Hugh Howey's Blog, page 32

GISHWHES

“Help!” Misha Collins cried. “She’s falling apart!”

The Time Continuum Machine rattled and roared. Struts began to buckle. Chains shuddered from their gears and flapped dangerously. The engine that kept all the cosmos running became a buzz-saw of terror.

The Queen of England leaned into her wrench, tightening bolts, but two came loose for every one she handled. “This is the end,” the Queen Mother said. Misha had never known the Queen to be dire. He believed it was the end as well.

“If I had nine arms, I could fix this,” Misha said. He stabilized the quantum flux dismorgaphier with one foot and kept the vacuous air filter in place with his shin. “What I couldn’t do with nine arms,” he muttered to himself.

“Hey,” the Elopus said. “Can I help?”

 

 

The Liliana Nirvana Technique

No, the Liliana Nirvana is not a secret massage chakra technique. But it may be the secret to launching a successful self-publishing career.

The effectiveness of this technique hit me at RWA. I attended a panel entitled “Self-Publishing Q&A.” It was two jam-packed hours of tossing out questions to mega bestselling authors Barbara Freethy, Bella Andre, Courtney Milan, and Liliana Hart. Of the four, only Liliana entered self-publishing without first having had a career with a traditional publisher. This anomalous beginning stood out during their introductions, but the uniqueness of Liliana’s success disappeared during the Q&A. Why? Because Liliana published as if she had a traditional publishing history.

She calls it her “5 down and 1 in the hole” technique. (No, this is not a page from the Kama Sutra. It’s far more important than that.)

Now, I should start by saying that there is no guarantee for success with any publishing path. My good friend and publishing genius Bella Andre disagrees with the ideas I’m about to set forth. And if you give me enough time and contradictory case studies, I might come to disagree with it as well. But right now, I lean toward thinking Liliana’s technique is absolutely brilliant. I think she discovered something that a lot of us lucked into. I think my own success owes something to the “5 down and 1 in the hole” publishing strategy.

So what exactly is it?

The idea is this: Annual releases are too slow to build on one another. And not just in the repetition of getting eyeballs on your works, but in how online recommendation algorithms work. Liliana suggests publishing 5 works all at once. Same day. And she thinks you should have another work sitting there ready to go a month later. While these works are gaining steam, write the next work, which if you write and edit in two months, will hit a month after the “hole” work.

Why does this work? I think it has to do with “impressions,” or the number of times people see a product before they decide to take a chance on it. (In this case, the product is your name.) It also has to do with recommendation algorithms and how new works are treated on various online bestseller lists. From my own experience, I know that it was following WOOL with four more rapid releases that helped my career take off. I followed these five releases a month later with FIRST SHIFT, and I released a work every three or four months after that (SECOND SHIFT, I, ZOMBIE, THIRD SHIFT, plus several short works).

Imagine a TV show that released an episode every year, and you get an idea of the limitations of such a system. Contrariwise, look at how Netflix drops an entire season and all the attention that garners. Where this gets really powerful is in the “also-bought” recommendations. Michael Bunker let me in on a plan of his to release one of his works at the same time as me. He promoted my work to his fans, and asked people to buy both books, which “paired” us.

Simultaneous releases have a similar effect on one another. While it’s still a chore to get initial readers, every sale will lead to recommendations for 4 or 5 more of your works. This is far less likely with a lot of time between those initial releases. Some authors will tell you you’re crazy to sit on a product while you write more, but this method has quite a track record.

Think of how it worked for authors who came from traditional publishing. Critics of self-publishing try to wave off the success of authors like Bella Andre, Barbara Freethy, and Joe Konrath to some imaginary massive following they won from their publisher, but they have told me that this isn’t the case. They didn’t gain a massive following until after they regained rights to their backlists and self-published. When they did get those rights, they secured works that were already written and edited. They could do some minor tweaks, update cover art, and release those works in rapid order.

Liliana wasn’t on that panel at RWA as an anomaly, but as an imitator, in all the best senses of that word. By even daring to release this way, I think she’s a genius. Ah, but it’s not a theory without some testing and validation. Otherwise, it’s just an idea. A hypothesis. Anecdote. Well guess what? Some of Liliana’s peers have tried the Liliana Nirvana technique, and the string of successes is absolutely remarkable.

Lila Ashe, Jessie Evans, Cristin Harber, and Marquita Valentine, are just a few who have used the 5 down, 1 in the hole release schedule. These are authors who just got their start and are already making full-time wages from their writing. Does that mean anyone who does this will have success? Absolutely not. You’ve got to have great stories, catchy blurbs, professional covers, quality editing, and the right metadata. But you are sunk without these things however you publish. Having them should be a given.

What I think the technique does is give you a better chance, once you have all these other things down. You hit bookstore shelves with a handful of titles at once, and they prop each other up. They direct attention toward each other. They amplify your signal. Yeah, it’s hard to create that initial buzz, but what if you can do something to turn up the juice? Liliana Hart may have discovered a way.

Does it have to be 5 books? Probably not. Will it always be this effective? Possibly not. Can you get even crazier? I think so. I blogged a few weeks ago about the insanity of releasing 12 books all at once. I know of a group of authors working on a plan to do something very much like this. I may even be a part of it, trying a new form of the Liliana Nirvana technique. I just hope I don’t throw my back out like last time.

Friends and Corporations

We have entered a new and very bizarre phase of the Amazon / Hachette negotiations. Now that Amazon has come out and stated its ideal terms, which turn out to be entirely reasonable, the tactics from those who hate Amazon, no matter what they do, have gone from misguided to just plain crazy.

Amazon says it is fighting for reasonable ebook pricing. This matches a long history of actions from Amazon. Their focus on ebooks at $9.99 or below is why publishers had to break the law and collude with one another in order to artificially raise prices on readers. So we have an established pattern of behavior here of Amazon fighting for reasonable ebook pricing and publishers working together to screw readers.

Now that Amazon’s book team has come out and flatly stated their intentions, the response from some has been to assume that Amazon is lying. The response from others has been to say that Amazon is a corporation. And the mantra repeated to anyone who appreciates Amazon as a business partner is that “Amazon is not your friend.”

So, no one has anything to say about the actual arguments and positions from either side? Is that what I’m hearing? To equivocate between Amazon and Hachette by saying both are corporations is absolutely absurd. Monsanto and Whole Foods are both corporations. So they’re the same, right? No need to look any further?

I’d rather dig deeper than that, if nobody minds.

* Amazon allows anyone to publish. Hachette doesn’t even allow unagented submissions, meaning they require you to pay 15% of your earnings to a third party just to talk to them, no matter how well you can represent yourself.

 

* Amazon pays roughly six times the royalty rate that Hachette pays.

 

* For their imprint authors, Amazon pays double the rate that Hachette pays. In fact, they pay more in most cases than even the pie-in-the-sky 30/35/35 suggestion made to Hachette.

 

*Amazon allows me to retain ownership of my work, which means I can leave if conditions become unfavorable. Hachette is making it more difficult to reclaim the rights to one’s work.

 

* Hachette is fighting for and has broken the law to secure higher prices. Amazon wants ebooks to be affordable.

If Amazon isn’t my friend, this must mean that Hachette is my mortal enemy. Because these two corporations aren’t anything alike. Amazon is a frugal company that puts its earnings back into future investments for its own growth, knowing that the failure to do so will see a foreign competitor like Alibaba march in to the US and dominate.

Hachette is a wasteful company situated in Midtown Manhattan that sends its profits overseas.

And there are authors who want to trot out the “both are corporations” line. How about: “Both have an ‘A’ in their names?” Does that also work?

Amazon doesn’t have to be my friend for me to love them. I love chocolate ice cream, and chocolate ice cream doesn’t even know I exist. But you might say that enough chocolate ice cream shoved down my throat can kill me! Or what if in some future I become allergic to chocolate, and then it makes me sick every time I eat it! If that sounds crazy to you, you’ll understand how crazy a bunch of people I otherwise respect sound to me right now.

Yes, Amazon might turn on us in the future. But Hachette turned on me already. Until they offer direct submissions and pay 50% of net and get rid of term of copyright licensing, they are the enemy. Until they give up their asinine pricing philosophies, their insistence on hardback fiction for debuting authors, their love of DRM, and their non-compete clauses, they are the enemy.

I don’t want them to be the enemy, mind you. I want them to change, which will improve conditions for authors, prices and selection for readers, and help books compete with other forms of entertainment. If I didn’t care about these things, I would write books, make a lot of money, and watch them go under. I don’t want that. No one should.

What I think has happened is that it has become very clear that Amazon is fighting the good fight and Hachette is on the wrong side. And for those who hate Amazon no matter what they do, they are left attacking the company’s supporters with ad hominem diatribes. They are left equivocating between all corporations without looking at behavior, a history of law-breaking, or stated intent. They are left countering anything positive with “that entity is not your friend.”

You know how you can tell that these people are disingenuous? When was the last time a publisher did something great, and the response from one of their authors was, “But you have to understand that my publisher is not my friend.” I’ve never seen such a statement. And it makes just as little sense when it is directed toward Amazon.

Here is a company not just saying they are for higher wages for authors and lower prices for readers, but one that is backing up those claims with action. I stand 100% behind them. If the last tactic the traditional crowd has in its arsenal is to paint those of us who know a good thing when we see it as shills, fanboys, or the irrationally infatuated, then they must not have anything left.

When the haters are left accusing us of love, the end must be near.

If you were getting a SAND tattoo…?

Temporary SAND tattoos might soon be a thing. If you were getting a SAND tattoo, what would it say? Is there a line from the book you’d enjoy? Or maybe slogans from various dive clans? Something like: Go Deep or Go Home. Or: Don’t bother, I’ll bury myself.

Leave your ideas or favorite lines in the comments. If we use your suggestions, I’ll send you something cool. Some really awesome SAND stuff in the works that we’ll be able to announce soon.

Could it be any Clearer?

For the longest time, getting a word out of Amazon required rubber gloves, lube, a stick of gum, and a length of string. During the ongoing negotiations with Hachette, that has changed. I mean, Amazon practically won’t shut up these days. Their latest blog post is particularly dense with revelations, and it should serve as a wake up call for authors and readers.

Here’s a link to their post. You should read it. Seriously.

As many have been predicting, Amazon is fighting for lower prices for their customers. It has also been posited over and over that lower ebook prices would generate more revenue for all involved, and now Amazon backs this up by revealing calculations pulled from their industry-best sales data. So who is Hachette fighting for, if they are resisting terms like these? The only people I can think of are those who sell millions of physical books at bookstores. You know, the Prestons, Pattersons, and Colberts. The top 1%.

Just as immense here is Amazon’s call for higher pay for authors, which is neatly tucked within the folds of their post. Amazon comes right out and states that they are asking for 30% on the sale of ebooks, which is what they currently get from most self-published titles. It is an entirely reasonable percentage for a retailer (bookstores get 40% – 50%). What I love, though, is that Amazon then suggests that the remaining 70% should be split evenly between the author and the publisher.

As Barry Eisler points out, Amazon just became the closest thing we have to a writers’ guild. Not only are they fighting for lower prices, which sell more books, capture more of an audience, and make more income . . . but Amazon just came out in favor of ebook royalties of 50% of net. That is twice what authors are currently offered.

Authors currently make 25% of net on ebooks, which is unconscionably low. To have an organization like Amazon mention fairer pay is more than most writing groups have been willing to do. Imagine if those groups (like SFWA and the AG) actually applied some pressure as well. I mean, can you believe that our guilds and associations aren’t fighting our employers for better pay, so it’s being left up to a retailer to even mention it?

I’m getting a metric ton of email and messages about Amazon’s public statement. Authors are getting in touch to let me know that after reading Amazon’s position in these negotiations, they immediately went and signed the petition at Change.org that asks Hachette to negotiate in good faith. That petition now has over 7,500 signatures. I hope now that Amazon has stated that they are fighting on behalf of readers, writers, and book culture, that even more people sign the petition.

There will be those who continue to doubt Amazon’s sincerity and motives. There will be those who continue to lionize publishers because they produce the books we know and love. But one of these companies has a long history of making reading accessible while paying authors more than they have ever made in history. The other has a history of illegally colluding with competitors to raise prices on their readers while paying authors shit.

Which of these companies do you support? Which one does your writing group or organization support? The correct answer has been clear to me for a long time. But with this last public statement, it just got even clearer.

The Reason for the Confusion

Some analysts appear to be confused about how so many authors can possibly be making more money while overall spending on reading is flat. Let’s see if we can’t figure this contradiction out.

The analyst linked to above gave a presentation at RWA (Romance Writers of America) last weekend. In both the blog post and the RWA presentation, we are shown this graph:

If reading dollars are flat, then author earnings should be flat, right? Not necessarily.

Let’s start with the fact that the above graph includes newspapers and magazines, which are down. Here are the trends for magazines. And here are the trends for newspapers. You would think, at a conference for novelists, that this would be taken into account. Now, if the spending on total reading is flat, and two of the three reading types are down, that probably means the revenue for trade fiction is up. We can only guess here, because the wrong data is being used for the wrong purposes.

It gets worse. (Well, the misuse of data gets worse, but the picture that emerges once we correct that misuse is a rosy one for writers.) If the spending on reading material is indeed flat, that’s awesome news for authors. And not just because of the magazine/newspaper mistake. We also have to remember that the average price of a read is down, thanks to ebooks (especially the self-published variety). So flat spending might actually mean more reading. And there’s another thing to consider — the most important thing, something lost on industry analysts –and that is that overall industry numbers don’t tell writers anything. Bookstore and publisher income doesn’t affect our decision to publish one way or another. If people are spending more of their reading dollars on books that send 70 cents of every dollar to the writer, that’s a sea change from a time just five years ago when only a dime of each dollar went to the writer.

Spending on reading can stay flat while seven times as much money flows from the reader to the writer. SEVEN TIMES.

If you are an analysts who reports to publishers and bookstores, this thought never crosses your mind. You don’t care if some authors get 12.5% while others get 70%. It isn’t about the author. It’s about the industry dollars.

I sat in the panel where this chart was shown, and I listened to the gasps of horror, and saw how the fear, uncertainty, and doubt are spread. But the logical failings didn’t stop there. The same fixation on the industry causes this analyst to make another mistake. Author income was broken down based on publishing path. And instead of lumping aspiring authors in with the traditionally published authors, they were set aside. The audience was shown earnings from the top few percent of those who managed to go down the traditional path, and those earnings were compared to the entirety of those who self-publish.

You can’t make this kind of poor reasoning up. You have to see it to believe it:

Check out the column for “Aspiring Writer” income. Unreal. How many aspiring writers are there? Are there 10 million aspiring writers and . . . say . . . 50 thousand who actually get published? Imagine if you lumped them all together on the same bar, how compressed the earnings would be toward the top. What sense does this graph make for a writer with a manuscript in-hand and a decision to make? None.

Wait. It gets worse. The same graph above also takes out the most successful self-published authors and calls them “hybrids.” Hybrid authors come in two main flavors: The first is the traditionally published author who got dropped from their publisher, got their rights back, and then self-publishes. Bella Andre, JA Konrath, Barbara Freethy and many others fit this profile. They barely earned a living with a traditional publisher, took control of their careers, and only then made millions of dollars. Industry analysts do not consider these to be self-published success stories. I’ve even seen some of them credit their former publisher for all the success they had after they were dropped for not selling very well.

The other main hybrid type is the author who does so well self-publishing that they get picked up by a major house. Like with the above group, the success for these authors came from the choice to self-publish. But again, credit goes to the publisher or the decision to go “hybrid.” In both cases, the above graph pulls these authors out of the category in which they belong (you know, the path that either earned them the most money or gained them enough readers to publish however they like) in order to create a false equivalence.

So take the graph in again. Out of the traditional publishing path, let’s remove all those who didn’t get in, despite making the choice to query an agent. Let’s also take the highest earners out of the self-publishing path. Can we artificially tilt the data any further?

Sadly, this is how industry analysts pose the question of potential earnings to authors. You want to laugh, but you have to cry.

Can you choose to publish with Random House? No. You can choose to send your manuscript to an agent and hope to secure their services and hope they submit your work to an editor at Random House, and hope you get an offer, and hope the book comes out. The only real choice is between self-publishing and querying an agent. But that’s not how the data on earnings and satisfaction were presented in this panel at RWA. What we saw were the results of publishing paths, not the expected outcomes of each potential choice.

If you want to show the outcome of each choice, you need to know how many people are submitting manuscripts that never get published. You need to know how many of those people give up and choose not to self-publish. Otherwise, you are taking the very top of one group and lining them up against the entirety of the other group. This seems so basic to many of us that we can’t understand how it doesn’t get through to these analysts. If you are trying to help authors make favorable decisions with their manuscripts, they need to know the odds at the outset, not the final outcome for those who won some lottery.

But what really blew me away about this panel, and why I applauded mightily at the end and thanked the analysts for putting the data together, was this: The artificially small and tilted selection of traditionally published authors did not fare much better than all of self-published authors in either income or satisfaction. Think about that for a minute. Even making the gross mistake of just looking at the winners from the traditional publishing path, this analyst wasn’t able to show that they were better off than the path that lumps in every single self-published author!

And imagine if the hybrids were placed where they belong!

What we have here is very similar to that flat graph on reading spending above: A seeming contradiction when there is none. There’s just a massive mistake in how the question is framed. Why are self-published authors walking around at RWA with so many success stories and so much personal and professional satisfaction? Because as an entire group, they are doing as well as the top few percent of those who managed to get traditionally published. Imagine if an analyst actually averaged in the zero dollars that most query-writers earn from their mailed-in manuscripts? (You know, that bar to the far left.) Imagine if they averaged in the negative satisfaction from all those rejection letters. (That same bar to the left.) The equality in earnings and satisfaction would disappear. And these analysts would see what everyone in the trenches is seeing: The good news amid all the FUD and noise.

The WOOL Comic

Issue #5 of the WOOL comic book series hit Comixology today. The cover art for this issue is from my favorite scene in the novel, when Jules dives down to restore the pumps. Also, tomorrow is when the first issue hits physical comic book shops, so I’m looking forward to going out and sourcing a copy.

Just one more issue left before the story is wrapped up. And if you think you know how it ends . . . you probably don’t.

The comic series is available at Comixology and also at Amazon. Another huge thanks to Palmiotti, Gray, and Brox for the job they did with the adaptation.

 

Glitch

Another gorgeous cover by M.S. Corley, this time for my short story, GLITCH. If you need artwork, hit him up for a quote.

 

Data Guy on the Author Earnings Methodology

A great exchange over at The Passive Voice. William Ockham, one of the great thinkers on all things publishing, put forward two of the criticisms he’s seen of the AE data. Data Guy chimes in with a third problem, and explains how all three criticisms do not alter the conclusions drawn from our reports. When people point to the vapid and non-existent but supposed “refutations” of our data, this might be a good link to rebut with.

I do apologize to those whom this information proves troubling, but it is a fair view of what is happening in the world of ebooks today. And all the trends we’ve seen point in the same direction.

William OckhamJuly 27, 2014 at 6:44 pm

I have seen a couple of interesting criticisms of the AE reports. The first is that Big 5 authors get substantially more in advances than the standard royalty rates would suggest (40% of gross was one figure mentioned). Assume for a minute that contention is true. Now take a look at the data from AE on the percentage of Big 5 earnings from titles originally published before 2011. Those are books that have definitely earned out. Create a model from the AE data that makes that 40% figure work. Publishing looks like a very strange business indeed. Spoiler alert! I suspect that that 40% of gross comes from looking at the first year income of a publishers’ titles. The Big 5 has always had what KKR calls the “produce model” of selling books.

The other criticism of the AE data is that the Big 5 is getting more than the Amazon retail price for many of their best sellers (i.e. Amazon is selling at a loss). This could skew the numbers somewhat. If this is indeed a big issue, there is a simple way for those publisher insiders (looking at you Jeremy Greenfield) to prove this. Replicate the AE approach, but pull the amount you believe the publisher is receiving. If that is beyond your technical ability, I would be happy to do it for you. For my standard overtime rates, $250/hour.

Data GuyJuly 27, 2014 at 11:42 pm

William, I’ll play devil’s advocate and add one more semi-”valid” criticism to the two you mention. 

While our sales to rank curve has proven to be highly accurate at predicting daily sales for ranks all the way up to the top 2 or 3 books, and even for those top 2 or 3 it will be quite accurate *on average*, the actual sales of the very top 2 or 3 books might vary significantly from day to day — from 5,000 to 10,000 or rarely even higher.

But it’s important to keep in mind that Amazon sells more than 1,500,000 ebooks a day (just integrate the area under the rank-to-sales curve to calculate that). Even if we happen to capture our sample on the day when the movie version of The Fault In Our Stars or Allegiant hits the theaters and sales of that #1 book spike to something wild like 20,000 units, it would end up making less than a 1% difference in any of the AE pie charts.

Let’s look at the other two criticisms you mention, which are the only other two I’ve found interesting as well.

The observation that Amazon pays traditional publishers based on a wholesale reduction of list, but sells those books at a substantial discount from list, is a valid one… and in fact, we built that assumption into our spreadsheets and pie charts.

We modeled Amazon’s effective retailer cut as only 20% for traditionally-published books. In reality, some books will be discounted deeper, and some will be sold at full list, but an average of 20% felt about right. But if you want to try out different Amazon retailer-cut percentages in our spreadsheet, you can — just change the number highlighted in yellow and the graphs will update. 

Just for fun, when Hugh & I were discussing what number we should use for Amazon’s effective retail cut on sales of traditionally-published books, I plugged in 0% to see what would happen. Even under such a extreme, non-credible reductio ad absurdum scenario (which would mean that Amazon is in total losing money across *all* sales of traditionally-published books), the Indie share of Amazon ebook author earnings was still 34% compared to the Big-5′s 41%.

The other valid criticism you mentioned is based on the observation that some traditionally-published authors receive advances that don’t ever earn out, thus they are effectively receiving higher-than-25% net royalty rates and our spreadsheets and pie charts don’t capture that.

While technically true, it’s also largely irrelevant, because those “extra” dollars — even if they add up to a significant total — only end up going to a tiny handful of authors at the very top of traditional-publishing’s pay scale. The payments these few megabestseller authors are receiving aren’t really “advances against royalties” in the true sense at all. These few authors have effectively negotiated the receipt of huge lump-sum payments for their books, instead of whatever nominal royalty rates are specified in their contracts (to avoid triggering escalator clauses).

For the other 99.9% of traditionally-published authors, advances are no more than a loan made against their own future royalties. Thus those advances have zero net effect on our pie charts. Our Author Earnings charts say “Daily $ Revenue to Authors” because that’s what actually matters to 99.9% of traditionally-published authors, regardless of whether those daily earnings are still paying down the advance and bringing that first royalty check closer, or the advance has already been paid off and those earnings will be reflected on the author’s next royalty check directly.

Epic Sleep-Deprived Mail Time

I open a mountain of mail on no sleep after a full day of travel.

 Part 1: Ben Adams

In this first part, I go through my Ben Adams mail. If you want to get in on the awesomeness that is Ben’s art, support him on Patreon. It’ll be the best thing you do with your monthly dollar (besides donuts [and bacon]).

 Part 2: The Small Pile

 Part 3: The Big Boxes