in the Bible, and it doesn’t come from the rules of damnation, but the guidance for salvation.

Homosexuality is not our sin; our sin is the fact that we often react horribly to those who are not like us.

We happen to be winning this long struggle. The country is becoming more tolerant. It’s happening more rapidly than many of us hoped. And as the world gets safer for gays to come out, more parents from a much more religious generation are going to have to cope somehow. They could very well have a harder time coming to terms with their child’s homosexuality than their children did.

If these parents are Christians, perhaps they can see that their child is not in the deepest part of their struggle when they choose to come out. For their child to have come out, to have mustered this courage, they are past the worst of their challenge. They have begun to accept themselves just as nature and/or God blessed them to be. Now they are scared what you will think. Now they are worried how you will handle the news.

When your child comes out, it’s long after they have wrestled with this internally, or with their closest friends, or partners, or in prayer, or in their private journals. Now it’s your turn. Now it’s our challenge. Do we look around for stones to cast? Or do we throw our arms around those we love?

What’s awesome is that we don’t even have to ask what Jesus would do. We know. Our challenge is to be brave enough, Christian enough, to do it.

 

 

Go See Mad Max

If you miss a chance to see Mad Max on the big screen in 3D, your life will be just a little bit emptier.

It’s an hour and a half since the credits rolled, and I still can’t believe what I experienced. I don’t want to hype it to the point of disappointment, but I will say that I don’t think a film like this has ever been made before, and nothing has blown my mind like this since THE MATRIX.

This is, in my opinion, the greatest action film made to date. And they really don’t need to make a WOOL film or a SAND film anymore. Themes from both books, along with settings and characters (even preferred actors) are all in here. I’m satisfied. Thank you, George Miller and everyone involved with this masterpiece. Wow.

Erin Latimer with a YA Question

Erin Latimer: My audience is mainly teens…okay, it’s pretty much all teens. And the thing is, most of them don’t have credit cards. They’re not allowed buying stuff on the internet. So…how do I sell them books? I’m a little nervous I’m going to get to my launch date in September and my book is going to crash and burn because none of my teen readers will be able to purchase it.

 

Erin’s email was much longer than this, and she listed a bunch of things she’s doing right, but my response was ballooning, so I figured I’d do a YA-specific blog post. Before I get to the YA part, I want to address Erin’s fear of her book crashing and burning. This only happens in traditional publishing, where first-week sales are crucial for a work’s success. This isn’t true with self-publishing. My YA works written six years ago sell great today, with zero marketing and with a quiet launch. Your works are forever. Your hopes for them shouldn’t be so brief.

As for the YA market, it can be a different beast in some ways, but probably not as great as some claim. We hear that print books are still coveted by younger readers, but one survey (in the link below) showed roughly half of teens prefer print books, and the other half had no preference or prefer ebooks. And we’re seeing shopping habits adjust to reflect this shift in attitudes.

This PW article has a lot of information and some great graphs. Keep in mind that these numbers are from Nielsen, so they greatly exaggerate the print component. These are numbers from works with ISBNs, which miss at least a third of the ebook market. Nielsen’s data gives us an idea of what’s going on in the Big 5, but not the market as a whole. And even here, we can see that the number of YA books purchased in physical retailers is on the decline, and online book shopping and ebook purchases are on the rise. That means indies are gaining a wider potential audience for their work, and this audience is only growing.

The preference for print books with many young readers might never go away, and there’s a good reason for this. Young adults enjoy being seen with their hobbies, as it helps define them, and helps them find like-minded peers. We adorn ourselves throughout life in order to define ourselves to others, but this is strongest, I think, as we are becoming our own people. I know that it was important for me to define myself as a reader. It was something I was proud of as a kid. I wanted to be around other readers. I “wore” my books the way another kid might wear a Nirvana t-shirt, to advertise our tastes, strike up conversations, and form bonds with others.

I used the word “might” there, because there is one way I see this changing. These days, I see a dedicated e-reader as the greatest sign that one is an avid reader. One idea an indie author or publisher might play with is creating a “deluxe ebook edition.” This would come with a “skin” for the back of their e-reader, which would show off their favorite work even as they move on and read other books. It could also come with a wall vinyl of the spine of the book, which could go on the readers’ “bookshelf,” growing into a collection of spines across their bedroom walls. Understanding the need to advertise our interests can direct promotional efforts, rather than giving up on ebooks.

There are several reasons YA is seeing growth in digital, despite this love of print. One is that parents are getting more comfortable providing digital allowances. Retailers should make this a focus to encourage the process, but I know in the past that I’ve been able to simply “gift” books or email gift cards to young readers, and they can buy whatever they like. Credit cards are not required. And kids often use their parents’ accounts anyway, with their permission. Young adults read on their phones a lot, and many already have tablets. The market is there.

A second reason is the rise of indie works, which are generally cheaper. Price-sensitive young readers can get one ebook or print book for $10, or they can get three or four for the same total price. Combine price sensitivity with avid reading habits, and it’s no wonder ebooks are on the rise. Then take into account that many of these readers don’t have cars to get to a physical bookstore, and that at this age we often want things “now” (even while in the middle of a boring class) and you’ve got more cause for growth.

One of the strongest factors may be that the YA market isn’t even a YA market. In addition to writing YA novels, I read them! So do many of the elderly, decrepit, has-beens my age. Just because you write YA doesn’t mean your audience is just young adults. It’s a genre, not a market.

So what would I suggest a YA author do? Self-publish and watch the market move toward you. Don’t sell your lifetime rights while things are in transition. I’ve seen claims that the “indie revolution” is over, or past its heyday. The opposite is true. The physical bookstore heyday of the 90s is past us. Major publishers are reaping incredible profits with the advent of ebooks, but their control of the market and their market share is declining. In the future, it’s quite likely that these will be rights-holding corporations, surviving on their backlist. Don’t be part of that backlist. Be your own frontlist.

You can start by innovating with your marketing, with stickers, character trading cards, USB thumb drives, and POD edition giveaways. You can write in lots of places and see where you might get discovered. Erin mentioned she has a following on WattPad. Keep that up. There are all kinds of outlets, from fan fiction sites to WriteOn. Post short works written in your world or using your characters. This might send readers to your paid works.

Another great idea is to reach out to local schools and see about talking to classrooms. Teachers are thrilled to have guest speakers, as it wakes up the class, brings in excitement, and links the teaching of literature to the real world, by showing young readers that authors are accessible human beings, and not all that different from them. I did this in North Carolina and was invited back over and over to the same classrooms, becoming a favorite YA author for many of these kids back when no one else was reading my material.

Above all, write stories that knock their mismatched socks off. Young readers make the best audience because they are simultaneously discerning and fanatical. That makes them difficult to please, but sure to spread the word if you do make them happy. This means not slouching with the quality of your plots and the crispness of your prose. You can be lazy when you write for adults, but not for kids. And don’t forget that they are smarter than we remember being when we were that age. Talk up to them, not down. They are incredibly patient with us dullards if they can see that we’re trying to reach their level.

In everything you do as an author, work harder than anyone else around you. Want it more than you want anything else in life. Even if fortune doesn’t favor you, you’ll have zero regrets, and you’ll create something you’re proud of. Hope that helps.

(Here’s a link to Erin’s blog)

 

Mother Rock

Dear Mother,

How are you?

Wish you could see this place.

I’m at the tip of Africa, this mother continent from which we came, and I’m thinking of you.

The sea here is rough, the coastline a jumble of rock and stone. The waves pound and pound without ever giving up, and you marvel that there’s any rock left. That it hasn’t all been turned to sand.

There’s one rock apart here. Alone. It sits out further than the rest, like it’s itching to get somewhere. Impatient. Headstrong. Eager. Or like it refuses to fit in. And I think of you.

I think of you in college, studying math, programming computers with punch cards, doing your own thing, standing apart.

I see you beside your brother, in the hospital, supporting him.

I see you with three kids, alone, working job after job.

I see you reading to us. I see you fishing in your purse for the money you didn’t have, and finding it anyway.

I see you falling in and out of love.

The waves here are cruel. Relentless. And I don’t know whether by some fate, some hidden feature, the lay of the land or some bar of rock or sand, but they funnel and meet and crash just on this one rock.

Nothing deserves this. And yet look how stoic. That proud rock under a cloud of spray. Rainbows are thrown across the sky. How is it still standing?

There’s all the world for the waves to go, but they land on her one by one, merge and converge. They come for you, mate after mate, as if some hand of fate, but it’s just the lay of the land, those bars of rock and sand, until all that’s left are walls of foam and rainbows.

She’s still there. The tip of this mother continent. I expect her to drown, to not emerge, but the sea subsides, and she lifts her proud granite chin, and I can almost hear her laughter amid the gulls.

I wish better for you, Mom.

But then my eye falls to the cliff before me, where calm seas lie behind that great rock, and there are pools here full of life, and shell, and wonderful, beautiful things, all in the happy shelter beneath rainbows and gentle foam.

There is calm all around that rock. And life’s not fair, but you kept me from drowning there.

I sit upon your curved and craggy spine, Mother Rock, and all the seas take aim. But the rock remains. How is it still standing?

How are you?

-Hugh

 

 

Go Fly A Kite

One of my best friends here in South Africa took me kite surfing today. He warned me it would take a few lessons to get the hang of it. The first place we went, the winds were too choppy. The kite was backing and then filling with air and lifting him off the sand. So we packed up and drove to the cape, where the seas were rougher but the winds steadier.

The winds were STRONG. We pumped up the kite, and Mauro took it aloft. I flew large kites for years in Charleston, but this is a different beast. You could drag ten people across the sand with one of these. The wind was 25 or so mph. Mauro landed the kite, and I stepped into the harness.

We sent it up, and immediately I felt the power of the thing. It was a 9 meter kite, one he’d never flown before. Took a few minutes to feel in control of it, and then Mauro had me power the kite down and drag myself across the sand, my feet leaving twin ruts in a large zigzag.

It was a rush. Depowering the kite (sending it straight up overhead), I would run and skip and whoop back to where he was, then do it all over again. After a few rounds, I took a break and Mauro went out into the surf. The walls of foam were over 3 feet high, and he just jumped them, carving the waves and zipping back to shallow water before heading back out.

When he came back, he showed me how to jump on the sand. I put the harness back on and powered up the kite, took a few tentative leaps, and by the fifth or sixth one, I was going about six or eight feet off the ground and a distance of twenty feet or so. I could do just this, no board, no water. My cheeks started hurting from the permagrin. Mauro warned me it was addictive, and I could feel it. I asked him if I could try the board. He said “No way.” I begged. He finally relented.

It was a bad place to learn, in the surf. He prefers the river when the winds are out of the east. I got my feet in the straps, the waves crashing around my shins, powered the kite up, and off I went — out of the board straps, up in the air, slamming into the water, dragging and spitting and laughing and shouting that I was alright. The kite crashed, and it took a bit to get it flying again.

One more try. I knew it would be the last. Mauro already didn’t want me doing this. Supposed to be the third or fourth lesson before you get in the water. This time, I got up, but for two seconds. Then I was REALLY up, yanked off the water again, a few feet off the ground, gliding for eight or ten feet, then splashing down.

An amazing first lesson. I’m almost scared to do it again, to feel what it’s like to soar above the waves, because I might not want to come back down.

Cape Town Meet-Up!

The Cape Town Meet-Up is happening! It’ll be on Thursday, May 21st, at 5:30pm at Book Lounge. They’re at 71 Roeland St. Here’s their website.

Refreshments for half an hour, a meet-and-greet, and then a discussion with a local author, followed by a book signing.

Hope to see you there!

What’s the Best Way to Support Your Favorite Authors?

This question comes from Tom, over on Facebook. I started typing a reply, and as is my wont, a quick reply turned into a blog post.

Tom: As a voracious ebook reader, Hugh, I’m curious about author income per sale across different vendors.

For example if an imaginary author’s ebook is available from Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and an author’s own site (for example), all for the same price, is there a difference in what the author makes depending on which vendor I purchase from?

The reason I ask is that as a reader, wanting to encourage authors whose work I enjoy, I would prefer to have the largest percentage possible go to the author rather than someone else.

This seems like a simple question, but there’s a lot to consider. First, a look at the payout percentage. 

For the same price, a direct sale from an author’s website will almost always put slightly more money in their pocket (roughly 20% – 30% more) than from a retailer. That’s if they are selling direct, as I and many others do. If there is a link on the author’s website to a retailer, that’s still better than going straight to the retailer, as most authors set up affiliate codes and get a small commission on the referral.

After these direct sales, you’ve got different payouts from different vendors, and on Amazon, it also depends on price. Works priced above $9.99 and below $2.99 earn 35% royalties on Amazon, while ebooks priced between these two numbers earn roughly 70%.

If that starts to sound confusing, let me simplify it for you, because authors often care about a lot more than income per book sold. While I make 30% more if you buy from me direct, I would rather you purchase from a retailer. Why? Because a sale on my site doesn’t help my product ranking. And product ranking increases visibility. Each sale on a retailer is more than a sale: It’s also a vote of confidence.

There’s more. I care about your shopping experience, and it will be better at a retailer like Amazon than it will be on my site. I can’t send the ebook to you over a cellular network and have it just appear. If you lose your digital ebook file, and your link has timed out (which it will, unfortunately), you’ll have to email me for another copy. With a major retailer, that ebook is in the cloud, waiting for you. You can also share that ebook with a friend through some retailers. I want you to do that. I want you to have a great reading experience. So that factors in.

Then there’s the review. If you purchase from a retailer, there’s a good chance they’ll prod you for a review or a star rating. These are gold for independent authors. That’s worth something to me, and so we have to factor that in as well.

Finally, you have the recommendation engine. If you buy my books at Amazon, they’ll send you reminders when I release something new. They’ll also recommend my other works when you shop. That can’t be purchased at any price.

So what are these things worth? Far more than 30% of my income on each sale. By giving up 30% of the list price, I get great customer service, cloud storage for my readers, robust marketing, a boost in ranking, point-of-sale and accounting services, and the word of mouth of a customer review. Wholesalers pay retailers around 50% of their profits for these services. I see it as a bargain, and as a better experience for my readers.

If you really want to support your favorite authors, my advice is simple: Read their books. Spread word-of-mouth. Write reviews. Email them and express your delight.

Readers have no idea how much we value these things. We rely on you all and appreciate you more than you know.

 

 

The May 2015 Author Earnings Report

Three years ago, I was faced with a decision. A very difficult decision. The WOOL OMNIBUS was selling well enough for me to quit my day job and make a go of it as a full-time author, while at the same time, major publishers were making incredible offers for the rights to my book. Six-figure offers became seven-figure offers. In the end, I turned those offers down.

The retelling of that decision often makes it sound like I knew what I was doing, or that I was confident in my position. I wasn’t. All I had were educated guesses. I had years of working as a bookseller, of watching ebooks gain ground, and seeing how readers reacted to having ebooks delayed, and how they reacted when the price of an ebook was higher than the paperback. I watched 1-star reviews pile up on my favorite authors’ works, and I saw that publishers often reacted out of fear of change rather than out of a desire to please their customers.

Their customers — I learned from working at that bookstore — was in fact us, the retailer. Not the reader. The checks to publishers came from us. We were the ones — as booksellers — who worked to please the readers.

This realization helped guide my decision. I knew if I made a deal, that the price of my ebooks would shoot up. And so during negotiations, I pushed for guarantees on price caps. Numbers were bandied about. Those numbers were very far apart. At the same time, I saw from foreign publishers that as soon as I signed overseas deals, emails would trickle in through my agent asking if I could raise the price on the English editions in their countries.

I learned a lot over the next few years, as I published with 40 traditional publishers around the world, including some of the largest publishers in operation today. I heard about pressure from physical bookstores to increase ebook prices, or they would refuse to stock the titles in their stores. I watched readers complain about VAT taxes and the price of ebooks in other countries. And I saw from my own pricing experiments that lower prices meant greater sales, happier readers, more word-of-mouth, and more income for me.

Even better, lower prices didn’t seem to be hurting my fellow authors. The number of titles we needed to sell to hit the same ranking crept up and up, which meant we were all selling more books. Avid readers could now afford to shop for more books, and the ease of access was driving up the amount of reading they were doing. The entire pie was growing right before our very eyes.

Was it suddenly easy to make a living as a writer? No way. But for many, it was at least possible to try. And the chances were far greater than ever before.

When my partner and I started Author Earnings.com, we did it because of the many sleepless nights we had while wrestling with how best to publish our works. We had a choice, and we wanted to make a good one. Many authors face this difficult decision, whether they just finished their first manuscript or their tenth. On the one hand, you have the promise of bookstore distribution, marketing muscle, and the validation of your work. On the other hand, you’ve got the readers — who end up providing the only validation an author ever needs.

It’s easy to say now that I made a smart decision. But I wish I’d known then what I know now, so I wouldn’t have stressed so much about that choice. We started Author Earnings.com because we want authors to have visual insights into what’s happening on the largest ebook retail store in the world. I wish this data had been available for me three years ago. I wouldn’t have done anything differently; I just would’ve felt less anxiety about making that choice.

So what does this report show? Higher ebook prices from publishers continues to erode their market share of ebook sales. Drastically. When you read industry reports on the health of ebook sales, keep in mind that these reports are discussing a mere 14% of the ebooks that show up on Amazon’s bestseller lists. That’s it. Indie ebooks account for 26%. Daily unit sales of self-published titles are now greater than the Big 5 publishers, combined. And indie authors are taking home more earnings from readers every day than those same authors, combined.

That’s more people writing what they love, more readers finding great works at fair prices, and more opportunities for artists to supplement incomes or make a living. This is great news for those of us who value reading and literature. And this data is invaluable to those wrestling with how best to express themselves through prose. What I assumed years ago, and what is borne out by this report, is that there’s no greater tool in your sales arsenal than control over pricing. None.

But that should be common sense. Value your readers, and they will reward you in return.

Here’s the May 2015 Author Earnings Report.

The Stamp of Awesomeness

Or so Amber has dubbed it. We’re two weeks away from closing down orders. Every item will get one of these stamps, as well as my signature, and Amber’s DNA from the shipping and handling. Pretty exciting.

Click here to grab one of the last 100 or so items available.

Or watch the videos below to find out what in the world is going on here.

This will be my last official book signing for quite a while. Unless you have tickets for San Diego Comic Con. You do have tickets for Comic Con, right?