Claire Ryan's Blog, page 19

The Brave New World

[image error]The reaction of traditional publishing to the Internet has always been somewhat lackluster. Faced with a new medium that renders 90% of their services obsolete, they struggle against the tide and thrash around like fish out of water. It’s only recently that Nick Morgan at Forbes said the Big Six should reach out and connect with readers, for gods’ sake – anyone who didn’t know that much doesn’t deserve to be in business, in my opinion, but apparently it’s something of a revelation in New York.

Somehow I get the feeling that the large publishers are already close to dying off. Tor, Baen and Harlequin have the audience and the savvy to survive, that I can see. The others? Not so much. This is what happens when your decades-old business model revolves around being a gatekeeper to a finite resource (shelf space) that nobody needs any more.

A Case in Point

Much ado has been made of Penelope Trunk’s recent article about her experience with a traditional publisher. She left them to self-publish, primarily because they didn’t have a clue how to market her book. Here’s a little of what they told her:

Three months before the publication date, the PR department called me up to “coordinate our efforts.” But really, their call was just about giving me a list of what I was going to do to publicize the book. I asked them what they were going to do. They had no idea. Seriously. They did not have a written plan, or any list, and when I pushed one of the people on this first call to give me examples of what the publishers would do to promote my book, she said “newsgroups.”

…There is no publishing industry fan page that is good enough to sell books. No one goes to fan pages for publishers because publishers are not household brand names. The authors are. That’s how publishing works.

“You know what your problem is?” I said, “Marketing online requires that you have a brand name and a following, and the book industry doesn’t build it’s own brand. But I have my own brand. So I’m better at marketing books than you are. I have a voice online and you don’t.”

I scheduled a phone call with my editor’s boss’s boss to tell him that. I told him his business is online marketing and his team has no idea how to do it, and he should hire me.

He told me, “With all due respect [which, I find, is always a euphemism for I hate your guts] we have been profitable every year that I’ve run this division and I don’t think we have a problem.”

I have to say, as a former marketing professional, this whole article simply took my breath away. It is close to inconceivable to me that a business would not know the most basic things about its sales, how to reach its customers, and how to coordinate its marketing efforts. It is also inconceivable to me that a business would treat a contracted partner like this. “We have been profitable every year that I’ve run this division and I don’t think we have a problem”? What author cares about that? Their interest is in their book, the one the publisher has bought with the promise of sales. No wonder Penelope left that deal, if the story is true.

She’s gotten some doubters – hell, even I doubt her numbers – but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. The Big Six don’t sell to readers; they sell to bookstores, to distributors. That, right there, is why they’re failing.

On marketing as a traditionally published author

See, the problem remains the same: authors need to do the bulk of the promotion regardless of how they’re published. It’s a well known fact that publishers don’t throw much of a budget at any but the biggest names when it comes to selling their authors’ work. For midlisters, it seems that all publishers can do is get their books into the bookstores that are shrinking every day, and a recent survey showed massive dissatisfaction among traditionally published authors with a major sticking point being the marketing – or lack thereof.

So the question remains – if you have to do all that marketing anyway, why would you consider giving up your rights for a pretty terrible advance and a pretty terrible royalty structure? Is it really worth the advance that you have to earn back, just to get professional level editing and cover design? Some authors will still find it a good deal, if they don’t want the extra work and go with the publishers that really know what they’re doing. I had the pleasure of speaking to a Tor author this week, and, based on her quite interesting perspective, I’m sure that there’s at least one publishing house out there who are worth dealing with.

I suppose there will always be a place for the author-as-writer-alone, as opposed to the author-as-entrepreneur, but I’m no longer convinced that there will be enough of them to justify the size and scope of the big publishing houses. With that in mind, I make this prediction for the next decade or two:

The Big Six will downsize, consolidate and possibly merge over the next few years as they trim sails and try to survive in the brave new world of publishing.
Paper books will continue to crash, and with them, even more book stores will close.
The survivors will be incredibly consumer orientated, and focused on delivering a good sales experience – closer to a boutique than a supermarket, possibly incorporating extra services for readers like a cafe with comfy chairs, or even a small lending library.
Ebooks will continue to explode, and Amazon will remain the dominant player with very little competition from the traditional publishers. If a disruptive service appears, it’ll be from a source far outside the usual publishing paradigm, like Netflix.
Non-traditionally published authors will come to dominate the bestseller lists.
Literary agents will start to go out of business, and some will re-orientate themselves around a new list of services that don’t necessarily include the Big Six.

I’ve no doubt that some publishers will survive, but which ones, I wonder… The great tragedy of the Big Six, unfortunately, is that they are simply too big and too slow; two years to publish a book is eighteen months too long with the speed at which the world moves now. I know they think Amazon is the enemy here, but they’re missing the most obvious fact staring them in the face: their lunch is being eaten by the ones who can move a hell of a lot faster, and that’s largely self-published authors. It wasn’t so long ago that an indie author couldn’t dream of getting into the bestseller lists, and now the top spot has gone to a book that a mainstream publisher would have laughed out of their slush pile.

And, believe me, the indies are already cranking out Fifty Shades of Grey clones at a rate that would terrify Random House. I also wonder whether there will be any money left for BDSM romances when the majors get around to releasing their own versions. Welcome to the new world indeed.

Related ArticlesThe Theory of Infinite Shelf SpaceThe Whys and WhereforesThe Nature of a New Medium

Five on Friday: The Business of Writing

Required reading for the week!

Kristine Kathryn Rusch on how an MA does (or doesn’t) prepare a writer for a career.

Jim Kukral from the Huffington Post on whether Obamacare will make more fulltime writers.

J.A. Konrath talking about exclusivity and freebies with Blake and Jordan Crouch.

Alan Rinzler on what you should expect from editors.

Support indie authors!

Today’s highlight caught my eye for two reasons: I just finished reading Pride and Prejudice for the umpteenth time, and I just love the cover. Step forward, Kimberly Truesdale, and her latest book called My Dear Sophy, a prequel to Austen’s Persuasion about the Admiral and Mrs. Croft.

Cover? – Regency style, and I just adore the picture-in-silhouette look.
Blurb? – rrrrrrrromance! Very appropriate, good to hook the audience for this kind of book.
Social media? – nicely developed, she gets a follow and a like from me.
Web design? – a free WordPress blog, but using one of my favorite themes and a strong layout. All thumbs up from me.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Related ArticlesFive on Friday: J.A. Konrath, just being himselfFive on Friday: Mixed Bag with a Side of VampiresFive on Friday: It’s all about surveys

Before and After: The Awakening

Covers are such important things, like I’ve said several times before. Covers need to communicate the essence of the book at a glance, as well as deliver important information such as the title and author. It’s the first advertisement for the book itself, and, although some may say that covers are simply old-fashioned in the age of metadata, it’s still a powerful visual representation of the story within. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say.

Today, I’d like to highlight a cover swap I did for Samantha Hoffman for her book called The Awakening.

Before

Here’s the cover, and I think you can agree it needs some work.

 The cover is serviceable in that it does communicate the title and author’s name, but it still has some major flaws. There’s a large chunk of space in the middle that serves no purpose. The layout and text placement doesn’t seem to go anywhere; it almost pulls the sight lines of the cover apart, such that nothing really jumps out at once to the eye of the viewer. The font seems like it was chosen at random.

This is the biggest problem I see with indie book covers, in fact. If there is one piece of advice I could give to any author who’s thinking of self-publishing, it would be this: EVERYTHING has a purpose. The color choice, the font choice, the reason why you put something over here and not over there; it all has a purpose. The purpose is not “because it looks nice/that’s my favorite color”. The purpose is “this tells you something about the book”.

After

Here’s the cover after I had a chance to rework it:

 What you can see here is that I used the same spiral design, but added a metallic filter. I used a different font, one that I thought better suggested the supernatural feel of the story. The placement of each element is not accidental; the eye should be drawn to the center design, and then immediately shifted up to the title by the almost-arrow shape of it. The use of the red cloth behind it is simply to give it texture and depth.

Covers are tricky things, and writers really do need to be mindful of what impression they’re giving of their work. A very basic checklist would go a long way to improving many covers:

Is it readable at scale?
Is the font appropriate for the genre?
Does it look professionally produced?
Is the cover illustration instantly recognizable for what it is?
Is the reader’s eye drawn to the title?

Further concerns, like the illustration representing what’s in the book, can come later. This much, at least, will make sure the cover doesn’t repeat most mistakes.

Related ArticlesBefore and After: HubrisOn Cover DesignThe Author’s Marketing Handbook

The Perception of Piracy

I got into a discussion over on Roz Morris’ blog last week on the nature of piracy. It got me thinking on a rather interesting aspect of the whole thing: how authors perceive it, versus what it actually is.

I’ve said before that combating piracy is a fool’s game, a waste of effort and energy that would be better spent elsewhere. But something that Roz said quite stuck in my mind:

We must stop sending the message that it’s okay to rip off creatives, for heaven’s sake. Our status has already been eroded enough by the entertainment business. In TV, films, books, the visual arts – and I dare say in music – the creative’s efforts are belittled as though we’re nothing more than happy noodlers. We must stress that creative work has value or none of us will have a living at all.

This seemed strange to me, in many ways. Who is sending out this message? Why is piracy such a major issue? This attitude seems common, among authors at least, but I have to wonder where it’s coming from.

Antagonism

It seems that this attitude stems from a fundamental disconnect between the idea of piracy, as authors think of it, and the reality of piracy. It’s basically antagonistic in nature in that it assumes that readers are just waiting for the green light to pirate everything in sight, laughing maniacally as they do so at the poor authors who are left to starve. But this clearly isn’t true in the case of other mediums; musicians still make money, even though their music can be pirated. Movies still make money, RIAA scaremongering aside. Even photographers, whose work is most likely to be copied freely, still make money. Have their money making methods altered due to the Internet? Of course. Do some people get their work for free? Of course. But this doesn’t change the fact that they do make money, and it’s never been shown that piracy has a major negative effect, so why would authors in particular think the sky is falling?

Some creatives talk about how piracy was beneficial for them. This doesn’t constitute a message that it’s okay to rip them off. Some listeners or viewers talk about why they pirate – but it’s not because they think it’s okay to rip off creatives. There’s always another reason; they have no money, it’s not available in their region or in their language, they want to sample it first. It’s not malicious, and it’s certainly not personal.

Saying that the status of creatives has been eroded in entertainment suggests that they had any kind of status before the advent of the Internet. To that I say: Hollywood accounting is called as such for a reason, and the abysmal treatment of musicians by the major record labels is so well known as to be a cliché.

Piracy is a response to an unfulfilled need, not a bogeyman waiting to steal bread from the mouths of authors around the world. That authors are so afraid of it suggests, to me at least, that they haven’t done the research on why piracy happens, how it can be beneficial, and why it may have no real effect on sales.

On Having Value

“We must stress that creative work has value or none of us will have a living at all.”

This was the one part that stood out the most to me. I’ve talked about value before, and it’s very relevant here because this statement is completely untrue in every way. Stressing that a work has value is completely meaningless; the RIAA and others have been throwing money at educating people for years, and it’s had no effect on piracy rates nor on sales. And why would it? Expecting people to value a particular work simply because they’re told to is ludicrous on its face. It’s essentially like trying to overrule their own personal tastes.

The idea that piracy will mean authors can’t make a living is also patently false. Authors can make a living now, and they will always be able to make a living, provided they adapt to the reality of doing business online.

I can’t help but think that the immediate, knee-jerk reaction of piracy = end of the world is a result of authors paying a little too close attention to the RIAA, MPAA and others who seem hell-bent on breaking everything to do with modern technology. Ultimately they have to sell an emotional argument to creators in order to get them on their side, and it seems to be working. This, of course, doesn’t stop the authors who come from a technical background from disagreeing with them very loudly, but the fact that this attitude is so widespread really does drive home how well these one-sided campaigns are working.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: authors have nothing to fear from piracy. It’s good to be aware of it, but it’s also pointless to have an emotional reaction to the idea of someone getting a book for free. At the time of writing, piracy seems to be either a benign influence or a mildly positive one on sales, and authors would do well to remember this before they spend their reserves of personal strength railing against it.

Related ArticlesLeave Your Egos at the Door, PleaseIndie Authors and the Problem of PiracySo much respect

Five on Friday: Mixed Bag with a Side of Vampires

Bit late with this post because of a mild sinus infection. Here’s your required reading for the week:

DigitalBookWorld reports that the trial over the major publishers colluding to keep ebook prices high now has a date: June 3, 2013.

Ursula K. LeGuin on literature versus genre, and the uselessness of the distinction.

Mike Masnick on the ‘scoop’ of online media in how websites attract attention and readers.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch on critiques and chasing perfection.

Support indie authors!

It’s actually sometimes rather hard to find authors for the Five on Friday post, but I can’t help feeling it’s a bit of a test to see if they notice that I’m talking about them and their books. Today’s possibly oblivious subject is Kristin King, whose new paranormal romance, Cain’s Coven, has just been released on Smashwords. It looks interesting in a more ‘grown-up Twilight’ kind of way – maybe a little more telling than showing, but definitely potential there.

Cover? – well-formatted, interesting, and works at scale. Can’t ask for much more than that.
Blurb? – I’m a sucker for poetry. Great hook there.
Social media? – all I can find is one single Facebook page and an inaccessible Linkedin profile. Some work needed here, but at least FB is up to date.
Web design? – no site at all! For shame!

Like many authors, some room for improvement and some things done well. Have a good weekend everyone!

Related ArticlesFive on Friday: Price Fixing a go go!Five on Friday: It’s all about surveysFive on Friday: Social Media Matters

The Anatomy of a ‘Subsidy’ Publisher

I’m a little late on this article – it’s quite a bit longer than usual. Let me introduce you to Tate Publishing, a Christian book company that has recently gained some notoriety because of its owner, Ryan Tate. Long story short, Mr. Tate berated and then fired twenty-five employees because of an anonymous email. Here’s the story from the Daily Mail.

Tate Publishing calls itself a subsidy publisher. To those of us have an inkling of the publishing business, this means they’re a vanity press; authors who go with Tate have to pay to play. Preditors and Editors consider them to be not recommended because they pitch themselves as a commercial publisher and don’t make it clear that the author has to make an ‘investment’ of $4,000.

I’ve gotten curious about this company and their lofty ideals. They talk the talk, of course, and spin a lot of marketing speak about discovering new voices and all that. I want to know whether their investment makes sense for an author, leaving aside their tendency to not mention it up front. It may be possible to answer this question with some analysis of Amazon’s sales ranking data.

The Data Source

I went to Sales Rank Express and did a search as follows:

Region: Amazon.com
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Format: Paperback
Sort by: Sales
Omit unavailable, omit tracking, omit reviews

SRE delivers the first 100 hits, so that is my sample size. (I used SRE to cut down on the time to gather the info; doing it by hand would take too long.) The sorting algorithm is based on what Amazon considers to be the ‘Best Sellers’ – as in, sorting by popularity – so these are the 100 most popular paperback books published by Tate Publishing. To double-check that SRE is at least somewhat reliable, I then went to Amazon.com and did the same search, and added in any books in the first 100 that hadn’t shown up in the SRE list. I added 26.

Cleanup

I pulled the info for each book into a spreadsheet and recorded the sales rank, name, author, format, list price, publication date, and ISBN. As the original SRE list had some duplicates, I used the ISBNs to remove them, leaving me with 109 books. If the list price was not obvious, I took the price for a new un-discounted paperback instead.

The next thing to do was remove any titles that were published by the Tate Gallery. To do this, I put each ISBN into the Tate Publising website, and marked off any that didn’t appear there. Then I went through every marked title in Amazon and Google Books, and checked the inside cover to see the publisher’s information. If I could not establish that the title was a Tate Publishing book – I looked for their logo, website address, or other contact info – then it was excluded from the list. Nine were taken out, leaving me with a nice round figure of 100 books.

Analysis

Here’s what I have determined:

The sales ranks vary from 10,999 to 1,600,845. The cheapest book was $6.99, and the most expensive was $29.99. The publication date ranged from January 2005 to June 2012. Here’s the sales rank vs. price:

 

This is interesting because it shows that the Tate bestsellers trend two ways – they predominantly have a bad sales rank, and they vaguely trend towards a lower price around the $10 mark. They have no significant sales, it seems.

The Comparison

I wanted to see how this would compare to a traditional publisher. For this, I needed a comparable sample size – meaning a publisher who had the same volume of titles up on Amazon, in the same genre. For this I picked Thomas Nelson, the largest independent Christian publisher still around (though they’ve been acquired by HarperCollins, apparently, so that may not last). They also have a self-publishing imprint called Westbow that uses editorial fee referrals, meaning they get a thumbs down from Writer Beware as well.

On Amazon, Tate Publishing have 8,259 new paperbacks available. Thomas Nelson have 7,302. I ran the same search query, and pulled up the same list of the top 100 bestselling titles. The sales ranks vary from 70 to 135,763. The cheapest book was $2.99, and the most expensive was $39.99. The publication date ranged from July 1992 to December 2012. Here is the same chart:

 

Obviously, Thomas Nelson have a much lower sales rank range, but it’s interesting to see that, although the range is wider, their list prices cluster very heavily around a particular point between $15 to $20, and their sales ranks cluster between 0 and 25,000. Their best selling titles are actually selling well in general.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

So, this tells me that Tate’s bestsellers are predominantly from the last five years, by publication date, whereas Thomas Nelson’s are spread over the last ten years with one or two from even earlier. (Not surprising; Tate was apparently established in 2001.) Tate’s sales rankings drop quite quickly and plateau around 450,000 – 550,000, while Thomas Nelson’s drop slowly and only taper off at the end of their top 100 list. Tate’s list pricing is variable, but Thomas Nelson’s displays a clear strategy where the majority of their bestsellers are priced in a narrow band.

Conclusion

The question I wanted to answer, here, was whether Tate’s business model of charging authors $4,000 up front is a good deal or not based on nothing more than the sales figures I can access through Amazon. That investment may have been worth it, despite what Writer Beware says about Tate, if the data showed that authors can make back the money. My conclusion, therefore, is this.

Their top 100 titles have no pricing strategy. They have more paperbacks listed than a publisher that’s been around in some form or another for over two hundred years. Their books do not sell, or if they do, it’s not on Amazon.com.

Although I am working with somewhat limited data here, I feel confident in saying that Tate Publishing appears to be a bad deal for authors. If someone were so inclined, they could produce a quality book for about $1000, sell it through Amazon and Createspace, and keep all the profits. Unless Tate can demonstrate significant sales in other channels (thereby suggesting some kind of marketing that’s missing Amazon, for example), their $4000 fee is not an investment – it’s a loss.

(A note on the data: This is a limited set and the validity of the conclusion depends on how relevant Amazon’s rankings are to actual sales – which I can’t test, unfortunately. I have done as much as I can to ensure accuracy. The full set that I worked with is available for download here if you’re inclined to check the numbers or do your own analysis - Tate analysis )

Related ArticlesBeware of Author SolutionsThe Power of FreeThe Handbook is now Available

Five on Friday: Sucking Money

Here’s your required reading for the week.

The Passive Guy reports an article from Shannon Hale on why indies are amateurs, and an insightful response from Anna Elliot.

Victoria Strauss on the new, money-wasting service being offered by AuthorHouse called BookStubs.

Daivd Gaughran in a guest post over at Catherine, Caffeinated on how to handle the non-US tax stuff – from February, but too valuable not to highlight.

Another from Victoria on Writer Beware on companies offering more money-sucking schemes to part authors from their hard earned cash.

Support Indie Authors!

Today’s brave self-published soul is E. Stoops, whose latest work is Corner of a Round Planet – a strange, alternate world sci-fi book just published on Amazon. E. (first name unknown) lives in the Pacific Northwest, probably somewhere close to my home town of Vancouver, and runs a little publishing outfit called Small Tomatoes Press.

Cover? – great photo, but it needs more of a sci-fi feel, and that text needs to pop a lot more.
Blurb? – very concise, good tone. Maybe add a little more info on the stakes?
Social media? – oh dear, where’s the links? I have a Facebook page but it’s not connected on the site. No Twitter? No Pinterest?
Web design? – free Blogspot blog, with a simple and effective design.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Related ArticlesFive on Friday: J.A. Konrath, just being himselfFive on Friday: The Chutzpah of HustlersFive on Friday: Very Good Advice

Leave Your Egos at the Door, Please

“The consumer [says] ‘Where’s my free music on the internet? Is this a free download?’ Fuck off! It cost me a quarter of a million pounds to make it, you’re not getting it for nothing. I want my quarter of a million back, thank you very much. That’s why we’re rock stars.”

-Noel Gallagher, famous British singer of the band Oasis.

An ego is a terrible thing to waste. C’mon, Noel, tell us how you really feel about your fans. It’s okay. Only some of them will be too offended by your attitude to buy your new album.

It never ceases to amaze me that artists take this kind of tack; that the mere act of them spending money on and ascribing value to their work means that everyone, everywhere, could spend money on and ascribe the same value to it. This is absolutely, obviously, not the case at all. We all make our own judgements on the value of certain objects, especially in art. There are people who would walk through fire to own a genuine Jackson Pollack, and there are just as many who would be happy to chuck it into the fire to rid the world of a little perceived ugliness.

Two days ago, David Lowery of the Tricordist blog posted a long article in the form of a letter to one individual music pirate, but that really addressed all pirates. Their main point – that there are no excuses, and one should pay for music, for many many reasons – is outside the scope of my blog, of course, but I found it interesting in how they ascribed value, and how those they addressed did the same.

A Difference in Value

Here’s two reasons they describe that people give to avoid paying for music.

It’s OK not to pay for music because record companies rip off artists and do not pay artists anything.
Artists can make money on the road (or its variant “Artists are rich”).

I have also heard the following:

The music isn’t legally available in their region.
The consumer has already bought it once in another format.
The consumer can’t afford it.
The music is available, but not in a format that the consumer can use.

These reasons are all quite well established, and can be applied to ebooks, apart from the whole ‘on the road’ thing. Let’s not argue about the rightness or wrongness of them for a moment. Let’s look at the basic underlying current; what people really mean when they say ‘this is why I didn’t pay.’

“I didn’t value it enough to pay money for it.”

A musician labored for years to learn how to play, and spent many hours and a lot of money working on an album. They have invested heavily in it. They value it.

The consumer has not and does not. They don’t care that it cost years or huge sums of cash.

The Author’s Dilemma

An artist has to be invested in the work for it to really shine. Authors are no different. But they also need to be realistic in a way that the recording industry doesn’t seem to be right now. The Trichordist article has an undercurrent of righteous fury that comes from placing value on their work, and they expect that everyone will share in that value, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I see the same undercurrent in many articles from the publishing industry regarding ebook piracy, and even among indie authors regarding pricing. I hear the sentiment, “I think my work is worth $5.99, so I’m going to price it at $5.99.”

No. Leave your ego at the door. Your work is not worth the price you choose – it’s worth the price the reader chooses. If that price doesn’t match the number on your listing, then you won’t make the sale. The trick is to pick the price that grants you as much profit per sale as possible, while being the ‘right’ price for as many people as possible. That sweet spot is where you maximize revenue and make the most money. Never think that pricing low or pricing at nothing devalues your work – it only does in your eyes, because you already value it so highly.

The dilemma is this: you, the author, must be invested in your work. You put it out there with the knowledge of your years of practice, with the hope that you told the best story possible, with the belief that it has a tremendous amount of value. At the same time, you also have to not be invested in it; to view it dispassionately as a product to sell, with a precise value that can be judged on profits and loss and in the response of your readers. You have to be prepared to accept that some people place no value on it at all.

The Way Forward

One thing that largely struck me about the Trichordist article is that, in the midst of this probably somewhat justified righteous fury, David spent a very long time explaining why ascribing no value to music is wrong. He presents many arguments that it’s wrong, and listening to music without valuing it enough to pay for it is illegal, and that people should value music and pay for it because musicians need to eat. All well and good, but he misses one important fact: this is not going to work. As Ben Goldacre said, “You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.” Someone’s judgement of value is a gut decision, not a rational one.

Reasoned arguments in this vein, or even excessive guilt-tripping, will not convince people of the value of a work. David is essentially telling them that music has value, not showing them that it does. And, as all authors know, there’s a big difference between showing and telling.

The only thing that will really convince people is if the artist (or author) proves that the work has value. Successful artists know this, even subconsciously; Amanda Palmer being the most obvious one. At the most basic level, delivering value comes in many forms; personal connections, extra material, backstage access, the feeling of inclusion and sharing. (Yes, sharing. Through Bittorrent. Through piracy. And combating piracy, by threatening lawsuits and imposing strict DRM measures, does more to destroy value than anything else an artist may do.)

And now we come back to marketing, or at least the kind of marketing that I espouse for authors. This is the heart of it; convincing people to pay for what you’re selling by showing them the value of it.

Even in marketing, just telling people that your book has value and they should pay for it tends to fail at making sales.

Related ArticlesIndie Authors and the Problem of PiracyThe Theory of Infinite Shelf SpaceThe Cargo Cult of Social Media

The DIY Stub

Author Solutions, who I will not link to, once again, are offering a new service called Bookstubs(TM) through AuthorHouse. Gotta add that trademark – very important… They are, in essence, business cards for your book. The front is your cover, and the back is a standardized bunch of links and a QR code with a link to where you can buy your book online. For twenty (20) of these plus a press release, they ask a starting price of $1,199.

My utter contempt for them truly knows no bounds, at this point. I read the article from Writer Beware on this and became instantly, irrationally angry that a company would dare to ask such a price for so little. In my considered opinion as a graphic designer and technical expert, this is a colossal rip-off that is an insult to every good author out there.

I’m going to prove it to you by telling you how to do it for close to nothing, step by step.

Step 1: Figure out your promo

There are plenty of different ways to do this, but I’ll stick to just a few: Amazon, Smashwords, and Goodreads. The promo is what goes on the back of your card, and the text is going to vary a little depending on which service you use. In every case, make sure you’ve allowed about two to three weeks extra lead time on the promo for the cards to be printed.

Smashwords: My personal favorite. The coupon generator is here. Generate a coupon as normal and choose the length of time you want it to run, then get the little five digit code. Get the Smashwords link to your book.

Amazon: KDP Select free days. Figure out when they’re going to happen and write the dates down. Get the Amazon link for your book.

Goodreads: Set up your giveaway. Get the link from the ‘Enter to Win’ button on it. It’ll be in the format of ‘http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/ent...’. You may not be able to get this until the giveaway is active, so be careful when you’re choosing when it’s going to run.

Step 2: Get the QR code

This you can do off just about any free QR code generator that’s available online. I googled ‘QR code generator’ and got this nice website. Put in your link to whichever service you’re using, hit Download QR Code, and you’re done. You get a nice little PNG file – save that some place handy.

Step 3: Get your cover ready

The cover goes on the front of the card. This will be a little different from your usual cover, because a business card has a different aspect ratio. Just to make it easy, use an image size of 1039 x 697 pixels and adjust your cover elements to fit, or use the usual cover and accept that the top and bottom are probably going to get cut off.

(I recommend Inkscape for this if you’ve got no other program – open it up, make a new default document, then go File -> Document Properties and change the resolution to 1039 x 697px. Then File -> Import -> choose your cover illustration -> embed, and then resize it to cover the page box. Remember, everything in that box is what’s going on the card – everything outside it will be cut out. Once you’re done playing around with it, export it by File -> Export, make sure PAGE is selected at the top of the dialog box, choose where it’s going to export to, and hit Export to get another PNG file.)

Step 4: Go to Moo.com

I get all my business cards from Moo. Bless their little cotton socks for being so customer friendly. You could go to any printing company for this, but I prefer them. Use their dropdown menu like so: Business Cards -> Classic Business Cards -> Use your own images. Upload your cover, and click Next Step.

Here’s one I did earlier over on the right. You’ll want to watch out for the ‘safe area’. Anything outside this could be cropped out when the cards are printed, so make sure all the important stuff is inside it.

Click the little button at the bottom right of the image that says Flip Cards Over. This will get you to the back of the card, where you can add your details. What you add in here is largely up to you, but make sure to include the length of time over which the promo is running and a little spiel about your book. If you’re using Smashwords, put the coupon code here at the top in big letters. You’ll have to play around with it a little to get the text to fit properly. Add a bit.ly link to the promo, your website, your Facebook page, whatever if you want to accommodate people without smartphones.

Once you’re done with the text, click on the little box to the side to add an image. Get your QR code image and add it here. The Moo image doodad might complain about it being low resolution, and it’ll blow it up to fill the frame. Don’t worry if it does. Turn the zoom slider down to shrink it, and then position it where you want.

Here’s the one I did for my book. Very straightforward. If you wanted to and if you had the skills, you could do a custom image for the side frame that incorporates your QR code – like, say, a picture of your main character with the code below them or something – to make use of that big chunk of white space I’m leaving in there. (My book’s not actually free on Amazon – this is just for illustration. Sorry!)

Step 5: Check out

Review your design, check out, and order whatever else you want from Moo. You can have rounded corners if you like for a little extra. Their usual card stock is good, high quality stuff, but I like to get the recycled stock because it’s easier to write on. Did I mention they also do little 1×1″ stickers? Yes, if you have some dead tree copies of your book lying around, you can make glossy stickers to stick to the front of them for ten bucks.

It’s $19.99 for fifty cards to start with, takes about two weeks if you’re not in a hurry, and you can pay by Paypal.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Stubs, or business cards, or whatever you want to call them, for your book.

This is effectively what AuthorHouse wants to charge you over a thousand dollars for. This is something that you could do yourself in a couple of hours, if anything, and that a professional designer could do in a couple of minutes. The cost? Twenty bucks plus whatever you want to spend on a copywriter for your press release, IF you want a press release.

(In my opinion, this is a half-assed ploy to get authors to spend money on just that – their idiotic ‘web optimized’ press release service. One which, I might add, has grammatical errors and no less than FOUR links to AuthorHouse in in the sample; links that are very obviously placed there for SEO purposes. I conclude, based on this, that authors are pretty much paying a ridiculous amount of money for nothing more than the privilege of boosting AuthorHouse in Google’s search results.)

Lastly, I would like to say that I think you shouldn’t do this at all unless you have a very definite aim in mind – like, say, you’re a fantasy author going to a convention and you want to have promo cards to hand out to people you meet. The usual marketing caveat applies; don’t just do this for the hell of it, do it because you have a plan for each and every card you pay to have printed.

And don’t waste your money on AuthorHouse.

Related ArticlesDo Authors Need Websites?The Power of FreeFun with Google Alerts

PitMacBooks.com

The website of Richard Pitman and Joe McNally, authors of the Eddie Malloy crime thriller series, was produced by Raynfall. We also provided proofing services for the books.

Related ArticlesPAWilson.caThe Use of Amazon Affiliate LinksThe Author’s Marketing Handbook