Mary Sisson's Blog, page 113

I'm back!

I'm back from the vacay--kind of exhausted right now, but anyway. Tomorrow I have the niece, but Wednesday I should be able to get the e-books up. I got the proof for the paper edition of Trust when I came back today and approved it.

Oh, honestly, Goodreads

So, you know how I was going to do a giveaway on Goodreads as soon as I got that cover problem sorted out?

Well, they're not going to sort it out. They can't possibly do that. I am, however, welcome to do a giveaway on Goodreads using the cover that got me my one and only one-star review. And to promote a giveaway that is sure to get me many more one-star reviews by people who feel mislead about the book's contents, I am very welcome to buy an ad campaign on Goodreads!

Ahem. Customer Service 101: DO NOT ask someone to give you their money in the EXACT SAME E-MAIL in which you tell them you don't intend to help them out. You have to give to get, got it?

Honestly. I see a Web site that has two major potential sources of revenue. #1 Advertising campaigns, which are bought by publishers and self-published authors, and #2 e-books sold on the site. If they can't update my cover (and not for nothing, but some people spend hundreds of dollars on custom art--and Goodreads is saying, No, you can't use that for promotions? You have to use the crappy placeholder art that didn't work, so you changed it?), what are the chances that they are going to effectively address my concerns if I purchase advertising from them or list a book for sale on their site and there's a problem?

So, yeah, long story short--not doing a giveaway on Goodreads. Sorry about that.

Your very own honeyguide

Jaye Manus has a great post on the competition among books. Obviously, there's a hell of a lot of books out there, so how are you going to stand out?

Well, as Jaye points out, you really aren't competing with all those books:

You might have written the very best ghost story in the history of the world, but if the reader is looking for a how-to book on plumbing, your ghost story will go unnoticed. Even if the reader can’t find the right how-to book, you’re still out of luck. They want plumbing advice, not ghosts. The how-to book is NOT your competition.

So, the key is to identify your actual competition, i.e., books like yours, and then start hustling.

I agree completely, and I would add that, once you find your actual competition, you should stop thinking of them as competition.

Think of them as honeyguide birds and yourself as a honey badger (seriously, click on the link and watch that video, it's awesome). Honeyguide birds are actually more than one kind of bird, but they all eat honey and other bee products. That's a lot easier to do if some other honey eater has ripped open the hive first, so they find hives and then lead other animals to them.

Terrific, huh? It's a symbiotic relationship--everybody gets more honey. Well, except the bees, who do kind of lose out in this scenario.

Readers who like your kind of book, however, are going to benefit. And, yeah, that's where I'm going with this analogy: Let's say you write Stephen King-like horror novels. So you market them to people who like Stephen King--he is your honeyguide! The readers benefit; you benefit.

Does Stephen King benefit? Well, maybe not, because he's been around for a while and has probably already saturated his market. But it's not going to hurt Stephen King--this isn't a parasitic relationship--because people can read Stephen King's books waaaaay faster than he can write them. He can saturate his market audience-wise--he can find every one who likes his kind of book. But he can't saturate it book-wise.

Even after he's eaten his fill of honey, there's some left for you.

Progress report

Not a terrible lot of progress today--I stripped five chapters in preparation for the e-book conversion. It didn't take long, but I'm a little burned out. The vacay should help.

Follow your passion...how, exactly?

A couple of interesting articles in the Wall Street Journal today about choosing to start a small business. Both are focused on the question, Should you follow your passion? And both note that there's not a simple yes/no answer.

The first article was written by a reporter who decided to start teaching tennis, a sport he loves. Unfortunately, it turns out that a lot of the people you teach tennis to don't actually love it--especially kids who are being forced to take the lessons. So....

When I was offered another newspaper job, I took it. I now understand that for me a dream job must feature creative tension and commitment. I'd rather be yelled at by an editor who cares about the quality of a story than ignored by a student who doesn't care about tennis.

The second article is more analytical (emphasis added):

People thrive when they find the work challenging, feel recognized for their abilities and have control over how they fill their time, [Professor Cal Newport] says. Adjusting the work to maximize those factors will rekindle passion better than matching your job to a pre-existing inclination.

Sometimes you can also discover new aspects of the job that you're passionate about. Mr. [Josh] Frey[, who started a baking business and was unhappy,] realized a lot of what he had enjoyed about working in a bakery had nothing to do with baking, such as connecting with people. So he saw that he could refocus the business and still be passionate about it.

He moved into an area that promised better and more reliable profits: promotional items and corporate gifts. He also began cherry-picking the parts of the job he liked and discarding the ones he didn't.What's more, he tapped into his love of mentoring with a side business that teaches entrepreneurs how to launch a career in the promotional-products industry. "I've never felt so aligned with what I'm doing," Mr. Frey says.

Of course he still bakes, and the author of the first story still plays tennis. And a career coach in the second story suggests people try "pursuing their passion part-time.... That way, they don't have to depend on it to pay the bills and don't risk losing their love to the daily grind."

I think this is all good advice, and it's important to remember that there is no one right way to go about being a writer.

I DIY with self-publishing. But I DIY with all sorts of things. I replace my own toilets. I do my own landscaping. I make my own lotion.

Why? Because I love it. My sister and I joke about it: If you're a little bit of a control freak and a little bit cheap, you will DIY everything you possibly can.

But I know other self-published writers who hire everything out. They're not stupid about it--they don't throw great gobs of money at the nearest flim-flam artist or anything. But they'd rather pay to have someone format their e-books than do it themselves. And that's totally fine. In both cases, we're cherry-picking the parts of the job we like, just like that former baker up there.

There are people like me who are going to be writing books from here on out. But there are people who like their day jobs very much, thank you, and also enjoy writing, so they'll crank out fewer books or write short stories or whatever. Once upon a time that was kind of a problem--publishers didn't want someone who just had one book in them. Now, who cares? Write what you like, switch genres, do fiction and nonfiction--it's all good. The work may be more difficult to market, but it's not like you get blackballed and your writing never sees the light of day, which was how things worked before.

It's so much more flexible nowadays. And I think in some ways that's disconcerting--after all, when that one fellow figured out that he didn't want to be a baker, that was probably pretty upsetting. It also means that there's no blueprint--you don't lock-step your way through steps 1-6 and voila! You are happy! But life doesn't work that way in the first place.

Progress report

I have finished proofing the large-print edition, entering text corrections and the art-corrections-that-cause-more-art-problems to the large-print edition, and entering text corrections for the regular edition. Then I uploaded the files for the regular edition to CreateSpace! Whoo!

Words of wisdom from Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman gave a commencement address (via Dean Wesley Smith) that's worth either watching or reading, depending on your preference. A lot of truth, there.

Progress report

Some progress and some prioritizing.

I read through half the large-print edition--unfortunately, because it got laid out twice, there are art mistakes, and art mistakes are very time-consuming to fix properly. After taking a look at the calendar and my planned trip, I decided that the thing to do was to prioritize getting the regular edition and the e-books out ASAP, and to fine-tune the large-print layout last of all. I also realized that, because of the way the books are formatted, it would be easier to take the e-book text from the regular edition rather than from the large-print edition.

So, I input the text corrections to the first half of the regular edition, and the text and art corrections to the first half of the large-print edition, but I didn't bother to fix the new problems caused in the large-print layout by inputting the art corrections--again, I'll fix those later. (I'll probably have to print the whole thing out again--ugh.) Since the fixes to the regular edition were just text corrections and didn't screw up the layout, those chapters are good to go!

Progress report

I'm done laying out the large-print edition! Whoo-hoo! Barely under the page limit, too--with the front matter, 814 pages.

My upper back has really been bothering me, which has been happening every time I do a layout (and has been exacerbated this time around by a couple of landscaping projects I've been doing). I've been thinking that it's because my monitor is just not that big, and doing a layout requires really peering at the text, so I tend to hunch forward. When I get a new computer, I'll get a bigger monitor, but that probably won't happen until next year. Today I realized that I could also just move the screen closer to me--that's helped some.

Why it's good to look beyond Amazon for marketing

Both David Gaughran and Lindsay Buroker have guest posts from Edward Robinson about how Amazon calculates the rankings on its popularity lists. Both posts are worth reading, and if you're really interested, you should also read Robinson's many blog posts on the subject.

The gist? Amazon has changed its popularity rankings so that you get less of a boost from giving away free books via its exclusivity program. Also, cheaper books may get less of a boost than more expensive ones.

I was wondering if something like this would happen, because one of the things Amazon does very well indeed is enable book discovery. Compromising that to promote books from its own or allied publishing houses (like Barnes & Noble did for Macmillan) or to promote its exclusivity program is the kind thing that can really backfire with consumers. If Amazon's book suggestions are perceived as being unreliable or junky or skewed by some corporate agenda, consumers will just ignore them--and maybe if they're really annoyed, they'll go find another Web site that makes better suggestions.

Authors, I think, need to get wise to the big picture here: AMAZON'S ALGORITHMS CHANGE. They may change in a way that helps you, they may change in a way that hurts you, but they have always been changing and they will always be changing.

Focusing your attention on gaming the Amazon system is, at best, a short-term strategy. Expecting Amazon's algorithms to take care of all your marketing needs is a really bad idea.

You don't want to be like those companies that become utterly dependent on their Google ranking, and then Google tweaks the algorithm, and their entire business collapses.

And there's no need for it. If Amazon is helping you right now, that's great--it works and it's free and it's really easy. I can totally see why people get into the habit of thinking that this is the only thing they need to do.

But if you don't diversify, the rug can get pulled out under you in an instant. If you don't make the effort to try out other forms of marketing, then if Amazon's algorithms stop helping you, you will know nothing useful. You will have no Plan B.