Claire Ryan's Blog, page 21

Five on Friday: A Chip off the Old Block

Here’s your required reading for the week.

on whether indies really do have a chip on their shoulder.

Neil Gaiman gives a truly stirring speech for the University of the Arts 2012 class.

GalleyCat provides a list of sites where you can promote your work.

Techdirt on the news that the court has ruled the Author’s Guild has standing to bring a class action lawsuit against Google.

Support indie authors!

Okay, time for a new fantasy author to shine – Ben Hale, with a new book called Elseerian. Only available on Smashwords as far as I can see, but the premise looks interesting and the writing looks like quality stuff.

Cover? – good illustration, but waaaay too dark. The title needs work to make it pop.
Blurb? – standard mythic fantasy. If that’s your kind of thing, it’ll hook you immediately.
Social media? – nowhere to be found, unfortunately.
Web design? – a free blog, so it was never going to be great, but pretty choppy overall. Needs a little work.

Plenty of room for improvement here. Everyone have a good weekend!

The Handbook is now Available

Today’s the day, and Amazon and Smashwords have The Author’s Marketing Handbook for sale on time. It’ll be a few days before the Createspace listing gets into Amazon, unfortunately, but it’s there and ready as well.

As it says on the back, “So you’ve published a book…” Here’s to everything that comes next.

The Amazon Kindle Edition
The Createspace Print Edition
The Smashwords All Formats Edition

Any author who’s been ripped off by Author Solutions and their ilk can have a free copy if they email me.

So you’ve published a book.

Now they tell you that you need a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and any number of other things, up to and including a kitchen sink and a pony. You’ve probably read a little on how to get started in online marketing. You may even have everything set up already, and you’re wondering why your promotions are drawing in less sales than if you stood outside in a chicken suit and held up a big sign saying ‘BUY MY BOOK!’

Well, you can put off buying that feathery costume for a little while longer. The Author’s Marketing Handbook has the info that every puzzled writer needs to figure out the whys and hows of using the Internet to sell their book. Written with flair, snarkiness, and a little oddball humor, Claire Ryan talks about the basics of finding and building a readership online, what tech you really need to know about, and guidelines on everything from proper social media usage to handling reviews.

Before and After: Hubris

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that design and copyediting make a big difference in the marketability of a book. With the permission of the author, I’m going to show you a case study on cover design and blurbs.

The book in question is called Hubris. This is a mystery thriller, with a lot of private detective callbacks but with more violence than you’d expect in a pulp story. Sort of like Remington Steele but with more blood. It’s written by Perry Wilson, who hired me to redo the cover and blurb.

The Originals

The blurb:

Charity Deacon is enjoying an afternoon latte when the sound of a car crashing breaks through her peaceful daydreaming.

Follow her as she digs into the reasons for the crash and uncovers the ugly underground world of Vancouver BC.

One of the main problems that jumped out at me immediately, when I took on this project, is that the cover didn’t really represent anything. One of the most important aspects of a cover is that it needs to represent the book in its entirety, and this image, although indicative of one element of the story, didn’t deliver a sense of the overall atmosphere. It also didn’t work at scale, and the font colors of the back didn’t really stand out well. The fonts themselves are indifferent. Covers need to be visually striking, and this one is not.

The blurb is simply too short. It doesn’t say enough about the book, and it doesn’t give any kind of hook to the story. This could be a result of not wanting to spoil anything, but too many self-published books fall into this trap and forget something to attract a reader’s attention.

The Process

We spent a very long time searching for a new photo. It had to be something that suggested the feel of the story, and the essential elements of the characters. I think we went through ten different versions, and several different iterations using patterns and filters. In the end, I did a sample cover using nothing but flat color – and it worked, instantly.

The dual silhouette is very visually striking, and works at the scale of an Amazon listing. This is the print cover, of course, and the use of color around the figure is a indication of danger, from within and without. This is a callout to the essence of the book – the external danger of the criminal underworld, and the internal danger of hubris.

Here’s the new blurb:

THEY SAY CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT.

For Charity Deacon, a private investigator with a nose for trouble, it’s just a way of life.

She witnesses a car crash that hides a brutal murder. The police don’t talk to PIs, but maybe they’ll explain why the victim had a bullet hole in his head in exchange for the photos and video she collected right at the scene.

Her latest client is a young streetwalker named Val. She’s used to fending for herself, but her sister Emma has fallen into something big, and anyone who shows too much interest in this particular business is liable to catch a sudden case of death. She needs the help of a pro, and soon, or Emma may not survive to be rescued.

Both are connected to the seedy underworld of Vancouver. As Charity traces each lead with Val in tow, they get closer and closer to the most dangerous criminals in the city – the Chinese gangs that like to kill anyone who gets too curious about them.

GOOD THING CHARITY HAS NINE LIVES.

It had to be longer, of course. This is all information that the reader finds out in the first third of the book, with a lead in to the rest of the story (Charity’s investigation, with Val helping her). The reader knows the stakes, and the danger. It’s also got a hint of hubris, a slight touch of overconfidence revealed in Charity’s nature that is so intrinsic to the story.

Conclusion

I consider this a very successful makeover, overall. The process took a lot of discussion – I could not have done it without reading and understanding the story. Having Perry on hand to answer questions was invaluable, and it was very much a collaboration between her in-depth knowledge of it and my expertise.

Of course, no self-published author is obliged to work with any one designer or copywriter, but I think this collaboration is the most vital aspect of having control over their work.  A traditionally-published author cannot expect to have this level of input, and a designer and copywriter in a large publishing house cannot expect to have this level of access to the author. Ultimately, the ability to work closely on a project means that we brought the best of our skills to the table, and produced something that we are both happy with.

The Author’s Marketing Handbook

I’m waiting on the ISBNs, but it’s almost here. The Author’s Marketing Handbook. 28,000 distilled words of my marketing and technical knowledge, as it applies to authors. It’ll be selling for $2.99 as an ebook and $5.99 in dead tree form.

I’m almost surprised that I’ve gotten this far, but also rather excited. I’ve put a lot of work into it. Here’s the blurb, if you can’t read the cover there.

So you’ve published a book.

Now they tell you that you need a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and any number of other things, up to and including a kitchen sink and a pony. You’ve probably read a little on how to get started in online marketing. You may even have everything set up already, and you’re wondering why your promotions are drawing fewer sales than if you stood outside in a chicken suit and held up a big sign saying ‘BUY MY BOOK!’

Well, you can put off buying that feathery costume for a little while longer. The Author’s Marketing Handbook has the info that every puzzled writer needs to figure out the why’s and how’s of using the Internet to sell their book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Written with flair, snarkiness, and a little oddball humor, Claire Ryan talks about the basics of finding and building a readership online, what tech you really need to know about, and guidelines on everything from proper social media usage to handling reviews.

Claire’s day job is running the Raynfall Agency, a publishing service company that aims to offer authors a better deal on their books. The Handbook was largely written as a response to the many companies out there who persist in selling authors their overpriced and worthless marketing packages.

It also means that she can stop repeating herself all the time when talking to new authors.

The Power of Free

I think we’re all familiar with the influence of free stuff on our buying decisions. It’s a standard practice, of course, where a business gives something away in order to attract more sales. The same is true for books; in this case, Amazon’s KDP Select program.

The basic idea of the program is an interesting one in that it allows ebooks to be borrowed like physical books, but what I suspect a lot of authors use it for is the 5-day free promotions. My question, which I believe is the most important one, is whether those free promotions actually encourage sales.

Let’s ignore the fact that making a book exclusive to Amazon effectively shuts down other sales avenues for now, and look solely at the potential of the KDP Select program.

Time Limits

The initial problem is that there’s only five free days out of ninety. This has two net effects:

Authors who want to make a book free forever can’t do it.
Authors who don’t use up all their days before the end of the ninety day block feel like they have to use them or they’re ‘wasted’.

The first is, unfortunately, a marketing constraint that plays directly to Amazon’s bottom line. If they didn’t have a time limit in there, hundreds of authors would make one or more of their books free for good and use Amazon as a convenient delivery system – meaning Amazon provides resources without being paid for them. The second creates a sense of urgency where there should be none, and it could interfere with a book’s marketing potential.

Marketing Damage

You may be asking why someone would make one of their books free. Surely the whole point is to get people to give you money, right?

Of course it is. But if you’re selling a product, you need to think about the big picture, and the big picture is always all about the sales; what maximizes sales, what gives the greatest boost to profits. If we already know that giving something away for free can attract more sales, then a restriction on free stuff can damage your marketing efforts. Amazon’s policy is a blanket one, covering many different genres and sections, and if an author in a particular genre already knows that one free book in their lineup will draw more sales to the others, then they’re pretty much out of luck. They can’t make that marketing decision on Amazon, even though it will lead to more money for them.

‘Wasting’ days is an issue as well, because it results in hasty and ineffective marketing. An author who joins the program a week before the current block is due to end may rush to make their book free for the five days, and see no benefit from it.

Using the Power of Free Stuff

These free promotions can bring in new readers and sales, but it has to be the right kind of free. The bottom line is this:

It’s not enough to just make your book free and expect people to come looking for it. You have to use those five days as part of a greater marketing campaign.

Offering your book for free is a powerful thing, but it’s not the start and end of a promotion. You need to put it in context. Ask yourself: how many other authors are out there today, telling the world that their book is free and you should try it out? If everyone around you is doing the same kind of promotion, then what about yours is so different? How can you distinguish yourself?

Here’s a sample marketing campaign, running over the course of a month and designed to promote the second book in a series.

Week 1: Post the book cover and release date. Try for interview or guest post on a popular blog.
Week 2: Post artwork of locations from the book, along with teaser lines.
Week 3: Send out advance copies (ebook and print) to review sites, with info on the following week’s promotion. Offer something extra to the sites’ readers to celebrate the launch.
Week 4: Run a seven day promo and raffle off a Kindle to readers who retweet, like, +1, repost, etc ending on the launch day. Make the first book in the series free on that day to encourage sales of the second one.

The power of free is only a tool that authors can use to boost sales, not an end result. Getting into the top hundred in the Kindle free section is not an achievement and authors get no royalties from it. A free promotion should do one of two things: increase the sales of the book or other books, or increase exposure in order to cause an increase in sales. Authors need to learn how to handle it wisely and make the best use of the allotted time in every ninety day cycle, otherwise their readers may become accustomed to getting their work for nothing.

Five on Friday: It’s all about surveys

Big news this week, if you’re an author who watches the industry.

The Writers’ Workshop reveal a large survey on authors’ dissatisfaction with publishers – small sample size, but some interesting conclusions.

Dean Wesley Smith on why indie authors need to treat their books like a publisher would.

Nate Hoffelder offers some context on the Taleist survey of self-published authors.

GalleyCat on Hachette authors sharing chapters of their work over Facebook.

Support indie authors!

Okay, not every indie author needs a boost, so here’s one that y’all should be paying attention to – Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She’s critically acclaimed, also traditionally published, and one of her older stories called Forest for the Trees just popped up on Smashwords. If ever there was an author full of good advice and sensible practices, it’s her. Go follow her blog now, dammit!

Cover? – the FFTT cover is spooooky.
Blurb? – also spooky, definitely a great hook.
Social media? – not linked anywhere on her website, which is a big no no, but up to date and rockin’ it.
Web design? – functional and with an excellent layout, but a little bland for my taste.

Have a good weekend!

Do Authors Need Websites?

Someone actually put this to me this yesterday, and I was tempted to simply start laughing. It seems debatable on its face – do authors, purveyors of narrative not generally known for their tech savvy, need to have a website? My answer would be that you’re asking the wrong question.

Do authors need an online presence, where readers can easily access info on their books and get direct updates? A central location that each social media account leads back to? A repository for the author’s articles? A malleable selling tool?

Yes, dear authors, you need a website. But you also need to know why. It’s not enough to just go out there and set up a blog, for example, without having some pretty definite aims in mind for what you need it to do.

The Selling Tool

This is your website. YOUR selling tool. It is the only one that offers absolute control. It’s the look and feel, the text, the placement of links, the flow of discussion; your online space is where everything is your choice alone. When running a marketing campaign, you know that no one is going to censor you or remove your links as a result of getting a complaint.

Amazon, for example, is geared towards selling all kinds of things, not just your book. Ditto for social networks; they’re designed to sell TO you, if anything. When you’re marketing a book, you need one selling tool that’s geared only for you.

Visibility

By not having a website, you make yourself harder to find. The first instinct of many Internet denizens, when they find something that piques their interest, is to go to Google and do a search on it. Your website – your main selling tool – should be at the top of that particular list, followed by stuff like Facebook and Amazon listings. It’s very straightforward – your social media accounts have a certain amount of info on you. Amazon has a certain amount of info on your books. Only your website has ALL of it in one handy location.

There’s a reason why businesses are told that they should have a website, and authors are no different. Both sell a product, and having easily available information on that product is worth a hell of a lot.

Statistics

I think we can all agree that social networks are great tools, but there’s something they don’t give you – proper statistics. No, Facebook Insights don’t count, as they’re not in any way detailed enough.

A website under your control can give you all kinds of valuable statistics on how many people are interested in you. It’ll tell you their general location, what site they came from, what pages they visited, how long they stayed there. I don’t think I can really impress upon you how important this is, but let’s go with an example.

You have a particular marketing campaign running on Twitter. The promo is listed as a post on your site, and you put the link on Twitter. Every time someone retweets it, they’re entered into a draw for an Amazon gift card. So, what can something like Google Analytics tell you?

The volume of traffic going to your promo post.
How much of it came from Twitter.
The average time spent reading that post.
How many clicked on your Amazon link (if you’re tech savvy enough).

All of this adds up to you knowing exactly how well that campaign is working. Go ahead and see if Facebook can tell you that.

I can’t believe that I have to say this in the year 2012, but yes, you need a website. You need a whole online marketing strategy, in fact. I beg you, dear authors, to heed my advice here: writing a book makes you an author, but everything that comes after that – especially your website – makes you a professional.

Beware of Author Solutions

First of all, let’s get something straight. If you publish a book, either all by yourself or by paying someone up front for the services you can’t handle (like cover design), for which you retain all rights and keep all profits, then you are an independent, self-published author. If you get an agent and a book deal that pays an advance and some healthy royalties, you’re a traditionally-published author.

If you use a service like Author Solutions, you’re a fool.

A Little History

Before the age of the Internet, people who paid for their books to be published outside of the mainstream industries were considered to be vanity publishing. It’s where the stigma of self-publishing comes from, and why there is a lingering attitude that those who self-publish were not good enough to get a book deal. Times have changed, of course, and self-publishing is becoming more and more respectable as a viable alternative.

The business model of a vanity publisher was very simple. An author paid for their book to be printed, as there was no other way to deliver their work to a potential audience. The company had no stake in its success and no reason to market the book; it was all on the author to sell as many copies as they could, to get back the cost of the printing. The point is that the company had already been paid, by their customers, the authors.

The Internet, of course, makes all of that irrelevant. Anyone can put their book up on Amazon if they want to sell it, with no printing required if need be. Why would an author pay for a print run if there were another, cheaper, far more convenient way to deliver their work? Like many industries before it, it was buried by new technology.

This doesn’t mean that vanity publishers went away, however. They just have a new face now, and many of them belong to the umbrella company called Author Solutions.

The New Business Model

There’s already a host of stories out there on Author Solutions and its subsidiaries, like iUniverse, AuthorHouse, Xlibris and others. I’ll forgo repeating them all here, but the summary is thus: there are problems galore. Emily Seuss is collecting some of the stories on her blog, and it’s worth a read.

Make no mistake about this, though – Author Solutions is a vanity publisher. They’re trying to pretend otherwise, but it’s clear that their services are pay-to-play. This is not a business model that’s favorable to authors, whatever way you cut it, and the fact that they’re pushing their services as self-publishing or independent publishing is plain misleading.

It’s all about the flow of money. According to Yog’s Law, money flows towards the author. I would add the caveat that, in the case of a true self-published author who may pay for a single service like cover design, all the profits flow towards the author. In Author Solutions’ business model, the money flows towards them.

Here’s how it works.

If you’re an author, you want to sell your books. This is presumably why you’re going to try to get into this business to start with. Marketing and selling aside, you at least know who, ultimately, is supposed to be handing over money for your work: the readers.  Not so with Author Solutions and their ilk.

In short, Author Solutions doesn’t sell to readers. They don’t get much money from readers. They get money from authors.

Let’s look at the statistics. I’ll use iUniverse’s price list as an example, as I’ve got some numbers on them from the How Publishing Really Works blog.

Average number of copies sold per title: 39.9
Average list price: seems to vary. Let’s say $15.95, as per the example on their site
Royalty Rate: 20%, the max that iUniverse offers as far as I can tell

Now, I’m not actually interested in how much the author gets. I’m interested in how much iUniverse gets. Let’s see if I can work it out, using the formula provided by iUniverse itself. (No, I am not linking to them. Sorry.) This assumes a sale to Ingram or another wholesaler.

List Price     -     36% Discount     =     Net Sale     x     Royalty Rate     =     Royalty Earned 

$15.95        -            $5.74             =       $10.21       x             20%            =            $2.04

Okay, the author gets that $2.04. iUniverse gets $8.17. The cost to print an average 150 page book using POD technology is $3.62. So, iUniverse gets a profit of $4.55. This means, on average, iUniverse gets a profit of $181.46 from book sales on each title it publishes. That’s $181.46 from the readers.

Now, bearing that in mind, their cheapest package that they sell to authors costs $899 at the time of writing.

The Bottom Line

I can’t really make this more clear. In this example (and I fully admit that this is nothing more than ballpark estimation), it’s blindingly obvious that iUniverse has no incentive to sell the books. They get far more money from the authors themselves, and it’s clear that their business model is geared towards that alone. I am sure of this because it’s already well known that the iUniverse sales team calls authors, not bookstores, to sell them on their products. Their website is geared towards selling to authors. By all accounts, every Author Solutions subsidiary works on the same model, and this puts them at odds with the purpose of the author in selling books to readers.

This just isn’t acceptable, not for an author who intends to develop a career out of their writing. Forget the problems, and the accusations of scamming and misleading advertising. This alone means that their company is a terrible choice. No sensible business person should ever, ever consider going into a partnership with a company that maintains the appearance of being aligned with their aims, while in actuality the company’s focus is entirely elsewhere.

Their tagline talks a lot about helping authors achieve their goals or fulfil their dreams. They just don’t mention that none of that includes commercial success. So here is my advice, dear authors, if you’re looking for help in publishing your work:

If you just want a few for your friends or family, use something like Lulu.com to buy individual copies.
If you need a run of books to sell at seminars, for example, look up book printing companies.
If you want to develop a traditional writing career, seek advice from the blogs of well known agents and big name publishers.
If you want to go down the self-published route, check every company who offers you services on Preditors and Editors or Writer Beware, and do a google search for “nameofcompany scam”.

In every case, you need to talk to other writers, preferably on the Absolute Write forums. Every time you’re told you need to hand over money for something or other, make sure you know exactly what you’re getting.

Five on Friday: Social Media Matters

Required reading for the week!

The Wise Ink blog on how Pinterest is used for marketing.

Terri Giuliano Long from IndieReader on the stigma of self-publishing, then and now.

The Passive Guy, letting us all know that Createspace now sells in Europe too.

GalleyCat on how a self-published book can be sold in brick-and-mortar stores.

Support indie authors!

I don’t normally read paranormal anything, but I’ll give any book a shot if it looks interesting. Today’s author caught my eye on Smashwords – Samantha Hoffman, and her latest book called The Awakening. It’s a tale of vampires in training and serial killing. Not a hefty tome at around 60,000 words, but she’s got some talent and I think she’ll be going places.

Cover? – works at scale, but visually uninteresting. Needs something more, I think.
Blurb? – good enough to hook me.
Social media? – just started, so all I can find is a Twitter account and it’s not really up to date. Where’s Facebook, or Pinterest, or Google+?
Web design? – a WordPress free blog. Good choice of theme, possibly not in keeping with the paranormal, but it’s well-designed at least.

Have a good weekend!

The Theory of Infinite Shelf Space

Consider a scenario: a company produces a product. The product is excellent, and demand is good. The company has overheads in order to produce this product and get it out to the masses. It’s a cost they are willing to bear.

Technology advances. Suddenly the capability appears for their product to be infinitely cloned and distributed at a speed and convenience that they could only dream about, and at a cost that’s so marginal as to be almost free. How does the company respond to this?

If the company was a record label, back when Napster was booming, the response was nothing short of horror. They did not see the fact that millions more people wanted their product now that they had easy access to it; millions of fans, all talking and engaging and sharing and buying. They only saw one thing: people were getting their product for free. The why and how were not important.

History Repeating

The reaction of the legacy industries to the Internet have been a joke, more or less. DRM, the SOPA and ACTA reforms, lawsuits, FBI warnings… but what difference has it made? None. The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it. Piracy hasn’t stopped, and it never will.

Their reactions have been the same, every time a new form of technology comes out. Then the business adapts, and finds that new markets open up that allow them to make even more money than ever before. The Internet, however, is something new, something far more expansive than they have ever encountered. Up to this point, the legacy industries have maintained control over what gets seen, or heard, or read. Now, the effortless transmission of data, and modern technology, has made that control all but irrelevant.

The publishing industry is no different than any other entertainment medium. It thrived when it was the only way for a creative work to get any kind of widespread audience. When a better way appears that allows a creator to build an audience, sell their work, and make a lot more money, then that industry is in a lot of trouble.

Infinite Shelf Space

The fundamental disconnect between a legacy entertainment industry and a modern, Internet-orientated one is that of scope. An industry that’s beholden to traditional ideas will not be able to take advantage of new opportunities, because they simply cannot think outside their decades-old box. For publishers, it’s infinite shelf space.

Let’s take a bookstore and give it infinite shelves on which to display books. Let’s give it infinite access, so that anyone in the world may walk in and buy a book. Let’s give it instant, custom distribution, so that any book is delivered in the format of the customer’s choice. Now imagine that someone stands outside this bookstore, and tut-tuts that there are too many books there, and how will people find anything? Well, let’s give it a terminal at the entrance, so that anyone can type in a title and the book magically appears in front of them.

Publishers have traditionally acted as the gatekeepers. In a world with limited shelf space, there is a market in selling that space. That, of course, is the province of the brick-and-mortar stores. There is also a market in deciding what’s good enough to appear in that space, and publishers have filled that spot for years. Their role as filters and producers was required, as a matter of efficiency; there were thousands of people who wrote books, and someone had to select the best and spend the money to bring them to the market.

But the problem of infinite shelf space turns all of this on its head. Unlimited space means there is no market in selling that space. Unlimited space means there is no reason to have a gatekeeper who selects which books appear. And if that unlimited space is more accessible, more convenient, and cheaper than the alternative, then it is inevitable that consumers will be drawn to it, and that authors will follow them. There are huge possibilities in this new publishing paradigm, after all. The legacy publishers, however, face the same problems as the legacy record labels – this publishing paradigm has no place for a business model that relies on having to ration out space and access. They have to adapt, and quickly, or risk being rendered obsolete – especially when the very bookstores that they rely on for the majority of their business are starting to close.

The Future

Part of the problem is that publishers don’t seem to recognize their core strengths. They have long experience in production, editing, and all the nuts and bolts of creating a good book. They also have the marketing systems to pull in, say, TV appearances. They have the infrastructure to take the fullest advantage of the Internet, if they are willing to reorient their business towards it and play up the skills that can’t be replaced with technology. Readers will still need someone to recommend the best work, and who better than the people who have years of experience in that? Imagine, for example, a marketplace website like Amazon where one could pay a set fee for access to a publisher’s titles? A Netflix-type system that offers an all-you-can-eat alternative to Amazon for dedicated readers, with all kinds of extras and bonuses for subscribers; one that respects the limitless nature of the Internet, and focuses on delivering the best experience possible? Readers would flock to it, because it’s a better deal for anyone who reads a lot of a particular genre or a particular publisher.

They could do this. The proof of concept already exists, obviously. Again, publishing is not so different from other industries that it can’t work just as well for them.

I fear that it will never happen because they’re simply too afraid of people getting their products for free. This has always struck me as similar to being afraid of whether it will rain today, and staying inside just in case no matter how interesting the outside world can be. Denying reality doesn’t make it go away, unfortunately, and I believe the major publishing houses will have a rather stark choice in front of them: radically alter their whole business around the theory of infinite shelf space, let go of the past, or simply be washed away.