Rachel Aaron's Blog, page 5

Heartstrikers 4 sample chapters!

The wait has been long and brutal, but...are you ready to read a sample of A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR?

The book has been up on Amazon for about three weeks now, and the preorders are blowing me out of the water. You guys are amazing!!! 
To fan the flames of anticipation even higher, we've put up a sample from Chapter 1 on the website for all of you to read ! 
Of course, those of you are on my mailing list already know this, because I just sent you an exclusive link to an even bigger chunk of the book. Twice as big at least, because you're awesome like that :D!
So if you're on my mailing list, make sure to check your inboxes! And if you're not on my mailing list, why not? That's where all the good stuff is! It's free and I promise never to spam you or give your information to anyone else. I only send emails when I have books coming out or when I'm giving you exclusive content, like this sample and the Heartstrikers short story Mother of the Year, so if you're not signed up already, do it! If you like my books at all, it's basically a funnel of awesome stuff.
Okay, okay, enough promo. I really hope you enjoy the sample chapters! Thank you as always for being my readers, and be sure to preorder your copy of A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR so it can magically appear on your Kindle at midnight!
Yours always,Rachel

It's finally here!! Heartstrikers 4 Cover Reveal and Release Date!

The wait is finally over!
A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR comes out July 28! I love this cover! Who is that fire dragon on Marci's shoulder, hmm?

To save his family from his tyrannical mother, Julius had to step on a lot of tails. That doesn’t win a Nice Dragon many friends, but just when he thinks he’s starting to make progress, a new threat arrives.  

Turns out, things can get worse. Heartstriker hasn’t begun to pay for its secrets, and the dragons of China are here to collect. When the Golden Emperor demands his surrender, Julius will have to choose between loyalty to the sister who's always watched over him and preserving the clan he gave everything to protect.

Pre-order it nooooooooooow! 
At long last, the wait is over! The fourth Heartstrikers book, A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR comes out July 28!

What happened in China? Where's Marci? What the hell is Bob doing? I know book three left you with a lot of questions (because you flooded my inbox with them), but now the answers are finally upon us.

A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR is the next to last book in the Heartstrikers series (that's right! 5 books!). If you've liked the books so far, you are going to love this novel. It's huge, it's epic, it's full of dragon drama, Bob's pigeon wears a a cute little hat...I'm just totally in love with it, and I know you will be, too!

Closer to launch, I'll be posting an excerpt from the new book on my website, so keep your eyes on the blog or follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter to make sure you get in on that sweet sample chapter action.

Of course, subscribers to my New Release Mailing List get even more sample chapters, exclusive special content like the Mother of the Year short, and they get all my announcements first, so maybe sign up for that if you're not already? I promise not to spam you! ^_^

Bethesda voice, "You know you want it."
As always, thank you all so so much for reading. I couldn't do any of this without you guys. You're the reason Julius, Marci, Bob, Chelsie, and everyone else is here, and I really can't thank you enough.

I really hope you check out the book. Happy Friday, and I'll talk to you again soon!

Yours always,
Rachel Aaron
Mother of Dragons Bethesda's Unpaid Intern

A DRAGON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR is the fourth book in the Heartstrikers series. If you're new, start from the beginning with NICE DRAGONS FINISH LAST! I promise you won't be sorry!

Which Paid Marketing Works (and Doesn't Work) for Books

Hi Folks,

See? We're not gone totally! In fact, I have a massive, crunchy, and highly informative blog post for you all today. This post was over a year (and more money than I'd like to admit) in the making. I do hope you all find it useful, we certainly have. Today's post is all about marketing, paid marketing in particular.

Which Paid Marketing Works for Books. (and which doesn't...)This summer, we embarked on a massive marketing effort for No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished. I had the whole campaign planned out with something new and interesting happening every week or every other week. We had our target customers, channels, and funnels all setup. To complete the package, we tracked the crap out of everything we did.
For the important parts of this article, we ran Facebook ads, we used Amazon Marketing Services, we commissioned art, and dropped list bait. We did a LOT is what I'm saying.

We spent thousands of dollars on marketing and today I'm going to share our data with you. 

I cannot bold that enough. This was, at the end of the day, a grand experiment for Aaron/Bach, LLC. We put down serious cash and we hired a professional data-driven marketing firm, Proof Industries to help us put it all together. Additionally, the whole effort coincided during a time of the year (launch) when we had maximum leverage working for us.
Now, I'm going to show you what we actually did, how well it's worked, and compare it to past marketing efforts to show how it stacks up. This is going to be one hell of a post.
So, first...
I want to plug the good folks over at Proof Industries. We threw an entire multi-channel marketing campaign at them in May and they made it happen starting in June. I could not have set up all the tracking infrastructure and hundreds of Facebook ads myself. They also helped us monitor the whole shebang as it happened and ran the post-mortem. 
Big thanks to Zach, Josh, and Ansley for helping us pull it all off!

What We Did to Market No Good Dragon This SummerHaha, it might be shorter to say what we didn't try this summer! The list of efforts is pretty monumental!

Pre-Orders - We put No Good Dragon Deserves Another up for pre-orders in late May, roughly 70 days out from the launch date. Why'd we do it for 70 days? Because our last pre-order was 60-days and I wanted to see if a longer pre-order window would sell even more books.

One Good Dragon Back Matter - We promoted No Good Dragon (book 3) with updated One Good Dragon (book 2) back matter. It basically had sample chapters and said, "you can pre-order now!"

Mailing List Announcements - We announced pre-orders, launch, and the audio book format launch via the mailing list.

Reviewers - We emailed advanced copies to roughly 20 independent bloggers for review.

New Posters - We created and launched five new posters, one with commissioned art from Gergana.


Mother of the Year - I've already talked about this one here. TL;DR it's an interview with Bethesda that you can only get if you sign up for the New Release Mailing List. We announced it and then, a few weeks later, we launched it.

Teaser Art - While the poster was a past commission that we finally turned into a poster, we also commissioned a new piece of teaser art that was set in book 3. This had a big announcement and will also, one day, become a poster most likely.

(Svena, Marci, Amelia)
Sample Chapters - They were going to come out anyway, but we definitely made a big noise about the sample chapters the moment they were available.

Big Summer Sale - we lucked out and Amazon put Nice Dragons and One Good Dragon both into their big summer sale for August at $1.99 each. This was not something we controlled, but I'm putting it here anyway because, if we didn't get the Amazon deal, then we were planning for something akin to the NDFL Mega-Fall Promotion that I did in 2014.

Paid Ads - Lastly, we had a lengthy schedule of paid ads via Facebook and Amazon Marketing Services. There were hundreds of ads, so I'm going to talk about the aggregate rather than individual ads. Basically we did ads for everything you see above. Whenever we did something, like announcing sample chapters or teaser art, we also pushed out boosted posts. The AMS ads were all targeted at people who were past customers since this was a book 3 release.

Social Media - It hopefully goes without saying that everything going on was echoed on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the blog.


How'd it Work?Both fantastic and not so great. Overall, the launch numbers themselves were most excellent.

All Heartstrikers launches compared (HS1, 2, and 3)
Since each launch is smaller than the last, this might look like a failure, but remember that every book in a series sells fewer than the one before it. So there was, in a way, a sort of limit on how well we could do. Given that book 3's launch was 89% the size of book 2's launch - I feel that we got as close to that limit as possible, which is a success IMO.

But did the marketing do that? Or was it going to happen anyway so long as the book was good?

I ask this insideous question because the not so great part is the actual numbers for many of the new advertising methods we tried. Here's the list again, with how everything did.

Pre-Orders - FANTASTIC. We sold thousands of additional copies of Nice Dragons and One Good Dragon the moment pre-orders went up and those elevated sales lasted from May to mid-October. (Though May doesn't look like much since pre-orders only ran for the last 5 days of that month)

Behold how amazing pre-orders are!

NDFL unit sales by month. Pre-Orders were May, June, and July
You'd better believe that we will be running pre-orders for basically everything forever after. It's worked well twice in a row so, IMO, this is now standard operating procedure.

Back Matter - This is a tough one. We did something similar in the past with NDFL and it worked awesomely. Problem is, this time, I couldn't measure the impact. I'm going to have to lean on past performance here and say that this was a contributor to sales. The real tell here is that I'd never consider not putting pre-order links in the back of book.

The back of the book is one of the best marketing tools an author has.

For example: Some 30,000 or so people have gotten to the last page of NDFL. In terms of marketing value, I'd rate a person who read to the end of a book as having 10 times the marketing quality of a mere click or even a detailed page view. To put that in perspective, it would probably cost $150,000 to $300,000 to reach an equivalent number (30k) of such highly qualified customers using less efficient advertising methods. WOW. Don't let your back matter go to waste folks!


Mailing List Announcement - Invaluable. Each time the list was contacted, there was a very visible spike in sales over the next 12 hours. It sold hundreds and hundreds of books this summer alone. More on the effects in my MOTY post.

Reviewers - This is where I need to shout out a BIG thanks to Fantasy Book Critic. He put up an amazing review up on the No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished page on day 0. It's hard to emphasize how helpful it is for us when that initial launch rush goes to check out the book and they see a long, glowing review from a trusted reviewer front and center.

We love the blog and YouTube reviews. They reach audiences we cannot and that makes each and every sale, click, or impression more valuable. Additionally, and this is not to be underestimated, they also help provide that precious continued legitimacy that all authors must get and keep. Particularly indies.

I just wish I knew how many books these kinds of mentions sold. Since most of the traffic they generate goes straight to Amazon, and it's spread out over time, it's impossible to tell. Although, there was that one time when Ilona Andrews reviewed Fortune's Pawn and boy did we see that! (years later, 1% to 2% of all rachelaaron.net traffic still comes from ilona-andrews.com)


New Posters - These didn't do anything. Like, nothing. The announcement posts we made had low views, likes, and reach. The website traffic never budged when they went up and sales of posters have been "meh" to the extreme.



Fortunately, the store front breaks even on its very modest fees each month. I like having posters that Rachel can sign and send to people as gifts. Also I dig the posters a lot. So, as long as they aren't losing money, they'll probably stick around because of these reasons.

We're not doing any new custom posters though. The costs just aren't justified. It'll just be cover posters as we have new covers.

So yeah. Posters do not affect our sales, drive traffic, get attention, or make significant money on their own. As a marketing tool, these things are totally worthless IMO. Your mileage may vary, but I have the feeling that readers just don't care about or want these things.


Mother of the Year - The post on this is here. The long story short is that MOTY was a wild success.
We gained hundreds and hundreds of new sign ups for the precious new release mailing list and that effect has continued on even months later. I still have every reason to believe that we've achieved a permanent (or at least long term) boost in the rate of newsletter signups.

This is the #1 best new trick we've tried this year marketing wise. 

List bait fiction is now going to be part of our standard tool set going forward. We'll probably make one per series to keep things fresh.

"Want a copy for yourself? Sign up for our mailing list!"

Teaser Art - I love commissioned art. It's so thrilling and fun to see art of Rachel's stories. As a marketing tool though, art is a mixed bag. On one hand, art works excellently on Facebook, Tumblr, and other social media. It will amplify how many shares and likes the related posts get for certain.

Unfortunately, it's not enough (for us) to justify the cost of the art. A bigger author might have more luck with this kind of thing, but I have my doubts. Say, for argument, that having a nice piece of original art will boost a given post's views, shares, likes, and engagements by 5x. That sounds great right? Well, if it's going from 1000 views to 5,000 views, guess what? It's still a massively negative ROI. I'll talk more about the gruesome inefficiencies of social media further down.

Anyway, the art announcement and such did not generate any measurable impact on sales and our tracking backs that up. ~__~ I'm sad, cause I wanted to do more art. We had really great art too! So, as a marketing strategy, custom art is now more of a vanity thing for us and I'll treat it as such.

This is, BTW, totally different from cover art. Keep that in mind please. Cover art is arguably one of the most important pieces of post-production we do on a book. Title, Cover, Blurb folks!

Sample Chapters - would you believe that these had almost no visible impact on sales? Like, we announced them and put them in the back of One Good Dragon and... nothing happened. No big sales bump and no traffic increases. No conversion rate increase on website sales either. Weird.

Our theory is that this might have been because this was book 3 in the series. No one needed sample chapters to make up their minds on buying. Also, we'd done a lot of promotion prior to the sample chapters reveal, so maybe we'd just tapped out our marketing reach and there was no one left on the fence for the chapters to sway.

So, while sample chapters are a crucial piece of that total package for the book, we've never going to pay for or go to great effort to promote their reveal again. At least not on anything other than book 1 of a series. That'll be an item with lots of reader curiosity where sample chapters can be a more powerful marketing tool.
Putting Things On Sale - the first two books of the series going on sale worked fantastically. Not only did both books, already riding on a high sales rank, ride higher, but sales for the third book were basically red-lined. It's hard to tell which benefited from which more, but we sold an amazing number of both.

This was our most successful discount price sale ever. It's impact has been seen on sales for Sept and Oct as well, which shows that the surge of readers picked up this summer are still filtering through. Will absolutely try to do this again. This sale-on-launch tactic seems to enjoy strong synergies.

and now for the last item, the one I bet you all are most interested in...
Drum roll please, Mr. AnimalPaid Ads and Social Media Oh boy, these were a learning experience....

Both paid ads and social media were absolutely terrible at selling books.

Oh yeah, I said it. These channels failed utterly by every metric we measured them by. Take a look at these inefficiencies,



Let's dig into my report here and chew on the interesting bits. For starters, I measure ads by three primary metrics

Price per 1000 Impressions - This is the most basic measure. I typically gather how much it costs to reach 1000 eyeballs as it's a great method for evaluating different ad channels against each other. For example, when a magazine offers "500,000 readers for $5000 ad spread" I see "$10 per 1k Impressions" which is horrible-bad and hell no. But when I see "1 million for $500" I'm all over it.

Price per Click - what does it cost to get someone to really look at the book? This is more valuable than impressions because you stand a better chance at getting a sale and you get to engage the customer. It's also the method most platforms charge by, so it's another primary comparison and evaluation metric.

Price Per Engagement - Ignore this one. It came with the metrics, but I don't use it.

Price per Sale - amount of marketing $$ spent per actual sale. Now, most of these figures are close estimates. Despite setting up a lot of tracking, there's still a margin of error present. Sigh. Anyway, this is the gold in that it's actual sales which have a tangible value. Clicks and impressions are much harder to put a value on.


Let's Compare

these ads and efforts to some more industrial baselines. Here's what I've run in the past using Google Adwords, AMS, and other services.

Look at the yellow area pleaseSo yeah, it's pretty easy to see that even broadly targeted AMS ads were better than any Facebook ad we ran. Also, as usual, Bookbub and email blast services are divinely powerful. By far the best paid marketing option out there for authors.

By these comparisons, most all of our ads this summer were wildly inefficient. $35 per sale?! $15 per 1k Impressions?! Woof! Who can afford that? Not us as we only make about $8 to $9 per sale (aggregate). It's just too much. There's no leverage here we can use to sell a meaningful number of books so there's no point in spending additional money on any of these avenues I feel. At least for now.

This makes me sad since I felt that the launch excitement, plus new content like art, would have translated into a very good result on the other ads. Ultimately, I think we just preached to the choir and failed to achieve any sort of marketing momentum. 
Some of these AMS and Google ads are in the striking range of $10 to $12 per sale, which will be great when the Heartstriker's series is finished. (That might be 2017 folks! Wooooo!)

Before We Move On
These failed experiments in advertising are, btw, entirely my doing. The professionals and artists we paired with for art and technical help all did their jobs expertly and excellently. I'd recommend any of the people I've linked above. In the end, Aaron/Bach, LLC isn't positioned correctly to make this stuff work and that's the bare truth of it.

But hey! That's what experiments are all about! We learned a lot and that's what I set out to accomplish. So,

What We Learned

These lessons learned are what we really paid for this summer. It would have been nice if more (any) of our big-ticket marketing items had sold some books, but really we were trying for an iron-clad test of our methods. 
Lesson #1 - Infrastructure makes all the difference.
When you hear about people who make a positive ROI on their Facebook Ads, it's almost always from people who have a lot of books out. Like those Romance ladies who are marketing their 22-book series where every book is a different entry point.

Or the Self-Publishing Podcast guys over at Sterling and Stone. Not only do they have a ton of books, but they have an amazing publishing schedule, related media productions, and one hell of a newsletter system. Seriously, listen to their podcast.

So this stuff can work but it takes a robust line of products and supporting online content, not just the three HS books. But give us a few years, a lot more titles, a few new platforms, and it'll be a whole different world around here.


Lesson #2 - New FICTION content is kingThe most well received, shared, and successful promotional material we had was anything related to MOTY or the actual book release. Everything else was a wash. The stuff that was good was better by an order of magnitude than anything else. (Note how the MOTY launch ads had a $0.04 cost per engagement? That's where it needs to be.)

In the future, we're going to only do paid ads for things like MOTY and book releases, i.e. new fiction that fans can consume.

Beyond that though, we're not gonna spend money on anything else. As Rachel mentioned previously, we're turning down from last year's full force social media and blogging efforts. In the end, they cost a lot and paid out practically nothing. Starkly so.


Lesson #3 - Social Media is too inefficient
Conversion rates on social media are god-awful. It's to the point where I seriously question if people who claim to drive sales with their social accounts actually are doing so of if they just have poor tracking and only think that they are.

(That's a glove thrown and I know it haha! SO if anyone has some concrete data to counter this view, I would love to see it. Hell, there's a guest post opportunity here if you can authoritatively talk on this subject and bring on some numbers to prove me wrong. Contact us!)

In our experience though, social media requires you to be rolling with tens of thousands of followers to be effective in any way. Your posts need to reach tens of thousands of eyes, or more, in order to sell anything. An example conversion rate would be 1 sale per 30,000 eyeballs. It's beastly.

Also, you can't grow by 1 follower a day and expect to get there. You need to grow by 20 to 100 per day to stand a chance at arriving in less than a lifetime. That said, social media growth tends to be non-linear, so the more your have the easier it is to get more.

So, if you aren't willing or able to get into those ranges then social media probably isn't the best marketing platform. It takes a lot more know-how and strategy than Rachel and I are willing to invest, that's for certain. We'd rather be writing books. Which is the most effective strategy still.

That's not to say we're leaving Twitter or something. Just that we're not going to be spending time slicing blog posts into tweets and advertising them. We're just going to tweet as we like to. It'll be less forced all around honestly which is best for all.


Lesson #4 - What about this blog?
Pretentious Title started as a place for Rachel to talk online about writing when she had something she was excited to talk about. It's also served as a place to post important updates and news concerning her author career. I joined during this last year because I wanted to help her out and because I love blogging.

However, the blogging strategy has been our biggest marketing mistake. I estimate that it's cost us nearly $30,000 in effort just this year alone. @_@ We like to help, but that's too much.

That might sound kinda weird. After all this is a widely read and successful writing blog. I love the posts we've written and the responses we've gotten from you all. I'm very happy about the authors we've helped over the years and this last year in particular.

The problem is simply that non-fiction isn't our business. 

Right now, we have a terrible business model as concerns the blog. "Write non-fiction and use it to sell fiction" sooooo doesn't work. It doesn't take a guru to see why either. We can't be on this blog, burning $30,000 a year, building a non-fiction platform and then not have a non-fiction product.

Why'd we do it? I mean, we certainly knew beforehand that we cannot sell fiction with non-fiction content.

Well, it was fun, but we also had a plan. Back when we decided to sink professional amounts of time and effort into the blog we aimed to launch annual non-fiction writing and writing business books along side the online content. That was the strategy and it's still a good plan to this day. Many successful non-fiction authors blog their way through their books. It's super effective.



Our problem is that we cannot write another non-fiction book. Rachel and I have started three of those suckers since 2k to 10k came out and we've never made it through a single one. We've always given up about a month in, hating the project utterly.

It's tragic and it's costly as hell, but we have to admit defeat. This place is just not going to become a serious non-fiction book imprint. 2k to 10k was a lovely spot of genius generated by a once in a lifetime writing epiphany, but it's just not going to get any siblings. The time has come for us to stop throwing good money away.

This is why the blog is going back to it's roots. Fun stuff when Rachel (or I) have something we're burning to talk about. No more pushing ourselves. More importantly though, giving that time back to our core business, fiction.

This applies to me too. I like blogging a lot more than Rachel does but I've got a book of my own to work on. It's done. I finished the first draft last spring. Editing on the other hand has been a long process. The story, plot, and characters are fine, but my prose and grammar are horrid. Fortunately, Rachel is my editor (I love you honey!) so I'm getting better with every new round of edits.

I love blogging, but in the long run, I'd much rather be an author than a blogger. Stop me if you've heard this one before but I have so many books I want to write.

Going ForwardKnowing that social media, the blog, and paid advertising don't work (for us) is an expensive lesson to learn. It's also a huge relief . We're finally free of feeling like we have to do these things. Free from worrying about what we might be missing by not doing them.
The future for us is drastically scaled back marketing efforts and a focus on books and fiction. We'll be very selective about advertising. We'll be running email blasted $1.99 and $0.99 sales as often as possible. We'll be doing paid ads for sale events and for new content announcements (new book, new list bait, any other purely original content Rachel makes).
The marketing experiments aren't over though! Oh no. Right in the middle of this big summer marketing campaign, I stumbled on to this tech crunch article. It's incredible and it's opened my eyes to a world of marketing concepts I'd never heard before. As soon as you are done here, GO READ IT. Also, read like every link in that article. Particularly the one concerning earned vs owned media. Rarely will you find such a treasure trove of solid marketing advice.

Anyway, it's too early to even whisper about what new marketing hijinks shall ensue, but rest assured we will talk about them here when we're ready.

Writing Wednesday: Needs Must

As I'm sure you already know, we here at Team Aaron/Bach are all about the reals. We constantly look at all manner of numbers to figure out what works and what doesn't work for us in the business of writing, including sales, newsletter sign ups, and website traffic. We also keep an eye on the production side of the equation, mostly by analyzing how I, the source of new words, spend my work time.

This is nothing new. Measuring my time was a huge part how I got my writing from 2k to 10k words a day. But as Travis proved in his Novel Project Management post, actually getting solid, quality time to write is a constant challenge even after you go pro. There are just so many other things you could be doing that fall under the umbrella of "work"--blogging, Tweeting, planning, etc--that sometimes the writing gets shoved around a bit. A foolish mistake, because ultimately, the writing is the only work that really matters.

Over the last year, Trav and I have been involved in a grand experiment to see if we could grow our social media presence in both fiction and non-fiction. The experiment has now concluded, and having run the post-mortem, we've discovered a lot of things we never expected. I'll leave it to my Travis-of-business to go over what we learned about Facebook ads and so forth in another post, but from my perspective, the single biggest discovery in all of this was how much of my work time each week I was spending blogging.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. I only write one post a week at best. It can't take that much time, right?

XKCD is the truth-sayer of my life.
This is what I always assumed, but the numbers say otherwise. As much as I love talking shop here on the blog, non-fiction is not my happy place. I'm a fiction girl first and forever. Writing books gives me energy. A good day of fiction will often leave me feeling ready to take on the world. Writing essays, on the other hand, takes energy. Energy and time. Four to five hours on average for each post, to be specific. It also interrupts my work flow. I won't go so far as to admit I call off early every blogging day, but let's just that Wednesdays are not 10k days. Too often, they aren't even 5k days.

This has been a persistent problem since we started the Writing Wednesday posts. At the beginning, I assumed I'd just get better, blogs would go faster, and everything would be great. Remember: I love writing these things! I love writing about writing, I love talking shop, and I love paying it forward. With all of that positive energy, I was sure I could get the time price down to something more reasonable. But a year later, the numbers are in, and I have to face the truth: I haven't gotten faster, and I can't keep losing a day out of every week.

To say I am not happy about this would be like saying "Bethesda likes power," but as always, the most important rule of being a good writer is being honest with yourself. The reals must come before the feels if I am to have any sort of accountability, and the reals are that if I want to get back to putting out more than one book a year, novel word counts have to come down, and the weekly time cost of blogging has to be cut. I'm still working on the former, but the latter begins today.

Wait, does this mean the blog going away?!Not at all! Pretentious Title will still be updated regularly with fiction updates, publishing numbers, and business posts as new information comes in. The free sharing of information is my favorite aspect of the indie author community and a big factor in why I decided to go self pub in the first place. Everyone wins when we share, and Travis and I are still dedicated to experimenting and posting what we've learned about the new frontiers of self publishing so that we can all move forward together into a brighter, more profitable future.

But while you will still see regular posts on the blog, the weekly Writing Wednesday feature is being retired so that I can focus on what I should have been focusing on all along: writing books.

Bummer. So are you done writing about writing forever?Absolutely not. I might be shifting my time focus back to fiction exclusively, but you can't stop me from talking shop. DO YOU HEAR ME, WORLD? I WILL NOT BE STOPPED! 
Can't stop the rock!
Ahem.
So yes, there will undoubtedly still be writing posts, they just won't be on weekly schedule. I'll still update Facebook and Twitter when I post, though, so if you follow me on Social Media, you shouldn't miss anything even if the flow is no longer reliable. Also, all my previous Writing Wednesday posts will stay up, and I very much hope you continue to find them useful.
Is there a good side to all this?YES! If you're a fan of my work, you've probably noticed the books are coming out mighty slowly for someone who gets 10k a day. We're talking one a year, which is the same pace I was at when I was traditionally published. Not so great for a nimble indie. -_-
Part of this slowness is because the Heartstrikers books have been way more complicated than I anticipated (And longer. Good Lord, those things are bricks), and part of it is because I've been dividing my writing time among too many side projects like this blog. But the great part about constantly analyzing your workflow is that you can see problems like this and fix them, which is exactly what I'm trying to do.
So readers, rejoice! If things go according to plan, you should have not one, but two new Heartstriker novels to read in the next twelve months, finishing out the series in Summer of 2017. Can I pull it off? Well, only Brohomir knows for sure, but it should be very possible. So keep your eyes open for that, and thank you all so so much as always for being my readers. I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to get these books out, but as you see, I'm doing my darnedest to fix the problem, and the waits should be much shorter from here out. 
Finally, a huge thank you to all my Writing Wednesday readers. I'm sorry I couldn't pull it off, but I hope the posts I did get out helped you with your writing. I might be biased, but I think writing fiction is the most noble, worthy, and rewarding of all the arts, and I can't encourage you enough to keep practicing and honing your craft. Even if you never get published, you will still have built a creative skill very few people can boast, and that is a worthy goal in and of itself.
Thank you for reading, and I wish you the best best of luck in all your writing endeavors.
❤s always,Rachel

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Great World Building

Hi folks,

Rachel refused to come out of her writing cave this morning. Something about Dragons, interruptions, and tasty with ketchup. So it looks like I'm going to be doing the blog post today. Mwahahaha! Last week was a business post, so this week I'm going to try to keep it writerly with a post on settings and world building.

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Great World BuildingI've been making my own settings since sixth grade. Not for books, but for the table top RPGs that I run for my friends. Surprisingly to me, this experience has been invaluable when I help Rachel world build for her series. In fact, one of the most crucial contributions I make to Rachel's books have to do with her settings. She's even written a post about my world-building help called My Husband, the World Wrecker. 

(RACHEL NOTE: This is true. All of my settings were either blatantly stolen from or enormously improved by Travis. Also, YOU GUYS, he is the best GM ever! Seriously. I learned so much of what I know about stories from being a player character in his games over these last 14 years. Just goes to show that you really do pick up novel writing skills from everywhere!)
I'm not a writer like Rachel, but this is something I've done a lot both together with her and on my own, so today I want to share with you some of the things I've picked up over my two decades and countless worlds worth of experience into what makes for really good world building. Now, this will be less "how to world build" and more "how I world build", but I hope that you all find this interesting none the less.
Starting Out, the Big Hook
All my best worlds start with a hook. The setting itself needs to have a core component that invokes curiosity, "OMG factor," an exciting twist, has implications, or invokes a sense of irony/dread.
However, I'm not a fan of every type of world hook. I definitely feel like some are better than others. Specifically, I'm a big big believer in the power of,

The contradiction. Aka, the mystery, the thing-that-doesn't-add-up, the glaring exception...

All the coolest settings I know of (including Eli, Devi, and Dragons ^_~) have the contradiction deep within them. Our brains are desperate for order. We instinctively crave for everything to make logical, or at least explainable, sense. When we see something that doesn't make sense, say a broken rule of the universe or society, the urge to know why it doesn't drives us nuts.

In story, just add on the fact that not-knowing might have deadly consequences and you'll get some great baked-in tension.
For example,
A world where everything is a spirit, yet only humans can control spirits, yet there are creatures who are not spirits and who are uniquely able to destroy them. ( Eli Monpress )A world where all dragons are evil, scheming monsters. Yet there is at least one dragon who isn't. ( Heartstrikers )A world where humanity hides in its last city and extinction is inevitable, yet no one (in power) is trying to fix the problem. In fact, they are probably making it worse. ( Attack on Titan )
Hopefully, each one of my examples causes you to automatically jump to "why". That why is the heart of a great world hook. All the various forms the contraction can take, lesser and greater, beg the question of why. Sometimes even "WHYYYYY?!!"

While this approach is really cool, it must come with a warning - the answer to "why?" cannot be bullshit. When you present readers and characters with a huge question mark, usually one that breaks the-rules-as-we-know-them, there has GOT to be a legit, meaningful answer that makes sense. Doing otherwise will break their trust in you and often results in your book being thrown across the room. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ︵ ╯(°□° ╯)

Almost always, the reason for the exception is that the reader just doesn't know all the rules and truths of the world yet. Once those are known, the new rules and old rules need to line up. Preferably in an awesome way that re-frames the plot and everything we've known to be true up to the point of revelation.

Example - An ancient vampire city that no one has been able to enter for 1000 years is now suddenly open. Why is it open now?

Bad answer - a Mary Sue teenage girl charmed her way past the guard by giving him her ipod. Turns out just talking to the vampires is good enough to get in and no one ever thought to try that. Now her friends are coming and going as well. The whole forbidden city has just turned into a mall at this point.

Good answer - due to the strange death of a vampire patriarch, the blood pact that maintained an ancient concealing barrier collapsed long ago. The ruling elite have been doing everything they can to hide this fact from their vassals and peasants for years now. A deadly web of magical illusions, sacrifices, and secret police are keeping the citizens ignorant. Cracks are finally appearing though, and that's how the main character actually got in. Her very presence within the city now represents a clear and present danger to the power of those in charge.

I think you can see the difference...


The Dual Purpose of the Setting HookJust as characters need hooks and your plot needs hooks, the setting really needs a hook as well. This is good novel building, but there's a second goal as well. A good, thorny, contradiction or mystery draws everything towards it.

Not just the readers mind you, but often the plot and the characters will be pulled forward as well. 

Our brains can't stand it when 1+2 = 5 and when we see this sort of thing we immediately have a strong reaction to make it make sense. Characters are people too and, when the-thing-that-doesn't-fit-in constantly affects their lives, the whole cast is driven towards the truth.

Now, if resolving the big mystery of your world isn't the story, that's fine. Orbiting around these suckers is also great. My personal taste though (and Rachel's as well) is to eventually go for the resolution, even if it means breaking reality, fighting gods, or changing the entire fabric of a society.

(Those of you who've read Rachel's novels are probably nodding a lot at how often this happens in her stories. We both love this stuff.)
There's lots more we can say about hooks in general. In fact, Rachel has a round-up post for you called 7 Posts to Help You Use Hooks Better. It neatly lists all her best posts on this topic, so please go check it out.

Let's move on to my next tip,

The One True HistoryThis is the second thing I make for any setting or world I'm going to be working with. It's usually a 1-5 page document that spells out in very straight-forward terms what really, truly happened during the important parts of the world's history.

I consider this document to be the setting's greatest, deepest secret. One that not even all the characters in the setting will know completely.

It's a map of how the world came to its current state. As such, most of what's in there is just a list of who did what and why at the most important junctures. What's important about this document is that it is not the history that the characters know. After I make the true history, I make the mainstream history that everyone believes to be true.

Now, any urban fantasy writer will commiserate with the perpetual difficulties that come from explaining Earth history as it is right now but with magic. That's a simple example of the difference between history as the average citizen is taught versus the true history of "how magic secretly drives all the major events of history but yet only mages know about it".

Any setting can and should use this trick though. What really happened is often lost to time, obscured by those who care or fear, or twisted into lies by those seeking power. No one character should ever have the complete picture until the very end.

In doing things this way, I've found, over and over, that one of the most useful tools in creating good setting tension is to hide the answer to the big contradiction inside the true history. Then, the more popularly known history becomes the characters' basic reality for the beginning of the story. Until they peer into the cracks that is.

Going back to my vampire city example...

The True History
The vampires are actually developing an immunity to the magical plague that makes them vampires, but it takes crazy long for it to develop enough to cure them. The patriarch who died was the oldest vampire ever, but he's been weakening ever since his 1900th birthday. He died due to mortal causes when his body finally overcame the plague.

All the other ancient ruling vampires are his contemporaries and are only a few years away from starting down the same road, but they don't know this yet because...

The death of a vampire patriarch caused the blood pact that maintained an ancient concealing barrier to collapse. The whole city is vulnerable to the outside world and their ancient enemies who are still looking for them.

As such, the council have spent all their time and energy faking that the shield is still up. They've woven complex illusions around the city to help prevent outsiders from stumbling in. They also gathered their most loyal followers into a secret police whose sole job it is to keep the death of the patriarch a secret and to prevent any outsiders from coming in. They are desperate to make sure no one learns that they, the most powerful vampires, are weakening.


The Mainstream History
Humans - what vampire city?

Average Vampire Citizen - Everything is cool and business is as usual. Except for a growing faction of rebels who think that our safe life inside this barrier is bad. They are crazy and dangerous. A special unit of loyal vampires has been formed to deal with them and to prevent their influence from spreading. If you think your neighbor has traitorous thoughts, please report them. The eldest patriarch hasn't been seen for a while b/c he's conducting a century long meditation project on better blood weaving techniques. For the glory of our city of course. Please direct further questions about the patriarch to the aforementioned special unit. Thanks.


I hope everyone can see how the main character(s), who perhaps slips past the secret police and gets into the city, represents a huge problem. In additional to whatever reason was driving the MC to go into such a place in the first place.

It's All About the Layers of Secrets Mmmm...layers...
As you can see, this example is a little simple, has no dates, and is really short. Ah, but it still has lots of lovely layers of secrets, lies, and ignorance. Complete with people violently protecting what they think of as the truth, even when they themselves are lied to or ignorant.

These layers are what I love so much about this method. We have the main characters' contemporary Earth knowledge. Maybe they are a little special given whatever problem has sent them colliding with the vampires. Then they discover a vampire city which shatters their understanding of the world as they and we know it.

In the city, they are in immediate danger and learn the hard way about rebels and secret police. As things get crazy with the vampire police, maybe they get a clue that shows how the official story doesn't add up. Like there are no rebels or the rebels are fake and actually just secret police posing as rebels.

That eventually leads them to investigate the missing patriarch. From there they learn he's dead, but how he died is an even bigger and even more suspicious question!

In ever increasing danger, they seek the cause of his death and the council tries to stop them. Eventually they learn that, SHOCK, the council doesn't know why the guy weakened and died. So they steal his blood and find someone to study it. Maybe the ancient enemies wind up helping.

Discovering the immunity is huge! More sacrifices and battles are had as they create a powerful magical vaccine that can cure any vampire. (Bonus, the vampire love interest we thought could never be now has a potential happy ending if they can survive it all and admit their true feelings for one another.)

We're at the massive conflict point as desperate ancient vampires are now just openly trying to kill the heroes. Everything is on fire, goes to hell, and all bets are off as the vaccine's first use is as a weapon to defeat the otherwise god-like council by stripping them of their powers.

Victory! The rest of the city is cured of the terrible disease and the city can rejoin the wider world. They are no longer trapped, oppressed, and hungry. Yay! More importantly, we learned all the secrets and the "why?" that was originally asked of the reader and characters was answered with panache.

fin

Do you see how the initial setting hook, ancient lost city opens up for no reason, starts the story but also ends it? It's wonderfully circular in a way that keeps the entire story on track, consistent through out, and looks really boss to readers because the author had the whole thing planned the whole time.

It All Comes Together In the EndThe contradiction, the one true history, and all the dangerous layers of guards, idiots, and monsters that lay in between. This sums up my favorite aspects of world building and setting-based plotting.

Now, this is only one method, which can be used to tell a wide variety of tales. It is not for every tale however as it has a particular focus on the status quo and on the powers that be. I mean, I didn't talk about characters once this whole post. Characters might, just might maybe, be my weakness as a story teller.

Still, I do hope that you can take some or all of these elements away with you and benefit from them. At the end of the day, these are more tools for the author's toolbox when crafting stories and books.

If nothing else, I had fun writing this. I can't tell ya'll how much I've wanted to yak about world building here on the blog.

As usual, if there's any topics you'd like me or Rachel to talk about here on the blog, please feel free to leave them below. We're always working hard to find information that is useful to you. You can also just hit me up on Twitter, that works too! (@TravBach) Rachel's social media links are here as well if you want to get live updates! (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+)

Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you all next week!

Sincerely,
-Travis

How to Build Your Newsletter Using List Bait

Hi Folks,

Today I'm going to talk about the Heartstriker short, Mother of the Year. I'm going to go over what it is, why we made it, and why it's available as it is. I'm sure ya'll will find this educational as there's a lot going on here. So far this experiment has been a rousing success, so read on and we'll get into,

What We Did With Mother of the Year and Why
This post started when Tom Sweeney asked,

"My only question (you didn't think i was going to politely leave without a question, did you?) concerns the Mother of the Year gambit.

I know you are not selling it, just making it available for those on your list, and this likely resulted in a LOT of people signing up. I'm just wondering how effective it was for the end game goal, not building a list per se but selling books. I understand your data probably doesn't have enough granularity to determine how many of the new signups went ahead and bought one or more of the Heartstriker series books. You could have each sold lot of MotY copies at $.99, so do you think you came out ahead with enough Heartstriker books sold to cover the loss of revenue had you sold MotY?"

@Tom Thanks! Also, I love questions! Please feel free to ask away.

My reply was a wall of text and I realized that it'd be better as a blog post. So let's talk all about Mother of the Year.


First off, what is Mother of the Year?

MOTY, the short story you can download, is an interview with Besthesda, The Heartstriker about her 5th autobiography titled Mother of Year. It's about 4000 words long and is less of a story and more of a TV show transcript. The work is supplemental to the main series, meaning that you don't need to read it to appreciate Heartstrikers. So while it might make some parts cooler, it's not essential.

It is only available for people who sign up for the new release mailing list. This last bit is the most important part. You cannot buy MOTY. It is list exclusive content.


Why is it list exclusive and not [also] for sale?

To properly answer Tom's question - we needed list bait, wanted list bait, and so MOTY was made specifically to be that. It's exclusivity is a crucial part of its functionality so we're not going to try to sell it. If folks can just buy it, then we've undermined the enticement to sign up.

Besides, we're not in the short story business, so I don't think trying to sell it would be a wise idea. People might think it was a full book if we did that.

That said, it's likely worth more as list bait than as a 99c sale item anyway. The new release mailing list has a very high conversion rate (30% to 40%). MOTY has increased signups from 50-80 per month up to 150-250 per month. It's been, so far, phenomenally successful beyond what I'd hoped for.

Now, I'm sure that some people are only signing up to get MOTY and the list's conversion rate will go down a little because of that. When HS4 comes out, we will send out the release announcement to the list. This is when we'll see the rubber hit the road as concerns the new conversion rate.


Ya'll had better believe that I'll be waiting with analytics. There will definitely be a post about how it all shook out. This won't be until 2017 though as Feb-March is likely the next big release date around here.

The point I want to make is that, I'm pretty sure that this is going to be a very effective means of building the list and it's much better than some other tactics out there. I've seen many authors do things like free kindle raffles where the kindle is also loaded with their books. These giveaways usually require social media follows and list signups for entry. TBH, I've never seen the point of doing this.

I have to wonder about the quality of signups people who do it this way are getting. How many people followed or joined just to get an entry in the raffle? Probably a lot. The whole method has very poor targeting and vetting. Heck, there's an entire culture of free-stuff hunters out there who just scour the web for raffles like these to enter into. Most unfollow or unsubscribe as soon as they get or don't get what they came for.

I've talked about the need to properly qualify your customers before. This philosophy has nothing to do with elitism and everything to do with not wasting people's time or money. The best purchase is by a person who goes on to enjoy reading the book. Anything less is detrimental all around I feel. It's also about building your brand.


Are the people signing up for MOTY also buying Rachel's books?

Hard to say. I'm going to guess that they are almost all people who've already bought and read her books. While this might sound like failure, it's actually fantastic IMO. We want legit fans on the list, not random people who don't know or care about Rachel's books.

MOTY was carefully chosen. It's a piece of fiction that mostly only interests people who've already read NDFL and beyond, since it relies on the reader having some series knowledge. In terms of vetting sign ups, it's very strong. Yet, it's still giving that crucial incentive for people to make the effort to sign up. We all cringe a little when we add ourselves to yet another email newsletter. So it takes push and pull to get folks over that hump.

But, about selling books. The premise of Tom's question is spot on. Why not sell it? How does MOTY earn money? Let's be straight, if it wasn't going to earn money, it might not have been written. Again, we're not in the short story business. 99% of Rachel's fiction goes into novel form for a reason.

That's all OK though, because it absolutely will sell books and it's probably going to sell a lot more than it looks.

Let's go back to the numbers

Old sign up rate for the list was about 50-80 per month. We had roughly 800 actual sign ups from May 2015 to June 2016. By comparison, we've had 700 in the last 75 days.



Now, I'll admit that we're riding high. It's launch summer. There was an Audible Daily Deal. Nice Dragons and One Good Dragon were both in the Amazon Big Deal for August. We've been running huge amounts of advertising. Really, we could not be driving more traffic right now without a truly outlier event occurring. It's been an amazing summer!

Still, I'm watching the click events and conversions in relation to sales. What I see gives me confidence that we're going to enjoy a permanent increase in monthly sign ups to the newsletter.  This paints a pretty rosy picture.

estimated newsletter sign ups
Here's my guess at what the list will look like next spring (2017). This makes me super excited! The list is really good at sales. See, about 30% of the people on the list will go buy the next book when it's release time. This percentage is based on the sales spike that always occurs the day the list email goes out. So I'm both under counting (people opening the email or acting on it later) and over counting (people who were going to buy anyway). This is very empirical, but it's been working so far.

So, just looking at how many books MOTY's extra sign ups might buy, we should get around 168 to 285 additional sales of Heartstrikers #4. Which, I might add, are going to be for a $4.99 book. That's the equivalent of 1700 to 3000 unit sales of a $0.99 MOTY release.

That's perhaps not the most compelling comparison though. I mean, do we think that MOTY might sell more than 1700 to 3000 copies on its own if put up on Amazon? Yeah, I'd say so. It could do that in its first year out for sure.

To put this in perspective, we're roughly 'paying' (in lost revenue) about $2-$4 per customer. Which is incredible. AMS is about $20/customer, Bookbub is about $4, and Google is, well, don't ask... We don't use Google Ad Words anymore ~_~

But what about when we get to the final Heartstrikers Book? The list might look like this then,


30% sales on nearly 2000 additional signups comes to 336 to 571 additional copies. Which is equivalent to 3500 to 6000 unit sales at 99c. Which I'm not so sure we'd achieve on something as small and not-a-novel as MOTY.

But then there's book 1 of the next Rachel Aaron series. Then book 2 and 3 and ... of that series. The overall contribution to list growth isn't just +sales on HS4 and +sales on HS5, it's also +sales to each of the books in the next series and the next...

I hope you can see how this really really adds up long-term. This return is very much like an investment. A bunch of 99c sales can't hope to match this, especially since they likely won't be bringing in new readers.

This is why every author needs to have a newsletter. 

Now, MOTY will lose effectiveness as a growth tool over time of course. This will be especially true during the next series when new fans haven't yet read Heartstrikers and don't care about MOTY yet. The list also suffers from general attrition over time as well, so these numbers are not as perfectly rosy as I'm making out. This is a decent enough picture though I feel as Rachel's list's attrition is so far very slight.

Depreciation is a fact of life, but that's OK. We're already in agreement that Rachel will make another list bait when the time comes. One that's based on the next series. That way new fans will have continued and relevant incentive to sign up and we can maintain the higher monthly growth.

If we stay devoted to making the list valuable to readers, not wasting their time with it, and courting people who would legit enjoy being on such a list.. I hope to keep that high conversion rate. Also, I can live with myself haha. We don't want any shameful marketing around here.

Two Birds With One StoneLastly, MOTY was released at a time when it could also help wet people's appetites for the release of No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished . We did this by dropping it during the No Good Dragon 70-day pre-order window. It was yet another way of creating buzz for the book release in a way that was interesting for readers. Something more than, "hey guys, book coming out! Pre-Order!"

We did a lot more promotion than just MOTY this summer and, once September is over and I have full data, I'll be making a post all about what we tried, what worked, how well it worked, and what didn't work. It's going to be awesomely informative so stay tuned.

but that's enough about Mother of the Year...

What Makes Good List BaitTo push this metaphor completely to its end, you need to bait your hook for the fish you want to catch. 
Confession: I know nothing about actual fishingRachel's new release newsletter is only sent out a few times per year. This is because it's defined by new content, which means she only mails out when there's something new for fans to read (or a new format). 
Some authors have a regular newsletter instead. I've even heard of weekly ones even. The newsletter is basically a blog at that frequency. Both ways and all the ways in between are fine, depending on what you want to achieve.
I feel that good list bait is exclusive. If you are going to the trouble of creating it, don't dilute its potential by making it available somewhere else too. People who really want it are going to have to sign up.
Don't make people sad if they can't get it. Some folks have strong opinions about newsletter signups and simply will not go no matter what you offer. Others will simply miss that there is a list entirely. I mean, NDFL has 40k+ sales and Rachel's list is not 40k people despite the fact that every reader is asked to join at the end of every one of her Heartstrikers books. 
From my personal experience, I cannot tell you how pissed off I am (still) that Blizzard put essential world events for World of Warcraft inside books, not the game, and I missed them. Stuff happened in the game based on these novels and I was so confused. Then I found out there were books that had setup these hugely important events. So angry! (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ (I haven't read the Warcraft novels out of spiteful anger to this day)
We made sure that MOTY was non-essential for the enjoyment of the series because the vast majority of fans will never know about it and shouldn't have to know about it. We're not forcing people to join the list.
It needs to add value to list membership. This is in line with the "don't waste people's time" rule and it's two-fold. Will people who join via the list bait derive value from being on your list as well as from the list bait? You need to get these two angles to line up as that's how you keep people on the list long term.

This is why, "Join the list for a chance to win a $50 gift card" is a bad idea. One person will get value from the list bait (the winner) and everyone else will just be on some list they probably don't care that much about (0 value). A list that's just adding one more regular email into their packed inboxes (negative value). Only a small percentage of people from raffles will stay around after the giveaway is over and those who do stay probably just forgot to unsubscribe (0 value to you). It's a waste of time all around. Well, all except the person who won the prize.

As I mentioned above, MOTY is most appealing to existing readers. Folks who probably would also love to be reminded when the next Rachel Aaron book comes out. Value in and value onward.

Wrapping UpThanks again Tom for the great question!

Anyway, next Wednesday's post will be Rachel on writing. We're going to be stick to alternating who does the Wednesday post. It really is better for us. A lot more work is getting done now! ^_^

If there's any topics you'd like me or Rachel to talk about here on the blog, please feel free to leave them below. We're always working hard to find information that is useful to you. You can also just hit me up on Twitter, that works too! (@TravBach) Rachel's social media links are here as well if you want to get live updates! (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+)

Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you all next week!
Sincerely,-Travis

Writing Wednesday: Creating Settings Readers Can't Forget (And You Can't Mess Up)

What ho, loyal readers! Rachel back again from the word mines where I have been slaving under dragons (very nice ones, but dragons nonetheless) to talk about...settings!

{Insert Cool Stuff Here}Settings are one of those writing necessities that too often gets overlooked. If you've done any writing research, you've already read dozens of articles about crafting characters and worldbuilding and plotting. But while these elements are all very important, surprisingly little ink, digital or otherwise, is spent on how to craft and imagine the actual physical space your characters, world, and plot inhabit.

This is especially weird when you consider how important set design is to other story telling mediums. Theatre, movies, television, and video games all have professionals who've made careers out of set design. Likewise, comics--both American and manga--spend an enormous amount of time on backgrounds.

In all of these, what the space where the action takes place looks (and sounds) like is clearly a huge part of the experience of the story. So why do we as authors, who have the entire reader imagination at our disposal, who spend months to years perfecting our characters and plots, so often delegate our setting to cliches like "dark forest" or "big stone castle"?

The obvious answer here is that, unlike all the things I mentioned above, writing is not a visual medium. Other than our covers and the very occasional illustrated edition, we don't deal in pictures. Quite the opposite. Saying accurately what something looks like is one of the hardest things to do in writing. "A picture is worth 1000 words" can be a literal statement when you're writing a book, and who wants to waste that kind of narrative space on what's basically a long, info-dumpy description? No one, which is why one of the most common pieces of writing advice I see in Fantasy circles is "don't stop to describe the scenery."

Make no mistake, this is good advice! We've all read (and most likely put down) books that stop the action completely to spend 5 paragraphs describing a castle on a bluff or the crowds in a city market. These are both setting-establishing elements that a movie director could establish in one camera pan, but would take us writers pages of tension-breaking description text to achieve the same effect, which is why you don't see them much in good fiction. They simply take way too long to do.

At the same time, though, creating an interesting, memorable, atmospheric world is a huge part of writing memorable fiction, especially in genre. However interesting your characters, plot, and world are, if you set them in a very generic Fantasy setting that relies on cliches to fill in your backgrounds, you are setting yourself up to be at least partially forgettable.

So how do you strike a balance? How do you create and then describe a setting that's unique enough to be memorable without spending a thousand extra words and killing your tension in the process?

It's a tricky balance, but there are definitely a few best practices I've learned over the years to make it easier. So, without further ado, let's talk about...

Writing Wednesday: Creating Settings Readers Can't Forget (And You Can't Mess Up)
"Sci-fi City" by JadrienC on DeviantArtUnless you have a very strong image of a place or scene in your head already (or you're actively writing one right now), chances are you haven't given much thought to your settings yet. To be clear, I'm not talking about World Building. I've gone over that whole other kettle of fish in detail already. This post is all about actual, physical location. The places where your characters live and your action takes place.

If we were working on movies or video games or any of the visual mediums, we would call this set design, and it would be a huge freaking deal. How many movies have you watched where just looking at the set was enough to create strong expectations of what was coming before any characters spoke or any plot had been laid down?

Hobbiton, I'm looking at you.Oh yeah, that's powerful mojo. Of course, we writers don't have these visual elements to work with, but that's no excuse not to have creative and interesting locations. We are still storytellers and entertainers. It is our job to be as interesting as possible, and creating really cool settings is a huge part of that, so let's talk about how to do it.

The Foolproof Guide to Settings #1: Matching Your Emotions
Going back to my all time favorite example-I-can-reasonably-assume-everyone's-seen, let's take a look at the Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars: A New Hope.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.This is a perfect example of setting fitting emotion. In this scene, Ben Kenobi and Luke are looking for a smuggler in a bar to get them off planet. It's a dangerous, tense scene that needs to feel sleazy and exciting, like you're doing something illegal, which of course the characters are. Consequently, the set design reflects this, giving us a smokey alien bar full of unsavory characters. Truly, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. At the same time, though, there's a levity to the Mos Eisley cantina, a feeling of dangerous fun enhanced by the band and the fact that, while half of the unnamed alien characters we see are brooding, just as many are laughing and drinking and having a good time. It's dark, but the bar is well lit and cheery, and the earth tone colors are warm and inviting, especially in contrast to the stark, clinical black and white of the Empire.

All of these setting details--the colors, the smoke, what people in the background are doing--work together to create a setting that feels not just real, but completely appropriate to the action taking place within it. This is exactly the sort of raucous, dirty, dangerous alien dive bar you'd expect Han Solo to be hanging out in...even before you know who Han Solo is. Further more, the setting is perfectly matched to the emotions of the scene. It feels dangerous and exciting, but in a very earthy, human, personal way, all of which matches the dangerous and exciting, but still very human tension of the meeting Han Solo, who's fresh off killing someone who screwed him over, and the result is one of the most iconic scenes in modern fiction.
This harmonization of the emotions of setting and action is the very first thing I shoot for when I try to imagine my setting. Obviously, most of your big setting decisions will be made by your plot. If your characters get thrown in prison, guess what! Your setting is a prison. But what kind of prison is up to you to decide. There's a huge difference between being locked in a sterile cell and being thrown into a slimy oubliette filled with bones.
Hoggle: Oh don't act so smart. You don't even know what an oubliette is.
Sarah: Do you?
Hoggle: Yes. It's a place you put people... to forget about 'em!
These are the choices that are up to you as an author. But while it might be tempting to simply not bother wasting words describing the details of a prison you're never planning to come back to, these details are, in fact, hugely important to the emotional tone of the scene. Prisons are usually places of despair, anxiety, and fear, but each of those emotions can take on infinite variety of forms. The trick is to choose the flavor that complements and plays off the emotions of the characters and actions.
For example, if you have a character who is thrown into prison to be forgotten and they feel they deserve to be forgotten, don't just put them in a generic dark cell. Lock them in a hole. Put them at the back of a long hallway where not even the memory of sunlight can reach. Fill the bottom of the cell with cold bone dust. Have the guards have to come down a set of very inconvenient stars to bring them food, and then have them not bother. Fill the corners with webs even the spiders have forgotten about. Use the setting to reflect your reasons for putting that character in prison to begin with, and with a few lines of description, you will have an incredibly creative, memorable scene that enhances the emotions of the story into something that feels cinematic without a single picture.
But Rachel, how do I come up with all that stuff?! I'm not, um, visually inclined...If you have a tough time visualizing your settings, you are most definitely NOT alone. I'm not visual at all, and I constantly have to remind myself to describe what things look like. But while characters are usually pretty easy (height, eye color, hair, clothing, skin, noticeable scars, standout features, etc.), describing settings can get...let's say onerous at times. I just don't care about the architecture of castles or what kind of trees might be in a forest. I care about the action! 
But while the action of a scene is definitely more important than what kind of trees are in the background, the background is still important. Even if writers don't know all the details, we generally have some kind of vague idea of what stuff looks like. The reader, by contrast, has nothing. They know only what we tell them, and if we don't describe a setting, they have nothing to work with. And if they have nothing to work with, it's very very easy for them to get lost in the action, and a lost reader is very soon a lost reader, as in someone who doesn't finish your book.
Thankfully, this is a very easy problem to avoid, which brings us to...
The Foolproof Guide to Settings #2: Painting a Simple, but Evocative, Picture "Within the Forest" by Qinni on Deviant Art - beautiful, simple, powerful
As we've already covered, there's only so much information you can get out about a setting without stopping the action to do an info dump description (NEVER GOOD). To combat this, I've learned to keep my descriptions simple and functional. You want your readers to have a clear image of where characters are and what the world looks like without describing every leaf and stick on the ground. At the same time, though, you still want your setting to be unique and, as we talked about above, emotionally matched to the scene.
To achieve all of this in as few words as possible, I generally focus on describing four things: spatial location, tactile experience, emotional experience, and cool factor.
Spatial location is the who, how, and where. It describes where characters and important items are in relation to each other. For example, if I have two people talking on a cliff, I will take time to describe how they're standing (face to face w/ the cliff in the background, both looking out over the cliff, standing with their backs to the cliff, etc.) and where (right on the edge, back a safe distance, and so forth). 
These sort of practical descriptions can be done very quickly, but they must be done and done clearly because these are the words that tell reader where to position characters when they visualize the scene in their head. 
Marci and Julius stood side by side at the edge of the cliff.
If there's not a lot of action in the scene, you can get away with being vague. But if positioning is important (someone's going to get stabbed, a character is moving into position to steal something, etc.) then expect to spend more words on it. That said, you don't have to be fancy with this stuff. In fact, it's better if spatial location descriptions are brief and very clear, It's like stage blocking. You want your reader to know where people are without noticing that you're telling them. The characters should just move naturally through the scene to where they need to be without breaking the narrative tension by making huge deal about it. 
Personally, I like to do this while showing emotion through movement. My characters stomp angrily across rooms and take terrified steps back toward windows or move in close to whisper while their hands inch toward their swords. This kind of description lets me tell the readers where characters are moving without actually saying "so-and-so moved to this part of the room." They're just moving as they naturally would in this situation. 
Remember: no one in fiction moves for no reason. If someone's getting closer to another character, they have a reason to do so. If you show that reasoning in their thoughts or description, then you'll always have something interesting to hide the boring details of your character blocking/spatial location descriptions behind.

Tactile experience is the physical reality of a setting--what characters are seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and so forth. When writing books talk about describing a setting, this is usually what they're referring to, which is ironic because I think physicality is actually one of the easiest and least important bits of information readers need to experience a scene in their heads.
The key here is to focus on info filling rather than info dumping. You never want to stop the action and go down a senses checklist. Instead, have your character experience the tactile reality of the setting as they move through it. For example 
Marci and Julius stood side by side at the edge of the sea cliff, their shoulders hunched against the cold, salty spray that blasted up from the crashing waves below.
There's a lot of description here, but it is all shown through the lens of the characters, which makes it interesting. No one cares about sea spray by itself, but when it hits people, it becomes interesting. Because of this, I always tie my tactile experience descriptions to characters. If a room is cold, I don't say "the room was cold," I have someone shiver because the room is cold. This is why I call this step "tactile experience." Because it is the experience, not the thing itself, that makes the detail interesting and important.
(On a side note, this is also why weather report openings are almost universally decried as a Bad Idea. Even the most dramatic weather is only mildly interesting unless it's happening over someone's head. A giant snow storm can keep my attention for a sentence or so, but a giant snow storm bearing down on a frantic character trying desperately to escape it is an entire novel.)

Emotional experience works hand in hand with tactile experience, but where tactile focuses on the physical feel of things, emotional experience is all about the other sort of feels. 
Every scene in good fiction has an emotion it evokes, and as we mentioned at the top, the emotional experience of the setting should resonate with that. You can do this directly (a lonely person standing forlorn on a street corner in the cold, dark rain) or ironically (a lonely person standing forlorn in the bright sun in the middle of a busy festival), but the connection needs to be clear. Otherwise, the setting will add nothing, or worse, detract from the emotional drama going down inside it.
But it's not always easy to figure out how a setting feels, or how to describe that emotion once you do pin it down. Personally, my trick is to steal from the visual arts and lean on colors and light to convey emotion.
Marci and Julius stood side by side at the edge of the cliff, staring out at the point where the dark gray water met the even darker sky.
See how lonely, cold, and dreadful that feels? We have no context for why these two characters are on a cliff, but just thorough the use of color and lighting in the setting description, I've made things feel oppressively bleak.
You can do this same trick with every sense, not just color and light. For example...
Marci and Julius stood side by side at the edge of the cliff, letting the warm sea wind blow between hands that were almost, but not quite, close enough to touch.
Isn't that sweet?! And all of it done by warm air and physical closeness. This is an example of how spatial location and tactile experience all contribute to emotion. You want the place itself to have a feel that is separate, but complementary, the emotions of the characters moving through it AND appropriate to its location in the story.
That last bit is super important. Whatever else is going on, if you're going to have a doom fortress, it should feel dreadful, even when it's the setting of a happy reunion. You can fudge this, though. Having the sun break through the normally oppressive dark clouds is a classic trick to temporarily change the mood of a setting to match the action. But these kind of heavy handed stage tricks should be used sparing since they can get really cheesy really quick.

The final element of crafting a really good setting is cool factor. You can have a perfectly functional setting if you have good spatial location, tactical experience, and emotional experience, but you won't have something that's really memorable unless you use your imagination to come up with something that makes your dark forest/dungeon/space ship/whatever cool and unique. 
Fantasy is full of  magical forests. And then there's Nausicaa's forest, whose every setting is beautiful, magical, and incredibly unique.I spend a lot of time thinking about this, and for me, the real secret to a good cool factor is surprise. You never want to use the first thing that pops into your head because chances are it's the first thing that pops into everyone's head, which makes it expected. Instead, try to think of a setting that your readers won't expect. For example...
Marci and Julius stood side by side at the edge of the cliff, staring down at the fathomless dark until the blackness itself began to move and twist like it was turning to stare back.
Wow, that went sideways, didn't it?! 
Now, obviously you can't pull this kind of stunt willy nilly. Sometimes a sea cliff is just a sea cliff, but you get the idea. Whenever you're planning your setting, the key to making it cool is to subvert, overreach, or otherwise avoid the expected. There are thousands of Fantasy prisons, what makes yours unique and cool? What makes your dark forest different? Why is your space port uniquely memorable over all the hundreds of ports I've read about as a SciFi fan?
These are not easy questions to answer. There's no trick here, not shortcut to being creative. You just have to think about it and use your unique vision as a creator to come up with something awesome. That said, just the fact that you are taking the time to think about these things for your setting--that you're not just being lazy and making due with "dark forest" or "dank alley"--will oftentimes automatically put your book ahead of the test.
By Our Powers Combined...

I know all of this feels like a lot to do for every single setting, but it really isn't. All of these thousands of words are just a fancy way of saying that the picture you paint in your readers' minds needs to be both practically useful--telling them where people are and what things feel like--and emotionally moving--having its own feeling appropriate to the scene and its own "oh wow" element that makes it memorable. 
Just like a movie director has to plan her color pallet, actor blocking, and set design that will make her scene work, you as a writer have to carefully craft every element of your reader's experience, because without pictures, that experience is entirely in your hands. If you don't do this, if you're not careful and meticulous in constructing the setting your scenes play out in, your book will come off as amateur threatre rather than a big Hollywood production, and that's not what you want. You want your book to suck people in, to envelope them in an experience they'll never forget (and will tell other people about), and the only way to get that is to give it to them. 
One of my favorite sayings is that writers are gods in their own books, and nowhere is this more true than in setting creation. We are literally waving our fingers and creating new places, and that kind of power requires thought, consideration, and responsibility. So if you're writing a book, or thinking about it, take a moment and make sure you're not being lazy with your settings. Don't over describe, but don't rely on stereotype to do your work for you, either.  Instead, focus on how a good setting with proper emotional resonance can elevate your scenes into something greater than the sum of their parts. 
If you're a visual person, try to picture your settings in your head like you're watching a movie before you jump into writing the scene. 
If you're NOT a visual person (as I am not), then you might have to build yourself some tools to help you imagine your setting. For reference, here are the ones I use.
Rachel's Setting Creation Cheat SheetUse questions to figure out the basics. Every setting you need is going to have some kind of context from the plot (a battlefield, a prison, etc). If you have no idea where to start, take this known context and start asking questions. Is this setting outside? If so, what's the weather like? If it's inside, is it in a building? What kind of building? What was this place originally intended for? Who moves through it? Is it cold? Hot? Is it generally pleasant to be in, or is it harsh? Even if you're terrible at visualizing, thinking up and answering these questions will often give you the details you need to create a unique and realistic feeling location without having to imagine it out of whole cloth (something I find very hard to do. Give me a blank slate and I go blank, but ask me questions and I'll answer them all day!)Search for visual inspiration online. A picture really is worth 1000 words. When I'm feeling uninspired, I'll go browse concept art on ConceptArt.org or DeviantArt. It's really hard to find art of my exact setting, so I look for pictures that match the feeling I'm going for rather than any specific details. Once I find an image that speaks to me, I grab my favorite parts and start working them into my own setting.Draw a blocking map. If you have a complicated scene that requires a lot of movement or if you're having a really hard time keeping track of where characters are in your head, a map is a huge help. It doesn't have to be fancy, I use dots and stick figures. You just need something to keep track of how characters move around and where things are in a scene. This will keep you from having people teleport or do impossible things like reaching across 20 foot long rooms to grab something.Use senses to spice up lackluster locations. If I have a dull setting and I can't think of any other way to make it not dull (for example, characters are having a clandestine meeting in a hallway. How do you make a hallway cool and interesting?!), I focus on my senses. I will describe the thickness of the carpet or the softness of the light, whatever it takes to make the scene feel real and immediate without having to describe the blank walls or closed doors more than the once it takes to establish that we are in a hallway. Obviously, you don't want to do this too much--the action and dialogue in a scene like this is always WAY more interesting than the setting--but you do want to keep working subtle hints in to keep the scene as an image in the reader's mind rather than two talking heads.These are by no means the only tricks, but you get the idea. Not being a visual person is no excuse for cheating your readers out of extraordinary settings. You just have to be more creative with your methods than writers who can picture everything clearly in their heads, and that's okay. All writers have their strengths and weaknesses. The winners are the ones who learn to work around their shortfalls to deliver a great, inventive story on all levels, even the ones they're not naturally talented in.
And with that, we come to the end. Thank you so much for reading my post! I hope you found it useful, or at least enjoyable. As Trav mentioned last week, we're moving to a one post a week format so I can catch up on writing work (oh god, there's so much). But have no fear! Rachel's giant walls'o'writing advice will continue. I'll be back in two weeks with another. Until then, enjoy the business post Trav's putting together and feel free to read the enormous backlog of writing posts. 
Thank you as always for reading, and I wish you happy writing!
Yours,Rachel

Book Marketing Tactics Round-Up

Hi Folks,

I'm sure you are wondering what I'm doing here on a Wednesday post instead of Rachel. Well, after last week's blogging ate three of Rachel's mornings, we have come to the long-building conclusion that we're both blogging too much. Books aren't getting written and that means Things-Have-To-Change(TM) around here.

We're still going to update everywhere Wednesday with new advice and helpful posts, but Rachel and I will be alternating who's up each week.

Anyway, there's been a lot of requests for marketing posts and, as I'm always asking for post requests, I'm going to try my best. Marketing is a HUGE topic ya'll. People get degrees and spend lifetimes perfecting it as a skill. In a way, we're always talking about marketing here in some form or another.

Since "marketing books" is too big a topic, I'm instead going to list and talk about every single book marketing tactic that I know of. It's going to be a,

Book Marketing Tactics Round-UpWe all need some practical, effective, actionable information to sell books with. While there's loads of abstract marketing strategy we need to talk about, books still need to sell and we all have work to do. SO, let's focus on the pragmatic stuff today and I'll have more abstract strategy talk for ya'll on another day.
What, specifically, can you do to market a book?I'm going to try to list things in the order of power/importance they will have on your book's sales.
0. Write a good book, write another good bookYou knew I was going to say this right? ^_~ Having a good story, well-told is the foundation. 
Marketing will just make a bad product fail faster, but a good book will enjoy word-of-mouth recommendations which are still one of the strongest and best form of marketing around. A really good book will have opportunities beating their way to it. (Kindle Big Deals aren't offered to bad books. Awards sell books too. Etc)
Launching new books is the second best thing an author can do marketing wise. Nothing sells books like selling new books. So yeah, primo marketing advice is to write, write well, write better, and keep writing.

1. Title, Cover, Blurb, First pageWe've talked about this a lot. These are what get customers to click, to sample, to buy, and to read. I cannot emphasize their importance enough as fundamentally powerful marketing tools.
If your book isn't selling well, but has good reviews, then maybe you should consider changing these elements around. Check out my post on relaunches and rebranding for more.

2. Back Matter and Front MatterThe front and back of your books are powerful tools, but limited. There's not a lot of space here to work with. Here's what Rachel and I consider to be sorta minimum best practices right now.
For front matter,have as little as possible, get people to the story asap.include your blurb. Kindles don't show the blurb. People will often add or buy your book and then read it months later. You want to remind them, then, why they were excited enough to buy it. Remember, it's not about sales, it's about earning readers. (and retention rates!)For back matter,thank the reader ^_^ ask them to leave a review . This one trick will double, triple, or even quadruple the number of reviews you get.ask them to join the newsletterhook them on your next book (if you have a next book, or a pre-order if you have one of those)

3. Reviews
Good reviews sell books and build careers. Endorsements and recommendations are the primordial forces of marketing after all. Items #0,1,2,3 in this list will help you get reviews on websites that sell books. Beyond that though, it's worth the time to court reviewer sites, bloggers, and such.

Reviewers lend their own reach, voice, and authenticity to a book's online profile. They help provide links, google search results, and direct traffic/sales.

It takes time to build good relationships with reviewers, but it's worth it. You literally cannot buy this kind of press. When going for reviewers, here's a few guidelines,
Don't be pushy or obnoxiousMake things easy for them (provide many formats, media packet, timely responses, etc)Don't attempt to influence the review, not even slightlyDon't give them crap if the review isn't as good as you wantedHonor their efforts with your own links and press for their review site/account/page/blog...Know that, when you ask someone for a review, you are committing to whatever they put up. If they don't like your book and say so online, too bad. You don't have to link to their bad review and you don't ever have to send them another book again. Silence is the most and best you can do with a bad review. 
While having a good book is important, you also want to court reviewers who you think would genuinely like it. Not only will they be more likely to say yes to reviewing the book at all, but you'll stand a better chance of getting a good review. Lastly, it's rude to waste people's time. So don't send books at reviewers just cause they have a large audience.

Ideally, reviewers are also your fans.

4. WebsiteBelieve it or not, the author website is pretty good at selling books. Especially when you have a blog or other content marketing paired with it to draw traffic. Rachelaaron.net + Pretentious Title have sent a total of 5000 people to Rachel's Amazon.com book buy pages over the last year. Going by our affiliates data, that's about 2000 book sales in total. That's not chump change.
At the end of the day though, the author website is part of the marketing foundation. It's not just for people finding you and your books online, but it's also a crucial tool for many other aspects of online marketing. 
I've an entire post about all the features a good author website brings to the table. Please check it out.

5. Author NewsletterAre you gathering your readers into your own private newsletter? If no, then get started. This is a very powerful marketing tool that allows you to cheaply and effectively market directly to readers. It's so essential that I'm sure you've all heard a lot about how you have to have one these days. 
There's a lot of different formats for these things. Some people use them like a blog, emailing the list with content every week/month. Others, like Rachel, only use it for big announcements. Both ways are fine, but there's a golden rule you need to know about newsletters.

Don't waste people's time.

Remember, this is email. If people click to open, that's already a big leap of trust on their behalf. If you then waste their time... BAM! Unsubscribed. You need to grow this list, which means that your every message needs to be valuable / entertaining enough for people to (a) open and (b) stay subscribed.
We use mailchimp.com for Rachel's new release mailing list, but there's lots of good free and paid offerings out there. I should do a post on these, it's a huge topic. For now, make sure you get one that comes with (as an option for later if nothing else) automation options. You'll want things like welcome letters and such as your list grows and you desire stronger features.

Tips for growing your list,

Ask. You have to tell people about it! You have to ask them! Almost no one will sign up if you don't ask. As I said above, asking at the back of the book works super well.Don't waste people's time. This is important enough to say again. Ask yourself, "is this wasting their time?" every time you send out an email to your list.List bait works awesomely. I'll have more data on this later, but the #1 thing we've done this year to increase newsletter signups has been the Mother of the Year reward for membership/signup. It's more than doubled the monthly growth rate (so far).Team up. Other authors often team up to collectively email using their combined lists. This is a powerful tactic that can get a lot of new customers and also new sign ups. 

6. Bookbub and Email Marketing ServicesNewsletter marketing is strong stuff marketing wise. It's no wonder then that there are tons of email marketing services out there that you can pay to use. You'll probably never have a 2 million person email list, but Bookbub will send you out to theirs for a couple hundred bucks.



Anyway, you all probably know about Bookbub.com so there's no introduction needed there. Getting your book featured on Bookbub as often as possible is a great strategy. It's tougher every day though and it's also expensive. (Totally worth the cost IMO)
If you'd like some alternatives, check out my NDFL Mega Fall Promotion post. I've tried and listed a lot of smaller email marketing services there. They might sell hundreds, or merely dozens, of books, but they are easier, cheaper, and efficient. That was by no means an conclusive list though (I didn't try the Fussy Librarian or Kindle Nation Daily). You should definitely search for more.
These services are all very useful in getting actual sales for you and helping you build momentum on your career and series.

7. Author Team UpsWe've never done a boxed set of books, and Rachel doesn't team up with folks often, so I don't speak from a lot of experience here. Teaming up with other authors to run signings, hangouts, promotions, newsletters, write books and publish boxed sets is a powerful tactic. I've heard no end of success stories about these methods so I would be remiss in not mentioning them.
Romance rocks the team ups!Business-wise it makes sense to me. Why reach 1000 newsletter subscribers when you can team up and suddenly reach 10,000? Getting 5 authors together can make for a pretty big hang out audience. A good multi-author promotion can work wonders through your combined reach and appeal.
How to get in on these things? I'd start by cruising kboards.com, but often times you need to network with other, similar to yourself, authors. If you are particularly gung-ho about these, go make one happen. Authors are all pretty easy to contact what with everyone being publicly on social media and such. Most are eager for promotion opportunities as well.

Don't know who to contact? Why not start with authors who show up in your Amazon.com also-boughts? You know you've got something in common.

8. Appearances
Any sort of guest post, interview, podcast, video event, signing, blog tour, and so on. Appearing in a place other than your own blog and social media. These sorts of events are very handy in that they leverage someone else's audience. Ideally that's an audience that is fresh (hasn't heard of you) and is receptive / appropriate for you to appear in front of.

Rachel's about page is a good example of these kinds of things.



Honestly, this stuff can be a mixed bag of success. Getting featured by someone big can result in a great boost of traffic. Medium and small sites will contribute also, but it's easy for these contributions to be invisible to you.

While we generally take an "it all adds up" philosophy here, but the gotcha on appearances is that they take time. Often they take more time that many of the other things I've mentioned above. A written interview, for example, might take a day to fill out.

Appearances are probably one of the most fun types of marketing though. It's not all about coldly calculated ROI after all. Just be careful about letting appearances get in the way of your writing. We see a lot of authors fall prey to that trap.

Note - Conventions kinda fall into this area but not always. Rachel has an entire post about this topic so please check out Writing Wednesday: Are Conventions Worth It?.


9. DistributorsAmazon.com is pretty much a given for all authors, but every store front you can get your book on is technically more eye-balls and more sales. Readers don't overlap between distributors a whole lot, which is good for finding fresh eyes, but it's troublesome because you almost have to build your readership on each sales channel separately. Be prepared to invest time and effort to succeed with any bookseller.
Anyway, the main reason I wanted to bring up distribution as a marketing tactic is because there's various marketing options here beyond just putting your book up on a new bookseller.

For example, Kindle Unlimited. While KU makes you Amazon exclusive, it puts your book into a much smaller pool. This increases exposure and reduces competition. Pay-outs, despite everyone's moaning, are still pretty darned good. Rachel makes more money from KU some months than from regular sales.


Another example would be Kobo. I loved the Kobo panel at RT2016. Mainly because Kobo really wants to work with you, the author with the good book, on promotions. Aside from coordinating launch promos and other sales events, one bit of advice I heard was to apply to be in Kobo's monthly 30% off sale. Applying is easy and authors are encouraged to apply month after month. Getting in that sale brings in a lot of positive exposure and builds readership on Kobo.

I have on good authority that both B&N and the iBookStore both have author promotion teams that you can email from within their portals. Both are looking for launch events and sale events to promote if you give them your time, effort, and book. They, like Amazon, also sometimes do their own big sales events and a working relationship with these promotion teams can help you get in on that stuff.

Pro tip, you are much more likely to succeed with these promotion teams if you make sure to give them enough advanced notice. The number 1 suggestion I heard for getting this kind of help was lead time. A month or two out ideally so that it can be planned and fit into the promotion team's schedule. Last minute requests for launch promo help is often just not possible for them.



Last, but not least, you can use Amazon's KDP count-down deal feature. This places your book on a special count-down deal page and everything. Right by itself that's good for boosted exposure and sales, though I'd recommend you pair such an event with a Bookbub or other, external promotion at the same time to maximize the punch.

There's more of these kinds of interesting options out there than my examples of course. So I'd encourage you to explore. Hopefully though, I've made my point that the booksellers have some great offerings.

Warning - stay away from Google. I'm not mentioning google books here because they can change your books' prices without notice, permission, or warning. This causes a price match on Amazon and other sites. If you have a book on Google, your entire empire is effectively at their mercy. Google decides your book is $0.99 for the month? Well, I hope you didn't want any royalties that month and I hope you didn't have any other sales planned! They don't care if they blow your 60-day Bookbub prerequisite.

We've actually talked to Google reps about this, but got no good answer. .(Google call us with a better one!)

10. Social MediaWow! This is #10! That's almost the bottom of the list. YUP. For all the importance placed on social media, it's terrible at selling books. We've done a lot of experiments with social media here and conversion rates are terrible on every platform we've ever tried. (1000 to 1 or worse!)


IMO social media suffers from a huge case of preaching to the choir.  Most authors only reach people who already know and like them. Now, some folks are really good at getting their marketing message to transmit outside of their own bubbles. If this is you, great. If its not, then social media is going to have a very poor ROI for your efforts.

Facebook is a bit of an exception, in that author pages are a great place to build fandom. Again though, if you don't do it naturally, you will likely be in for a bad time.



11. Paid Ads
You can also just engage in paid advertising. The best marketing is free, but money buys eyeballs from lots of places. Amazon Marketing Services, Goodreads Ads, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter for Business, and so on, are all examples of paid ad distributors that can work for authors.

If you want to try these out,

You need to measure the results

While you need to measure the results of any advertising (time is money friend), measuring these methods is essential. See, really making them work takes R&D. You have to try, experiment, research, learn, and refine. It's gonna take spending some money and eating some losses until you learn how and where to market your stuff.



I'll be open about this, our experiences here have been universally rough. Everything I named above, except Facebook ads which we haven't given a serious try to, has been a loss. I've been doing R&D as I'm advising you and I've been having a terribly unsuccessful time with it.

IMO this isn't because these places don't work. It's because we here have a poor product funnel. Rachel has 11 novels (not counting 2k to 10k) out but the low royalty rates on the 8 NY novels nukes the return on any advertising investment we make.

This'll change as she writes more indie books though. I am very much looking forward to having a completed, 5-book, Heartstrikers series to play with for marketing purposes



12. The Weird Stuff




There's more to marketing books than I've covered here today. This is just a list of popular places and methods that I've encountered. There's endless opportunities out there. I haven't talked about YouTube at all, because I know and hear very little about it (publishing wise). There are guys out there who make power point presentations for free or sale to promote their non-fic platforms and do so very successfully. There's also running a podcast or internet radio show. There's Google groups. There's email courses. There's so so much.


Thank's for readingI hope that, while we weren't talking strategy, I have given you a good list of workable tactics you can pursue to promote your own books. Later this year, I'm hoping to have new and better information for you as we are wrapping up some major experiments this summer. Data is still coming in though so it'll be a bit on that.

We'll have plenty of other business posts in the mean time though, don't worry! Not like there isn't a shortage of things to talk about in this industry.

Anyway, next Wednesday's post will be Rachel on writing. As I said at the top, we're going to be alternating  who does the Wednesday post.

If there's any topics you'd like me or Rachel to talk about here on the blog, please feel free to leave them below. We're always working hard to find information that is useful to you. You can also just hit me up on Twitter, that works too! (@TravBach) Rachel's social media links are here as well if you want to get live updates! (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+)

Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you all next week!
Sincerely,-Travis

Writing Wednesday: Know Thy (Publishing) Self

The other day on Twitter, I posted

So many authors make it out like self pub is the only smart way, but if you don't love business, you're going to have a bad time as an indie.— Rachel Aaron/Bach (@Rachel_Aaron) August 29, 2016

I originally wrote this as the second part of a response to someone replying to Trav's (awesome) business post about the mechanics of a commercially successful series. The commenter in question had mentioned that business posts were basically intimidating, and I absolutely agree. Big pages of numbers and math can be very intimidating if you're unfamiliar with them, but part of self publishing is getting familiar with stuff like this. This is the business part of the self-publishing business, and if you hate it, then maybe self publishing isn't for you, and that's cool. There's tons of other ways to get your book out there! No big deal.

That's all I was trying to stay. I didn't think it was anything special or incendiary, just the facts as I saw them, and yet this tweet got a lot more attention than I expected. At first, I wasn't sure why. It's hardly my most eloquent statement. But then I realized what I saying--that it's okay to choose not to self publish if that's not what works for you--was actually kind of radical in its own weird, publishing politics way.

So (since I didn't have anything else to talk about today) I thought I'd take a look at why that is, and what it means for all of us as individual writers. Onward!

Writing Wednesday: Know Thy (Publishing) Self


If you've spent any time (and I do mean any time) researching your publishing choices on the internet, you've probably seen someone telling you that there is only one smart way to go, and if you choose anything else, you're wasting your writing, your money, and your time. Sometimes this is said very politely with lots of excellent case studies showing exactly why one publishing path is better than the other. Other times you're flat out told you're a moron who's being swindled if you don't do as the author in question suggests.

No matter how it's said, though, there is always an opinion one way or the other. Pretty much every writer you ask, whether they're a multiply published veteran or someone who's only one chapter into their first book, has very definite ideas about which is better: trad or self.

Whenever you have a topic this divisive, there's going to be conflict. Even though most authors (with a few loud exceptions) are extremely polite, reasonable, and eloquent about their thoughts on the subject, picking a side for yourself can still feel like an emotional decision rather than one based in fact. This is especially true if one of your favorite authors is an outspoken supporter of one camp or another. When that happens, choosing anything else can feel like a betrayal. Even if the one choice makes sense for your situation, if someone you respect and like so much is constantly calling what you're considering stupid, it's only natural to think "am I being dumb? Am I actually throwing my writing future away if I do this?"

This is the part of the self pub vs. trad pub debate that I hate the most. Not the discussion--that's very good, very necessary, and a great tool for bringing to light the pros and cons of each path--but the absolute division. The constant refrain--sometimes boldly shouted, sometimes tacitly implied--that the other side isn't just wrong, they're dangerously, career wreckingly wrong. That if you sign with a traditional publisher, they'll hit you with an abusive contract to take all your money and keep your rights forever. Or if you self publish your first novel and it flops, no traditional publisher will ever look at you again.

To be clear, this isn't fear mongering. Both of the examples above can and do happen, but they're also both worst case scenarios, and that's what makes the question of what you should do with your novel so difficult. Because the truth is that both trad and self publishing have horrible pitfalls and incredible heights. Neither of them is easy and nothing is guaranteed. So how do you know which is right for you?

This is the point where pretty much every respectable publishing advice blog will say some version of "the right choice depends on you and what you want from your career." I've actually said that exact thing in my own post about self publishing and money. But what does that actually mean? If you've never published a book and never had a publishing contract and never worked with a publishing house, how do you know what's actually right for you? After all, whatever you choose, you're going to be locked into that decision for that title for years, maybe even forever.

That's not a choice to be made lightly! But while there are plenty of blogs that talk about the practical differences between the two (including mine! Click here for my Authors & Money posts on trad vs self), in my experience, the real difference between the two isn't actually in the business, but in what each one expects from you, the author.

That's what this blog post is really about. Every publishing blog under the sun (again, including this one) has posts about the practical, business differences between trad and self like royalty rates, contracts, marketing, and so forth. But while all that stuff is really important, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how great the numbers are if you, the author, are unhappy with your choice. You could succeed beyond your wildest dreams in either self publishing or trad, but if that path's version of success doesn't match yours, then it doesn't matter.

In the end, this isn't a really choice of which publishing road is better. It's about which one is better for YOU, and the only way to figure that out is to figure yourself out.

Again, no small feat! "Know thyself" is a life long journey. But as someone who's seen the ups and downs of both the self pub and traditional publishing paths, maybe I can help put this old, bitterly contested question into a more personal light.

Your Best Heaven, Your Worst Hell, and All the Work In Between.
The Best of TimesAs Travis wrote in his amazing post about author career planning, the most necessary step for any successful career is to actually figure out what counts as success to you. The best example I have of this is the old "money vs. fame" choice.

If you've always dreamed of being a famous author who appears on television and does international book tours, then making millions of dollars off your self pub series while never becoming a household name probably won't make you as happy as it would the author whose always dreamed of being rich. Similarly, the shy author who hits the NYT thanks to a great book and a massive push from their big publisher might not enjoy their sudden rocket to fame. They may have just wanted to be left alone to write their books, not deal with all these people! But if they also don't want to be rude to their fans or squander their chance. Panic!

These are classic examples of success mismatch. Both of these hypothetical authors--the millionaire indie and the NYT Bestselling trad author--have what can be objectively termed wild success, and yet they still don't feel successful because they didn't hit what counted as success to them. This isn't to say they're unhappy or ungrateful. I think any author who achieved either of the above would be very aware of how awesome that is, but it still isn't what they really wanted.

This is why determining what counts as success for you is so important. If you're going to be working as hard as it takes to become a successful author, then you need to know where you're aiming in advance so you can work toward that.

Do you want to be rich? When you day dream about the future, do you think about buying a house and supporting your family in style on your book sales? If this is what you want, self publishing has the highest chance of getting you there.

Do you want to be famous? Do you daydream of bookstore signings and bus tours? Do you want to be flown to a conference as a guest of honor and address a giant room full of screaming fans If this is what you want, traditional publishing has the highest chance of getting you there.

None of this is guarenteed, of course, and neither is it exclusive. There are indies who've gotten famous just as there are trad authors who've gotten rich, but each path definitely has its strengths leading to more likely outcomes. Self publishing's 70% royalty rate simply can not be beat for making money. Likewise, publishing houses are star making machines. They want you to be famous because your rockstar status sells more books and the author dream.

Again, none of this is absolute. Indie or trad, every author's career is different. But this is how how the cards are stacked in each deck, and while I'm sure there are plenty of us who'd love to be rich and famous, determining which of those two is your own personal best version of heaven plays a huge part in figuring out which path you'll be happiest pursuing.

The Worst of TimesBut a career isn't defined by its highlights. Great as these wild successes are, they're also highly unlikely. Most people who write books will not be hugely successful. Quite the opposite. Most of us will bomb out at one stage or another, and that's really important to keep in mind since the flavor of failure is very different depending on whether you go indie or trad.

Which of these sounds worse to you?

A) You spend a year writing a book that you're super proud of. You polish it up to the very best of your ability and begin the querying process full of hope. Hope that is immediately dashed when the rejection letters start rolling in. Never one to give up, you rewrite your query and first pages and try again, but it does no good. No matter what you do, it seems that no one in the world wants your book, and after a year of polite "thanks but no thanks" letters from everyone in New York, you finally throw in the towel and trunk the book to be forever unread.

Or.

B) You spend a year writing a book that you're super proud of. You polish it up to the very best of your ability and put it up on Amazon full of hope. Hope that is immediately dashed when no one buys it. Never one to give up, you rewrite your blurb and first pages, change the price, buy a new flashier cover and try again, but it does no good. No matter what you do, it seems that no one in the world wants your book, and after a year of bouncing around in the six digit sales ranks, you finally throw in the towel and either abandon the book to the depths of Amazon where, other than that one random sale every month or so, it will be forever unread, or take it down entirely and pretend it never existed.

Make no mistake, both of these situations SUCK. There is no lower hell for an author than having your book universally rejected. It's the lowest, most worthless feeling in the world. Unfortunately, it's also fairly common. I was Author A for my very first book, and while I've never been Author B, I can't imagine it hurts any less. Sure, maybe the indie title got a few sales, which is 100% more than the querying author got, but the indie author's name is also now tied forever to a failed book unless she takes it down, in which case the sales will stop and she'll be right back in the same boat as her trad counterpart.

But while both of these authors were ultimately failures, it's the nature of that failure that I want to look at now. Choosing the publishing path that will lead to your personal version of success is hugely important, but so is picking the one whose version of failure you can tolerate best.

Obviously, there are many, many more ways to fail in either of these than just the two examples above, but speaking broadly, the nature of indie failure is public rejection (having your book fail on Amazon for everyone to see) while traditional is personal rejection (the dreaded rejection letter or having a publisher drop your series).

Again, both suck royally. No one likes to have their work rejected. But just as you probably liked one of the success stories better, you would probably take one of these failures over the other. That preference isn't everything, but it still tells you a lot about which style of publication would potentially fit your personality best. Or at least which one you'll be able to stomach.

The Rest of the TimesBut vital as it is to understand which brand of success and/or failure you can handle best, these are both opposite extremes. Sadly, dismal failure is far more likely than wild success, but it's still not as likely as good old mediocrity. While you will probably experience both failure and (hopefully) success if you write long enough, you'll probably spend the vast majority of your writing career somewhere in the middle, which is also where these the two publishing paths actually deviate the most.

We're going to look at two examples again. This time, though, I'm going to use my own real career rather than hypotheticals.

I wrote my first two series as a traditionally published author. During this time, the vast majority of my professional time was dedicated to writing and, after my books were out, doing promotional events and marketing. I started my blog, went to conventions, and wrote my books. As a trad author, my biggest concerns were meeting my publisher's deadlines and making my editor happy. My books were in print on shelves at bookstores, and my publisher, Orbit Books, set up tons awesome events for me to promo my books with other authors from their stable, including my childhood hero. I was well taken care of, I had professionals who would answer my questions, I even got to excuse myself from a party once to "take a call from my editor in New York," which is still to this day one of the bossest things I've ever done.

But despite all of this awesome, there were still a lot of things I wasn't happy about. For all that I was well taken care of, I also had no control over my own work. My publisher decided my covers. They decided how my books should be marketed. They set the price, which I felt was stupidly high. Certainly higher than I felt comfortable paying for my own books as a reader, and yet I could do nothing. I was merely the talent, and if I had a problem, there were a million authors ready to take my place.

To be clear: this was never said to me. Everyone I worked with at Orbit was incredibly lovely and reasonable and absolutely wanted what was best for my books. We just didn't always agree on what that was, and when push came to shove, it was always the publisher who won. They had all the money, they had my rights, which meant they knew best, even when I knew (and was later proven right) that they were wrong. And I hated that.

I hated not having control. This was very rough, because I loved having an editor and a publisher behind me, but I hated that someone else was deciding what was best for my books. I was the one talking to my readers every day, but when I took my ideas to the publisher or tried to protest when they made decisions I didn't think were best, I had no ground to stand on. And, while they did listen and even changed the cover of Fortune's Pawn for me, it was always clear that I was still the low woman on the totem pole.

This wasn't their fault. I was just one book in a catalog, and they had a budget to stick to. But for me, this book was my world. It was my career, and not being able to do absolutely everything I knew needed to be done to make it a success was making me crazy. I also didn't like that I was making so little money per sale. Especially on ebooks, which were now my best selling format and cost the publisher very little to produce. I'd seen my indie friend's sales. I knew that I would sell way better at a more competitive price point. So when the time came for me to try a new series, I decided it was time to switch and try doing things my own way.

This was the real beginning of my self publishing career. I'd already tested the waters with 2k to 10k , but I am first and foremost a fiction writer. If I was really going to make it, it had to be with a novel, so I pulled out all the stops. I wrote the best book I possibly could, and then I paid to have it edited to hell because I was dead set determined to make sure my readers couldn't tell the difference between my NY books and my indie ones. I paid for the big, flashy illustrated cover I wanted and then I did about fifty million versions of the typography on the front until it was absolutely perfect.

All told, I sunk about $3000 and countless hours of work into the post production of Nice Dragons Finish Last. Keep in mind: this was all stuff my publisher used to do. I was doing all of this work on top of my normal writing, but I didn't mind, because I was doing it all for me. I was finally in control of my own work, and for me, that was happiness. It also didn't hurt that my obsessive attention to detail and quality paid off in spades when the book went on to sell equal to, and then eve better than my trad titles, all while costing my readers half what my NY books did AND earning me four times as much per sale.

For me, this was a taste of heaven, and that's the point I'm trying to make. I had a wonderful trad career with a great publisher who treated me fairly, promoted my books, and took good care of me. I loved my editor, I loved the Orbit PR department, and it was pretty nice to just write for four years without having to worry about anything besides meeting my deadlines and keeping my editor happy. I had a good thing going, and I could have sold Orbit the Heartstriker series.

But I didn't. I chose to walk away and go it alone, and not because I was abused by my publisher or any of that "trad publishing is evil!" you'll see on some indie blogs. I left because, at the end of the day, I wanted to be in control of my own work. I left because I like the business side of publishing, and I wanted to make those decisions myself.

I also wanted to make more money, and there's nothing wrong with that. Writing might be an art, but publishing is a business. I know some of you will find it terrifying, but for me, it was absolutely the extra work of finding my own editors and commissioning my own cover and learning how to do the Amazon dance to be able to make $3.42 off a book that sells for $4.99. To me, that was math that couldn't lose. Math worth giving up my publisher's support and my coveted spot in the bookstore for.

Will it be worth it for you? That's the question isn't it. But if you read the Traditional Publishing part of my story above and thought "that sounds really awesome!", then that gives you a clue. Likewise, if you read the reasoning for my decision to go self pub and thought "that makes a lot of sense," that's a clue, too.

I can tell you right now that our careers will be nothing alike--no two authors' are--but the fundamentals are always there. If you're the sort of person who finds comfort in the idea that your publisher's got your back. If you love the thought of not having to worry about finding an editor or buying a cover. If you think stepping out of a party to take a call from your editor sounds like the coolest thing ever, then maybe trad publishing is for you.

Sure you'll be giving up some potential income--there's no publisher in the world who can pay indie royalties--but there's no such thing as a free choice. Whenever you pick one path over the other, you have to pick up something, which is why knowing what you want is so important.

If you can't say "I know I'm giving up some earning potential, but it's worth it to get X from my publisher," then you will never be truly at peace with your publishing decision. The same goes for Indie. If you can't say "I know I'm giving up getting my book into bookstores for the moment, and I'm going to have to do a lot of research and work on my own, but it's worth it to keep control over my books and make that mad indie 70% royalties money" or something else like that, then you're not really ready to make this decision. Because it isn't black and white. It isn't easy or clear or obvious, and anyone who claims otherwise is either incredibly lucky to have found their perfect match, or incredibly biased.

Whichever path you choose--indie or trad--you will be giving up something valuable, something other authors would kill to possess, and you have to be at peace with that. You have to go into this with eyes open, or you'll always have regrets. Hell, you might have regrets anyway. You might get knee deep into self pub or trad and discover you hate it. I thought I'd love seeing my book in bookstores, but it actually made me very nervous and uncomfortable. All I could see was all those other books and wonder, "how will anyone ever find mine?"

That was a feeling I'd never even considered before it happened. Obviously, you won't know this stuff unless you try, but that's just another reason why it's SO IMPORTANT to keep an open mind and do your research, because you might have to switch. Until you've actually gotten experience in both indie and trad, everything is still just hypothetical. But if you wait until you have experience in both, you'll be a multiply published author. Your career will already be well underway, and you won't need articles like this, because you'll already know. But that's what this blog is about: sharing my experiences and outlining the pitfalls so that you don't have to fall into them.

If you take nothing else from this post, understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with going indie or trad. They are both perfectly valid forms of publishing with their own strengths and weaknesses. Both sides have wild success stories, dismal failures, and everything in between. If you have a really good book, you will be successful no matter which you choose. Likewise, if you have a terrible book, you will fail no matter which you choose.

Either way, you're going to do a fuck ton of work. You'll do more work for self publishing (and you'll also get more of the money because of it), but trad authors have to do all the same marketing and self promotion as everyone else on top of the writing. Being a published author is just a lot of work. There's no way to avoid that, but you can choose what kind of work you are most comfortable with and will bring you the rewards you value most. That, at its heart, is what the publishing choice is all about: what works for you. What makes your dreams come true, or at least doesn't drive you crazy.

Figuring that out is what it means to know your publishing self, and if you can do that, then you will be exactly where you need to be.

Whew, that got long!Thank you as always for reading. I really didn't intend for this to turn into such a huge, impassioned post, but I hope you were informed and entertained by my story. Not that this really counts, but I do writing posts every Wednesday, so be sure to check back in or just follow me on Twitter, Facebook,Tumblr, or Google+ if you don't already.

Thank you again, and happy writing!
- Rachel

Let's Talk Numbers: How Long Should Your Series Be?

Hi Folks,

Travis here. I've been talking about career planning and such lately, so I felt that today would be a good day to provide another tool for ya'll to use in that regard with an in-dept look at how the length of a series affects you commercially.

Obviously from an artistic standpoint your series should be as long as it needs to be, but there's a lot of wiggle room within that band. The idea here is to give you the information about how different novel lengths and series structure affect your bottom line as an author so that when that choice does come up, you have the tools to make the best one!

There's a lot of topics in this post that I've been dying to get onto the blog, so I'm really excited about this one. Let's go!


Let's Talk Numbers: How Long Should Your Series Be?
Are you ready for some graphs and charts?! Cause I am. It's been a while since I've dug into the nitty gritty behaviors of book sales. Today though, we are going to look at the economics and math that power our mainstay fiction series. 
We do so in the attempt to answer the question of, "how long should your series be?" Really, I hope to provide you with the tools to help answer that question for yourself.
Let's start with the most common genre fiction method of publishing: writing a sequential series of books. These are books that are meant to be read in order and they are published one after the other as they are written. (Since it's so common, this is going to be my assumed definition for the word "series" throughout this post.)
As I've talked about before, not everyone who reads book 1 in a series will go on to read book 2,3,4, etc. in the series. Since the books are sequential, this creates a funnel effect whereby 99% of people who read book 5 are people who've also read all the books before it. Same goes for any length of series be it three books or a hundred.
This creates a bit of mathematical tyranny for authors. Let's look at the theoretical earnings of a well written series that sells 1000 copies of its book 1.
(For fun, x10 units and royalties and it's pretty mid-list)
What these columns mean,Retention Rate = The percent of readers from the previous book who read the next one. For example, this chart says that 60% of people who read book 1 will go on to read book 2. I should disclaim that these rates you see here are very good. My examples assume that the series is excellently written.Royalties Earned = How much each individual book will earn in royalties in its first 9 months, which is about 70% of the royalties it'll earn in its first 2 years. Beyond that, the planning is totally different.Total Royalties = this is a running total of all royalties earned by all books. $12,454 is how much our test series will have made 9 months after book 7 comes out (it might earn more later, but we've found that 70% of a typical book's earnings happen during the first 9 months.)This chart shows the diminishing returns on readership that a long-running and highly sequential series suffers from. Book 4 only earns half as much as book 1 does! And book 7 is only one third earning power. 
But do not despair!
Were this the true case of things, no one would write series except as purely artistic affairs. I had to show you this chart first to make everything else make sense. I'm sorry to mislead.

What's missing from this picture so far are two dynamics.Series growth over timeLaunching a new book grows the series better than anything elseNow, figuring out how many book 1's book 2's launch will sell is, quite frankly, impossible. It depends on a great deal of factors that have only marginally to do with how well book 1 did. All I can say is that if book 1 has a lot of good reviews, then books 2, 3, and so on will have a stronger launch effect on it.
For example, I bet a lot of NDFL readers come in from people who saw One Good Dragon Deserves Another on the kindle Hot New Releases list. The pull power of that list and Rachel's book on that list is impossible to estimate, but I can tell you that just putting One Good Dragon out there sold about 4000 extra copies of Nice Dragons than the book would have sold on its own without the sequel launch.
When we say books sell books, this is what we mean. Releasing a new book in a series gives all the previous titles a boost as new readers see the new book, get excited, realize it's number X in a series, and go take a look at the first one. Again, there's no 100% accurate way to tell how this will play out for every book. That said, though, I've done loads of research to bring to you, today, a reasonable estimation of what series growth can look like.

These numbers are based on a modest, new(ish), and indie mid-list author, which is why series growth goes up and then down. This chart assumes a new novel launch every 9 months.
a modest and partially-hypothetical mid-listSeries Growth is what's important here. In a nutshell, it's how many book 1's each release on that list sells due to the buzz and attention it's launch creates. Keep in mind (cause these numbers won't add up otherwise) that if book 1 sells 1000 copies, then book 2 also sells more and book 3 sells more and so on. This next chart shows how that effect was incorporated in my example.

This chart shows how all the books in the series grow, one launch at a time. Book 1 has 18000 sales at the time book 7 comes out. Though the fact that book 6 has 6299 readers when book 7 comes out is what matters for the size of book 7's launch.
Anyway, here's a chart of the estimated royalty earnings on said modestly mid-list indie series.
Keep in mind this is over 5+ years of writing and earning (aka, $30k/yr)What's awesome is that you can see how just the growth from new launches keeps the series's earning power afloat. Book 7 here sells basically as well as book 5 did at its launch and better than books 3 and 4 at theirs, despite the reader drop off.

What lessons can we draw from this?
Reader Retention Rate Is Critical for Long Running SeriesWanna see something scary? Let's say that book 3 in this series was bad. Maybe it had crushing tension problems or killed off the star character. For whatever reason, a big chunk of people who read the first two novels just aren't finishing this one. An author's nightmare, right? Well, watch what happens to sales...

Here I changed the data so that only 40% of people who read book 3 go on to read book 4. Behold the death spiral that results. Not only did $80k in potential total earnings go up in smoke, but the series has utterly lost its staying power. It might never hit a high sales rank again, and I'm really under-estimating the compound negative effects here.
I cannot tell you how grateful I am that Rachel and I have never faced this situation. The thought of her writing a book 5 in this situation, knowing that it and the rest of the series is already doomed from a sales standpoint, is unthinkably horrible. 

Should you quit the series if this happens to you? I don't know. The situation is so crappy. The fans who've stuck it through deserve a finished series, but authors still need to eat and pay rent.

Now, some series can recover, just look at the Wheel of Time series. Book 1 was cool, but long and slow and hard as all heck to get through. Book 2 was mildly better, but most readers agree the series only really took off at book 3, which is also when Wheel of Time became a breakout success. TBH, this pattern is super rare and should not be counted on. Also, WoT came out during a different time in a different market to a different readership that expected different things from its Epic Fantasy. The current hot and crowded marketplace probably won't allow for this kind of long recovery anymore, which makes writing a really good first book all the more important.

But despite these risks...

Long Series Are Reliable EarnersWe can all see that the earning power and staying power of a long series is solid. Long series are good at building readership. They are also predictable. I've looked at this retention rate thing a lot and I know that publishers monitor it as well. If the books are good, you can fairly accurately predict how many sales the next book will garner. The same cannot be said for a new series.

A new series is always a bigger gamble than a sequel will be. 

Sequels are reliable earners. But when a series is very sequential with each book requiring knowledge of previous books to make sense, this reliable nature can become reliably negative should the author mess up and release a stinker.

Longer series are a risky in terms of execution.

Hands down, I would recommend new authors stay away from doing 5 or 7 book series. Obviously, it can be done (Rachel's first series was five books long), but the bar for making it work is higher than it looks. Each book has to be very good, preferably great, to keep readers hooked and moving forward. That's a tough act to pull off once, let alone five or more times. The rewards of consistent earnings are there, but only for people who can execute a 5+ book story and not drop the ball even once.

This might sound unreasonable, but really it's mostly an experience thing IMO. I don't think many veteran authors would bat an eye at this concern. And that's great, because if you can successfully pull it off, a successful longer series can generate a reliable income for many years.

Earn power aside, though, there's a concrete strength possessed by longer series that you won't hear others talking about much...
The Marketing Power of Longer SeriesHow much would you pay to get someone to buy book 1 of your series?

This is important. If you spend $100 on Facebook ads and sell 10 books, how much money did you make? Tip: It's not 10x the royalty on that book.
The answer depends on how well you marketed to that customer (ie, are they a good fit for your novels?), how well your series moves readers along, and how long the series is. Look at this,

This shows how much money (adjusted) a reader buying book 1 will likely spend on the series as a whole. If the series has a good reader retention rate, then, on average, a new reader who reads all the way to the end will spend $7.26 total for the 3-book, $10.12 for the 5-book, and $12.44 for the 7-book series respectively.
I'm worried this chart is confusing, so here it is again, modeling the results of an ad campaign that sold 100 copies of book 1.


Let's go back to our opening question. In light of these numbers, would you spend $10 to convince one person to buy book 1?

For a trilogy, probably no. For a 5-book series, maybe. For a 7-book series? Definitely. I'll pay $10 to make $12 all day long.
But I'm assuming a lot here. I'm assuming you have a 7 book series that is well reviewed and has the great tension and reader investment management necessary to get people all the way to the end. I'm assuming your paid ads are written and targeted in a way that will land you good quality customers who will legit like your book. If you just get a ton of exposure with poor targeting, these numbers won't work out at all. Even if you can land that book 1 sale, badly targeted readers who aren't actually a good fit for your series will bail from it in much higher numbers than organically acquired readers (people who came in on their own through reviews, blurbs, and so forth) do.
Still, in the world of marketing and paid online ads, efficiency is hard to come by. It takes a lot of time and money to bring down the cost-per-sale of Facebook and Amazon ads.
We've also found that having more series out doesn't change this dynamic as much as you'd think. My best guess is that only 20% to 40% of Rachel's readers move from one of her series to another. I've heard other authors and panelists at RT2016 cite similar numbers.

So what does this do to the cost of bringing in new readers?

This chart shows the estimated results of an ad campaign that sold 100 copies of book 1 of series 1. My fictional author in this example also has a 5-book series and another 3-book series out that happy customers can move to once they are done reading series 1.

(Note that some customers might go straight from series 1 to series 3, and my example doesn't account for that. It's not actually that important for this discussion though. I changed the order around in excel just to see and the order makes an insignificant difference.)

You can see how fast and hard customers filter out after they complete the series that they came in on. Please keep in mind that we're only examining an ad campaign that tries to sell book 1 of series 1. This is not a model for the overall behavior of multiple series in general. We're examining just a single entry point into the author's sales funnel.

What is important here is that each customer conversion from the ad campaign above spends approx $8.86 on average on books by the author. Compare these 11 books vs the 7-book series example from above (which was $12.44 per customer), and that's the point I want to show off here,

Longer series are more efficient to market than shorter ones

Online advertising is hard. It's tough to get a return on your investment for any series, but the more books you have out there, the better your chances get. If you have lots of short series and stand alones, then your reader funnel has a lot of holes and places new readers can fall out of your work. But if you have a long series or multiple long series that suck readers in, then you're free to spend more advertising bucks acquiring each new reader because the chances of that reader buying and reading enough books to pay for the cost of getting them are that much higher.

Online ads are just one form of advertising, of course, but the same logic works for any form of advertising be it Bookbub or landing an Amazon Daily Deal or even having one of your books reviewed in the NYT. All of these are amazing opportunities to sell books, and the better your reader funnel is (ie, the more of those new readers you can hook and keep for multiple titles), the better your position for leveraging those strokes of good fortune.
So, better marketing and reliable earnings at the risks of increased execution challenge. That's series length economics in a nutshell for you all. Before we go, however, I'd like to talk about a couple of exciting and interesting special cases when it comes to series structure and length.
Special Case #1 - Episodic SeriesThere's a special kind of series out there that I absolutely have to talk about because this post is the perfect place to do so. You have all the context I could ask to appreciate it now.

In Romance, there is a type of long running series that can gain more readers with every book rather than lose them. This happens because, even though the books are all in the same series, each new title features a new main couple. This couple is related to all the others in a series often by blood as the number of bachelor brother quartets in Romance illustrates), but every book starts and finishes an enclosed plot line of its own, complete with Happily Ever After ending.

This stand alone nature allows new readers to enter the series at any books, but since previous and future couples (and the world itself in the case of Paranormals) feature heavily within the narrative, every book also acts as a hook to pull readers into other titles in the series. The end result is that every book in the series acts like a first book, pulling in new readership and growing the series as a whole. BUT, because each book also helps advance the overall world of the series and sometimes even advances an overarching meta plot (as happens in the freakishly successful Immortals After Dark PNR series), each new release also acts like a sequential novel in a long running series, carrying reader investment along through multiple titles as they frantically read to see where things will go.

This truly is the best of both worlds! New readers are courted and enter with each new launch as if it was a book 1 while existing readers swarm to every new release the moment it comes out like it's the latest episode in a long running series. Because of this powerful synergy, these series can and do run crazy long--we're talking dozens of books or more--achieving lengths that few SFF writers would dare for, or be justified in even attempting.
With multiple entry points, people come in and then spider down the series's back-list growing the whole series to boot, creating some powerful sales mojo.

Just look at that monster! I flipped the retention rates to be modestly positive and behold: total earnings are double that of the traditional example. That's insane! The ladies who have the skills to do this are raking it in, lemme tell ya.
I call these "episodic series" since, like every episode of Law and Order, every novel can technically stand alone while also functioning as a new entry in a longer plot. They also seem to be a Romance phenomenon due to that genre's requirement for HEA endings. The Dresden Files is the closest thing I can think of to doing the same thing in SFF, but it's not truly an episodic series since, while each new novel has an enclosed plot, there's still a lot of sequential reading involved to actually understand what's going on. That said, though, I bet ya this math is the reason they stopped numbering the Dresden Files books. The publisher is trying to harness that Romance math by creating more entry points into Butcher's series. 
Sadly, I do not know if this kind of setup can be ever be truly duplicated in SFF. I've not heard of it if it has happened, and I suspect that it might rely tightly upon the unique nature of Romance readers and culture. It might also just be a catch-22: they can get away with episodic books because they've always had them. Seriously, this style of Romance writing goes back to the very beginning of the genre.

Sadly for the rest of us, other genres (with the exception of Mysteries, who do something similar by having one detective that solves a new case in each book) don't seem to be able to make the jump to this episodic style for whatever reason. Our readers just don't take to it as well. If they did, looking at the math above, I guarantee you we'd be up to our ears in episodic Fantasies, SF, and everything else.

Le sigh...


But enough pining for other people's sales mojo. Let's move on to what we do have!

Special Case #2 - SerialsSFF and other genres might not have access to the episodic series mojo in the same way Romance does, but there's still a way to have your cake and eat it too.

Normally, having a lot of books published as a long series involves a lot of risk and time investment, all of which can be deep-sixed by one bad book. But there is a way to dodge both the giant time investment of a standard series and to reduce the risk (or costs rather) of a mid-series failure, and it's called the serial. 
These beasts are pretty new (to our current marketplace, at least. The Victorians were all about 'em!) and things are kinda a wild west right now. There's not really a standard yet, but basically a serial is a long running story broken up into 20k to 40k (or smaller!) chunks that are tight, fast reads. If novels are movies, then series are episodes in a TV season. In fact, many serial authors actually adopt TV show structuring and language. They produce serials in "seasons" and call each installment an "episode"  to make sure readers understand what they're getting into. This is a very good idea since there is no force more terrifying than a reader who thought they were getting a novel and ended up with a serial instead.
Now, I don't have first hand or even second hand experience with serials. I don't read them and Rachel doesn't write them, so I have no way of knowing if it's a good way to structure a story. Today, I just want to comment upon the insane strengths of their math.

See, the scary truth of our current marketplace is that, well.. er... (I HATE to say this) shorter books don't really sell less well than longer ones.

This is likely why we've seen the length of a full novel creeping down. Why, in my day, 120k+ was a proper fantasy novel! Thrillers, Mysteries, and "Beach Books" were in the 90k range and novellas (hahaha) were 50-60k. These days, I keep hearing people talking about 70k novels or lower and I just want to shake my head. Maybe this is just my version of "you darned kids," but the fact is that novels are getting shorter because that's the way the money flows.
This is all simple economics, really. The best, most powerful way to grow as an author is to publish lots of books. If you can publish 4 books at 80k each per year, why should you publish two 180k books that year instead? (Commercially speaking, of course) The guy/gal who publishes 4 books a year will grow more than twice as fast as the author pushing 2 a year assuming that customer satisfaction remains equal.
"Customer satisfaction" is the sticking point. Despite being economically superior in every way, shorter books have a weakness in that they are not as popular with readers nor do they build as stable a fandom as longer books do. Speaking broadly, shorter books are just, well, a bit more forgettable than longer ones. This isn't because writers of short books aren't as talented as long form writers. They just have less room to work to work with. There are outliers of course, but for most writers, it's simply not possible to squeeze as much character development, complexity, and drama into 50k as you can into 100k.

Also, traditional publishing has taught readers over years to expect a certain amount of story in a book. If they get less than expected, they can easily feel cheated, even they paid a reduced rate for the title. This might change as readers adapt to the trend for shorter fiction, but right now at least, most readers have a very fixed idea of how much story a "novel" entails. Cheat them out of that, and it doesn't matter how good your short book is, you're going to get bad reviews. Even worse, you'll have readers who feel ripped off, and that's a BAAAAAAAD thing. 
This expectation is why successful serial writers adapt the language of television rather than novel series. A "novel" has a fixed definition in many people's minds, but an "episode" is something else entirely. By managing expectations successfully, many serial writers have figured out how to bridge both worlds. A 12 episode serial that has 40k word episodes is therefore 480k words long. That's the same word count (and risk) as a 4-book series of average length books. Except for the part where it sells and can be marketed like a 12-book series..... 
Boom baby!And that's why we are suddenly seeing a revival of the serial despite the fact that readers famously hate serials. Despite the fact that many of the big serials have loads of nasty reviews. Despite people saying that they don't want to pay $2.99 x 12 to read the whole story or people saying that they hate the constant cliff hangers (one per episode!). OR People saying that the story they just paid for was too short. AND People feeling like they got conned into buying a short-story they though was a novel...

I could go on, but ya'll get the point. IMO these problems are all reader expectation and marketing issues. Over time, as people find and read more good serials and get used to the format, these things will smooth themselves out. There are already successful and well reviewed serials out there, so victory is clearly possible (and extremely lucrative).

Like I said, though, we have 0 personal experience with series. If you want to write one, my only real advice is to go do your research first. I wish there was more I could say, but we don't have a lot of experience here... yet ^_~.

Anyway, let's wrap up cause wow this post got long.
How Long Should Your Series Be?
Artistically? It should be whatever length is best to tell the story with. 
That said, the longer I do this job, the more I realize how flexible a good story idea can be. Often times, a long book is just one removed side character or plot-can-kicked-down-the-road away from being a normal sized book. Conversely, many stories have areas that can be gainfully explored and brought up to main plot level, providing extra distance if desired. You can fudge it, in other words.
But should you fudge it? Commercially, it depends on skill and interest. Are you good enough and interested enough in the story to write a long series? (Don't dismiss boredom! It's a major risk on multi-year projects.)
Longer series are riskier than shorter ones. It takes more skill and experience to properly structure and execute a long series, with tension management being only one of your concerns. However, I feel that the reliability of earning power and their marketing advantages make for tantalizing rewards.
Shorter series carry less risk and (often) a lower difficulty curve. They're also still perfectly commercially viable. There's nothing wrong with writing a 3-book series or even a stand alone! In the end though, it all comes back to the strategic level thinking I talked about last week. What do you need to write to get to where you are going? Think ahead! Look at where you will be if you do a 5-book vs a 3-book. Do you like that position? Does it set you up for the next series and where you want to go? These are serious considerations.
There's also the whole deal with smart risks. Corporations love sequels because they are such reliable earners. However, sequels are seldom break out hits. It takes a new idea to break out and become the next big thing. Publishing knows this, which is why the debut author is such a huge thing. They are always looking for that next big hit, and they know it doesn't come from a book 3.

What this means for your own career is something only you can decide, but I hope that I've helped arm you with enough information to make the choice a bit less murky. Again, there is no real right or wrong here. Strong as the math argument for a long series is, I really don't feel like this is a black and white issue. Life is messy and careers are complicated. Same goes for writing. Take your time, think and plan. Decide what's best for you and your writing! 

Thanks for Reading!If there's any topics you'd like me or Rachel to talk about here on the blog, please feel free to leave them below. We're always working hard to find information that is useful to you. You can also just hit me up on Twitter, that works too! (@TravBach) Rachel's social media links are here as well if you want to get live updates! (Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Google+)

Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you all next week!
Sincerely,-Travis