Mary Sisson's Blog, page 86

A sad but illuminating read

I recently finished Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Wow.

Basically it's a story of a company making the difficult transition from being a mom-and-pop to being a large public corporation. But from the point of view of the writers and artists, it's a story about getting screwed, very, very badly.

Now, the comics industry has evolved, so now people are much more likely to get an ownership share of what they create. But that didn't used to be the case--it used to be that, if you wanted to work in comics, you had to work as a hired hand--and what's alarming about it is how normal that seemed to everyone.

In fact, there are a couple of places where people--sometimes other comics people--express surprise at the notion that the creator of a character would dare expect an ownership share! After all, they didn't contribute anything!

Wow. Wowowowow.

And very enlightening, no?

What does a person mean when they say that the creator of a character didn't contribute anything to it?

Well, for starters, I think there's that very human tendency to give yourself credit for anything that is successful, even if your involvement was tangential. That's definitely a major issue in comics--often you've got one person coming up with the character with input from others, and then still other people develop it. So if you contributed, say, the money, you might well say, "I contributed the money! You, the creator, didn't! My contribution is the only one that matters!"

The other thing is I think an important insight to the corporate mentality: For-profit corporations exist to make money. Ergo, it's easy for people working at corporations to assume that the only thing that counts for anything is money.

I remember at one point someone was confused because some corporation was claiming that they needed to restructure because they weren't getting enough "respect." The person found that baffling, because why the hell would you undergo the trouble and expense of restructuring in order to get respect? That sounds neurotic at best. And I had to explain that, in business speak, "respect" means "money from investors." A "good" business is a profitable business--it doesn't matter if they make money by poisoning small children, as long as they are making money, they are "good." If they are making more money, they are "better."

If you are in an environment where the only thing that is recognized as positive and worthwhile is money, then it can become very, very easy to dismiss other kinds of contributions. That's why one person can create (out of thin air) a character worth billions of dollars, and another person can, with complete honesty, express their sincere opinion that the first person did not contribute anything to that character.

Many of Marvel's artists and writers experienced true poverty, and in some cases they got desperate enough to sue. Marvel defended itself very aggressively (and why shouldn't they, these people had contributed nothing), and even went so far as to countersue people for amounts of money that were piddling to Marvel but doubtless ruinous to those people. They don't apologize for this--they regard these people as thieves who are trying to get something for nothing.

The only thing protected people was insisting on having fair contracts. That was it. Anyone who expected largesse at any time from any of Marvel's various owners got the shaft. Of course they did. They hadn't contributed anything!

Color me skeptical

I've gone back and forth on Barnes & Noble's prospects, but some news came out recently that really is making me down on the whole Nook business.

Namely, Pearson (owner of Penguin) is taking a five percent ownership share in the Nook business.

It's not just that I think Pearson is making a host of dumb decisions lately. Or that I think their rationale for doing this (securing better distribution for their educational materials?) is basically nonsensical, or that I think they're really shoring up Barnes & Noble because they're hoping nothing will ever change in bookselling.

It's also because Barnes & Noble also announced that holiday sales sucked for the Nook business (which, it should be noted, includes both e-books and e-readers), and that the company is going to miss its numbers. According to Publisher's Weekly, twice as many Nooks sold this Thanksgiving weekend than last--which parallels Amazon's report of stronger Kindle sales that weekend--but still, Barnes & Noble is not going to meet their revenue projections. (And I know it's not been a great holiday season for retailers in general, but Amazon isn't saying that they're going to miss their numbers.)

I've mocked Barnes & Noble for being rather creative in how they present themselves to the market, and I think you see the fallout from that sort of creativity here. Either Barnes & Nobles projections were bullshit designed to keep investors from running away, or the company has been doing a horrible job selling e-books and e-readers. Or both.

How that click thing works

I posted earlier about my first pay-per-click advertising campaign, and Jim Self commented, "I bet someone out there has crunched the numbers on what level of bid gets the best results."

If you're scratching your head as to what he's talking about, when you book a pay-per-click advertising campaign, you bid a certain price that you will pay if the ad is actually clicked on. Bid too low, and your ad never actually gets shown to anyone--which is what happened my first day. Bid really high, and your ad will get shown to everyone, right away!

Sounds like a good idea to bid high, right? But it's not, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, you need to look at your potential revenue per customer--you don't want to bid a dollar a click if you only have one 99-cent book out and can only possibly make 35 cents off each customer. The math isn't always that simple--my first pay-per-click campaign was for a free book, after all, but the hope is that they'll buy copies of Trust. Some already are, which is awesome, but I have no idea what the conversion rate is, so I can't sit down and calculate my exact return on investment. But it really doesn't matter--I'm more likely to cover the cost of the campaign (which wasn't much--$71.22) if I keep the bid price low.

The other reason to bid low is that you set a daily budget, and once your campaign hits that cost, it closes down for the day. So, if you have a daily budget of $100, and you bid a dollar a click, your ads will stop showing after 100 people click. If you bid 50 cents a click, 200 people can click before your campaign goes dark. Ten cents a click? One thousand people!

If you're running an ad campaign where the click takes someone to where they can buy your book, then clearly you want to maximize clicks. In that scenario, getting as many clicks as you can before your money runs out matters far more than having the ad shown to everyone quickly.

The tricky thing is that, as Lindsay Buroker notes, Facebook suggests a range of bids per click that is very high. Lindsay said that Facebook suggested she bid almost a dollar per click; she wound up doing fine at 20 cents. I'm assuming that costs have gone up because of all the post-holiday advertising, because I initially bid 30 cents, and the ad wasn't being shown. I raised it to 50 cents, and the ad got shown fairly often.

That was for a short-term campaign--I was only running those ads for two days, so I couldn't wait and see if the bid price was going to drop. Now I've started a new campaign advertising Trang at its normal price, and I've set the bid price at 40 cents, which gets it shown some, but not a lot. I'm fine with that because this is a long-term campaign, so I can check on it every now and again to see if the bid price should be raised or lowered.

So, just to demonstrate potential-revenue-per-customer thinking:

The campaign for free copies of Trang cost me 50 cents per customer and has the potential to make me $3.44 per customer (assuming 100% buy through for both books, which is absurd, but we're talking potential here). That means if one out of every 6 or 7 clickers goes on to buy Trust, I will break even.

The current campaign for Trang is costing me 40 cents per customer and has the potential to make me $5.44 per customer. That means if one out of every 13 or 14 clickers goes on to buy both books, I will break even.

If I only had Trang out, the first campaign would be strictly a money-loser, and the second campaign would have only the potential to make me $2 per customer (one out of every 5 clickers would have to buy Trang for me to break even). If Trang was 99 cents, the second campaign would have only the potential to make me 35 cents per customer, which would make it a money-loser at my current bid price of 40 cents.

If Trials was already out and priced at $4.99, the first campaign would have the potential to make me $6.88 per customer, and the second would have the potential to make me $8.88 per customer.

In other words--get back to work!

Progress report

I finished up chapter 3 of the Trang audiobook!

Progress report

I re-recorded the necessary lines for Chapter 3 of Trang, did the compression, and started in with the noise removal. When I was recording it, the washing machine was running, but I didn't think it would make enough noise to matter. And it doesn't--kind of. You can't really hear it, but you can see the spin cycle come on and off if you look at the voice recording. And if I do a complete noise removal in-between words when the spin cycle is on, then you notice it--it sounds cut-off. So I used more-subtle noise removal, and that worked fine.

It's early days yet, but so far I'm liking the point system I created for myself--it helps keep me focused on priority tasks when many other things are also competing for my attention. One thing I like about it is that I feel like it's adequately flexible to be useful when things are crazy. For example, next week I've got children half the time, so I just looked at the calendar, figured out how many days are available for me to work on book stuff, and adjusted the points I need to earn accordingly.

Holiday expectations

Passive Voice put out the question, how are your holiday sales doing? And there's a lot of angst out there, because we writers all know that people get e-readers for Christmas and then at 12:01 a.m. December 26 they all go online and buy gazillions and gazillions of e-books, so if your sales aren't skyrocketing by December 27 or December 28 at the very latest, you should just go take a nap on the railroad tracks because it's all over for you, baby.

Except, you know, how do we know this? Kris Rusch addressed this question of unrealistic post-holiday sales expectations this very day last year, noting that despite all the sales and specials, the main beneficiaries of a post-holiday sales bump were authors like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, Charlotte Bronte, and Mark Twain. You know, because people who get a shiny new e-reader under the tree at Christmastime go online and immediately go for what is familiar--what they already know they like.

Which makes total sense to me. I used to walk into the Strand Bookstore in New York City ("18 Miles of Books!"), and my brain would just short out. I'd have a list of books in my head, but I'd walk in there and there would be 18 miles of books and that list would be GONE. It was like my brain turned to static. 18 FREAKING MILES of books. Holy Christ. How the hell are you supposed to deal with that?

And Amazon's, like, a billion times worse. You're frazzled already from all the holiday crap (the shopping, the wrapping, the crazy relatives, the logistics, the pageants, the parties, the cooking, the decorating, the drinking, the junk food, the travel, the uncooperative weather throwing a wrench into everything all the time) you've been having to do for the past month or two, you open up a shiny new e-reader, you go online, and--JESUS WEPT! 18,000,000 MILES OF BOOKS!!! Your head is going to explode! So you just grab The Wizard of Oz (which you plan to read curled up in a corner as you suck your thumb) and figure that you'll deal with the rest later. You don't want to be making lots of tough decisions and taking risks on new things--you've been doing that since Halloween! You need a break!

And of course, increasingly, people aren't opening up shiny new e-readers--they're opening up shiny new tablets. People who buy e-readers want them for one thing: To read books. People who buy tablets might not even think of them initially as e-book reading devices--they are, and people will gradually figure that out, but the average tablet buyer isn't immediately going to jump online and buy a bunch of e-books. That's going to take some time.

One thing to keep firmly in mind is that this is a new industry. And it's a changing one! Writers on the cusp of the year 2013 shouldn't hang themselves because they aren't meeting expectations created in 2011.

The early e-book adopters clearly were big readers--you have HarperCollins saying that more than half its U.S. fiction revenues come from e-books, but only 23% of Americans read e-books, so these people buy a lot of books. Later e-book adopters may well buy less, especially on the day after Christmas. I am optimistic that this industry will continue to grow, and I'm hopeful that e-books will result in more people becoming readers, as tablet (and phone) owners slowly but surely figure out that there's this really convenient, inexpensive way to tap into the wonderful world of books.

But I don't expect all that to happen by the end of business today.

A survey and some things to remember

This (via PV) is a survey by the Pew Research Center on e-book reading. Wanna know why I don't think e-books are really flatlining and print is the future?

In the past year, the number of those who read e-books increased from 16% of all Americans ages 16 and older to 23%. At the same time, the number of those who read printed books in the previous 12 months fell from 72% of the population ages 16 and older to 67%.

So, you've got fast growth in the percentage of people reading e-books, and you've got a meaningful decline in the percentage of people reading paper books, despite the fact that paper books are readily available. Then you've got an awful lot of room for those trends to continue.

Yeah, I'm not going to mourn the end of e-books just yet.

The survey also shows that more people are using tablets to read e-books than dedicated e-readers, which again underscores the point that the e-reader market and the e-book market are two different markets.

In the spirit of making the same damned point over and over again: See how different the results are when you survey a different group? The Pew survey is of the general population, and the results look very different than when you survey publishers. Even small publishers.

Not to slam Dean Wesley Smith, who produced what I thought was a very good blog post about keeping production going. Lots of valuable insights there about striking a balance between accountability and perfectionism. He makes some suggestions, and then notes:

Chances are you will not remember [the suggestions].  Sadly. You will be buried in a life crisis and then when that clears you will be mad at yourself for not doing the impossible and protecting your writing time and meeting your weekly goals. And you will be swirling in the failure instead of just focusing on being successful the following week.

Wow, was that easy for me to type and so hard for any of us to do.

The real key to having a successful year writing fiction is that when you get stopped, and you will, to start back up as soon as you can.

All very true, and good for me to keep in mind as I recover from the holidays and look toward spring....

Who's clicking?

When I put together the original pay-per-click advertising campaign I did on Facebook, I went to a lot of trouble to target people with likes I thought would fit well with Trang--social science-fiction, Babylon 5, etc.

But yesterday, when I first noticed that no one was clicking on the ad, and before I figured out that the ad simply wasn't being displayed, I though the problem might be that these people didn't read e-books. So I quickly threw up an identical campaign that was aimed solely at Kindle users. (Again: Beat that, dead-tree advertising!)

Well! Today both ads are indeed being displayed, but still none of sci-fi crowd is clicking on the ad. The Kindle folks, however, are clicking. (And they appear to be actually grabbing free copies--Trang is now #3 in science fiction:series, which kind of cracks me up. Can I claim it's a bestseller now?)

So, definitely ads for the next set of KDP Select free days will be aimed at Kindle users. Trang is available as a paper book, so I'm gonna keep things going with the sci-fi crowd, since it can't hurt (and if they don't click, it doesn't cost me a dime--seriously, pay-per-click ads are kind of like e-books, where it's more trouble to take them down than to leave them up). But it looks like it'll be well worth it to have specific campaigns for each kind of e-reader user--Kindle, Nook, Kobo, whatever.

The reason I didn't initially market to Kindle users is that marketing sci-fi to a general audience often isn't very productive. But with pay-per-click, as long as I am very up-front about the kind of book it is (and I'm using the "clever return to the social sci-fi of yesteryear" line), the audience seems to self-select. Since (unlike with display ads) I don't pay for those who don't click, it doesn't matter if only 1% or 0.1% or 0.01% or 0.001% of the people who see the ad are interested.

KDP Select and online advertising so far

I put Trang into KDP Select (Amazon's exclusivity program) December 1, and today was my first free day, which I promoted doing my first online advertising campaign. So I thought I'd post about how all that is going.

Lots of people get lots of different results with KDP Select, but there are two advantages to it: 1. People enrolled in Amazon Prime can borrow your books for free (you get paid for the borrows), and 2. You get to make your book free.

Some people make so much money off the borrows that they don't even bother with the free days, but nobody has borrowed Trang since I enrolled it, so I get the feeling that's one of those things (like sale pricing) that works if people already know about the book or the author. Certainly in my case it's not going to do the job all by itself.

But I wasn't going to let the free days work all by themselves--I was running an advertising campaign on Facebook!

Well, it turns out I have something to learn about pay-per-click advertising. My first glimmering of this came a couple of days ago when I was reading an old post about online advertising by Lindsay Buroker. She wrote:

With Facebook, I tried some ads to direct people to the free-ebook tab on my Facebook Author Page. It didn’t cost me much (a couple of dollars most weeks), and it did get some people to click the links on the free-ebook page....

Note the bolded bit. With a pay-per-click campaign, you pay only when people click on your ad. If nobody's clicking, it doesn't cost you much to run one--you know, just a couple of dollars a week.

In other words: Better-known author than me + free book = little interest on Facebook. Doesn't sound so good for me, does it?

Compounding the problem, I didn't bid enough for the ads, so for most of today (which is Day 1 of a two-day period of free Trang) Facebook didn't actually serve up any ads. I'm assuming the price is especially high today because there are a lot of post-Christmas promotions going on. Anyway, I bumped my bid up (which you can do mid-campaign--beat that, dead-tree advertising!), and now Facebook is showing to ad to people. But they haven't clicked on it.

Which, apparently, is par for the course with pay-per-click ads! The upside is that this ad hasn't cost me a thing (and of course I don't know that I'm not benefitting from getting my name out there--I just know that people aren't clicking). It definitely seems to me like pay-per-click is better suited to a long-term campaign--I might not get very far running one for only two days, but given the low cost, I could keep one (or many) going pretty much indefinitely. Good to know!

Anyway, despite the Facebook campaign being kind of a flop, the free book is doing OK, presumably helped by me finally getting around to posting about it on Kindle Boards and Tweeting about it. Trang has even spent most of the day in the top 10 among free books in the science fiction: series category!

I went to see how it was doing in the science fiction: space opera category, and...whoops! It's not there! Yoikes--apparently when I got the books put into the science fiction: series category (which requires special dispensation), they lost their other categorization. So I put them back in science ficiton: space opera, but they're not showing up on that list, presumably because I didn't do that until late in the day. We'll see if Trang shows up there later on--I'm assuming science fiction: space opera is a bit more competitive that the science fiction: series category, what with it having 7,419 titles instead of 326.

Progress report

I edited the audio recording of chapter 3--funny thing is that, despite all the screwups in recording, there are relatively few lines that are going to have to be re-recorded, and those are pretty much all toward the end.