Mary Sisson's Blog, page 136

So global....

Today I mostly did end-of-year non-book-related things, but I also sent out numerous copies of Trust to numerous Library Thing people. It's really a global bunch, which is kind of neat. I know there are various barriers to selling e-books globally, but it's clearly easier than it once was--at least people can find out about you!

And a couple have said that they wanted the book specifically because it is '60s style social sci-fi, which makes me think I made the right call with the series covers.

Giving, giving, giving

I had some family stuff early in the day, and the rest of the time was spent sending copies of Trang to the Library Thing people. Some people have some pretty fun e-mail addresses--it amuses me when the person's name indicates that they are one gender and the e-mail address indicates the opposite gender. I also had someone whose e-mail was something along the lines of EvilPsychoFreak@whatever.com, but their messages were extremely polite. I wonder if that means I'll be getting deranged hate mail from CutieSweetieSnuggleBunnies@fluffyprecious.com.

Give it away, now

The Library Thing giveaway ended today, so now I have to, you know, actually give away the copies. There are about 125 people wanting one. The site basically just gives you a list of names, so I had to e-mail everyone to see what format they want. (I could try contacting them through Library Thing, but I figured that since I'll need valid e-mail addresses to send the e-books to, I might as well test them now.) My e-mail is really not set up for doing mass e-mails--I may have to upgrade in the future, we shall see.

I also updated Calibre and made a new Mobi file, but it's still not consistently justified on the left. Le sigh. Hopefully it will do for those who want Mobi.

Some people are never satisfied

I'm back from a trip to attend my friend's memorial service. A lot of the people there were folks who I haven't seen in some time, so I had the following conversation.

PERSON: So, what are you up to these days?

ME: Writing, like always.

PERSON: What are you writing?

ME: I'm working on a series of four science-fiction novels. I've published the first, the second will probably come out in the spring, and I've started writing the third.

WHAT I'M THINKING: Wow, saying that out loud makes me realize that that's a lot of work! No wonder I've been feeling busy--I'm juggling three projects here!

PERSON (clearly unimpressed): So, what else are you doing?

The entrepreneurial mind-set

One of the things I used to really enjoy doing as a business reporter was interviewing entrepreneurs--people who had struck out on their own and started businesses. Sometimes these were small businesses--local chains--and sometimes they were businesses that you and me and your Aunt Sally all know.

What made these stories so much fun to report and write was that the entrepreneurs were all completely insane. They had all done it wrong. We're talking dropouts, dyslexics, bozos who couldn't hold a job for more than two months, financing their businesses by maxing out credit cards, living with their parents, and just plain crossing their fingers. These people did not cautiously climb the corporate ladder--or if they did, one day they just went crazy and kicked the ladder out from under them because they thought they could fly.

Totally entertaining. I mean, artists and writers like to think of themselves as misfits and bohemians, but Jesus Christ, we have nothing on these people. (If you think I am exaggerating, read this profile about the woman who founded Stila--OK, fine, she has an artsy background, but even the ones who start accounting firms are more like her than not.)

In short, these are people who have what I would characterize as a rather extreme faith in themselves and their way of doing things. It's not the normal way of doing things, which is why they tend not to do so well in corporate settings.

That kind of self-reliance I think is really important for writers--in general, really, but especially when they approach the business of publishing books today.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a profile of best-selling self-published author Darcie Chan (excerpts available here if you can't get behind the pay wall). Chan is a lawyer who wrote a book, put it up on Amazon as an e-book, did some promotion, and sold 400,000 copies! (Wow!)

That's all great, except that it looks like she's spending all her energy now trying to find someone else to take care of this property. She got an agent, who has not been able to sell the book to traditional publishers. (Does this make me look like a total ass? Possibly--although I'll turn it around and say that I expect the publishers who survive to routinely pick up successful self-published books.)

The problem? She's selling the book for 99 cents, and traditional publishers want to sell it for $26. Of course.

Call me crazy, but I think that having to sell things at really high prices is traditional publishing's problem, not Darcie Chan's problem. I think she needs to start thinking in terms of self-reliance, instead of looking to traditional publishing to take care of her.

Part of the issue, in my opinion, is that she's not monetizing her success: She's treating a gold mine like a nickel mine and thinking she needs help because she's only a humble nickel miner. Obviously pricing is something that is constantly debated, but when you've sold 400,000 copies? At that point, you don't need to introduce yourself to people. You can raise your prices. She's made 35 cents per book, so since May, when she put the book up, she's made $140,000. If she raised the price to $2.99, she'd make $2 per book. Even if her sales over the next six months plummeted to 100,000 copies, she'd make $200,000--and if they hold up, she'd make much more. Maybe her mind doesn't work this way, but for most people, once they've made a million dollars or two, they start thinking that maybe they're capable making good business decisions and don't need someone else to do that for them.

Another reason she wants a contract with a traditional publishing house is so that she can make a paper book that will be available in libraries and bookstores.

Uuugggghh. Because as this blog has amply demonstrated, it is impossible to make a paper book any other way. (She already has a cover, she just needs to hire a layout artist--hell, CreateSpace will do that for you for $249. I think she can afford that at this point.) Libaries do carry self-published paper books. And to the indie bookstores where she lives, she's a bestselling local author--I'm fairly certain they'll stock her.

Darcie Chan seems like a smart woman, she's willing to invest in her book, and I'm sure she'll find her way. But this sort of thing is why you see such frustration coming from people like Dean Wesley Smith and Joe Konrath--it takes relatively little research to discover that you don't actually need a publisher to lay out and print a paper book. It takes relatively little research to realize that the main advantage a publisher brings is with marketing, and hell, Chan's done an excellent job with that.

But you have to be willing to do business research. You have to approach this as an entrepreneur.

Some entrepreneurs can't go it alone--and it's very much to their disadvantage. Have you heard of a CT scan? Several people had the idea, but the machines were so insanely expensive to build that for years it never went anywhere until someone came along who had connections with the right kind of manufacturing firm. Likewise you might have a brilliant new concept for the design of a computer chip or a car--but unless you also own a chip- or car-making factory, good luck implementing it.

Writing is not even remotely like that nowadays. It's much more like software, where some guy working in his garage can change how everybody works, socializes, and thinks. You can go it alone, and increasingly, you'll have to. (I mean, publishers don't want a book that sold 400,000 copies in six months? WTF?) Writers have to be self-reliant in order to write--you have to believe in your vision and your product. Is it really such a challenge to extend that self-reliance into the arena of producing and distributing your book?

As it so happens....

CreateSpace thought the automated system's problems with the file were nonsense, too. I've ordered a new proof.

Now that it's all cleaned up, I can see what's wrong with it!

The Trang proof came today, and I realized that the placement of many of the chapter numbers causes them to get lost in the book's gutter (tricky, because it looks fine as a layout printed on a large piece of paper--those have no gutters). So I decided to fix that, plus one or two other little things.

We'll see how that goes--with the exception of one minor correction, the only thing I did to the interior file was change the placement of the chapter numbers. But CreateSpace's automatic error-checker freaked out, claiming that every sentence starting with an italicized f was now outside the margins. I finally just clicked "Ignore Errors and Submit"--we'll see if I get anywhere with that.

Doing useless things very well

(I was looking for a clever quote to encapsulate the title's idea (I can't imagine that Gilbert & Sullivan never touched on this subject), and I found this, which is irrelevant but pretty funny anyway.)

Anyway, the other day when I was reading M. Louisa Locke's blog, I saw a post in which she bemoans her lack of Twitter followers. Now, this is a woman who was recently able to retire from teaching on the strength of her book sales. Clearly, she is doing something right, and while she may not be doing Twitter right, that apparently does not matter.

I've also seen people fretting over whether Amazon can do everything for a writer that a traditional publisher can do as it moves into becoming more of a full-service publisher. This, despite that fact that Barry Eisler recently said that, more or less, he made more money with Amazon's publishing offshoot in two months than he made with a traditional publisher in ten years.

I'm sure there are plenty of things a traditional publisher can do better than Amazon--for example, getting books into bookstores. The problem is, they don't matter. Newspapers were shockingly good at distributing huge quantities of paper very quickly to millions of people. And if they're going to survive, they'll have to stop doing that.

It's silly to say, Oh, Amazon just sells cheap stuff--traditional publishers have the mojo to push $26 books and $13 e-books. The fact that traditional publishers sell a really expensive product means nothing to the author if the author is making peanuts. It's already something of a given that, if you have decent sales, you make more money self-publishing. As contracts by traditional publishing get more and more draconian, that difference is going to become a yawning chasm.

And I wonder how that's affecting people within the industry. I mean, most people go into publishing because they love books and want to help make good ones. It's got to be pretty frustrating to be in an environment where you aren't allowed to do your job and where your company is screwing your writers so badly that they can't make a living any more.

That's what I think that infamous Hachette memo is about: I think the brass is trying to assure the rank-and-file that, really, they do have a purpose (other than sucking every last drop of money out of their writers for the benefit of their corporate overlords, who will doubtless reward them with a layoff). And I think the people who really want to help writers create good books will eventually either strike out on their own or join up with the more-reputable companies offering services to writers. Maybe I'm projecting from my own preferences, but I hated feeling like I was just spinning my wheels for a paycheck. Why be useless when you can use your talents for good?

Just a quick note

Just letting everyone know that I'm probably not going to be horribly productive over the next week. I'm attending my friend's funeral and memorial service, which is not taking place anywhere near me, and I've got a lot of year-end housekeeping to do.

Interesting theory on pricing

This is a guest post by Elle Lothlorien on Joe Konrath's blog about pricing. I've read complaints about "the kind of reader" who buys 99-cent books, with the general implication that they're not the sort of reader one would want. That struck me as both kind of snobby and a way of deflecting rough reviews--you know, "99-cent book buyers are cretins who just don't understand my art!"

Her theory accounts for the phenonmenon of getting more tough reviews when you drop your price (which she saw when she dropped the price of her book from $5.99 to 99 cents) without, you know, sounding like a major whine:

 

Here's what I suspect was happening: At $5.99 . . . [y]our customer wants to like it. After all, they've read the reviews and it looks like everyone else liked it, right? If they get through the first few chapters and begin to suspect that the book just isn't for them, they're very likely to return it for a refund. Hey, six dollars is six dollars. And if they do like it, they want to jump on the review bandwagon and let everyone else know just how much they liked it. 

At $0.99, the reader isn't as heavily "invested" in your novel. If they didn't like it, they may not bother to return it to get their dollar back. Instead they'll find their way to your review page and let you have it by way of a negative review.

 

She's arguing that the person want to like it because it's kind of expensive, but I think it's more that, if a person is going to spend $5.99 on a book, they're going to 1. think about whether they're going to like it before they buy it, and 2. return it for a refund if they decide a few chapters in that it's no good. Whereas if they're just interested in a bargain, they'll snap up something cheap whether or not it's really their thing, and then, as she notes, if they don't like it, instead of returning it, they finish and keep it, and therefore feel entitled to leave a bad review.

This is interesting from a marketing perspective, because one of the challenges for a book that's not a commercial, mass-market thing is to find an audience. You want people who are going to appreciate what you have to offer--people who like to read what you like to write. You don't necessarily want to market to everybody, because there's a large contingent out there that's just never going to like the kind of book you wrote. And the implication here is that higher prices might help accomplish that. One of the great things about e-books is that they make it really easy for people to buy and read books, but maybe there's something to be said for having a (small) barrier to entry--like a speed bump. Nothing serious, just something big enough to make people think for a minute about whether they really want to buy it.