Rachel Aaron's Blog, page 15

Let's Talk Numbers: Wild Speculation on the New KU

I know I'm supposed to be on vacation, but this was too exciting not to talk about!!!

As I mentioned a week ago, Amazon has changed the way it calculates borrows for Kindle Unlimited, their book subscription service. In that post, I was pretty optimistic about the proposed changes, and now that new system is actually live...well...I'm not really sure what to think. It could be absolutely amazing, or it could be the death knell for my (and probably a lot of other authors) participation in the program.

For readers, of course, the program looks exactly the same, but for authors with books in Kindle Unlimited, we will now be payed per page read rather than just getting a single payout every time a KU user borrows our book and reads past the 10% mark. Of course, this leads to the question of how much Amazon will pay us per page, and what counts as a page anyway?

These two questions go hand in hand. Of course, due to the vagaries of Kindle Select Global Fund payment system, we won't know how much per page Amazon is going to shell out until they actually pay. That said, many authors are speculating that the KU payout will most likely be around $0.005 per page.

They arrived at this amount using the numbers presented in this email which Amazon sent out to all its KU participating authors last month. Here, Amazon reported that "KU and KOLL customers read nearly 1.9 billion Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENPs) of KDP Select books" and that, due to this high volume, the Global Fund for July and August would be set to $11 million. By working backwards, we see that $11 million divided by 1.9 billion pages read works out to about $0.0057 paid out per page that KU readers read.

Half a cent sounds pretty pathetic, and it would be if Amazon was using the print page count, which is the one we're all used to. But hey, this is Amazon we're talking about! And as always with the 'Zon, the reality of the situation is much, much weirder.


Page count in books can vary enormously depending on spacing, how much dialog there is, if there are pictures, etc. To counter this, Amazon had to come up with some way to normalize what counts as a "page" across all their titles, a process they refer to as the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC).

(If you have a title in KU, you can find your book's KENPC by going to your bookshelf in KDP and clicking on the "Promote and Advertise" button. Your KENPC will be listed on the left hand side of the page inside the "Earn royalties from the KDP Select Global Fund" box.)

Now, the very first thing everyone notices about their KENPC is how freaking huge it is. For example, Nice Dragons Finish Last , which has a print page count of 287,has a KENPC of 785 pages. 785!! That's Robert Jordan level!

How did Amazon arrive at this giant number? Again, no one knows for sure, but my favorite theory (as first postulated by author W.R. Pursche here) is that the KENPC for a title is derived by taking a kindle file's total number of characters with spaces and diving by 1000. This math certainly comes up pretty close when I apply it to my own titles, and it just makes a lot of sense. Characters and spaces are the lowest level breakdown of any text display, and I'm willing to bet whatever Amazon picked as their "average Kindle screen" can display 1000 characters + spaces at a time, thus constituting one page.

Now, of course, the truth is probably a lot more complicated, but it doesn't actually matter. What matters here for authors is that, however they derived it, the KENPC page count Amazon is assigning to books is much higher than traditional page counts, which is a pretty freaking sweet deal when you consider they're now paying by page.

For example, under the old system, I got approximately $1.33 every time a KU reader borrowed one of my books and read to at least the 10% mark. Under this new system, though, if a KU reader borrows Nice Dragons Finish Last and reads all the way to the end, and I get paid $0.0057 per every one of those 785 "pages" as estimated by the KENPC, that borrow will end up earning me $0.0057 x 785, or $4.47.

This is almost a dollar more than I would earn from a sale, which is ridiculously awesome when you consider the KU reader is getting my book for "free." This set up is especially awesome for me since I write pretty long books that people tend to read all the way through. Also, since Amazon is now counting every page instead of borrow count, the numbers are freaking crazy. Just look at these graphs!



Click to enlarge.
Everyone's saying Monday's reporting was low, but as you see, KU readers clicked through 22 thousand pages of Nice Dragons on Tuesday. and they've gone through nearly 10 thousand pages already this morning. Total this month, a few hours over 2 days in, I've already had over 40k pages read. If the $0.0057 payout is correct, that's $229.64 earned so far, which is already way more than I earned under the old system.

I fully admit these numbers are probably temporarily inflated by my participating in the Kindle Big Deal last month, but even if I go back to my old KU borrow rates of about 10 copies a day, I'm still going to make substantially more money because, under this new system, I'm going from $1.30 a borrow to $4.47 assuming they finish the book. Even if they don't finish, so long as they read more than 233 pages as counted by KENPC, which is about 30%, I'm still making more than the old $1.30 per borrow.

That is a very low bar for success. I'm not saying this change is great for everyone. Like I pointed out in my previous KU post, if you're a short story writer, these changes are less than ideal. But, if the math above is anywhere close to correct, then novel writers (or anyone with a lot of words in KU) stand to make a lot of money under this new system. In fact, these changes could be so good, they might change my mind about leaving KU when my KDP Select contract is up in August.

Once again, though, it all comes down to Amazon. They could still epically screw us all over by paying a tenth of a cent per page, but I don't think that's going to happen. No one wants KU to succeed more than Amazon. That's impossible if there are no good books in the program, and the best way to get and keep good titles is to pay authors well. That's how Amazon got all of us to go indie in the first place, and I'm betting that's what they're doing now with this new KU system.

The only real worry I have left is what this new system will do to sales rank since, under the old system, borrows counted as sales. Will this change now that we're counting pages? I have zero idea, but I'm very interested to see what will happen. (And if you have any good guesses about this, please leave them in the comments below. I'm dying of curiosity!)

Call me an Amazon fangirl if you must, but I'm really excited about these numbers and I can't wait to see the final results when July's actual final payout is announced next month. And you can bet there'll be a blogpost for that, too!

Thank you for reading my wild speculation! I hope you enjoyed it, and as always, happy writing!

Yours,
Rachel

Writing Wednesdays: How to Deal With a Character Taking Over Your Book

We're on a bit of a sudden enforced vacation here at Casa de Aaron Bach. We didn't realize summer camp was closed the entire week of July 4, so it's suddenly "madly run around North Georgia doing outdoorsy stuff with our son!" time. Because of the interruptions, today's Writing Wednesday is going to be a little different.

Every November for the last four years, I've done an AMA with writers over at the NaNoWriMo fantasy forums. These posts are super fun and one of the highlights of my year. The question format gives me a chance to write out a lot of my writing processes and strategies, some of which I didn't even think about until someone asked me. The result is a ton of information that I'm very proud of, but, due to the inherent nature of forum replies, can be pretty hard to read.

So today, in the spirit of posting something interesting while also not abandoning my husband for too long to the whims of a bored 5-year-old (THANKS TRAVIS!), here's one of my favorite question/answer pairs from the thread, conveniently extracted and cleaned up for your reading pleasure.

I promise we'll be back to the new stuff next Wednesday. For now, though, let's talk character wrangling!


Writing Wednesdays: How to Deal With a Character Taking Over Your Book
Emma Rowene asks:
My main character shares some of Eli's personality traits, I think. He's charming, skilled, facetious...but I'm finding that I'm having some trouble pulling it off. He's sort of overshadowing the other characters (who I think are also pretty great) and is coming across as not as deep a character as he should be because of some of these personality traits. So I guess my question is: do you have any advice? How did you go about writing Eli?

Rachel Aaron:
I had the exact same problem when I was writing Eli! When you've got one character with a super strong personality, especially he's a voice you love and find really fun to write, it's all too easy to end up with that character dominating every scene he's in. And while that's not technically bad (assuming he's your main character), it can make your book very one note by stealing everyone else's page time.

Personally, I solved this problem by increasing Eli's character flaws. Eli's cockiness, checkered past, and inability to keep his mouth shut got him into a lot of trouble, which gave the other characters a chance to shine by saving his butt/yelling at him/coming up with their own plans. 2) I made sure that all my other major characters had interesting and important story lines of their own (Nico and her demon, Josef and his sword, Miranda and her spirits, etc). So long as your people have goals they're actively pursuing and which are complicating the plot away from your MC, it's much easier for them to make their voices heard. And finally, 3) I made sure to shift the POV away from Eli for large sections of the text. This allowed me to tell other parts of the story Eli and Co. couldn't know about as well as giving me opportunities to show the action from alternate, non-Eli points of view, even if Eli himself was in the scene.

This final division paid off two fold. First, because watching from another character's POV was often actually more interesting than being in Eli's head since they didn't know what Eli was going to do. And second, because it gave me lots of chances to develop the POV characters independently while still telling Eli's story. I used this trick especially to develop characters who wouldn't otherwise talk a lot, but had very definite opinions, like Josef (stoic swordsman) and Nico (quiet, introverted demonseed).

Now, this was just how I solved my "Eli keeps taking up all the air" conundrum. I'm sure there are infinite other ways to do this exact same thing (that's the great thing about writing, there's always more than one way to fix a problem!). Still, I hope they'll give you a kicking off point to try and fix the same issue in your book.

That said, I do want to address the concern you bring up about shallowness. When you're writing a charming, skilled, charismatic character, making sure your reader doesn't think they're shallow is a huge issue. We tend to think these people are shallow IRL, so you're already writing up hill when you pick this kind of personality as your main character. The trick is to make sure your character has serious problems and showcasing those in way that makes an otherwise overpowered, charismatic character seem deeply sympathetic. Eli might have been charming, handsome, and seemingly care free, but it was clear by the middle of book one that his take-nothing-seriously attitude was just a cover up for some extremely deep and messed up issues.

Readers love this stuff. They love getting to feel like they're on the inside of a character no one else really knows. So don't be afraid to reveal your character's demons early and often, especially if that character might come across as Too Good To Be True otherwise. If you can pull that off properly, you'll end up with a charming but wounded character people will love and root for instead of just another smug bastard.

I really hope that helps! Sorry to go on so long. As you see, you asked me a question very near and dear to my heart. I hope my experience helps make your writing easier, and best of luck on your book! It sounds awesome to me, but then, I might have a very soft spot for charming rogues.


I hope you enjoyed this blast from November Past! I'll be doing NaNo again this year, so I hope you'll drop by and ask a question! If this post wasn't enough to whet your writing whistle, click here (or in the "Writing" label below) to see 7 years worth of Rachel writing posts! (No promises about the ones at the beginning, though. ;) )

Thank you as always for reading, and happy writing!

Yours,
Rachel

Writing Wednesdays: What Description Really Does

Nice Dragons Finish Last is $0.99 for only one more week! Get you one!

Writing Wednesdays: What Description Really Does
Like exposition, writing description is one of those things that, if you're not already inclined to it, can feel like an anchor around your paragraphs. It's all too easy to go overboard describing what your characters see and feel, and while you may think you're giving your readers what they need, you're really just sinking your book under dead weight. If you go too light on description, though, your readers don't know what anything looks or smells or feels like and the book falls flat.

Just like everything else in writing, good description comes down to good execution, which is just a fancy way of saying "You've got to do it well." That's no sweat if you're one of those writers who already loves description. For me, though, description is one of those writing elements I've always struggled with. I'm a plot and characters girl who'd do everything in dialogue if she could. I'm also not a very visual person, which means I'm constantly forgetting to describe basic things like what characters are wearing because I just don't think about it. My readers do, though, and boy did they let me know.

So right from the beginning, I knew I had a problem with descriptions, and like any good writer, I got to work on fixing that.

Most problems in writing can be solved through experience and listening to feedback. If you've got someone you trust to read your work and give it to you straight--and then you actually listen to the criticism and make changes as appropriate--you can solve almost any writing issue pretty quickly. But this cycle of constructive criticism and growth gets hamstrung when the problem in question involves something that you don't actually care about as a reader, like me and descriptions. I didn't notice them when I read books, so I didn't really think critically about putting them into my own.

I think every author has a blind spot like this somewhere. Unfortunately, many of us use this as an excuse to take the Mind Over Matter approach, as in "If I don't mind, it doesn't matter." The book seems awesome to me! Why should I care if people are complaining about something I see as unimportant?

I don't think I have to explain why this is a toxic and self destructive way to think. Even if something doesn't matter to us, we're not our audience. Writing for publication means thinking about appealing to a wide spectrum of readers, not just the ones who think like me. If I want to reach that broad audience, I have to try to be good (or at least not bad) on all levels, not just the ones I care about. I'm not saying authors should freak out over every negative comment--that way lies madness--but if readers are consistently complaining about something, then it's a real problem, and it's up to us as good authors to fix it.

So how did I fix my description problem? Did I keep the criticisms in mind and focus on consciously adding more and better description to my work? Well, yes, but that was only the first step, something to help me treat the symptoms. I'm a firm believer that really good writing should be fun and flow naturally, and constantly harping on myself to remember my descriptions was definitely not part of that.

If I wanted to keep my natural, fun writing rhythm, then writing good descriptions needed to become part of my creative process, not something I tacked on after the fact. To do that, I needed to look past my own antipathy and figure out what good description actually does in a novel. It's like that one tool in Photoshop you never use because you don't actually understand how it works. Once you figure it out, though, you don't know how you ever lived without it. That was the awakening I was going for, and sure enough, once I took the time to actually stop and ask "what does description actually do?" I started caring about it a whole lot more.

Cool backstory, Rachel, but can we actually talk about description now?
Right! Moving on!

On the surface, description just seems like writing finishing work. It's not part of the structure, like characters and plot, it's just language that tells your reader how to imagine the things and people in your book, like costume and set design for a movie. But right there, in that seemingly dismissive comparison, we see how important description is, because there have been any number of movies that have used costume and set design to enormous effect, telling huge swaths of the story with visuals alone before any dialogue had even been spoken.

A perfect example of this is my current darling: Mad Max Fury Road.



There are probably 15 minutes of dialogue total in the entire film. The vast majority of the narrative--the exposition, the stakes, the world building, the characters' struggles and histories--is told entirely through what, in a book, would be description. It is the very definition of show, don't tell, which is exactly what good description exists to do. It's not just labeling your character's eye color or explaining what a sword looks like. Used properly, description becomes an entire other vehicle for the story that runs in silent parallel to the action and the dialogue.

Writing good description is all about balancing two needs: information and tension. You need to make sure your reader has a good a mental picture of what your world looks like, especially if you plan to use that information to great effect later. At the same time, though, if you pause the story for a 1000 word description of architecture, no matter how relevant, any tension you built before that point will be murdered.

Since boredom is my sworn enemy, I've historically erred on the side of too little, but (as was evident from my grumpy readers) that was almost as bad as too much. What I really should have been focusing on (and eventually learned to love) was using description as a tool. Like any good tool, you only need to pull it out when you've got a specific job to do.

Way back when I was writing my very fist book (the one that I never sold), I thought that if a character saw something, I had to describe it. This led to a lot of boring "here's what the trees look like" paragraphs that agents described as "dragging" in their rejection letters. The lesson I took from this was don't describe anything unless you have to, but that was wrong, too. The key I was missing was balance. You have to describe things so the reader knows what your world looks/feels like, but which things you need to describe is completely dependent on how important they are to your story.

For example, if a character walks into a room, you don't need to describe every aspect of the room (like Bad Writer Rachel used to). You just need to describe enough to convey the feelings and information you want your reader to pick up in this part of the story. If my character is waiting to meet with the Emperor of a failing empire, but I didn't want to actually sit there and info dump about how the empire is failing, I'd shift all that exposition to the description. By filling the waiting room with faded banners, shelves that weren't dusted, and displays of treasures from conquered peoples that my POV character now though of as being in extremely bad taste, I could passively tell the entire story of a ruling civilization's decline without actually saying a word.

This is ideal of description as story, but sometimes you need descriptions for more practical reasons. Describing how many chairs are in a room and how they're positioned might sound boring beyond belief, but if your MC is going to be using them as weapons later, you can't escape it. If your reader doesn't know what those chairs look like and where they're located beforehand, it's going to look like your MC is just throwing chairs out of nowhere à la Bad Cop from The Lego Movie.

These sort of practical "this goes here" descriptions were the ones I struggled with the most. I had to describe certain things for technical reasons--like the giant cathedral window I was going to throw someone out of--but stopping the action to actually write all of that out completely broke the tension.  If I didn't describe the setting beforehand, though, it looked like I made up a window on the spot just to throw someone out of it, which is one of the hallmarks of bad writing.

Fortunately for me, the solution to this problem turned out to be stupidly simple. After a lot of trial and error, I discovered that the secret to writing technical "where/what stuff is" descriptions without ruining the rest of the scene was to do the vast majority of my description while I was doing something else.

Take the sentence below:
Bob and Julius burst into the abandoned classroom, knocking the dusty chairs and desks out of their way as they ran for the window.
This sentence is 100% description, but it's disguised as an action sentence. The reader's interest is held because we have two characters running through a room, ostensibly from or toward something. All that movement and implied threat creates tension and interest for the reader. They want to know where the characters are going, and if they're going to make it. At the same time, though, I'm also telling them what the room looks like (dusty, abandoned, in a school, probably dark) and what's in it (chairs, desks, and other things you'd find in a classroom).
I could have done all of this by stopping the action to describe the room in detail, but that would have put a speed bump in the middle of my scene, and F that. Any time you stop the action to say what something looks like, you break the flow, and while that can be a powerful narrative tool, especially if you have something really dramatic/shocking/important to describe, most of the time it's bad bad bad. You don't ever want to break the reader out of the scene unless you're doing it on purpose for shock value, like so:
She turned the corner and froze, eyes wide. In front of her was...(insert paragraph of description here).
As you see, that sort of "stop the camera and let it sink in" reveal can only be done so many times, and only for really important things you're certain the reader's going to be interested in. Most of the time, though, I've found my best bet is to try and sneak descriptions in wherever I can. It's just like when I talked about Info Filling vs Info Dumping for exposition. Rather than dumping my descriptions all at once, I break everything up and sprinkle it around wherever it'll fit.

For example, if a scene has two characters standing and talking, I'll move them around and let them interact with the environment--picking up knickknacks, brushing dust off counter tops, smelling the dry scent of old books, tightening their cloaks against the damp, etc. This kind of sneaky, between-the-lines description lets me weave in tons of setting exposition while also doing dialogue. Plus, if I'm really on the ball, I can also use the character's fidgeting to show how they're feeling, like having them grip something too tightly. By using our description strategically, we're hitting a whole flock of birds with one stone here, and that is always awesome.

Dialogue isn't the only place you can use this trick, either. Letting your characters interact with the environment creates a never ending source of passive exposition. Trip them on rocks, get them stuck in mud, drench them with rain, fill the air with the sour smells of the market, make their formal clothing too tight, you get the idea. It's all about balancing information with tension. Doing whatever it takes to set the scene without actually having to stop and set the scene.

And that's how I do description! These strategies have helped me come a long way with my descriptions since my first book, and I now count good description as one of the most powerful weapons on my writing utility belt. Whether you struggle with description or not, though, it's always good to understand how an aspect of writing actually functions mechanically within a story. Knowledge is power!

Thank you as always for reading, and if you want more technical writing tips/tricks/discussions, check out the Writing Wednesday archives!

Until next time, I remain your friendly neighborhood Spiderman author,
Rachel

Kindle Unlimited Is Changing Their Payment Structure and Why I Think That's Awesome

I was on a sort-of vacation last week (well, as close to vacation as I get), so I didn't hear about the newly unveiled Kindle Unlimited payment structure changes until my (not actually publishing related) friend mentioned it to me at dinner.

Since any change to KU is the definition of Relevant to My Interests, I proceeded to be very rude and looked it up right there at the table, and you know what? I really liked what I read, and here's why.

Amazon's imagery was more right than they knew. It's a wild sea out there.
Unlike many authors I talk to who tend to see Amazon'g book subscription service as EEEEVIIIIIIIL, I've been a pretty big fan of KU since Amazon announced it last year. I wrote a post breaking down the math of why KU should make everyone a lot of money back when it was first announced, and my opinion is pretty much the same now as it was then: that the Amazon exclusivity requirement sucks, but overall KU participation should be a good deal for most authors.

I'm pleased to report that my own experience with the program has been largely positive. I've been in KU for a year now, and while it's been much better for my fiction than 2k to 10k, I don't really have complaints on either score. That said, I will be taking my books out of KU later this year to try out other venues (gotta try new things!), but that decision is based entirely on wanting to reach out to new, non-Amazon markets, not because I'm dissatisfied with the program.

BUT (you knew there was a but, right?), as much as I personally love the idea and most of the practice of KU, it's no secret that the payment system was notoriously easy to game. Scamming was ridiculously rampant, and that's the problem this new KU payment system seeks to remedy.

How Kindle Unlimited Worked
Kindle Unlimited pays authors out of a fund set up by Amazon. Think of it as a large pie that Amazon slices up and doles out to its authors based on how many KU subscribers read their books. Previously, your slice of the pie was calculated based on how many KU readers borrowed your book and read to at least the 10% mark. Short story, graphic novel, epic Fantasy tome, doesn't matter. So long as they made it to that 10% mark, you got paid the full borrow amount (usually about $1.33), regardless of how long your book was or whether or not that reader actually finished it.

I'm sure you can already see the problems inherent to this set up. Almost as soon as Amazon posted these rules, the online bookstore was flooded with ten page "novels" written by people like "James Paterson," "Steven King," and "Norah Roberts." These titles were deliberate scams designed to trick KU readers into clicking on what they thought was a new release by a mega bestseller. Under the old KU rules, it didn't even matter if they instantly realized they'd been scammed. With a 10 page book, they only needed to look at one page in order for it to count as the 10% read the scammer needed to get paid the full KU payout.

Since all KU authors are paid out of the same pot, these scams hurt everyone. Not only were scammers sucking money away from legitimate authors, they were infuriating readers and making KU itself look bad. Amazon knew this and ruthlessly cracked down, but it was like fighting a hydra. Strike one scammer down and two more would pop up in their place. So, in order to save Kindle Unlimited (and themselves a ton of policing), Amazon changed the rules.

How Kindle Unlimited Will Work Starting July 1, 2015 (and Why It Rocks)
Starting next month, Kindle Unlimited will now pay out by pages read. Showing that Amazon has learned from their mistakes, this new system works off an algorithm that averages ebook page counts by total wordcount (so you can't just give all your books huge fonts and tons of white space) and starts the reader on the Prologue/Chapter 1 (so you can't just add tons of obviously skip-able front matter to pad your page count). In order to get paid the maximum borrow amount, a book will have to have quality content that captures and holds the reader's attention all the way to the end. (You know, the stuff that should be there anyway.)

Personally, I'm a HUGE fan of this change. I love the idea that Amazon is literally paying KU authors for being good writers instead of just good marketers. Under this system, authors who write good books people want to read are the ones who reap the maximum reward.

I also love that it incentivizes longer books, because I really dislike the current practice of chopping up would would otherwise be a single novel into multiple "serial" segments to maximize revenue. Not that I think any author who did this is evil or a scammer. Business is all about figuring out ways to get the maximum profit from your investment, and there is no arguing that you made a lot more money from borrows and sales off five 20k titles priced at $2.99 each than off one 100k novel priced at $4.99. But while some authors love the idea of serials and wrote them legitimately, KBoards and other self pub hangouts were constantly barraged with authors asking if they should cut up their novels into serial format simply because of the situation I described above, and I think that sucks.

When a system encourages artists to put their work into a format readers hate (and make no mistake, readers HATE serials. Just look at the reviews for any top selling serial and and you'll see what I mean), that's a bad system. It's bad for readers, it's bad for authors, it's bad for the book business in general. You want people to be happy when they finish your story, not pissed because they're having to buy/borrow 5 books to get one novel's worth of story.

I think Amazon became very aware of this, and the new KU borrow system is a step toward addressing it. Now, instead of encouraging authors to put out as many titles as possible, length be damned, Amazon is financially rewarding authors who tell good stories, regardless of format. When it comes to KU at least, the 100k word novel sold as one title will earn exactly the same as the 100k novel divided up into five 20k segments, encouraging novelists to write in the way that best suits the story.

As a writer who firmly believes that a story should be exactly as long or short as it needs to be, and as a reader who loathes arbitrary serial fiction (again, not talking about stories that are actually written to be serial format, but books that have been obviously chopped up just to take advantage of Amazon's payment structure), this is a HUGE change for the better. I am fully behind these new KU changes, and I hope Amazon takes more steps like this in the future.

But Rachel, How Can You Support the New KU Changes When They're Hurting Short Story Writers?!
When you look at the complaints leveled against the new KU, almost all of them come from two camps: short story writers, and authors who feel they should be paid for any amount of reading, regardless of whether or not the reader finishes the book.

Of these two groups, my heart goes out of the short story writers the most. Short stories are a very demanding form of fiction, and I fully respect the work that goes into them. That said, I don't think Amazon's new system is unfair, because no matter how much you put into your short fiction, it's still short. A short story might be deeper than the abyssal trench and more beautiful than a rainbow at sunrise, but the fact remains that it still takes less time to read and produce than a novel-length work of comparable quality.

In that light, I feel that the new system is actually more fair to authors since it rewards novelists and short story writers equally for their efforts rather than paying the same for 1,000 words as for 100,000 as was the case before. It's also more in line with the rest of the industry that has always paid by the word for short fiction. Plus, you can still charge whatever you want for people to buy your story, so it's not like Amazon's taking away your ability to make money off your short fiction. I do sympathize with the fact that you can no longer make $1.33 off a borrow on a $0.99 short story, but we all knew that gravy train had to dry up sometime ;).

But while I admit this new system is less advantageous to short fiction, I still think it's a good change over all. Fewer scammers gumming up the KU library improves the discoverability of quality books, and that means more borrows and more money for everyone!

As for the second group, the ones who feel they should get a full borrow price for any reading regardless of whether the reader finishes or not...you're entitled to that opinion. I don't agree, of course, but I'm not going to tell you how to feel. Personally, though, I think that if the KU part of your business model depends on getting your money up front because you're not confident readers are going to read your book all the way to the end, you have a much bigger problem than how KU borrows are calculated.

Wow, That's a Lot of Praise. So Are You 100% Behind the New KU?
Well, about that. I've always thought KU was a pretty good program, and these new changes make it even better. But while Amazon has addressed some of the problems with the KU model, they haven't touched what I see as the two greatest problem with the program: the Amazon exclusivity requirement, and fact that payments are still made out of the KDP Select Global Fund.

Where Things Get Less Awesome
While I love love LOVE the idea that KU has abandoned as single payout at 10% in favor of paying a small bounty per page read, just how much this per-page payment will be is impossible to say since Kindle Unlimited pays authors out of a fund that changes every month.

Let me be blunt: I REALLY f-ing hate this system. If you need a refresher for why it sucks, here is how Amazon explains the rules.

We base the calculation of your share of the KDP Select Global Fund by how often Kindle Unlimited customers choose and read more than 10% of your book, and Kindle Owners' Lending Library customers download your book. We compare these numbers to how often all participating KDP Select titles were chosen. For example, if the monthly global fund amount is $1,000,000, all participating KDP titles were read 300,000 times, and customers read your book 1,500 times, you will earn 0.5% (1,500/300,000 = 0.5%), or $5,000 for that month.

Obviously, this part of their website hasn't been updated with the new KU rules, but you get the general idea. How much authors earn from enrolling their books in KU fluctuates from month to month based on how many titles are currently in the program, how many readers are borrowing, and how much money Amazon's Magic 8-Ball tells it to put into the fund. This volatility plus the fact that participating in KU means making your titles exclusive to Amazons makes it extremely difficult for authors like me to say whether or not borrow payments from KU are worth taking our titles off every other vendor.

When you earn your living off your books, that is some vitally important math. I know it seems weird after spending this entire post singing the new KU's praises, but this complete lack of reliable numbers and the odious Amazon exclusivity requirement is why I've decided take my books out of KU when the agreement expires later this year, and why One Good Dragon Deserves Another  will not be included in the program at all in the foreseeable future.

Again, it's not because I haven't been making money--I've made lovely money off KU over the last year--it's just because that money isn't enough to outweigh the cost of not making my book available in every other market. And that's really kind of a shame, because my novels are exactly the kind of books that would do the best under the new KU system.

So Is the New KU Worth It?
That depends on you. 
When I first signed up for KU, I was seeing one sale of my self-published titles on other vendors for every one hundred I was getting from Amazon. By that math, KU was totally worth it for me. Even at an insanely low $1 per borrow (a worst-case scenario that KU has never actually hit), I only needed about 10 borrows a day to make up all the money I lost by taking my books off other vendors.
A year later, though, I don't think this is the case anymore. My self-published series is much more well known and my ability to advertise has grown with it. With these two factors, I'm hoping that I can the sales on non-Amazon vendors that will blow past the money I was making in KU. 
Will it work? I have no idea. But part of the joy of being self published is the freedom to try new things. If I put my books on the other vendors and they flop, I might be coming back to KU, because it is a very good program. But whether or not it's the right program for me right now--or for you, or for any author--completely depends on our own unique situations. 
That's why discussions like these are so important. Businesses, especially cottage industries like self-publishing, are all about knowing when to take smart risks, and determining what makes a risk smart or dumb is entirely a matter of information. No one can look into the future and predict if a novel will soar or flop, but the more we know and the deeper we understand how the modern book selling machine functions, the more confident we can be in our choices. And really, what more could you ask for?
BONUS! An Unexpected Benefit!
In addition to all the stuff I said above, there is a new, insanely cool new feature coming in with the new KU payment system, and that is Amazon's promise to report much more detailed KU borrow information!

"When we make this change on July 1, 2015, you'll be able to see your book's KENPC listed on the "Promote and Advertise" page in your Bookshelf, and we'll report on total pages read on your Sales Dashboard report." - From the new KU Announcement

I'm not sure exactly what the above means, but I'm ready for any expansion to the current "X number of borrows per day" tally. The best thing that could happen would be some kind of chart that would show you exactly where the average borrowing reader put your book down. 
Just think what that kind of information could do for your writing! It would give authors a window into where we lose people. I mean, just imagine if you could see the exact point where 50% of your readers quit. Clearly, there's something wrong with that part of the book, and while that would suck to see on a finished work, knowing where the problem is means you can fix it. I'm not saying we should go back and obsessively edit finished books, that way lies madness, but the option would be there if we wanted it, and that is a miracle compared to the old Traditional Publishing system of releasing a book into the wild and being trapped with that version forever. 
If nothing else, I'd be happy just to get some more information. Anything's better than the current report, which is just a number of borrows with zero context.
And That's It!
I hope you've enjoyed this in depth look into the pros and cons of the new KU! If you disagree with my conclusions, or if there's an aspect you feel I left out, please leave it in the comments below. I'd really love to hear how these changes are affecting other writers on the front-lines of self publishing. 
Thank you as always for reading, and I'll see you on Wednesday for another Writing Wednesdays post!
Hearts and ponies forever,Rachel

Writing Wednesdays: The Price of a Novel (It's Not What You Think!)

Quick bookkeeping note: Nice Dragons Finish Last is still on sale for $0.99, and the sequel, One Good Dragon Deserves Another is still available for pre-order. This is where the books live! Get you one!

So I normally like to keep these WW features focused on the craft of writing, but an event happened this last week that really got my writing goat, and thus this post was spawned. I hope you enjoy it!

Writing Wednesdays: The Price of a Novel (It's Not What You Think!)
The other day I was at a social event, talking to the parents of some of my son's friends (as you do), and it came up that I was a writer. This is still a pretty new thing for me. Even after five years as a full time author, I still find it hard to say "I am a writer" in mixed company without feeling like a poser, but I'm slowly getting better.

Anyway, after the usual "What do you write? Why haven't I heard of you? I've always wanted to be a writer!" back and forth, it comes out that I self-published my last novel, and this one lady asks me how much it costs to put out a professional quality self-pub book.

Now, as you've probably noticed, I don't mind talking money at all when it comes to my business! I feel that giving people real world numbers for the costs and benefits of writing is the most effective way to take power away from those who try to dupe new writers and take advantage of their dreams. I've actually broken down my costs for publishing Nice Dragons Finish Last on the blog before, so I was able to proudly tell this lady that it cost me about $3000.

She gets this shell-shocked look on her face. "Three thousand dollars?"

I explain how that includes hiring editors and copy editors and commissioning custom art for the cover. I also tell her how I was able to save money since, as a former graphic designer myself, I could do the design work for the cover and the ebook interior on my own. But while I'm standing there being proud about how low I kept my costs, she's still staring at me like I'm nuts, and then she says,

"I would never pay that much for my book."

And ladies and gentlemen, this is when I start looking at her like she's crazy. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I write for a living and must therefore expect to make that $3000 back plus some (otherwise I would make no profit and thus be unable to survive), or the part where $3000 is a tiny investment when you're talking about a small business that supports a family. No, I was staring at her because those three thousand countable, bankable dollars I paid to have my book professionally packaged are the least of my costs when it comes to writing.

Allow me to demonstrate.


Let's say you've decided to write a book with an eye toward selling it to the public in the future. For the sake of argument, I'm going to leave hobby writers out of this. Also, at least to start, we're going to assume you're not writing full time yet.

Now, to be commercially viable, your book is probably going to fall somewhere in the range of 70,000 - 100,000 words. Since we're not talking about full time writers yet, this means those 70-100k words will have to be written on the edges of other things--work, family responsibilities, sleeping, all the necessities of life. But you're serious about your writing, and you've read 2k to 10k (SHAMELESS PLUG!), so we'll say you're kicking butt and writing 2000 words over 2 hours every weekday.

This is a very respectable rate! Even taking weekends off, 2000 words five days a week equals 10,000 words per week. Assuming you don't skip any days, you'll have your (let's say 80,000 word) novel done in a mere 8 weeks!

But, as anyone who's ever attempted to write anything of novel length knows, the math rarely works out that neatly. Even if you're religiously hitting your 2k every day, you're most likely going to have some sections of the book that need to be rewritten. Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you just changed your mind, whatever the reason, you're practically guaranteed to have some words that, for whatever reason, don't make the cut into the final work.

This is perfectly normal, but it does make the math for our example a little wonky. Still, we're assuming a best case scenario here, so let's say our hypothetical writer really lucked out on the rewriting and is able to finish the first draft of their 80,000 word novel in a mere 10 weeks while writing a mere 2 hours a day every weekday. A truly awesome, but still totally doable, feat!

But, of course, this is only a first draft. If our hypothetical writer wants to sell this novel, she's going to have to edit it herself at least once before it's even ready to go to a professional editor (which is a whole other kettle of fish). For now, though, we're just talking about the writer's time spent on the book, not people we hire, and we're still assuming this book is blessed, so we'll go with an insanely optimistic 4 weeks (still only writing 2 hours per weekday) spent getting the novel into ready-to-submit condition.

So where does the price part come in?

Going by our example above, Hypothetical Novelist was able to write a first draft 80,000 word manuscript after 10 weeks of writing and 4 for editing. Assuming we're still writing only 2 hours per weekday and 4 weeks per month, that's a total of (10 x 14) 140 hours spent getting this book from concept to completion.

140 hours is a lot of time. If you'd gone out and gotten a minimum wage Walmart greeter job, you'd have earned $1050 for the same amount of time. For a professional job (like the graphic designer position I quit to become a full time writer), you probably would have earned somewhere in the range of $1400 - $2800 (assuming $10-20 an hour) if you'd spent that time working instead of writing.

So right there we have a numeric baseline for the "price" (also known as the opportunity cost) of writing a novel. This is the money you could have made if you'd chose to spend those hours at a paying position instead of at your keyboard.

But even this measure is not really accurate. Keep in mind, all our estimates above were made assuming a best case scenario every step of the way. Reality is rarely so kind. For example, it took me over a year to write my first book. Since I didn't keep records back then, I have no idea how many hours I sunk into that book, but it was easily in the 300-400 range. That's sixteen solid days spent working on a manuscript that I never did sell. Also, like our hypothetical novelist above, I was not yet writing full time, which means those 300-400 hours came out of my free time, the time outside of my real, 40 hour a week job.

This is a very important point. From an economic standpoint (and I think a personal one), our free time is far more valuable than the time we spend working our jobs. We have to go to work or school, but our free time is ours, those precious hours we get to spend with our families and hobbies and other things that make us happy, productive members of society. By choosing to spend those free hours writing a book, we're giving up the chance to spend them doing other things, like going out with our friends or playing video games or learning a new craft or going to the gym or any of the millions of other activities we could do in our spare time.

Now, for me (and I very much hope for all of you as well), writing is a fundamentally enjoyable activity. It's something I'd do (and for a very long time, did) even if I never made a dime. But just because something is enjoyable doesn't mean it is without cost. Everything we do in life comes at a cost of not doing something else, because time is the one thing we can not make more of. There are only so many hours in a life. By choosing to spend some of those hours writing, especially ones taken from the slim fraction of the day we get to keep for ourselves, we are paying a cost. Most of us pay it gladly, because writing is amazing, but that doesn't mean the price isn't there.

When we talk about the "price" of producing a novel, we focus on the monetary outlay, the actual money we lay down for services like editors and design and so forth. The opportunity cost of writing itself is almost never mentioned. This is because the sacrifice of being a writer is implicitly understood. If someone has written a book, you know (and they definitely know) that it took them a long time. This is why so many writers feel they are entitled to profit from their work, even if it's their very first book and it shows. We put in time, the thinking goes, we should get something out of it.

But again, as anyone who's ever written a novel and tried to sell it can tell you, that's not how writing works. You can pour your blood, sweat, tears, and free time into a novel for decades and never sell a single copy. You can try your absolute hardest, pour everything you are into a book, and still see it fail.

This, too, is the price of a novel. The bitter, personal cost of doing your best and still falling short. It's having strangers tell you that your greatest isn't good enough. It's taking a risk and putting your work out there only to be ignored, or even openly ridiculed. It's failure and lots of it, over and over again.

Is it worth it? Well, if you're asking me, I say, yes. A thousand times yes! Being a writer is the best job in the world. Not only do I get to basically play make-believe for a living, the business and practice of writing itself is something I find fundamentally enjoyable. I do this stuff for fun! Hell, I do it on my vacation.

For me, a decade of hard work and a stack of rejections is nothing compared to the joy of getting to write full time, all the time. I can't say if that will be the case for you because we're different people. But if you dream of being a writer, if stories clobber you and demand to be told, then I'm going to go out on a limb and say becoming a writer is totally worth all the pain it takes to get here. That's why so many of us put with so much to do it!!

Motivational speeches aside. though, now do you see why I thought that lady was crazy for balking at my $3000? Out of all the sacrifices writing requires of us, the money up front it costs to hire a good editor, copy editor, and artist is the part she has a problem with?!

I love writing more than Devi loves her armor, but if I could pay $3000 up front to get a finished version of my book with zero work, I'd do it in a heartbeat. So would everyone, which the entire logic behind why publishers pay advances, because the true price of a novel is hard work and time. How much work and how much time varies from writer to writer, but there is no dodging the effort. At some point, someone has to actually write that book. Someone has to put in the effort--not just to write that particular story, but for the hundreds of unpaid practice hours (almost always taken out of the writer's personal free time) that it took to hone their writing skills to the level where they can demand a price for their effort. And it is that--that time, that practice, the hard work a writer puts in to develop their thought, creativity, and skill--that adds together to create the worth of a novel. That is what a good book costs. That is the price of art.

So when someone (including yourself) tries to devalue your efforts as a writer, keep this truth in mind. I'm not saying you should spend $3000 to publish your book--you should spend whatever you deem wise according to your own budget--but you should also never forget the price you've already paid. Simply by finishing a book, you have invested a large portion of your life, hours that you will never get back, into your story and your craft. If you then go on to submit that book for publication, either on your own or with a publishing house, you're opening yourself and your imagination up to extremely harsh criticism, which also takes its toll. Even if your novel never sees the light of day, you still have to pay for it. You pay with your time, with your energy, with the lost opportunities those hours could have gone to. And it is up to you, the writer, to make that investment worth something.

That is your ultimate worth as a writer: your skill and the time it took you to get it. These things have intrinsic value, and the more you invest into them by practicing and trying to get better, the greater that value becomes. No one owes you a book contract or a readership--it's up to you to earn those things by being awesome--but at the same time, you should never undervalue or undermine your own time and effort. If something makes you feel cheap or desperate, don't do it. If someone tries to tell you your time spent learning to be a better writer was wasted, don't listen. They're wrong. Even when it feels like you're doing nothing but finding new ways to fail, failure teaches more than success. So learn from your failures and focus on creating works that you can take pride and joy in, because every day you spend writing, you're paying a price whether you know it or not. Don't ever let that go to waste.


Wow, that got heavy. Can you tell I care about this stuff? (But then again, caring about stuff is kind of the hallmark of being a writer. No one could get through a book if they didn't care). As always, thank you so much for reading, and happy Writing Wednesday!!

Yours always,
Rachel 

Let's Talk Numbers: Reader Retention Rates Across a Series

So today, completely of his own volition (and because he is a giant data geek), my husband, business partner, and far more sensible half, Travis Bach, is here to share some publishing numbers! Today, we're looking at reader retention rates across series, how many people who buy the first book in a series can be expected to buy the others.

Now, of course, this number will vary wildly between writers and even between series by the same author, but (as Travis is about to explain) looking at your book sales from a top down, data driven perspective can enable you to make some pretty sharp best guesses, or at least ballpark. If nothing else, it's an interesting topic to think about and I thought you guys would enjoy getting a peek behind the curtain for how we make our business decisions here at the Aaron/Bach book factory.


But first, a disclaimer.

This is a numbers post! There will be lots of graphs, tables, and postulations about the math of self-publishing. If that's not your thing, that's totally cool, but you'll probably hate this blog post. I'm sorry. Here is a picture of a Toothless to make it up to you.

And a link to something else to read!
Still with me? Okay, then I'm going to assume you like numbers. Yay! That said, it also should be mentioned that this is a post about my specific numbers. As in sales.

Posting numbers on the internet is always a super awkward thing to do. Talking about your sales in public in any fashion has always been one of those Things You Don't Do as an author. Personally, I think that's silly. Sure we're artists, but plenty of us are also trying to make a living here, and numbers are what make business go 'round. Withholding information about the financial realities of a business, any business, only helps those who are trying to take advantage of the ignorant. Also, I personally LOVE reading numbers posts from other authors, and as they say, you should write (or get your husband to write) what you love :).

All of the above is a fancy way of saying that I'm not putting these numbers up to brag. (There are tens of thousands of self-published authors out there who sell better, worse, and about the same as I do) Nor is it meant to seem cocky or disrespectful to the readers who so generously made these numbers possible. (Seriously, if you bought my book, I love you. You are the reason I am living my dream as an author, and there are not words to express the depth of my gratitude for that. Thank you!!) Everything posted below is offered purely out of the spirit of openness and sharing information that is one of the things we love most about the Indie Author community. The more we share knowledge, the more we all know. Also, one of the stated goals of this blog is to show you the life of a working writer (me), and looking at sales data is a huge part of that.

So, with all that covered...take it away, Travis!

Let's Talk Numbers!

Thanks my love! Hi everyone, I've been wanting to do another big numbers post since there was such a great response to the Kindle Big Deal vs Bookbub article. There's so much to talk about that my potential posts threaten to become books, not blogs, and so today I'd like to focus on a piece of the whole I've been looking at, which is how book consumers move through a series, and how we use that information.

A quick disclaimer though - I can only talk about the data from Rachel's books as that's all we have to work with. That's not much mathematically. This information is completely anecdotal and is not statistically sound.

What is Reader Retention Rate?
How many people are likely to read book #2 (or 3,4,5,6) of a series? This is a question that I ponder a LOT. It's useful for answering questions like:
How much revenue do we expect to have this year? Should we write [book x]?*Should we promote book 1 (or book n-1) more? *TBH though, commercial value is usually a tiny factor in determining what gets written next. Rachel's enthusiasm + existing series commitments are the primary determining factors.

In seeking the answers to these questions, I've been looking at what I call the Reader Retention Rate (cause the term sell-through is already taken). Reader Retention Rate is the percent of people who read "the next" book.

Generally, this is computed simply by dividing net sales+borrows for the sequel by the same for Book 1. So if 20,000 people bought the first book in a series, and 10,000 people bought the second, then I'd say that there's a 50% retention rate from Book 1 to Book 2.

What Does It Look Like?
Without further to do, here's the retention rate numbers for Rachel's series as of the end of 2014. (Click to enlarge.)


The reader retention rate for Eli is a little weird because the first half of the series was compiled into a 3-book omnibus. I include its sales when calculating book 4, the 34% you see above.

We have plenty of asterisks here since this aggregate ignores things like specific marketing efforts, sales, and so on. However, we've also never done a serious, prolonged free promotion of any kind for any of Rachel's titles. I've been told that those have very poor follow through on readers since many people who snap up free eBooks when they go on sale never actually get around to reading the book. None of our books have been there though, so this assumption (true or false) is not artificially dragging anything down. (Not to say that free isn't a valid tactic, this just isn't that conversation)

Another factor in our favor here is that all books in all series shown are very well reviewed (4 stars+), which means we are at least comparing books of similarly received quality. Fortunately, Rachel hasn't written a book that's tanked (knock on blessed wood then burn as offering), so I don't have any data for how a bad book (or at least one that readers hated) would affect reader retention rates. (Rachel note: probably very badly. Note to self: never write a bad book!)

What I've Learned From This
When I first made this table, I was pretty astounded. Coming from the marketing world where a 5%  conversion rate is amazing, these numbers appeared astronomically high. First, I'm baffled by the 133% for Spirit's End, it has somehow outsold Spirit War considerably. All I can think of is that lots of free sources like person-to-person borrowing, libraries, and piracy carried readers en mass to this final book. Second, and more importantly, I'm pretty wow'ed by the retention rates in general. I was expecting something less than 25%, so these are high numbers and that changes our game plan in some important ways.

I think that the Eli book 3 to book 4 retention rate is artificially low because of the omnibus. At $9.99 for three titles, the omnibus is basically $3.33 per book, a price that appeals to price-conscious consumers, while the the fourth book, The Spirit War, is $9.99 by itself. That's a 3x price cliff between book 3 and book 4, and I'm sure we've lost a lot of potential readers right there because of sticker shock. Even with that gap, though, 40% of readers who started The Legend of Eli Monpress finished the series as a whole (compared to 50% for the Paradox Trilogy).

The third thing I've learned is that retention rates shoot up towards 90%+ after book 2. In both our 3-book and 5-book series, retention rates for book 2 to 3 to 4 to 5... are all generally high.

A well written series is likely a strong factor here, but the real takeaway from these numbers is that they show the importance of getting people to read book #2 in a series. It also helps illustrate why publishers and book sellers love series in general, particularly long ones.

The common wisdom is to get as many people to read book 1 as possible since sale for a series take the shape of a pyramid. Because new readers have to start with book 1, that book will always be the best selling title of the series. So, the logic goes, the more you sell book 1, the better everything else will do (broaden the base of the pyramid you can make the whole thing taller).

That's still a good strategy, of course. Going forward though, we're definitely going to place increased importance on getting people to book #2 in any series as well, especially for series with more than 3 books since those readers will stick around in much higher numbers from then on.

How I Use Reader Retention Rate
When we found out Nice Dragons Finish Last was selected to be part of the Kindle Big Deal (still on sale for $0.99 until the end of June!), we started scrambling to update the back matter with sample chapters and a call-to-action for pre-ordering One Good Dragon Deserves Another. We did this specifically because we'd seen how selling readers on the second book hooks them in for the whole series.

(Rachel note: I've been saying this without proof for years! "The first book sells the second, but the second sells the series" is one of those annoying things I say to people all the time. Nice to finally have some data to back up my previously unfounded suspicions!)
In a more round about way, I also use these retention rate figures to peer into our future. Guessing future sales has always been an invaluable tool for me when making our income projections. I plan our financial situation out 18 to 24 months in advance. Estimating book sales as accurately as I can is absolutely vital.
Let's use the upcoming One Good Dragon Deserves Another (available for pre-order now!) as the prime example.


Before I explain this picture, I have a confession to make. I'm scared as heck to post these numbers. This is straight from my central planning sheet, the realest deal I have. One thing that Rachel and I both love about the self-pub industry is how open everyone is with their numbers. So I'm putting my trust in you all.

What you see here,Total Nice Dragons Finish Last (NDFL) - this is how many copies sold or borrowed of Heartstrikers #1 that I estimate will have sold by August 1st. Adoption Rate - aka Reader Retention Rate from book 1 to book 2... I probably need to change that for consistency sake. More on how this is used below. You'll notice I have it set to a "cynical" estimate of 50%. I feel that the data from Eli and Paradox suggests that we should will see something more like 60% to 70%, but I have a policy of always low-balling my guestimates.Sales Schedule - I have noticed that monthly book sales, when graphed, all seem to have the same shape of curve. I'm always working on this, but I have an experimental method of estimating this curve for any book release. As seen above, this spreads out the estimated sales for book 2 across a timeline. What you see in the sales schedule is the estimated 10,000 copies of One Good Dragon spread out on my experimental book sales curve (slope really). It's only 9 months of sales because I haven't figured out how to estimate long tail yet. Over 2 years, approximately 80% of a book's earnings appear to happen in the first 9 months it's out, so I focus on that for now.

This curve is assigned actual dates on my income schedule sheet based on when actual royalty payments will start arriving. Add a few more books with this same method, say Rachel's next 2 years of writing projects as well as some rough assumptions of performance for older titles, and that's how I figure out how we'll be doing.

For example, since people who read book 2 are very likely to read book 3, I assume a 90% retention rate and estimate book 3 using the same curve as above.


I'm not going to talk about when this book might come out (Rachel note: because it's not written yet!), but it does have a place on my income schedule. Despite planning Rachel's writing so extensively, that plan shifts and changes in minor and major ways depending on countless factors and events. We only announce release dates when we are fairly sure that they are true.

Does this mean I update my sheet a lot? Yup.

"But I don't have a sales curve thingy that I can estimate with!"
I'd love to do a post about common sales behaviors I see in books. Hopefully sooner than later there'll be a Let's Talk Numbers post about that. In the meantime, though, this retention rate is still useful.

This post isn't about, "You should do things my way," but is instead all about an interesting metric and some ways that we put it to use.

For another example....

Should I Write Novel X?
This retention rate and estimation method is pretty useful for evaluating new book and sequel potential. I need to add a disclaimer to this section though - we don't use sales projections to determine if a series is going to keep going. That is a purely authorial decision based on telling a good story. We might make a lot more money from making a series 5 books instead of 3 books, but if the story in question cannot be told well in 5 books, then it's not gonna be 5 books. (Rachel note: damn straight. The story will be what it'll be!)
Lately, though, one question we've been wondering about is - should Rachel write another writing book? Would [enough] people want to read it?
The gut answer is yes, because the writing posts on this blog are very popular and 2k to 10k is popular. We'd like to have some semblance of data though, too, because writing any book is a big decision that carries opportunity costs. Time spent on a writing book is time Rachel isn't spending on fiction, and it's nice to have some solid logic to use when we're trying to decide if that's a good idea or not.
Let's say that 25% of people who've read 2k to 10k will try out another Rachel Aaron writing book. That's a low rate given our data so far, but this is a different animal than a true sequel. Even so, we see that about 30,000 people have bought or read 2k to 10k already, meaning that 7500 people might want to read another one. That's a comforting guestimate that says that Rachel's time spent writing it would not be wasted.
Is there going to be another Rachel Aaron writing book? It's not been started yet, so I cannot confirm anything. All the other decision making factors (time, interest, quality, value to reader) have to be there for a book to happen. This is all here to illustrate some practical uses and applications I've found while studying Reader Retention Rate numbers.

All in all...
I hope you've found this post informative, or at least interesting. It's hard to get good data in the publishing world (or life in general), so we do the best we can with what we have. My predictions here are certainly going to be wrong compared to the real world numbers, but that's not important. What's important is how wrong they are. I'd be really happy if I called it even remotely close; like within 20%. That'd be amazing - or not given how far down my estimates are adjusted. If I'm way off, oh well. I'll keep striving to get better.
If this whole post feels like counting eggs before they hatch, you are probably right. It always makes me feel like I'm making plans with a side of hubris. Those plans are super essential though. Projections like the ones above are what I use to answer questions like "can we afford to fix the car?" or "can our son go to summer camp?" You know, the important stuff.

When you're supporting a family on writing, having the information to answer questions like this is a vital part of life. So I try to support that nagging internal voice, the one that says I'm making plans with guesses, with fairly pessimistic overall performance estimations. If a number feels even slightly too good to be true, I move it closer to the worse scenarios. As I said, I'm not super accurate, nor can I be since no one can predict a book's future, but I've been consistently 'accurate enough' that we've been able to run this place for years without any real fiscal crises; and that's nothing to sneeze at.
Lastly, I'd love to ask if anyone out there has some Reader Retention Rate info they'd like to share with us to help us see the larger picture. I only get to see Rachel's info after all! If you don't want to leave a comment on the blog with your info, please fire off a message via the rachelaaron.net contact form - Rachel doesn't mind forwarding the info over to me at all. (Thank you honey!)
That's all, thanks for reading,-Travis

Rachel here again! 
Isn't Trav the greatest?! Best career move I ever made was marrying a person who loved business and spreadsheets! For real, if you're serious about making writing your job, try to find a Significant Other who's on board with that and excited to participate. They don't have to be a numbers person like Travis or anything specific. You just need someone who will support your ambitions, because the writing life is truly a whole household affair, especially when deadline time rolls around!

Thank you again to Travis for putting all of this together, and thank all of YOU for reading! I hope you enjoyed this look at how the sausage of self-publishing gets made. If you have any questions for Travis about his process or if you have any numbers of your own you'd like to share with us so we can get a better picture of how things work and maybe do a more comprehensive post that doesn't just focus on one data set (my books), please leave it in the comments below or shoot us an email through the contact form. I'll make sure he gets it!

Happy Friday, and happy writing!

Yours always,
Rachel

Writing Wednesdays: Info Filling (Or, How to Write Exposition *Without* Being Boring)

Yay! Another Writing Wednesday! I'm so glad you guys have been enjoying these. :) Also, I wanted to take a moment and say thank you so so SO much to everyone who's pre-ordered One Good Dragon Deserves Another ! The reception has been overwhelming. I can't wait for you guys to read the actual book come August!!

And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, the first book in the series, Nice Dragons Finish Last , is still only $0.99 on Amazon, so go check it out!

Now, on with the show...

Writing Wednesdays: Info Filling (Or, How to Write Exposition *Without* Being Boring)

Oh exposition, you quarrelsome beast.

Exposition is one of those fancy literary vocab words most people first encounter in High School English. Anything that feeds the reader information in a story--the description of a town square where a riot is happening, the explanation of the political situation that caused the riot, a recounting of the tragic personal history of the woman leading the riot--counts as narrative exposition, and it's famous for being one of those things that writers, especially genre writers, mess up.

It makes sense. The burden of exposition (which every writer struggles with at some point) is exponentially higher for those who write about people, places, and things that don't exist in real life. A thriller writer can simply say "the stern FBI agent" and expect his reader to know what he's talking about without spending paragraphs explaining what this "FBI" thing is. A Fantasy author, on the other hand, often has a entire new world to introduce before our readers can even appreciate what's going on with the plot.

That's an exponentially heavier exposition burden to bear with a much higher bar for success. Sloppy, info-dumpy exposition, which might slide under the radar in contemporary fiction if the writer is strong in other areas, becomes a deal-breaker any kind of genre fiction where the writer is introducing their reader to complex new worlds, societies, or rules for reality. There is simply too much to explain to do it badly, which is why skillful, interesting exposition is one of those skills every writer, but particularly every genre writer, must master if they want readers to stick with them long enough to see the rest of the book.

So how do we do it? How do you explain your epic magic system/political conflict/hyperspace travel to your reader without dumping a giant, book-closing wall o' text on their eyeballs? Well, fortunately for us, there's a trick to writing good description/exposition that's not actually hard to master. It just requires that you one 1) be aware of how much you're asking your reader to absorb at any one time, and 2) remember to stay entertaining.

How to Write Exposition People Won't Skip

Ask a non-Fantasy reader why they don't read Fantasy, and one of the most common complaints you'll hear is that there's too much exposition. Who wants to sit around and listen to some elf sing a song about the history for five pages? Dullsville.

Now, I happen to enjoy a good elf song, but I can totally see why people would complain. For years, Fantasy authors, Tolkien included, have relied on info-dumps to explain the detailed history of their worlds, often through songs or inscriptions or whatever other in-text excuse the author can come up with for a history lesson. This sort of thing happened so often, it became one of the conventions of the epic Fantasy genre, and when done well, it can definitely lend a real feeling of elegance and other-worldliness to the text. When done badly, however, this sort of exposition is the most excruciating, boring, nonsensical crap you'll ever wade through.

It's stuff like this gives Fantasy a bad name in so many circles. Don't believe me? Take a second and imagine reading the most stereotypically bad Fantasy novel you can think of. Chances are, your imaginary book starts with a densely written prologue describing the birth/fall of the world in lofty, quasi-poetic language.

That's how bad this thing has gotten. The convention itself has become a marker of terrible quality. Even if you do write a masterful, entertaining, beautifully crafted exposition prologue/elf song/found history/whatever, chance are most modern readers will just skip it because so many other authors have abused this exposition mechanic so abysmally.

So, if even masterful infodumps are off the table, how do you describe your pantheon/world breaking/epic history/other weighty topic of world building? How do you teach your reader what they need to know about the history of your world without sitting them down for a history lesson?

The exact answer to this problem will depend on your own particular book, writing voice, and intended audience, but a trick I like to use in my Fantasy (and Science Fiction) novels is something I call Info Filling.

Rather than dumping information on the reader all at once, I use whatever exposition I want the reader to learn as filler for when I'm doing other things. For example, say I'm introducing a new character who is foreign to my main cast, and she has a hideous scar. Maybe one of my characters asks about it, showing how tactless and direct he is (character development!), and the new lady gruffly informs him that she received this scar because she was a medicine woman who was accused of witchcraft, and the villain scared her face to show the world that she was evil (exposition and character development!)
As you can see, this is a much more natural and interesting way to inform your reader that there's a bad dude out there accusing ladies of being witches and scarring their faces than just sitting them down and telling them about it. By filling your information into the scene rather than just dumping it, you've turned your exposition into its own little story within your larger narrative and you've also layered in some character development, which is always good.

Tricks like these let you squeeze an enormous amount of exposition into your prose without making the reader work for it. Whenever I do a scene--any scene--I'm always trying to squeeze information about the larger world into the cracks wherever it will fit, even if I'm not using that information immediately. It's just there, a natural part of the world, and if you do it well, your reader will absorb all the information they need without even realizing it.

You see this tactic all the time in really good video games. Portal, for example, has zero info dumping. Nothing. Everything about the world and how it came to be that way is told in small details which are arranged to be found naturally as the player progresses through the puzzles or as part of the ambient atmosphere. But even with this complete lack of hand holding, by the end of the game, the player still knows enough about the world and its stakes to care about the final boss battle. That is amazing, and probably my favorite modern example of how good exposition should work. Also, the game is stupidly fun and clever, but you knew that, right?

I've also found that approaching exposition as a seasoning rather than a main dish really helps to "load balance" the information my books. Since I've completely abandoned the idea of trying to cram entire concepts down my reader's throats early in the text, I'm free to dole information out on a purely need to know basis as the plot progresses. Not only does doing things this way make the reading/writing experience a lot easier for all involved, it also ensure that, when I do need to stop and explain something complicated, my reader is ready to learn it.

It's all about creating investment first. You use your characters and your plot to show your reader why your history/worldbuilding/etc. is important, and only then, when they're desperate to know, do you hit them with the details. This is how you turn what would otherwise be boring, info dumpy exposition into a treat your readers will gobble up. Parcel it out slowly, feed them just enough details so they understand what's going on (but are never overloaded) while you draw them in. Then, when they're hooked and turning pages, that's when you hit them with the big, complicated explanation.

Pull this pattern off right, and you'll never get accused of info dumping again. :)

I hope this gives you all a new avenue of attack on your exposition woes! Thanks for reading, and I'll be back next Wednesday with another writing post.

Yours,
Rachel

Writing Wednesdays: Battling Perfectionism and Shutting Up Your Inner Editor

Yay! Time for another Writing Wednesday! First, though, (in case you missed my spam on Monday), I have a new book coming out! One Good Dragon Deserves Another, the long awaited sequel to Nice Dragons Finish Last (which is currently on sale for $0.99!) will release August 1, 2015! You can read a sneak-peek sample here, or pre-order your very own copy on Amazon.

Also, if you clicked any of those links, you might have noticed that I revamped my website. So check that out, too. It's pretty!

Okay, okay, Rachel, enough with the promo. Let's get to the good stuff!

Writing Wednesdays: Battling Perfectionism and Shutting Up Your Inner Editor

Perfectionism is a common curse for writers. It makes sense, too. With so much time and work going into a single product, striving to make it "perfect" is the the logical conclusion. Add in the inevitable writer ego, and it's all too easy for us to get hung up on the little mistakes rather than seeing all the stuff we got right. But while perfectionism is often spun as one of those "good flaws" since it implies a high level of quality control in the final product, the truth is that giving in to perfectionism is one of the absolute worst things that can happen to your writing.

I was on the #NAlitchat podcast last year, and one of the hosts brought up what I felt was a really brilliant observation about this exact topic. She put forth that most writer perfectionist tendencies aren't due to actual perfectionism, but, rather, to fear. Perfectionism, she said, can be just another name for procrastination, because it's easier to find problems than it is to take the plunge and put your work out there to be judged.

Now, of course, I'm not saying every incident of perfectionism is due to fear. If you care about books enough to write them, you probably have high standards, and there's nothing wrong with going over your work multiple times in an effort to make it as good as possible. That's just having pride in your work. The problem comes in when the need to make things absolutely perfect starts getting in the way of actually finishing the book. The most insidious form of problem perfectionism is when you start doing this during the first draft stage of writing, when you shouldn't be worried about editing at all. This problem is so common, writers even have a pet name for it: the dreaded Inner Editor.

The Inner Editor is that obnoxious voice in your head that butts into your writing and tells you you're doing it wrong. That's a stupid word choice. No one will ever want to read this. Real authors don't use adverbs, and so forth.

This litany of insecurities is totally normal, but just because it happens to nearly everyone who tries to write doesn't lessen its negative impact. The Inner Editor monologue can be crippling, especially if you're new to writing and haven't yet gotten enough words under your belt to build up the necessary weight of experience and confidence to shut that stupid voice down. But sometimes even experience isn't enough to save you. I've written fourteen novels, and I still get hit with bouts of the Inner Editor.

So how do we deal with this problem? How do we get over perfectionism and shut the Inner Editor up so we can actually write the damn book?

Sadly, I don't have a single bulletproof answer to this. One of the amazing but sometimes frustrating things about writing is that everyone does it differently. How you get around the mental roadblock that is your Inner Editor will depend entirely on your work style, your personality, and what motivates you as a writer. That said, I've had a lot of fights with my Inner Editor over the years, and I've developed some key self-defense strategies that worked really well for me, which I'm now listing here in the hope that they'll help you as well.

Rachel's Anti-Inner Editor Battle Plan #1: Create a Safe Space
Like I said above, the Inner Editor's criticism tends to revolve around insecurities about other people's judgement of your work, so one of the very first things I did to get away from it was make myself a safe space. It can be a mental space or a physical one, or both! You just need somewhere--a room, a folder, a notebook--where you can convince yourself that your writing in this place will never be read by anyone else unless you allow it.

The idea behind this strategy is to create a safe zone where your Inner Editor's complaints are rendered invalid and, therefore, not your problem. What does it matter if that's a stupid way to write that sentence? No one ever has to see it but me. And if I do write something awesome, I can just copy-paste it into my manuscript, and no one ever has to know that it was the lone survivor of 34 pages of crap.

Personally, I create a safe space for myself by always thinking of my first draft as the practice draft. I subscribe to the theory that the first draft is what you write to learn how to write the book. I'm not writing the book people will read, I'm writing the sludge that I have to work through in order to learn how to write the book. I'm building my mock-up, drawing my sketches, doing my warm-up routine, whatever metaphor you prefer. The important thing here, though, is that I know that the words I'm writing are in no way the finished product. They're vital practice, the rehearsal before the play, the safe place where I am allowed to write crap and make mistakes and experiment. It's only after the first draft, when I've failed forward enough times and ended up with a more-or-less manuscript I'm excited to work with, that I switch mental gears and thinking about my document as a book that others will read.

One of my favorite mantras is that writing is not a performance art. You don't ever have to show anyone your work until you're happy with it. And while this sort of thinking can definitely lead to a downward perfectionism spiral where you never show anyone your work, it can also be a source of strength and confidence. By taking away your Inner Editor's platform, you're putting yourself back in control. You're the one with the power who has the final say in everything. You're the writer, which is the same as being a god within your created worlds. All you have to do is find a place where you're comfortable embracing that power, and your Inner Editor doesn't have a chance.

Rachel's Anti-Inner Editor Battle Plan #2: Accept That There's No Such Thing As A Perfect Book
One of my favorite bits of author coping advice I've picked up over the years is the habit of going to the Amazon or Goodreads page for my favorite novel, the one I believe is absolutely perfect, and reading the one star reviews. The point of this isn't to drag down my favorite work--so far as I'm concerned, those one star reviewers are Wrong McWrongpants from the city of Wrongville where everyone's wrong--but to remind myself that every book, even the ones I think are brilliant, even the lauded classics, have things people can criticize. This doesn't they're bad books. I obviously think they're amazing books. But no book, not even the top 1% of the best, is perfect to all readers, and, therefore, mine doesn't have to be, either.

Understanding that it is provably impossible for a book to be "perfect" was a huge step for me in battling my Inner Editor. I'm a detail oriented person, and I tend to get really down on myself about what are arguably very minor, subtle things. Going bad review surfing, while sometimes infuriating (how could anyone say that about THE LAST UNICORN? Don't you people understand that book is a masterpiece!!!???) is, for me, a vital exercise in perspective. It's almost too easy to get so wrapped up in our own work, we forget that our readers are not us. Some of them will fixate on flaws we never noticed as a reason to give a terrible review, some won't care at all, and there's nothing we can do to predict or change that. All we can do as writers is our best, and even that is inherently flawed.

Once I accepted that and realized that my Inner Editor's criticisms were both correct and completely irrelevant at the same time, it was a lot easier to tune her out and focus on what was actually important: writing a book I was proud of.


Rachel's Anti-Inner Editor Battle Plan #3: Get Lost In Your Own World
If you've listened to/read any of my advice/ruminations on writing, you probably already know that I'm a huge believer in the idea that writing should be fun. I mean, we're basically playing a very high level game of make-believe, creating worlds where we are gods and best friends and devils all at the same time. That's heady stuff, so much so that one of the three breakthroughs of how I went from writing 2k a day to 10k was to get excited about my work, but what I didn't talk about there was the fact that embracing this fundamental creativity of writing has become my single best defense against my Inner Editor.

When you're suitably excited about something, nothing can bring you down. Take your favorite series/band/sports team/whatever. Are you going to stop being a fan just because someone else said the thing you love was stupid? No way! F the haters!

Now, take that same level of "I love this and nothing you say can change my mind" and apply it to your writing, and you'll find that Inner Editor's commentary matters just as little as the people who try to tell you that our favorite whatever is stupid. This doesn't mean they can't have true criticism (nothing is perfect, see battle plan #2 above), but, and this is the secret, you don't have to care. If you really focus on getting excited about your own world and writing and characters, that excitement, that love and passion for your story will not only shine through your words and get your readers excited as well, it can also be an iron wall against Inner Editor nagging.

I call this being your own biggest fan, and while it can definitely be taken too far (you don't want to fall so in love with your voice that you become blind to actual weaknesses you need to address), I believe it's a vital part of the artist side of being a writer. After all, if I don't love my books, why am I writing them? If I don't care, why should anyone else? So don't be afraid to really dive into your world and embrace whatever you think is most awesome. Let yourself be a fan for your own world, and you'll reduce that Inner Editor to just another hater.


Rachel's Anti-Inner Editor Battle Plan #4: Let Go and Move On
This is the final stage of beating your Inner Editor. For me, this part happens in the later drafting stages, when I've already used the strategies above in the battle against my Inner Editor. Unfortunately, for me at least, my Inner Editor rarely stays beaten. So long as I have insecurities about my work, she'll always rise again, and so the final stage of any writing project for me is learning to let go.

For me, at least, this part never gets easier no matter how many books I write. Even now, five years later, there are a million things I still itch to fix when I think about the Eli books, but I can't. Those books are done, beyond my control, and that's okay. Are they perfect? Of course not, but there are still thousands of readers who love them despite all the stuff I know I messed up. Think of your own pleasure reading. Do you expect every book you encounter to be perfect? No, you just want a good story that will move and entertain you, a book worth reading. That's as it should be, because the only person who will ever care about true perfection in your books is you.

This is a lesson I have to relearn on every book. There are always so many things I could fix, and asking strangers to read your work never stops being terrifying. At the end of the day, though, every writer, even me, has to let go, because if you don't, that book will never be published.

This is the ultimate goal of beating perfectionism, the reason (other than your own mental health) that beating your Inner Editor is so important. We only have so much time to write in our lives. If you let yourself get hung up on perfecting a book that's already 99% done, you'll lose all those books you could have been writing. You can polish and polish and polish until you can't stand the sight of your own words anymore, but at the end of the day, you still have to let that book go free in the hands of readers. If you don't, if you let fear or obsessing over small details hold you back, no one will ever read it, and that would be a great tragedy, indeed.

I hope these strategies help you with your own battles against your Inner Editor. If you struggle with perfectionism, please know that you're not alone. Thousands of writers at all levels of success struggle with these exact same issues, but the ones who make it are the ones who find a way to look past all the minor tweaks that can seem so stupidly important and focus on what really matters: telling your story and getting it out into the world!

There will always be more books to write, and I look forward to reading yours.

Thank you again for being my reader, and I hope you enjoyed this edition of Writing Wednesdays!

One Good Dragon Deserves Another comes out August 1st! Cover! Blurb! Pre-order info! Sample chapters! OMG!

YES! At long last, One Good Dragon Deserves Another, the highly anticipated sequel to Nice Dragons Finish Last has a release date, and that date is August 1st, 2015! (Pre-order here, if that's your jam) (And for Amazon.UK)

After barely escaping the machinations of his terrifying mother, two all-knowing seers, and countless bloodthirsty siblings, the last thing Julius wants to see is another dragon. 

Unfortunately for him, the only thing more dangerous than being a useless Heartstriker is being useful one, and now that he’s got an in with the Three Sisters, Julius has become a key pawn in Bethesda the Heartstriker’s gamble to put her clan on top.

Refusal to play along with his mother’s plans means death, but there’s more going on than even Bethesda knows, and with Estella back in the game with a vengeance, Heartstriker futures disappearing, and Algonquin’s dragon hunter closing in, the stakes are higher than even a seer can calculate. But when his most powerful family members start dropping like flies, it falls to Julius to defend the clan that never respected him and prove that, sometimes, the world’s worst dragon is the best one to have on your side.

Sample chapters are already up on my lovely, newly revamped website (new book, new look!), or you can pre-order your own copy now on Amazon.com!

And as if all that wasn't enough, Nice Dragons Finish Last is also on sale all this month for $0.99 as part of the Kindle Big Deal! So if you know anyone who hasn't read the series, and you want to get them started for cheap, this is a great chance. ;)

I hope all these announcements make your Monday, and I really hope you enjoy your first look at One Good Dragon. Please let me know what you think in the comments, and as always, thank you so much for being my readers! You guys make my world go 'round :D!

Yours,
Rachel

PS: Right now, the Heartstrikers series is available on Amazon only due to the first book being in Kindle Unlimited. HOWEVER! This will not be the case forever, and I will absolutely let you know when the books become available on other readers/vendors. Thank you for your patience!

Interview Round-Up!

Wow, what a crazy week!

Well, technically, it's been 10 days, but still. I did a three podcasts and had a fantastic time! Basically, I finished my book and RT and was still like "MUST DO ALL THE THINGS!" Thankfully, I had plenty of people willing to talk to me and overall I think it went very well. I had an absolute blast, talked a lot about writing/the writing biz, and dropped a ton of info about Paradox, Heartstrikers, and what I'm writing next.

For those of you who are confused or who missed out over the week and still want to get in on this sweet, sweet podcast action, fear not! I have listed them below for your listening convenience. Please enjoy, and if you like one of the shows, be sure to let the hosts know! They're the ones who did all the work. I just showed up!

And now, the links!

Podcasts/Hangouts Rachel Was On In May

Sword and Laser #216 - Why Genres Don't Matter on the Internet

"We talk with Rachel Aaron about why she doesn't worry about genre anymore and how she had to fight the siren song of Warcraft to become a professional writer."

(Available as both audio & video streaming and as a direct download. Also EEEEE I WAS ON S&L YOU GUYYYYS! #fangasam)


Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast #32 - Traditional Publishing, Indie Publishing, and Writing More Words Per Day with Rachel Aaron

I talk about how 2k to 10k is still working for me, the difference between trad and indie marketing when it comes to getting your book out there, and the importance of remembering to have fun with your writing! (The single most important factor, IMO). There's an extremely detailed write up of all our topics on the link above as well if you want to jump to something specific.

Also, you can't really see it, but I was wearing my Auryn necklace from the Never Ending Story! So, ya know, bonus. (Audio and video, streaming and direct download.)


And last, (but 1000% not least), I was on the Smart Bitches Podcast #143. Fantasy, Romance, and the Writing Process – An Interview with Rachel Aaron

This was an enormous personal honor for me. I've been a fan of the Smart Bitches blog since before I got published, and I can't tell you how stoked I was to go on and talk to Sarah, who is an absolute delight! There's tons of goofing around, great book recs, plus talk about my upcoming Heartstriker books and a proposed new Paradox trilogy.

So if you're a fan of my fiction (or just good books in general), definitely give it a listen. It was an amazing good time! Thank you, Sarah, for having me on! (Plus, every book we talk about is linked on the podcast page, which is kind of amazing, because we talked about a LOT of titles!) (Streaming audio only)

And that's it! Thank you all for tuning in, and come back on Monday when I'll have some biiiiiig announcements!

See you then!
Rachel