M. Louisa Locke's Blog, page 16

KDP Select Free Promotion: Discoverability Experiment, Part Two

As stated in Part One, my goal in joining the KDP Select program had been simple, to get my two Victorian San Francisco historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, back up to the top 5 rank in the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. Their ranks had dropped to between 18 and 24 after Amazon added hundreds of titles to that category just before Christmas. The experiment in light of this goal was an unqualified success.

I used KDP Select to offer the Kindle edition of Maids for free for two days, December 30th and 31st. When the free promotion ended, Maids of Misfortune was at #1 in the historical mystery bestseller category, and it has stayed there. In addition, Uneasy Spirits, a sequel to Maids, rose to #8 during the promotion of Maids, and by the end of the first week after the promotion, it had risen to #3 in the historical mystery bestseller category.

What I had not expected when I embarked on the experiment was that Maids of Misfortune would also rise to the top ranks in so many other categories. But it did! When Amazon calculates its rankings, it includes the free downloads. So, when the promotion ended, those 14,500 free downloads moved Maids of Misfortune up to the 400s in the overall Paid Kindle store ranking and to the top 5 in popularity in the categories of mystery, and mystery — women sleuth, and historical romance. This made the book very easy to discover by a much wider potential market than ever before. (I published Maids of Misfortune at a time when Amazon let authors choose more than two categories; for sales purposes, this gives it an edge over other books, like Uneasy Spirits, that are in only two categories.)

This greater discoverability immediately translated into increased sales that have kept Maids of Misfortune up in the overall rankings during the week after the promotion ended. Last night, at the end of the first post-promotion week, Maids of Misfortune was #164 in the Paid Kindle Store and, while it has slipped a bit in the other categories, it was still #1 in popularity in historical mysteries, #7 in mystery-women sleuths, and #7 in historical romance. These rankings are high enough to make the book very discoverable — which leads to more sales — which leads to maintaining a high ranking — which leads to more sales.

The sales of Maids of Misfortune since the promotion ended have been fantastic. In November 2011, before the promotion, I sold 376 copies of Maids of Misfortune in all venues combined (Kindle US, other Kindle European stores, CreateSpace, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.) This was an average of 12.5 books a day. In December 2011, before the 2 day free promotion, I sold 433 books, with an average just under 15 books a day. In the week after the promotion ended, Maids of Misfortune sold 3183 books in total at an average of just under 455 books a day. Since I was no longer selling it in Smashwords and Barnes and Noble, these sales were almost entirely in the Kindle Stores.

Another unexpected consequence was the number of books I was now selling in the European Kindle Stores. In the 5 months before the promotion I was averaging 16 copies of Maids of Misfortune a month in these stores (primarily UK and Germany), but in the first week after the promotion I have sold 148 copies—an average of 21 books a day, pushing Maids of Misfortune up to #2 in the historical mystery category in the UK store.

I had hoped that the massive download of Maids of Misfortune during the promotion would eventually translate into a spill-over to Uneasy Spirits. I reasoned that, as people finished the first book, they might decide to buy the sequel. This in turn would lead to a higher ranking that would make it more visible. This has already happened. Before the promotion, in November 2011, Uneasy Spirits (which I published in mid October) sold 341 copies—an average of 11 a day. In December 2011, before the promotion, it sold 531 copies—an average of 18 a day. During the promotion and the week after, Uneasy Spirits sold 414 copies—an average of 46 a day (well over twice the rate of sales.) One result of this is that Uneasy Spirits is now showing up in the top 100 bestselling romantic suspense books, again making it more discoverable.

A final unexpected consequence has been the number of copies of Maids of Misfortune that have been borrowed by Amazon Prime members. When you "enroll" a book in the KDP Select Program, readers who belong to Amazon Prime can "borrow" the book for free for one month. I assumed, because I was a relatively unknown author and because Maids was priced at only $2.99, that few people would borrow it.  Why would they when there are other much better known authors whose books cost more to buy? Yet, in the first week since the free promotion, 766 people have borrowed Maids of Misfortune. That means I will get some, I don't know how much, of the $500,000 Amazon has reserved to compensate KDP authors whose books were borrowed during January. These borrowed books also are included in the calculations that Amazon uses to determine the book's rank, so they also help maintain its visibility.

Trying to explain the phenomena, I looked more closely at the list of books in the historical mystery category, and I realized that those higher priced books ($8 and above) by better known authors (like the Maisie Dobbes series by Winspear, Gabaldon's Lord John books, or King's Russell-Holmes series) are not in the Amazon Prime lending program. Most of the books that are available for borrowing are by indie authors like myself, who can recognize a good promotional tool when we see one and who have control over the decisions we make about our own books. One apparent result of this is that Maids of Misfortune and other indie-authored books are ranked higher than those higher-priced and better-known books in the historical mystery category.

In summary, enrolling Maids of Misfortune in the KDP Select Program turned out to be much more successful experiment than I ever imagined it would be. Not only has it made this book and the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, more visible in the Kindle Store through high rankings in a number of categories, but the rankings have produced a large number of sales.

I don't know how long this pattern will last, and I can already see a slight slippage in total books sold per day. KDP Select gives authors the opportunity to do promotions like this for a total of five days in a three month period, so I still have three more promotional days that I can use, if necessary. But there is no getting around the fact that in the first week of January 2012, I sold 3,515 books. And that — by any measure — is wonderful news for this indie author.

At the end of January I will post Part III, an analysis of the success of the experiment at the end of a month, but, in the meantime I would like to hear from those of you who have also experimented with the KDP Select program to learn what your experiences have been.

KDP Select Free Promotion: Discoverability Experiment, Part One

Ok, I confess I stuck the term discoverability into the title since it seems to be the new marketing buzz word. As a professional historian who has spent most of her life in the past, I am getting rather a kick out of riding the wave of change within publishing — even using new words for old concepts like marketing, promotion, and publicity.

In this blog I have frequently posted about these issues, the importance of branding, the possibilities of blog tours, and the use of tags and categories, all describing what I have learned about how to sell books as an indie author. The bottom line of all those posts has been about how an author can get potential readers to discover their books, when they don't have the same opportunities available to traditionally published authors (publishing house book reps, catalogs, big name reviewers, organized books tours, shelf space in book stores, etc.).

Today I am going to look into the newest tool that Amazon has given indie authors — the free promotion through KDP Select.

Some background. The pros and cons of offering a book for free has been the matter of a debate that has ranged between the argument that offering books for free devalues literature to the contrasting belief that an author should offer their books for free as a matter of philosophical principle.

What I am talking about here, though, is offering books for free as a short-term promotional strategy.

Very good arguments have been made that offering free copies of a book is a way of getting your book noticed, getting people to read it and decide they want to buy your other books, and — my particular obsession – using it as a way to improve your rank in the Amazon browsing categories so that is was more likely to be discovered by readers.

However, until recently, if you published your book through the Kindle Direct Platform (KDP) and wanted to get the 70% royalty, you had to sell your book at a price between $2.99 and $9.99. You could decide to sell the book at a lower price, (reverting to 35% royalty rate), but you could not set a price of $0.

The only way, as an indie author, you could do this was to set your price to $0 on other sites (e.g., Smashwords and its affiliates, your own website), and if Amazon's bots found it, they would discount your price to $0 (and of course you would stop getting any royalties.) Authors did do this, but it has a big down-side: you have no control over when or how long your book will be available for free on Amazon. It could take months for the Amazon bots to reduce your Amazon price (it took a year for Amazon to lower the price of my short story), and when you want to end the free promotion it might take weeks or months for the Amazon price to go back to normal. This means this is not a useful strategy to use for a targeted promotion — for the launch of a new book for example.

Then came the Kindle Owners Lending Library Program ("KDP Select"). When first instituted, it was very limited. It was only available to traditional publishers and it only gave readers who were members of Amazon Prime the opportunity to "borrow" one book a month for free. (Amazon Prime is a subscription service that gives members other benefits such as free shipping, free downloads of games and videos for the Kindle Fire, etc.). There was a good deal of controversy over whether or not publishers had agreed to allow their books to be borrowed for free, what if any compensation authors would get, and, again, whether offering books for free was a good thing.

However, the breakthrough for indie authors came on December 8, 2011 when Amazon offered authors who publish through KDP the opportunity to participate in KDP Select. There were caveats. They had to sign up for a three-month commitment and stop selling their enrolled books through any other venue. The carrot? Those authors who signed up would get a share of a pot of money and they would get five free promotional days in the three-month period. This was and is controversial — particularly the exclusivity required — and it left unanswered questions about how the pot of money would be divided up and whether the bulk of the money would go to just a few big names in indie publishing. What interested me, however, was the free promotional days.

Last Christmas the sales of my one historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, were fantastic, and I sold 4600 books on Kindle in December and January, and another 1400 in February. This Christmas I had a second book, Uneasy Spirits, available. It had been selling well since I published it in October. I put my short story into Kindle Select as a harmless experiment, but decided to delay putting either of my novels into the program until I saw how well they sold during the days after Christmas on both Kindle and Barnes and Noble.

Something unexpected happened the week before Christmas, however. The historical mystery category on Kindle, which had been artificially small because of a glitch in the KDP program (I had been posting about this for nearly a year and a half), expanded from having only around 81 books to suddenly having over 1600 (I assume the glitch was finally fixed.) Almost overnight, both of my historical mysteries, which had been hovering in the top five best selling books in this category, slipped down in ranking to the teens and twenties. The top ranks were filled with books that had been traditionally published, had been out longer than mine, or were classics. (I did find it amusing that someone — probably a publishing house techie — had put such classics as Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Conon Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, and Dorothy Sayers' Cloud of Witness in this category.)

In addition, during the week after Christmas, a number of other authors began to report that their post-Christmas sales were not living up to their expectations compared to last year. The greater number of ebooks available (estimates are that the number of ebooks doubled in the last year), the greater numbers of ebooks offered at 99 cents, and new patterns of consumption by the newest Kindle owners, were all offered as reasons for this. The best discussion I have read so far on this subject has come in Kristine Rusch's post, "The Holiday Surprise."

To make a long story short, it seemed clear to me that, although the market for ebooks had increased considerably with all the ereaders sold for Christmas, I was facing a great deal more competition for those new consumers.  I needed to do something to make my book stand out so it was easier to discover.

So, when I got back home after visiting my family for the holidays, I put my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, into the KDP Select program and then created a two-day promotion for it by making it available for free on December 30 and 31. I hoped that this would make Maids more visible and that there would be an echo effect that would send Uneasy Spirits up the ranks so it would also become easier to discover. Finally, I hoped that, after the promotion was over, both books would stay highly ranked (at least in the top ten) in the historical mystery category long enough to generate a greater number of sales than they had been generating. In my experience, a high rank can beget better sales, which in turn will sustain the high rank.

I tweeted and announced the promotion on Facebook and Goodreads and on a few lists and forums on the day before the promotion and then on the two days of the free offer. (I only have about 500 Facebook and Twitter followers — not great, but not terrible.) And I crossed my fingers.

The day before I started my free promotion, both Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits were bouncing around in the 10,000 to 15,000 rank in the overall Kindle Store. While I know that some authors would kill for those rankings, I was used to being around 4,000 to 5,000. Both books were also bouncing between 18-24 in the historical mystery category. I was selling about 15 of each title a day.

At the end of the first day of free promotion, 6500 people had downloaded Maids of Misfortune, it was #67 on the Kindle store free book list, #1 on the free historical mystery list, and #1 on the free women's sleuth mystery list. And Uneasy Spirits had risen to #12 on the historical mystery bestseller list, selling 26 copies that day.

At the end of the second day, over 14,000 people had downloaded Maids of Misfortune, it was #35 on the Kindle free book list, still number #1 on the historical mystery and women's sleuth lists, and even #3 on the free mystery list. Uneasy Spirits had risen to the #8 position on the historical mystery bestseller list, and had sold 54 copies that day.

I clearly had reached my goal of making Maids of Misfortune more visible! The morning after the promotion ended, Uneasy Spirits still was in the #8 spot and Maids of Misfortune was in the #3 position. Clearly it was now easier for readers to discover both books with these high rankings. I am not the only author to report this sort of success, see this post and comments on the Passive Voice.

What remains to be seen is how long this bump in visibility will last, what kind of sales it will produce, and — if there is an increase in sales — how much will it be and how long will it last?

I will report on the results in Part Two of this post. So stay tuned.

Apart from the marketing angle, I couldn't be more thrilled personally by the success of this free promotion. As anyone who has read my posts (for example my last one assessing my second year as an indie author) knows, I was already quite pleased by the fact that I had sold 15,000 copies of Maids of Misfortune in the two years the book has been out. Now, the number of people who have the book has doubled.

Do I mind they didn't pay for it? Not a whit. Even if the sales I hope for down the road don't materialize, for me it has never been strictly about the money. When I wrote as a 17 year old in my high school yearbook that I wanted to do with my future is "write happy books" (I know, I know, not a particularly felicitous turn of phrase!) I meant that I wanted to write books that gave readers the kind of enjoyment that authors like Georgette Heyer gave me, (Laurie King calls it frivolous fiction, and I love that phrase). Being an indie author has given me the opportunity to do just that. And today, Amazon's KDP Select just gave me the opportunity to tickle the fancy of a whole lot more people. How grand and what a wonderful way to start the New Year!

My Second Year as an Indie Author: Even Sweeter Success

In December 2010, a year after I had self-published my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I wrote a piece evaluating my experience in my first year as an indie author. This December it seemed fitting to see how my second year as an indie author compared to the first.

First the Numbers:

Last December, I wrote that "…there is every reason for me to think that I will do even better next year than I did this year with Maids of Misfortune…" and I was entirely right.

In my first year as a self-published author (December 2009-November 2010), I sold 2693 books, most of them $2.99 ebooks, and I made slightly more than $5000.  In my second year (December 2010-November 2011) I sold an additional 12,245 copies of Maids of Misfortune and 943 copies of my second book, Uneasy Spirits, which came out mid October. This means I sold a total of 13,188 books (again most as ebooks) and made over $25,000, before taxes.

From everything I have read on other authors' posts and on the Kindle forums and boards, my success has been duplicated or surpassed by a significant number of indie authors this past year.

What do I expect to happen next year?

Earlier this year I began to wonder if there would be a natural saturation point for Maids of Misfortune, (all the people who would be interested in a cozy mystery set in 1879 San Francisco would have already bought the book), and if the trend of more sales each month that I saw in 2010 would be reversed in 2011.

I think that the answer to this is a qualified yes. My sales of Maids have steadily fallen since the peak I achieved last Dec-Jan-Feb (when I averaged 2000 books sold a month). For example, I sold only 376 Maids this November.  This decline in sales may also reflect both the shift to 99 cent pricing in ebooks in 2011 and the increased number of new and backlist books that traditional publishers and self-publishers put into ebook format. The competition in my niche has increased and many of these books were priced lower than my $2.99 price point. (I experimented for a month with putting the book at 99 cents, but the increase in sales didn't justify the loss in revenue).

However, I do expect the sale of Maids will go up again, at least temporarily, as millions of new Kindle owners start downloading books Christmas morning. In fact, already this month I have seen a slight uptick in the average number of Maids of Misfortune I am selling per day (people who couldn't wait for Christmas?).

In addition, I now have 2 books on sale. While I don't know if all the people who read Maids will go on to read the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, nor do I know how many people will be interested in reading Uneasy Spirits as a stand alone, having the second book has certainly boosted my overall sales.  In September, before Uneasy was out, I sold a total of 589 books. Then, in November, when Uneasy had been out a full month, I sold a total of 957 books (31 books a day).

So, with Amazon reporting Kindle sales of a million a week this month and two books on the market, I have every expectation that next year my sales will equal, if not surpass, this year's sales.

Total Job Satisfaction:

Being an indie author is not all about sales (or even about the control you have over your own fate). This past year I experienced some significant but indirect by-products of being a self-published author that have given me a good deal of personal satisfaction.

First, I was able to become a full-time writer. In 2010, I was still teaching part-time and learning how to market and I was only able to write a short story, Dandy Detects. In 2011, I determined I was making enough money so I could retire completely from my teaching position. Consequently I had the time write and publish the sequel, Uneasy Spirits. Since it had taken me 20 years from first draft to publication to get out my first book, being able to complete an entire book in less than a year was enormously satisfying.

Second, I began to pass on my knowledge to other aspiring indie authors. In 2010 I was mostly learning from others, reading their how-to books, reading their blogs, and trying out their tips. In 2011 I began to notice my blog posts were getting more comments and were being linked to more often. I was asked to do guest posts. I began to offer advice and guidance to authors who were either just starting out or trying to adapt to the new opportunities of ebook and self-publishing. This January I am presenting at the SDSU Writers Conference, where I will be one of two "professionals" (among nearly 40 agents and editors) talking about self-publishing and selling ebooks. In April I will be the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Southern California Writers Association. While not every person I have helped this year has achieved as many sales as I have, some have, and others have actually begun to surpass me. As a life long teacher, I have found helping out other authors to be almost as satisfying as writing and selling my own books.

Third, I have become part of community of authors. While my participation in various online groups like MurderMustAdvertise, CrimeThruTime, and All Mystery News introduced me to a number of authors, it has been my membership in the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative (HFAC) that has been most rewarding. The HFAC, formed at the end of 2010 by a group of historical fiction authors who came together to market their ebooks, invited me to join in the Fall of 2010. During 2011, I have served on the HFAC Board of Directors, and, in this capacity, I have participated in the recruitment of other members, the building of a sophisticated website, and the testing of strategies for marketing both the website and other members' books. Along the way I have learned new technical skills and developed new marketing ideas, but, more importantly, I have met a wonderful group of writers.

One of the reasons I had been hesitant to retire from my job as a college professor was my fear of losing the sense of community I had with my colleagues: people I served on committees with, talked with casually in the hallways, people who over twenty years had become my friends. But membership in the HFAC has fulfilled my need for community, both through shared endeavors and frequent internet conversations. And, as a result, many of these members have become my friends. Friends I have never seen face-to-face, friends who live in the four corners of the globe, but friends who share my love of history and writing.

In Conclusion:

My second year as an indie author, whether measured in books sold, words written, help and advice given, or friendships made, has been more successful than I would have ever dreamed possible.  And once again, I have every expectation that next year will be even better.

Wishing you all a Happy Holiday!

M. Louisa Locke

My Alternative to Blog Tours: Two Week Vacations

One of the reasons I was hesitant go the traditional route in publishing was the horror stories I had heard about book tours, from my friends who were published authors and from authors' blogs. (You know, the headaches of organizing tours, the long car rides, bad hotels, bad food, and hard-to-find venues, and the embarrassing book signings where no one shows up or those who show don't buy any books.)

However, when I decided to self-publish, which meant that my books would be sold primarily as ebooks, on line, I discovered that a new method of marketing had emerged, called the Virtual Book Tour, or the Blog Tour. I first read about this in an informative piece on Publetariat in 2009 called What's A Book Blog Tour?  In the past few years, doing a blog tour when you launch your book has become almost as de rigueur for an indie author as the old-fashioned book tour for the traditionally published.

The typical blog tour seems to be about 30 days, with authors signing up to guest post on a different blog each day. Some variations include swapping posts, or getting a whole group of bloggers to agree to post on each other's blogs during that month. This can be a complex enterprise and there are now companies that will organize blog tours for authors, just as there are companies that organize the real book tours. It tickled me to discover that the well-respected book marketer, Dana Lynn Smith, just launched her new book, Virtual Book Tour Magic, with a Virtual Book Tour.

Yet, when I launched my first historical novel, Maids of Misfortune, I didn't do a blog tour. The truth is, my first ever blog post, Why I Decided to Self-Publish: The Long and Winding Road, came 2 weeks after the publication of the book, so I was in no position to start doing guest posts on other blogs. I told myself I would do one for the launch of the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, which came out October 9, 2011.

I am now confessing that, despite my good intentions, I didn't even try to organize a blog tour for the launch of this book. I was too busy getting the book out early enough so it would have a chance to garner enough reviews and sales to push it up the rankings in the historical mystery category on Amazon before the Christmas holidays when all the new little Kindles will be under the tree. Of course, the fact that I am a very slow blogger, seldom writing more than two posts a month, may have had something to do with my decision (smile.)

For a nano second I felt like a failure, until I realized I had inadvertently signed up for an alternative to the classic blog tour. Instead of a whirl-wind trip through the blogosphere, I had planned to do a series of very pleasant two-week vacations where I got to hang out on three separate blogs.

My first visit in mid November was to a delightful blog that the historical mystery author Susanne Alleyn has set up where she interviews the fictional sleuths in historical mysteries. In my case this resulted in an "Interview with Mrs. Annie Fuller, Boarding House Keeper and Clairvoyant," which was great fun to do. I got to give away a few books, make new friends, and even introduce a few of my friends to this blog.

My second visit came two weeks later, when I visited author Jenny Milchman's blog, Suspense Your Disbelief, to tell about my "Made it Moment." Here I was asked, as a guest, to tell about some seminal turning points in my journey in self-publishing. As readers of my own blog will tell you, I just love to talk about this subject. What was most rewarding was the number of people who dropped by to comment on my story, and I had such a good time that I plan on visiting again soon.

Finally, I am currently on another two week vacation, this time to Suzanne Adair's blog, where I was able to slip into my history professor persona and talk about "Women and 19th Century Spiritualism," as part of Adair's Relevant History Series. During this visit I get to talk about Victoria Woodhull, a real-life 19th Century celebrity who ran for the U. S. presidency, as well as reveal why I chose to give my fictional protagonist the job of clairvoyant. Again, this visit has been a very pleasant one, where I am getting to meet new people, so do come and hang out with me awhile.

What does this all mean? For me, a slow blogger, this experience has revealed an alternative to the more hectic, difficult to organize, blog tour. I am not a good traveler in the real world. I don't like trips where you have too many stops, where you are in a new place every day. I like to go somewhere and stay for awhile. I guess that works better for me in the virtual world as well.

Does it sell as many books? Probably not. But I have discovered that for me to be successful in marketing I must be doing something I enjoy, and, despite my failure to do a traditional blog tour, my new book Uneasy Spirits is selling well. It is consistently one of the top five best-selling historical mysteries in the Kindle store, and in the past few days it has started showing up in the top 20 bestselling historical mysteries on Amazon.

So, what about the rest of you? How do you like doing blog tours? How successful have they been for you? Have you discovered alternatives that work better?

I would love to know.

On My Journey in Self-publishing: My Gratitude for the Kindness of Strangers

J.A. Konrath has often repeated the list of what you need to become a successful self-published author: "Write good books, with good descriptions, good formatting, and good cover art, sell them cheap, and keep at it until you get lucky." I would also add, however, you need the kindness of strangers.

I have a lifetime of experience of being supported by people I know, whose friendship, sympathy, advice, and encouragement has sustained me in my life and work. However, in the past two years that I have been involved in self-publishing, I have been overwhelmed by the way previously unknown strangers have helped me, and today I wanted to give thanks to them.

First there were the bloggers. When I started on the journey to self-publishing, my writer friends were still firmly enmeshed in traditional publishing. That was their experience, and most of them thought that was their future.  This meant that I had to turn to strangers, bloggers I had never heard of before, like Morris Rosenthal's with his How to Publish A Book, Jane Friedman's There Are No Rules, Mick Rooney's POD, Self-Publishing, and Independent Publishing, Joanne Penn's Creative Penn, Henry Baum's Self-Publishing Review, and J.A. Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. I know how difficult it is to write consistently, clearly, and frequently about a subject that is so complicated, varied, controversial, and changeable. Yet these bloggers were doing exactly this when I started to look into self-publishing in 2009. It was these bloggers that convinced me that there were other options besides traditional or "vanity publishing." These were the bloggers who gave me the confidence to choose self-publishing and the information I needed to become successful, and I thank them.

However, among their ranks there were bloggers who reached out and directly helped me in ways I can never repay. When April Hamilton made me a regular contributor to her wonderful and comprehensive site Publetariat this provided a platform for my ideas that I would have never have reached on my own, helping me build a following.

Joel Friedlander is another blogger who has gone out of his way to promote my blog, featuring my posts on his blog the Book Designer and tweeting about them. Whenever my back posts get a spike in hits, I can often count on Joel to have been the one who has caused this.

Next came Steven Windwalker, the champion of all things Kindle, who responded to some of my comments on Kindle Nation Daily with the offer to publish a Kindle Short (this was in the days before this cost anything), which then sent my first book, Maids of Misfortune, rocketing up the Kindle historical mystery best-seller list, where it remained for nearly a year, greatly facilitating that book's success. I would like to specifically thank these three.

I know that on the surface the examples above might not seem like kindness, but just people making good social media connections for their own benefit. Yet what has struck me consistently about these and other members of the self-publishing community is that they seem genuinely interested in both sharing information with and promoting other self-published authors. I am a very small fish (in terms of length of time in self-publishing, books published, and breadth of my social media following) in a vast ocean, yet I have never been made to feel that way. Instead, I have been made to feel welcome, and the kindness of these strangers has been a large part of the reason I have enjoyed the process of self-publishing so much.

Then there are the writers. I have a writers group, who long ago stopped being strangers and became friends. But the group I am talking about is the growing number of writers who I have come to know in the past two years of self-publishing. I mean the strangers who I have never met face-to-face, who live scattered around the globe, who I may have encountered only briefly when they comment on my blog or participate in the same thread of discussion as I do on a list or blog. They have made me feel a part of a community of writers.

In particular I would like to mention my fellow members of the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative. This group of historical fiction authors who came together in 2010 to promote their ebooks has given me so much in the past year of my membership. These are men and women I had never met before, and they have edited, read, and reviewed my books, shared their knowledge of marketing, and spent enormous amounts of time working on building the membership and creating a wonderful website. In the process a number of them have moved from strangers to friends. For this I give special thanks.

Finally there are the readers. Strangers who write unsolicited thoughtful reviews on places like Amazon or Goodreads, write me emails telling me how much they enjoyed my work, and comment on my facebook page. Small acts of kindnesses that are more precious to me as a beginning writer than all the sales. Some of these people even offered to be beta readers for my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, giving me wise advice, close edits, and the confidence to get the book out before Christmas. Without every stranger who was willing to take chance on buying a book by an unknown author, I would have no success, and I thank them all.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

 M. Louisa Locke

Podcast Review and Interview on Maids of Misfortune and Self-Publishing

Jane and Mark Kalmes have done a lovely Podcast Review of Maids of Misfortune and then followed up with an Podcast Interview with me that discusses the writing of this book and my experiences with self-publishing.

The review can be heard at http://www.indiebookpodcast.com/2011/...

The interview comes in the second half of a  podcast found at  http://www.indiebookpodcast.com/2011/...

Hope you find these podcasts of interest.

M. Louisa

Categories, Key Words, and Tags, Oh My: Why should an Author Care?

Two weeks ago I published my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, and in the process I was reminded of how confusing it can be to determine the best category and key words I should use on Amazon to describe my book. Since there are several other authors who have been wrestling with the same question in the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative (HFAC) that I belong to, I decided to write this post on how to use categories and keywords to maximize ebook sales.

For the purpose of this post I am focusing on ebooks on Amazon, in part because that is where I have the most experience, but also because Amazon is definitely ahead of the other ebook stores in its sophisticated approaches to helping readers find books. My understanding of these issues is based on my experience as a self-published author using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Finally, as with much of the publishing process, there is still a lot of conflicting information about how Amazon categories, keywords, and tags work, so some of what I say is more of an educated guess than documented fact.

First some definitions:

Categories: When a book is uploaded into KDP, an author (and, I assume, a traditional publisher) has the opportunity to choose two categories. It used to be that Amazon allowed you to choose five categories, which is why some books have more Kindle Store categories listed at the bottom of their product page. When you, as author, choose a category for your book, you are actually choosing a browsing-path for readers. That browsing-path/category consists of a hierarchy of sub-categories and your book is available for readers to discover under each of the parts of that hierarchy. For example, in the case of my most recent book, Uneasy Spirits, one of the two browsing-path/categories I chose was:

Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical 

If you browse for Uneasy Spirits in the Kindle store, you will find it in under all four parts of the hierarchy:

Fiction

Fiction–Mystery&Thriller

Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery

Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical  

Note that each time a reader goes one step further down the hierarchical browsing-path, there are fewer books to browse. For example, as I write this, here are the numbers of books in each of these four areas:

Fiction [324,671]

Fiction–Mystery&Thriller [43,629]

Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery [9,700]

Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical   [73]

By carefully choosing my category, I make it much more likely that a reader will find my book, since the pool of books is smaller with each step down the path.

The "categories" Amazon offers when you upload your book to KDP are apparently BISAC categories, a book industry standard for subject headings.  What is confusing is that the "browsing path" that Amazon generates from your choice is not always the same as the BISAC category you chose. Amazon apparently converts the BISAC categories that you pick into the Amazon browsing-path categories and subcategories that show up in the Kindle store — and the two are not always the same.

To make matters more confusing and frustrating, this conversion process does not always work accurately. You can read more about this on my blog post, "Working Amazon" and on Suzanne Addair's blog post, which provides a hilarious description of the trouble she had with getting her wonderful new Revolutionary War thriller, Regulated for Murder, in the right category. (Suzanne is a fellow HFAC author.) To complicate issues further, the browsing categories for books and ebooks are not identical, and Amazon creates browsing categories like "newly released" and "best sellers" and "editors' pick" — some of which are separate from the browsing-path/categories and some of which are available as additional qualifiers to the browsing-paths. Are you lost yet?

Keywords: When you publish your book with KDP, you can choose seven "key-words" in addition to the two categories. These are really key phrases since they can be more than one word. For example I used terms like "Victorian Mystery" and "cozy mystery." These "key-words" are apparently used by Amazon in its own search engine — along with words in your title and subtitle and product description. This may seem very straightforward, until you get to the next definition—tags.

Tags: These are another kind of key-word or key phrase. They are listed on a book's product page under the heading "Tag this product" and were designed by Amazon to help customers describe and find products using key words called "tags." Readers can add tags to a product page and can indicate that an existing tag is useful. It used to be that the "key-words" that authors chose at the time of uploading a book to KDP were automatically displayed as "tags" on the book's product page, but this evidently no longer happens. Of course, after publication, an author can add tags to a product page just like readers can.

There is contradictory information about how Amazon uses "tags" and "key-words" in its own main search engine, but I believe that "key-words" that the author has assigned to a book are searchable in Kindle store, the but "tags" are not.  For example, I did not add the word "clairvoyant" as a "key-word" when I uploaded my book Maids of Misfortune to KDP, but it has been added by customers as a tag on the Maids product page. So, if I go to the Kindle bookstore on the Kindle device (or the main search box on the Amazon website) and search for "clairvoyant," Maids of Misfortune does not show up in the 100 books that are listed in the search result. So, apparently, Amazon does not include the customer-created "tags" in its Kindle bookstore search (available on the Kindle device) or in the standard search box on the Amazon website.

"Tags" are available for a different kind of searching, though. The "tags" themselves are clickable links. Readers can click on any "Tag" on a product page and find other books that have the same "tag."  For example, if, on the Maids of Misfortune product page, I click on the tag "clairvoyant" (which 19 people checked as useful), the result is 152 books, including Maids of Misfortune. Also, in the "Tag" section of the product page there is a special search box labeled "Search Products Tagged with."  By entering terms in that special search box, you are searching only "tags."  Searching "clairvoyant" using the special tag search box finds those same 152 books. Note that "tags" are typed in by users so you will see misspelled tags!

Why Should an Author Care?
Categories, keywords, and tags can be used to help readers find your books, and these are methods that are generally not available to authors of print books that are sold in brick and mortar stores. As authors of ebooks, we need to learn how readers find books in estores like the Kindle store and use the tools that are available to us to maximize our sales.

When you sell a book to a traditional publisher, who then distributes that book to bookstores, you, as author, really don't have much to say about how readers find your books. You hope that the bookstores will shelve your book on the right shelf (and that they have separate shelves for your genre) and you hope your publisher can convince the seller (or pay them) to put your book in special places like "newly released" tables, or "best seller" tables, or under "staff recommendations." Beyond that, there isn't much authors can do besides cultivating booksellers at conventions and through book signings, hoping this will convince them to feature their books — a time-consuming and expensive proposition. (Although I know one author who always turned their books and books of their friends so that the full cover showed whenever they found them in a bookstore!)

However, self-published authors, by their choice of categories, keywords, and tags, can increase the chances that a reader will find their books in an ebook store. I am going to discuss two strategies an author can use to achieve that end.

The first strategy is to choose a category (browsing path) that ends up with a small number of books at the end of the path.

For example, I could have chosen as one of my two categories, the browsing path of Fiction—Historical Fiction for my newest historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, which is most certainly a work of historical fiction. However, this would have placed this book in a final pool of over 15,000 books in the Kindle store. Maybe some day I will be such a successful author that I can compete in a pool of that size, but right now as an indie author without a big promotional campaign behind me it would be easy for me to get lost in that pool. Few people are going to scroll down through hundreds if not thousands of books to find mine.

So, I chose to place both of my books, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits in the Fiction—Mystery&Thrillers—Mystery—Historical category/browsing-path. Not only does this more accurately define the sub-genre of these two books, but there are fewer than 100 books in this subcategory. It took me six months to reach the top ten books in that subcategory with my first book, Maids of Misfortune, but once I did, my sales went up exponentially. In May 2010, I sold 55 copies of Maids in Kindle and in August, after the book hit the top 10 in this category, I sold 249.

I did a fair number of things to help Maids of Misfortune achieve that top ten status (price changes, reviews, short story, etc.) but I could have done all those things and it still wouldn't have gotten me into the top 10 in the category of Historical Fiction—it is just too big a pool of books. With the publication of Uneasy Spirits, I had the benefit of now being a better known author, with an already existing fan base, which explains why it took only 24 hours for this book to hit the top ten in the historical mystery subcategory. Even so, as an independent author without a whole publicity machine behind me, I still would not have achieved this within the "Historical Fiction" category.

This strategy (getting your book into the smallest possible pool of books) is also why I chose to put Uneasy Spirits into the browsing path Fiction—Romance—Romantic Suspense (4,800), rather than into the Historical Fiction (15,000 books) or the Historical Romance (8,800 books) subcategories. Again, this was in part because this subcategory accurately describes the book, but also because the pool of books in this subcategory is smaller than in these other two. This is also why, when I had 5 choices of categories when I uploaded Maids of Misfortune, I chose History—United States—state and local—west as one browsing path. I not only figured that people looking for books about the western US would be interested in my book, based as it was on solid historical research, but this was also a pool of less than 500 books, and Maids of Misfortune has been at the top of this list for most of the last year.

The second strategy is to use key-words and tags that will help users find my book in a small pool of potential books.

Let's take the example of a work of historical fiction that is not a mystery and that, therefore, doesn't have a lot of options apart from being placed in the historical fiction category with those 15,000 other books in the Kindle store. Here the application of key-words (or tags for people who are doing a tag search) is the appropriate strategy for narrowing the pool to a reasonable level, giving your book a better chance to compete. For example, when I was giving advice to a fellow HFAC author, Elisabeth Storrs, who has written a well-reviewed work of historical fiction, The Wedding Shroud, which has not yet found the readership that it deserves, I investigated what key words she could use.

I discovered that a user who is browsing in the historical fiction subcategory and looking for books about Rome will narrow that list from 15,000 books to 221 books if they put in the search term "Rome." If they search for "Ancient Rome" they will find a list of just 88 books. And, if they searched for "Early Rome" while browsing in the historical fiction subcategory, they would find just two books.

My recommendation was that she use "Rome" and "Ancient Rome" for two of her seven "key-words" because readers using this browse-then-search strategy would be more likely to find her book in these smaller lists of books that match. This would enable her to compete more successfully in an otherwise broad category. And, of course, these terms more accurately describe the historical fiction she has written!

However, I did not recommend the use of "Early Rome" (although it equally described the period of the book) because it produced such a small pool of books that readers probably wouldn't return to that search. The other two key-words bring up enough books to make them search terms that readers would be likely to use the next time they were ready to look for a new book.

These two strategies can boost your sales in two additional ways.

First, they will help you get on an Amazon "Top 100 Best Seller List." Second, they will help ensure that people who find your book will have found books similar to yours — and that improves the chances of your book showing up on the Amazon "Customers who bought this book also bought" recommendation system.

The best-seller lists: Amazon has a computer algorithm that updates the "best-seller lists" in each category and subcategory every hour. While secret, the algorithm evidently takes into consideration "all-time sales, as well as recent sales that are weighted more heavily than older sales…" according to an Amazon spokesperson quoted in this article. Needless to say, no matter how good your sales are in a given hour, or day, your chances of getting into a top 100 best-sellers list and staying there are pretty slim if you are competing against 15,000 other books.

If, however, you are in a group like Horror-Dark Fantasy (227 books), or Science Fiction—Series (169 books), or Fantasy—Authurian (27 books), or Mystery—Historical (73 books), your chances of being ranked in the top 100 in these categories increases (or becomes 100%). Since many customers start their searches for book in the best-seller lists, this heightens your visibility and cachet and increases your sales, which in turn helps you stay on and move up the best seller lists. The increase in sales may, in time, help your book rise in the other categories or key-word searches where your book is listed. Very briefly after Christmas of last year, when my sales were high (700 books in the 3 days after December 25), I actually made the top 100 of the category Mystery—Women sleuths (6,222 books). Heady days!

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: Amazon uses an algorithm that identifies other books that people who have bought your book have bought. You have to have a certain number of sales for this to kick in (Uneasy Spirits had enough Kindle sales so this section appeared within a day—my print edition came out a week later and has had fewer sales, so its product page does not yet have this feature.) In addition, it appears that for a book to appear in this list, a certain number of your customers must have bought the book. For example, nearly 15,000 people have bought Maids of Misfortune, yet there are only 100 books that show up in the "Customers Who Bought" list, and I know that those 15,000 people bought more than 100 books altogether. It also appears that there might be some other limitations; I haven't seen more than 100 "also-bought" books listed, even for popular books like Amanda Hocking's ebooks.

You'll want to do more than just sell enough books to trigger this feature, however. You'll want to make sure that the books that show up are similar to your book – and you can do that by using the right categories, key-words, and tags. For example, I could certainly have put my books into the category of Romance—Historical, but then the books that would show up in this "Customer who Bought" list would be dominated by books that tend to put the romance before the history and have explicit sexual themes. While there is nothing wrong with these books, a customer who bought my book, based on the expectation it would be like these historical romances, might be very disappointed by the rather chaste nature of my protagonists' relationship.

Since my books are in the Mystery—Historical category, it is not surprising that the list of books in the "Customer who Bought" feature is filled with historical fiction (usually in the Victorian era) and mysteries. This adds to the chance that the customer who is checking out my book will think, "Hey, I read those books and liked them, I will probably like this one." And if they buy my book, there is less chance they will be disappointed —  thinking, "Where was the sex?" — and give my book a bad review. And finally, it will also mean that my book will show up on "customers who bought" lists for books that are in my sub-genre. You can imagine how pleased I was when I discovered that Maids of Misfortune had started showing up on a "customers who bought" list for Victoria Thompson's Gaslight Mystery Series! That meant my book was being seen by exactly the readership I want to attract.

In Summary:

As an author, you need to carefully choose categories and key-words when you publish and add your own "tags" after publishing. You need to take into consideration not only what best describes your books but also what will maximize the chances that a reader who is browsing through the Kindle store will find your books. You also want to make sure that readers who find your book are the ones who would be most likely to buy it and enjoy it. Careful uses of categories and key-words and tags can also increase your chance of getting on one of the best-seller lists and showing up on one of the "Customers who bought" lists, which in turn will help boost your sales. Carelessness in using these strategies can condemn even the best work to the backwaters of the Kindle store —  undiscovered, unbought, and unread — and that would be a shame.

Uneasy Spirits and Halloween: Using Fact in support of Fiction

"The feast of All Saints, which was ushered in Friday evening by the old-fashioned games of 'All Hallows' E'en, was yesterday celebrated in the Catholic and Episcopal Churches." San Francisco Chronicle, 1879

 "It's barmbrack cake. Beatrice has baked a ring in it, and tradition has it that the girl who gets the slice with the ring will marry within the year." Annie Fuller, Uneasy Spirits.

The first quote above is from a real person, who was reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle about real events. The second quote by Annie Fuller, a fictional person and my protagonist, from my newly published historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, which is set in 1879 San Francisco. As we approach Halloween, 2011, I thought it would be fitting to discuss how I used factual data from the past to provide historical context for a work of fiction.

As I was plotting Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I knew that I wanted the story to start only a few months after the first book ended, which was the last week of August, 1879. I also knew the basic plot was going to revolve around Annie Fuller trying to expose the shenanigans of a trance medium who claimed to commune with the spirits of the dead. So, placing the action of Uneasy Spirits around October 31 and the celebration of Halloween seemed a fairly obvious choice.

I got a calendar for October 1879 (one of the wonders of the internet is being able to find this sort of thing so easily), made a list of the main scenes I had outlined for the book, and then decided to make Halloween (which was a Friday that year) the day when several of the semi-climatic scenes in the story occurred. I then literally counted back from October 31, and determined that the opening scenes of the book should happen about 3 weeks from this date. In the final version of the book, the first chapter opens on October 11.

But then I was faced with a real problem. Despite being a professional historian and having written a dissertation that focused primarily on women who worked in San Francisco in 1880, I had no clue how people in 1879 San Francisco would have celebrated Halloween. Did they trick or treat? Wear costumes? Have Jack o Lanterns? I had some vague idea that young boys in small towns went around tipping over outhouses on this night in "earlier days," but beyond that, I didn't even know if anyone would actually celebrate this night at all, much less how, in a larger city like San Francisco.

A little research was in order. The first clue came with the mention in the San Francisco Chronicle of "old-fashioned games of All Hallows' E'en." I now knew to look for what someone in 1879 would consider "old fashioned games," which led me to several internet sites that reported on Halloween, including an article in Harpers Magazine for 1886. In addition there were a good number of contemporary articles detailing the history of this holiday.

All these articles agreed that, while Halloween's roots can be traced back to a number of ancient cultures and religious beliefs, in the 19th century it was the Celtic peoples, particularly the Irish, who had the strongest influence on the development of Halloween as a night of celebration. It was the Irish who seemed responsible for turning October 31 into a night of fun and games, and Irish immigrants brought their traditions with them to America, profoundly influencing how this country celebrated this holiday.

I couldn't have been more pleased with this information because the Irish were an enormously important ethnic group in San Francisco in 1879. They not only made up a substantial percentage of the working class of the city, they also were represented among some of the economic and political leaders of San Francisco (men like James Flood and William O'Brian, the Silver Kings, and Frank McCoppin, a former mayor.)

Not coincidentally, two of the most important people in Annie Fuller's life are her cook, Beatrice O'Rourke, and her maid-of-all-work, Kathleen Hennessey, both Irish. Once I knew about the prominence of parties as the way to celebrate Halloween in the late 19th century, it was easy to decide that Annie Fuller would host a party at the boarding house she owned, with Beatrice and Kathleen inviting their friends and family. A perfect setting for one of the main climatic scenes of the book.

And what fun that party was to write. There were indeed jack-o'lanterns at that time (in Ireland the tradition was to use turnips!), and I was able to work a pumpkin into the plot in what I thought was an unusual way. In addition, there were games like "snap the apple," dancing, and special foods, like the barmbrack cake, which was one of several elements of Halloween activities that revolved around trying to foretell the romantic futures of participants.

I now had a way to provide a new and different setting in which my characters could interact. The detail I had gleaned from my research would make my portrayal of the past more authentic. And finally I was able to leaven what could have been a series of very "heavy" scenes with a light, humorous scene, which is one of my goals as a writer. And I learned something, which was much fun for me as I hope it is for the reader.

Oh, and click here to find a recipe for that barmbrack cake, in case you want to make it for Halloween! 

Sources:

Lynne Olver, Halloween and Day of the Dead Food Traditions, 2005   http://www.foodtimeline.org/halloween.html

Bridget Haggerty, An Irish Halloween Part 1 and 2

 http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/acalend/Halloween1.html

William Sharp, "Halloween: A Threefold Chronicle," Harper's Magazine, Vol 73, 1886

http://bit.ly/newKG3 

My Book Ate My Blog

I ran across an excerpt of this interesting post entitled "My Book Ate my Blog" by Sophie Perinot on the Passive Voice blog (which if you haven't discovered the Passive Guy yet, run right over and check him out!), about the difficulties of balancing the demands of maintaining a blog while trying to write. The comments on her site, and on the Passive Voice, were filled by people who agreed that blogging was taking them away from writing or how hard it was to maintain a balance.

As I thought about my own history of blogging, I found an interesting pattern had emerged.  First of all, I am not a prolific blogger. For the whole time I have been blogging (21 months) I have produced only 40 blog posts-counting this one (which means an average of 1.9 posts a month). My blog posts tend to be long, detailed, and they often take me 1-2 days to write. According to perceived wisdom on the subject of social media and marketing, this infrequent blogging pace, and my hopeless inability to use Twitter effectively, probably explains my small number of subscribers (40), and my low number of views (7000 views total in the 21 months I have been blogging–an average 333 a month).

Nevertheless, I have been very fortunate that most of my posts have been cross-posted in Publetariat, providing with me a much larger readership than these statistics suggest, and generally my statistics have shown growth, with 2011 showing 5 times the number of hits than 2010-and the ratio of growth should be even higher by the end of the year.

However, when I examined it, my pattern of blogging did not seem to suggest that my blogging had any negative effects on my writing. I started blogging in December of 2009 (the same month I self-published my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune. Between Dec 2009 and the end of Dec 2010, I published on average 1.7 posts per month. I was marketing, not writing, during those 13 months—so there was no conflict at all.

I started working on my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, in January 2011 and completed the first draft at the end of June 2011. In that 6 months period I averaged 2.3 blog posts per month. Obviously writing did not interfere with my blogging, nor vice versa, since in that 6 months I produced a draft that was over 140,000 words long.

However, as I rushed to complete the draft in June and then began the process of getting feedback, rewriting, getting more feedback, editing, and then proof-reading the manuscript to get it ready for publication by October 15 (my self-imposed deadline), my blogging rate went down considerably. I not only didn't post anything in Jun, but I only produced one post for July, August, and by the skin of my teeth (since this post is coming out Sept 28th) one in September.

One could conclude that blogging had not interfered with my writing (since I was more productive as a blogger when I was writing full-time.) However, once the book was a real entity, and I moved into high gear to get it published, it completely consumed me. In other words, it was my book that ate my blog.

My conclusion? When I was marketing my first book, blogging was a natural extension of that process, no conflict. When writing the book, blogging was actually a nice break from the fiction, and my blogging benefited. But when the first draft was done, and I knew I had a book, and I created a deadline for myself (I was committed to getting the book out in October, in time to garner reviews by the Christmas holidays), then doing everything that was necessary to get that book out there to readers began to consume me. Everything became secondary.

But today I am currently waiting for the print proofs, I am confident I am not only going to meet my deadline, but the book may actually be out there a week earlier, so watch out world, this blogger's back!

So has your blog eaten your book, or has your book eaten your blog?

Why Self-Published Authors Know Best

I ran across this quote today, from a post that historical romance novelist Courtney Milan wrote this week as an open letter to agents.

The traditional information storehouse has been inverted. Right now, the people who know the most about self-publishing are authors, and trust me, the vast majority of authors are aware of that. For the first time, authors are having questions about their careers, and their agents are not their go-to people.  

While not having an agent, in fact having decided in the fall of 2009 not to look for an agent for my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I can't really speak to this group's effectiveness in this new publishing climate. Neither to I want to go into whether or not I think that the decision on the part of some agents to begin to publish their authors' work has ethical or conflict of interest ramifications.  Although the latest brouhaha that just erupted when an agency threatened an author with legal action because she said they were setting up as a digital publisher, when they insisted they were just starting an "assisted self-publishing initiative" suggests that this question is not going to go away.

What I want to address is Milan's assertion that authors are the people who know the most about self-publishing. I not only agree, but I would take this one step further. I think that self-published authors may know the most about publishing, period, in this time of expanded ebook publishing and social media marketing.

Let me count just some of the ways:

1.  Most of self-published authors know about both legacy publishing and self-publishing, which gives them a uniquely broad perspective.

In my experience, most of self-published authors have already had fairly extensive experience with the legacy publishing industry (as traditionally published authors, as authors who have spent years trying to become traditionally published, and as friends of published authors). From this experience we are in a better position to make well-informed decisions about the costs and benefits of both paths to publication, and which path to choose for a given project.

For example, since we understand the lead time it takes to get a book published with a legacy publisher, versus a self-published book, we might choose self-publishing for a non-fiction book that is very time-sensitive, but willingly pursue a legacy publisher for a work of fiction that we feel would do best in print and distributed through brick and mortar stores.

2.  Self-published authors were among the first to embrace ebook publishing as their main method of publishing, and therefore they have longer and greater experience in this realm, which is where the market is expanding the fastest.

For most of us the lack of capital meant learning how to format and upload ebooks ourselves, therefore we understand both the relative ease of this process and the importance of it. Even if we decide to pay someone else to do the formatting, our experience helps be better judges of the value of this service.

For example, we would be much less likely to be snookered into paying a high fee to an agent or anyone else for "taking care of" this for us. We understand that while most readers of ebooks are fairly tolerant of an occasional formatting error, they don't like a lot of white space, including indents that are too large, blank pages, and unnecessary page breaks. We understand the cover design that works on a printed book sitting on a shelf doesn't work on a thumbnail on the virtual bookshelves of an eretailer or a website, and we have had the chance to experiment to find the most effective covers for our books in this environment.

3. Self-published authors have up-to-date information about sales data, and they can and do share that information.

The turning point for me in making the decision to self-publishing came when I read Joe Konrath's initial blog postings listing his ebook sales. I finally had the concrete numbers to determine what kind of sales I would need to pay for my capital outlay, and what kind of income I could make, compared to the advance I could expect going the traditional route.

Agents, publishers, even traditionally published authors, are very unwilling to ever talk about numbers, unless, of course, they are talking about a New York Times bestseller. The whole convoluted publishing industry accounting system, the lag in recording royalties (which go through the agent-I mean, what is up with that??), the fear that weak numbers are going to be the kiss of death for achieving the next contract, all work to keep a veil of secrecy. If you are an author this means you may never really understand how many books you sold, when and where you sold them, which covers worked, which price points worked, and which method of delivery got you the most profit.

Self-published authors working through such methods of delivery as CreateSpace for print or KDP or ePubit for ebooks not only have ready access to this sort of information, which is so crucial for designing effective market strategies, but we have no reason not to share this information. I can write that my sales have been lower this summer than in the winter, and not worry that this will hurt the chances that my next book will be published, or marketed aggressively, or reviewed positively. And I can learn from other authors if they are experiencing a similar pattern, and if so, what they are doing about it. This is one of the reasons we knew that ebook readership was going up, that certain price points worked better than others, that the Nook was beginning to claim a significant share of the market, before most of the traditional pundits did.

4.  By necessity, self-published authors have had to rely on eretailers, but this has made them savvy about how best to attract customers in this expanding retail environment.

For example, authors published through legacy publishers are often slow to understand how important it is to get your book into the right category on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. In my experience most traditionally published authors, and their agents and editors, don't even know that categories had been chosen for their book, and, as with most aspects of publishing (the title, the cover design, the product description), the authors don't have ultimate control over the final choices. Getting any changes made after publication (in a cover or category or price that doesn't work) is also difficult.

5.  Again by necessity, self-published authors have had to develop alterative methods of marketing—which have made them innovators in using social media for this purpose.

I am still amazed when I read comments by traditionally published authors on various sites saying that their books have just "been put up on Kindle," and asking if anyone has a suggestion how to market those books. Obviously neither their agents or their editors have had much to say on the subject, beyond "set up a website." Not surprisingly, it is self-published authors that seemed to give the most detailed advice in response to these queries. See Rob Walker's huge thread on KDP community forum.

6.  Self-published authors are going to continue to be the innovators in publishing, no matter what the future holds, and therefore the best source of information.

We have to be innovators, because we don't rely on anyone else-not agent or editor-to ensure our books are out there and being read. Two years ago, when I researched self-publishing, Amazon's Kindle and Smashwords, were the two major ways open to me to independently upload my book. Since then Barnes and Noble's ePubit, Google Editions, Kobo and many other companies have made it possible for independent authors to publish on their sites. In addition, while the iPad's ibook store has been slow to expand, more and more people are downloading books, often using the Kindle or other aps, not only to the iPad, but more often than not to the iPhone or other similar devices. Traditional publishers are forced to deal with each of these changes slowly, often with protracted negotiations, which slows their authors' access to these venues.  Self-published authors were able to respond immediately to these changes, as they will be able to do with what ever new twist the ebook or print on demand aspects of the industry takes.

Self-authors are intrinsically less conservative than people who work within the legacy publishing industry, where risks can ruin a career. An agent who takes on too many cutting edge writers and can't sell their books, an editor whose choices don't make back the authors advances, the author whose sales don't pan out, all risk losing their business, their jobs, and their next contract. The motivation, therefore, is to choose authors and books that either fit this year's trend (no matter that by the time the book comes out the trend may have peaked), or fit squarely into a niche market, and aren't too long, or too short. Self-published authors have the choice to take risks, because they answer to no one but themselves and their readers.

7.  Finally, I believe that most authors are going to become self-published authors, and therefore will remain the major source of information about self-publishing. Not because they are all going to leave legacy publishing, but because more and more authors are going to see self-publishing as one of their options over their career.

Practically every author I have ever known has an idea for a book or a manuscript squirreled away, or a short story or novella they have written, that they either had failed to sell to a legacy publisher, or simply never tried to write or sell, because they knew that this work wouldn't be acceptable. These ideas, these works, now can see the light of day. The market may turn out to be small for any particular work, but if you have written something that pleases you, that you as a reader would like to read, and you can self-publish that work and watch as people buy it, review it, and email you about it, the satisfaction is enormous.

I spoke to a college journalism class this spring about the possibilities of self-publishing, and a young man came up to me afterwards, all enthusiastic, and he told me that I had given him hope. His father had tried to discourage him from pursuing a career as a writer, telling him it would be years and years, and maybe never, that his work would ever see print. I had just told him what he had written already, what he chose to write next month, could be out there being read in a few days time.

This is one of the reasons that agents or publishers who try to lock authors into exclusive clauses, or manipulate print on demand to keep hold of copyright, are simply going to drive even more of their authors into self-publishing. Once an author has been exposed to the liberating belief that all of their work can get in print, and all the work that is good, will get to be read, they will not go back to telling themselves that the gatekeepers were saving them from the awful mistake of publishing a bad book, and that the favorite quirky cross genre manuscript they wrote really is better off never being read by anyone.

Does this mean the end of agents or publishers? Of course not. But it does mean that those people in the traditional publishing industry who continue to hold self-published authors in contempt, who continue to try to argue that all authors and all published books should go through their doors to get to the reader, who fail to turn to their authors and their readers for advice, are going to find themselves losing out in the future.