Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 112

How to Turn a Microsoft Word Document Into an Ebook (EPUB)

Note from Jane: This post has been updated to reflect changes in tools available on the market.

So your book is sitting in Microsoft Word, and you’d like to get that material converted into an ebook format you can sell through ebook retailers such as Amazon. Unfortunately, your basic version of Word doesn’t offer that functionality. So what do you do?

If you’re patient and willing to format your Word document carefully, you can use the automated conversion processes of Amazon Kindle, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Pronoun or similar ebook retailer and distribution services. They want to make it easy for you to get published, so they’ll convert your Word document into an ebook (EPUB) file instantly, as soon as you upload it.

But the results may look terrible. Much depends on the quality and complexity of the document you start with.

Thus, the following list offers workable options I’ve found that (1) don’t involve hugely expensive software, with one possible exception, and (2) don’t get you knee-deep into Word formatting. My assumptions are that you don’t want to become a Microsoft Word ninja and that you may desire to edit your ebook file outside of Word.

Note that most of these methods will only be appropriate if your book is predominantly text, with few images and specific formatting requirements.

Start with Draft2Digital’s free conversion tool

Authors often report the Draft2Digital conversion from Word to EPUB to be the smoothest and easiest they’ve used. Fortunately, you don’t have to distribute through Draft2Digital in order to take advantage of their conversion; their terms of service allow you to set up an account, upload your Word doc, export the EPUB file, then take it elsewhere, to another retailer or distributor. (Not all ebook distributors are so kind in their terms.)

Once you’ve downloaded the EPUB file from the automated conversion process, you may be happy with it exactly as is, or you may want to open it up in Calibre or Sigil to make adjustments. Calibre is a free ebook management software that allows you to edit EPUB files; Sigil is an open-source software for editing EPUB files. They work on both PC and Mac.

Use Amazon’s free tools for creating ebook files

Amazon offers a couple free tools to help you design and format ebook files using Word, but there’s one huge caveat: They will create ebook files that work on Kindle, but they will not be EPUB files. That means that the files you prepare using Amazon’s tools will not work at other retailer or distribution sites, which almost always ask for EPUB format ebook files.

Amazon’s tools include:

Kindle Create. This is a free software you can download (for Mac or PC) and use to preview and edit your book. You start with either a Word document or PDF file.

Kindle Create Add-in for Microsoft Word . This is a free plugin for Microsoft Word users that allows you much of the functionality found in the stand-alone software, but right in Word. Currently it’s only available for PC users.

Use Reedsy’s free cloud-based editing tools

Reedsy is best known as a freelance marketplace where you can find editors and other publishing professionals help you edit, publish, and promote your work. They also offer a suite of editing and collaboration tools that can help you format and export EPUB files out of their cloud-based system. The functionality is so far limited, but—as before—you can load up your EPUB in another software, such as Calibre or Sigil, to make further adjustments if you don’t want to keep working in Reedsy.

The drawback: You can’t import your Word file into Reedsy. So if your book is in multiple Word files, you’ll have a very large copy-and-paste job ahead of you. They explain the process here.

For Mac users: Vellum ($)

One of the most beloved tools of indie authors, Vellum is an intuitive software that helps you design, format, and export great-looking ebooks, in EPUB format. It allows you to start by uploading Word documents (among others). However, it will cost you. While the software is free to download, being able to export your files will cost you a one-time fee of $199. This option makes the most sense for authors who expect to be producing multiple ebook files over many months or years.

Dump your Word doc into some other word processor that can export EPUB files

If you own or use any of the following tools:

Apple Pages
Scrivener
Google Docs

… then you can export your document as an EPUB file. Sometimes it’s not a bad idea to take your Microsoft Word document, import it into or open it inside another one of these systems, then see how well it exports as EPUB.

For unafraid and adventurous Mac users: Sigil

As mentioned earlier, Sigil is a free, open-source editor for EPUB (ebook) files. Probably the most difficult part of using Sigil is identifying how to download and install it, since it’s on Github and isn’t exactly marketed to the average non-tech consumer.

However, once you have the application installed, it’s not difficult to work with if you know a little HTML. If you can use WordPress—or even if you’re comfortable with Microsoft Word’s quirks—you can probably handle Sigil once your content is imported properly. It’s a very lightweight software. (Here’s a user guide.)

To use Sigil, you can’t start with a Word file, but it can handle text files. So what you need to do is appropriately prepare your Word files to import into Sigil while retaining your basic formatting. This process requires using Mac’s TextEdit software, which is installed for free on every Mac. (PC users: Sorry, I haven’t found an equivalent way to do this using PC software.)

Open TextEdit preferences.
Adjust the HTML Saving Options as shown below. Select “XHTML 1.0 Strict”, “No CSS”, and “Unicode (UTF-8)” and check “Preserve White Space.”
Open your Word document in TextEdit, then save it as an HTML file.

You now have a file that’s (more or less) like an EPUB file and ready to open in Sigil. Next steps:

Download and install the Sigil software if needed.
Go to “Open file.” Select and open the HTML file you just prepared in TextEdit.
Presto! You now have an EPUB file you can edit and fine-tune through a simple interface.

If your entire book manuscript was in that one file, you’ll need to break it into chapters. To do so, look for the menu button that looks like this (“Split At Cursor”):

Place your cursor where the chapter break should occur, then click that button. You’ll immediately have a new chapter file in your ebook.

If your book is split across many different Word files, that means you’ll have to convert all of them to HTML (following the TextEdit instructions above), then import them one by one into your Sigil EPUB file. To add a second, third, fourth, etc. chapter to your ebook, look for the menu button that looks like this (“Add Existing Files”):

Here’s what my Sigil work area looks like after importing two chapters:

Your turn: What tricks or tips do you have to share about creating and editing EPUB files? Let me know in the comments.

What Belongs on an Author Website Homepage? 4 Key Elements

Whether you’re an emerging author or one that is well-established, it can be challenging to figure out what belongs on your website’s homepage and what to say about yourself on the front door to your online presence.

Knowing how to craft your homepage starts with knowledge of two things:

clarity about your readership or audience—or who you’re addressing
a focused and clear message you want to get across to that audience

If you don’t know your readership that well or your message is fuzzy, that will likely be reflected on your homepage. Since visitors to your site may not linger for more than 7 seconds at your site, it’s important to focus on what visitors should remember about you (or your work) after they leave. This requires careful consideration of your homepage copy and accompanying visuals; together, they should convey the most important aspects of your work (or your “brand”, if you want to think of it that way—but you don’t have to).

Here are the key elements of any author homepage that need to distill your message and appeal to your readership.

1. Clear identity

For authors, a clear identity equates to the name you publish under and what you publish (or who you publish for). This clear identity should be at the top of the page and the first thing that people see. Ideally the visuals tie into the work you publish (e.g., book cover designs, themes in your work, any official branding you use).

Here’s an example from novelist Barbara Freethy’s website.

She has three very effective elements here:

An image that ties into her book covers and series
Social proof: #1 New York Times bestselling author
A clear statement of what she writes: Women’s Fiction, Contemporary Romance & Romantic Suspense

If you’re not a bestselling author, that’s okay. There are other forms of social proof, such as book awards, excerpts from great reviews, or praise from well-known writers or publications. Review your official bio statement for the accomplishments you’re most proud of; they might belong on your homepage as social proof.

For unpublished or emerging writers, you may not have anything yet that qualifies as social proof. That’s also okay. Your website (and homepage) is always a work in progress and evolving alongside your career. When you have something worthy to put there, add it.

Multi-genre authors, or authors who have multiple types of audiences, usually face difficult choices about what to prioritize and what messaging to use. Your homepage will typically be more effective if you focus on appealing to the audience that you want to grow or focus on the type of work that you want to be known for. Other types of work may have to take a backseat, at least as far as the homepage is concerned.

2. Your latest book or books

Visitors should see or be introduced to your most recent book (or the book most important to you) on the homepage, without having to scroll or click around to find it. Ideally, visitors can click straight to their favored retail site to make a purchase.

Again, using Barbara Freethy as an example, she shows us the cover of her latest book, with a quick summary (basically back cover or marketing copy), then links to all the retailers at the end.

Some authors will put covers of all their books on the homepage, which is fine (here’s an example from author Andrew Shaffer), but don’t assume people will scroll down a long homepage. Make sure you have a “Books” tab in your menu/navigation so people can quickly jump to or scan all your titles without scrolling.

When you’re featured in the media or online in a way that might bring people to your website, don’t hesitate to play to that on the homepage and direct people to where they can find out more information about whatever you were featured for. Don’t make people look; take advantage of their attention while you have it.

3. Links to social media sites where you’re active

If you have an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere, include clear icons somewhere on the homepage where they can be found quickly. Usually that means putting them in the header or footer. It’s OK to link to just one site if that’s the place where you prefer readers engage with you. Avoid linking to social media sites where you have an account, but don’t engage or actively post.

4. Email newsletter sign-up

You should have a dedicated spot for email newsletter sign-up on your homepage, or you should use a pop-up. (I discuss using pop-ups here.)

The most important part of your sign-up is the language you use when asking people to subscribe. Avoid a generic call to action, such as “Sign up for my free email newsletter.” Instead, craft the copy in such a way that no other author could use the same language. Make it unique to you and what you send.

If you also blog

Some authors who blog will put their blog front and center on their homepage. This can be a mistake unless your blog is current, popular, and compelling. For most authors I work with, it’s far better to have links to their most recent blog posts apparent on the homepage, and use the homepage to more prominently focus on their books.

If you decide to have your blog take up most of your homepage, I recommend that you not show the full text of each post. Instead, show an image + excerpt and make people click through to read, so you have room to feature a range of latest posts (without making people scroll forever), plus reserve the sidebar for some other things—like thumbnail images of your book covers.

Note what I haven’t recommended so far: a welcome message

For novelists, usually welcome messages on the homepage take up space and don’t say anything meaningful. However, such messages tend to be popular when you’re an online entrepreneur and need to state upfront what you offer a potential client or customer. (See Tara Gentile for an example.)

This approach can feel stilted and less effective for novelists especially—unless you’re trying to turn yourself into a personality and/or have the celebrity status of John Grisham. Most authors I know want to put the focus on the books, not themselves—unless they’re nonfiction authors who are also thought leaders, speakers, or otherwise public figures.

None of the above means you should avoid having a picture of yourself incorporated into your homepage design—quite the contrary—and you should do so if you’re comfortable with it.

Parting advice

Be focused in what you present on your author homepage—avoid a carnival of images, boxes and buttons. Keep it clean, with some kind of clear hierarchy or structure. Don’t expect people to linger, read, or scroll through lots of material. Most visitors will be very task-oriented; make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, which is most likely information about you and your books.

Now it’s your turn: What has been a successful strategy for your website’s homepage?

Having Trouble With Plot? Look at Your Characters.

It’s become an old adage of writing advice that, in a great story, character and plot are inextricable from one another. Character doesn’t dominate, and the plot doesn’t dominate. Rather, the seeds of conflict lie in the character, and the chain of events that unfolds couldn’t possibly exist in the exact same way, or have the same repercussions, for someone else.

In his recent essay for Glimmer Train, novelist and writing teacher Joshua Henkin comments on the how the roots of character grow the branches of plot. He says:

My graduate students often tell me they have trouble with plot, but what they’re really telling me is they have trouble with character. I remind my students to ask themselves a hundred questions about their characters. Better yet, they should ask themselves a thousand questions, because in the answers to those questions lie the seeds of a narrative.

Read the full piece from Henkin.

Also this month from Glimmer Train:

On Dialogue by Rowena Macdonald

 All of Old. Nothing Else Ever. Ever Tried. Ever Failed. by Silas Dent Zobal

How Time Zone Differences Affect Your Book Marketing

Today’s guest post is by social media expert Chris Syme (@cksyme), author of The Newbie’s Guide to Sell More Books With Less Marketing.

Do you know what time it is in Mumbai, India? Knowing time differences in the countries where you sell books is key to social media engagement, and ultimately sales.

Where is your market? 

There are two key demographics you need to be aware of if you use social media to help sell your books: where your readers live and what time of day are they using social media. Let’s start with finding out where in the world your readers are. There are a couple different ways you can do this.

Checking your book sales by Amazon Marketplace will give you a general idea. If you are selling books wide (Kobo, Nook, iBooks, etc) that won’t give you the full picture, especially for Canada where Kobo is very popular, but it will give you a good start.

Recently I did some demographic research for a fiction author who writes both contemporary romance and historical fiction. I found that her book sales on Amazon were strongest in the U.S. (where she lives) and United Kingdom. Next came India followed by Canada and Australia.

Here’s the path to find the marketplace reports in Kindle Direct Publishing: Homepage > Reports > Sales Dashboard > All Marketplaces drop-down menu. All the Amazon marketplaces are listed in that drop-down (red arrow below). You can check your sales over a time period you specify.

Where is your market on social media?

Next, you need to know how many of your readers in those various countries are using social media. You can check the social media user base in any country in the world with services like Pew Internet, Social Bakers, and Statista. Since Facebook has the strongest sales potential of any social media channel (AOL Platforms study) and is used by over 70% of the global adult population, I recommend using Facebook as a baseline. The graphic below from Statista reports Facebook use (by country) as of July 2017:

After you check general use data, check your Facebook Insights dashboard under the “People” tab to find out where your Facebook fans are and where the highest reach numbers are. This will help clarify if your personal audience follows the data about the general global audience. Global statistics are not a given so be sure and take any differences into account. Here is an example from the same author’s Facebook Insight’s dashboard. We want to take note of the “Country” column in this particular graphic. The city column is irrelevant unless you plan to target particular cities with your social media posts. I don’t recommend doing that.

You can also get similar information from other social media channel dashboards.

What time is it? 

Your next step is understanding what time of day people are on Facebook and what time zone they are in. For instance, Mumbai (India) is 12 hours ahead of this author’s time zone. Because she sells a fair amount of books in India, I recommended she schedule social media posts for their peak use time as well as Great Britain and Australia. For U.S. posting times, keep in mind that the bulk of the population is in the Central time zone.

You can check your fans’ peak time Facebook use in Facebook Insights. Here’s the path from your Facebook page menu: Insights>Posts>When Your Fans Are Online. The big blue graphic on that page reports peak use times for your fans and is reported in your time zone. According to this author’s data, peak use times fall mostly between 8:00 AM and 7:00 PM.

Scheduling your posts for optimum engagement 

After I analyzed all the data above, I concluded that this author needed to be posting on Facebook at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM. The later post will reach her audience in India at 7:00 AM their time, and the earlier post will hit UK readers at 4:00 PM.

The reason we want to be aware of peak use times is that social media posts have a limited lifespan for engagement. According to Post Planner, the engagement of a Facebook post pretty much dies off after five hours. On Twitter, the current lifespan of a tweet is around 18 minutes. 

There are a couple different ways you can schedule Facebook posts so you don’t have to be glued to your computer. First, you can use a scheduler like Buffer or Sprout Social. They also schedule for most of the other social media channels.

If you want to schedule your Facebook posts inside Facebook without using a third party scheduler, you can do that as well. I personally prefer this method for Facebook. There is a drop-down menu on the right side of the Publish button on each post that will allow you to schedule a post to go out at a specific time. If it is a time sensitive post, you can also put an end time on when that post will quit showing up in people’s newsfeeds (white arrow below).

In order to maximize your social media sales, be sure you take the following into account:

Make sure your books are for sale in all the countries where you have readers and fans.
Know the time zones where your readers are.
Use a scheduler to hit their peak times online.

To get the best chance of selling your books with Facebook, make sure you are giving your posts maximum exposure during your reader’s optimum timeline.

Using Amazon Ads to Sell a YA Novel: A Detailed Analysis

Today’s guest post is by author Deanna Cabinian (@DeannaCabinian).

When I started a sponsored products ad campaign with Amazon, I was skeptical—just another hot new tool that might work for some authors but not everyone. But I figured if I can get my novel in front of customers while they’re in buying mode, it was worth a try.

While Amazon sponsored ads haven’t been a marketing miracle, I also haven’t lost that much money—and copies of my YA novel, One Night, have sold at a steady pace. My strategy was to try several ads and analyze them over the course of a month. If an ad didn’t sell any books in five days or so, I stopped running the ad. If the next ad I tried performed better in terms of click-thru and conversions than the current ad I was running, I stopped the lower performing ad. My goal was to break even or not lose that much money. I set a budget of $100 for the test.

To write the ads, I looked at my reviews and tried to use words that came up often (“sweet,” “charming,” “lighthearted”). I also tried to mention comparable authors and titles. At first I struggled to come up with 100 keywords, but as time went on, I built up the list to over 600 keywords by looking at keywords that led to sales and also-boughts of those keywords. (For more on this process, check out Amazon advertising advice from Robert Kroese.)

The results of my test are below. Here’s a quick explanation of what the terms mean:

Click-thru rate: the percentage of people who clicked on the ad after seeing it

Sales: the number of books sold as a result of the ad

Conversion: the percentage of people who made a book purchase after clicking the ad

Royalties: what I earned from book sales connected to the ad (gross)

Net profit: what I earned from sales after deducting advertising expenses (net)

Keywords that led to purchase: what the user was searching for on Amazon when they clicked and purchased

Amazon ad #1

I decided to mention Paper Towns, a comp title that readers have mentioned to me.

Click-thru rate: .073% CTR
Sales: 3 (2 print, 1 digital)
Conversion: 1.81%
Royalties: $9.33
Net profit: -$13.06

Keywords that led to purchase:

books for teen girls
jenn bennett

Amazon ad #2

I decided to speak to a specific type of reader—those who love lighthearted romance.

Click-thru rate: .072% CTR
Sales: 5 (3 print, 2 digital)
Conversion: 3.22%
Royalties: $15.39
Net profit: -$7.83

Keywords that led to purchase:

13 reasons why
ashley poston
we are the ants
sarah dessen
the importance of getting revenge

Amazon ad #3

I tried comp authors with this one.

Click-thru rate: .11%
Sales: 2 (1 print, 1 digital)
Conversion: 2.56%
Royalties: $6.06
Net profit: -$5.67

Keywords that led to purchase:

adam silvera
the thing about jellyfish

Amazon ad #4

I decided to get creative with this one. I thought mentioning “quirky” characters would be good since it comes up in reviews, but based on the numbers I don’t think it worked. I guess in this case quirky was a bad thing.

Click-thru rate: .055%
Sales: 0
Royalties: $0
Net profit: -$1.94

Amazon ad #5

I’ve seen a lot of ads that pose a question so that was the tactic I tried here. It didn’t work.

Click-thru rate: .047%
Sales: 0
Royalties: $0
Net profit: -$2.91

Amazon ad #6

I was trying to speak to Elvis fans on this one since my novel has a strong Elvis element to it. My gut told me this wouldn’t work and I was right.

Click-thru rate: 0%
Sales: 0
Royalties: $0
Net profit: $0

Amazon ad #7

I tried to combine elements of ads 2 and 3, the best performing ads. This ad has been running for one week and it has already become the top performer.

Click-thru rate: .10%
Sales: 3 (1 print, 2 digital)
Conversion: 5.36%
Royalties: $8.85
Net profit: -$0.28

Keywords that led to purchase (so far):

jenna evans welch
the hate u give
upside of unrequited

Overall results from Amazon sponsored product ads

Total sales: 13
Print sales: 7
Ebook sales: 6
Royalties: $39.63
Ad spend: $71.32
Net Profit: -$31.69

All in all, I’m pleased with the results. Just having the data on what authors and titles lead to sales is valuable in itself. I will continue to optimize and test ads and add keywords to the campaign with the ultimate goal of turning a profit.

Have you run an Amazon sponsored products campaign? Share your experience in the comments.

Reader Analytics from Jellybooks: Crunching the Numbers to Improve Book Marketing and Sales

Note from Jane: This is an extended version of a piece that originally ran in The Hot Sheet, an email newsletter for authors that I run in partnership with Porter Anderson.

Last year, the New York Times dubbed JellyBooks “Moneyball for Book Publishers.”

If you’re not familiar with Jellybooks, here’s the short version: They research consumer reading behavior, and that research is typically paid for by publishers. While companies like Amazon and Apple can track reader usage and data, that data isn’t typically shared with publishers. So Jellybooks gathers willing readers and secures their permission to collect and report on their anonymized reading data to publishers.

Earlier this month, Jellybooks announced they would focus exclusively on reader analytics. Since 2012, they’ve been running the company primarily as a service to help readers discover books, but they’ve now decided to pivot entirely to understanding how people actually read books. Andrew Rhomberg, founder of Jellybooks, says they can answer questions such as:

Does the book have a high word-of-mouth potential?
What are the optimal cover, title, and description for a book?
Is the audience a narrow, loyal niche—or a broad, less-committed mass-market audience?

Rhomberg says Jellybooks typically addresses these issues prior to publication, but sometimes they study why a hardcover hasn’t sold well and how performance can be improved for the paperback.

Jellybooks has already run dozens of reader analytics campaigns spanning hundreds of titles for all types of publishers, and they have provided ebooks for free to thousands of readers. Rhomberg was kind enough to answer my questions about some of their findings.

Jane: When clients hire you, are their needs related predominantly to marketing and promotion of books—to better figure out who to market a book to? I  noticed that, at the time of the New York Times article, people were worried that JellyBooks insights could affect acquisitions or editorial decisions about how writers craft their stories. So I guess I’m asking: Are any publishers hiring you for that type of work?

Andrew Rhomberg: We are still very much focused on the publicity, marketing, and sales side of the publishing industry. Reader analytics is used to measure the strength of reader engagement with a book. … Usually we address [this] before a book is published, but sometimes we also look at why a hardcover hasn’t met its sales targets and how this could be turned around for the launch of the paperback.

Very recently, I was invited to give a presentation at a leading literary agency and the question did come up: Could reader analytics suddenly feature in acquisition decisions? My answer was: very unlikely.

First, if there is no manuscript or only a rough draft, then what are we testing? Acquisition editors have to make decisions on what the potential of a book is, while what reader analytics measures is the reaction of the audience to the final work.

Second, the time it takes to conduct a reader analytics campaign is a couple of weeks, but the typical acquisition process works on much more compressed timescales, so there is a mismatch here.

Third, we at Jellybooks are not keen on finding ourselves wedged between authors and agents on the one side and publishers on the other side. Therefore we are not the least bit enthusiastic about applying reader analytics to this area even if it was a fit.

There are always exceptions. We have often seen great book for which nobody abroad seemed to show any interest. Increasingly we hold detailed data on audiences and reader preferences in multiple languages and territories. What excites us is: How we can help a great book get translated, find a foreign publisher and reach as many readers across the world as possible? This is an area where reader analytics can potentially help a lot, not as a gatekeeping tool, but as tool to make good work really shine and spread its wings. We prefer acting as evangelists for books, not judges of books.

We found that literary agents were excited about the tool because they wanted to maximize the sales of a book. Using reader analytics and A/B testing, it is possible to quantitatively measure what is the best cover, the best title, the best description, and the best way to position a book. The goal is to make great books, and for authors to succeed and reach maximum potential, and the way we work with publishers is very much focused on this aspect. Obviously, not every book has the same potential or should be marketed the same way and a large part of our work is to help find the right approach, target the right audience, and use the appropriate channels to reach a book’s natural audience.

It is correct that editorial still views us with some degree of suspicion, but that’s mostly editors who have never had first-hand experience of the tool. Those who do value it for helping them better understand why some things work. They absorb the findings into their knowledge base and it helps them make better judgements.

Reader analytics also helps cut through internal debates between editorial and marketing when a book is not meeting its forecast. We help people around the table understand what factors are responsible for a book not reaching its intended audience. Reader analytics data is highly actionable, but also provides common ground for debate between different parties within a publisher.

Do you have any specific takeaways to share about the influence of cover art on reading or recommendation behavior?

When picking a book, readers are much more influenced by the cover than they realize. We have routinely asked readers why they pick a book and then compare the answers with results from A/B tests where we could objectively measure the influence a cover has on the actual decisions that test participants made. How did a cover influence readers to pick one book and not another?

The answer is that covers influence readers greatly in their choices and reader are not even aware of it. There are no hard rules why one cover works better than another with respect to “pick me.” It’s not simply about standing out; a cover has to be appropriate for the targeted audience, fit the title, match the description and much more.

The cover should raise expectations, but not create misleading expectations. There is a fine balance. We call it “truth in advertising,” because cover, title and description are the central advertising message for a book. A/B testing is a wonderful tool for measuring what works, but more often than not the outcome of those tests is surprising. It’s just incredibly difficult to predict why one cover will work and another will not, because visuals have such a huge impact in the selection process of how people choose books.

What we have found in countless A/B tests is that covers have a negligible influence on whether somebody will finish a book or not—assuming of course the cover wasn’t wildly misleading, then you do see an effect. Completion rates seem to be driven almost exclusively by content. On the other hand, the speed with which somebody finishes a book is indeed influenced by the cover. Good covers pull people back and give people a reason to finish the book faster, which helps in sustaining a viral cycle with a fast turn-around time. Think of a virus that needs 14 days to become infectious versus one that needs only 5 days. Which virus is going to spread faster? It’s the same with books.

The most important finding we’ve made, though, is that the word-of-mouth potential for a book—the probability that somebody will recommend a book to others—is heavily influenced by the cover. This surprised many publishers, but it makes perfect sense. People in general, and readers in particular, are very much aware that they are being judged by the recipient based on what they recommend. Our social standing is influenced by what people see we read and recommend and, in that context, covers matters greatly. Again this is mostly something people do subconsciously without even being aware of it.

Now, it is important to note that a cover that performs well when readers make a selection for themselves will not automatically perform well when they recommend the book. The two effects are distinct and reader analytics provides a tool for measuring these two influences independently of each other, so we look for the cover and package that optimizes for both situations.

This is also an area where we often have discussions with publishers who argue, “All I care about is that people buy the book, that it sells in the bookshop.” And we respond, “No, you need to also pay attention to the word-of-mouth factor, because the bulk of sales will come from people recommending the book to others.”

In addition, as an industry overall, we need to focus on readers being happy with the books they buy. Only then will we grow the industry and only then will we effectively compete with other entertainment options, such as games and virtual reality and games. Those guys do lot of product testing. They pay close attention to how engaging a game is, if people stay engaged, if it is fun, and much more. If books want to compete with games in the 21st century, then author, agents and publishers will need to pay just as much attention to whether readers are entertained, informed, and content with their book purchases, as people are who play computer games.

Do you think your testing is applicable across all genres? And has one genre been the favorite of yours (or your clients) for testing?

We have worked with a wide range of fiction, from romance and crime to thrillers and horror, women’s fiction and literary fiction, YA novels and fantasy, Man Booker winners and unabashedly mass-market fiction. One category we haven’t done yet—more an accident of history than reader analytics not being suitable for it—is science fiction.

We have found that completion rates in each genre can fall anywhere between zero and one hundred percent. Every genre has super-engaging and less engaging books. There seems to be no rule that romance is more likely to be finished than literary fiction and vice versa. However, romance is generally a much faster read, thrillers are read faster than literary fiction, biographies are the slowest.

Generally speaking, we focus on fiction, any area of fiction. It is nonfiction which we haven’t quite cracked yet, because reading behavior for nonfiction is very different to fiction and completion rates matter less here. Reader analytics in its current form is still useful for nonfiction with a strong story arc, like a Malcolm Gladwell, but for other books it is much more difficult to measure reader behavior because nonfiction books are often purchased or downloaded to be read “some day.” So that means they have a high degree of optionality. This is something that still vexes us. It is a tough nut, but we hope to crack nonfiction, too.

Can you share a story from any recent projects that resulted in a key marketing takeaway or insight?

Well, I stated that reader analytics is not an editorial tool, but there is one thing we have noticed when using reader analytics: a lousy ending that is too abrupt and leaves people hanging or wondering, “Why is this ending now?” This has a very negative effect on the recommendation factor for a book. Readers want some level of closure. Authors should avoid being too clever with cliff hangers. The last 10 or 20 pages really need to seal the deal.

Note: If you would like to experience reader analytics as a test reader, JellyBooks is running a test reading campaign for 10 books with Sourcebooks until end of August that is open to US residents. You can claim one or two books in exchange for sharing your reading data with Jellybooks and Sourcebooks.

If you enjoyed this post, then you’ll want to check out The Hot Sheet, the essential industry newsletter for authors.

The WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

Note from Jane: This post is occasionally updated to keep up with changes in the WordPress ecosystem and reflect the evolution of my own site.

As every WordPress site owner knows (at least those of you who self-host), plugins are one of the most wonderful and useful things about WordPress. Much of the functionality you need, someone else needs, too—which means there’s probably a plugin that provides it, without you having to hire additional help or learn how to change the WordPress code.

But before I get to the list of plugins I love and recommend, there are some risks to using them:

First, plugins can sometimes conflict with your WordPress theme. You should add them carefully and one at a time—and ensure that everything works the same as it did before.
Plugins may also interfere with each other. Again, add them carefully and study the results. If something “breaks” soon after you add a plugin, that’s the most likely cause of the problem.
Poorly written plugins can be buggy and present site security risks. You can avoid the “bad” ones by choosing highly rated and popular plugins that are frequently updated. (Anything that hasn’t been updated in more than a year is best avoided.)
Plugins can make your site run more slowly, but the trade-off is usually worth it. If you don’t actively use a plugin, it’s best to deactivate and delete it.

Without further ado, here’s my list of indispensable WordPress plugins.

WordPress Plugins I Highly Recommend


WordPress SEO by Yoast . This plu-in is like a friendly SEO expert looking over your shoulder (in a good way), to help you optimize your pages, posts, and site metadata. This plugin is ideal even for people who don’t know what SEO means—in fact, it’s a good place to start. Read more about it here.


Jetpack. This is the plugin developed by the WordPress folks themselves and is kind of like getting about two dozen plugins in one. I use Jetpack for lots of functionality across my site, such as: sharing buttons at the end of blog posts and pages, show related content after posts, brute force attack protection (makes your site more secure), better image loading, and downtime monitoring. If you upgrade Jetpack, it c an also provide you with security scanning and backups of your site.

Contact Form 7 . Every site should have a contact form. This is pretty much the standard and free version that most people use. You can make it as simple or as complex as you like, and also create multiple contact forms. This used to be my go-to plugin for forms until I bought the premium plugin Gravity Forms. (See next items).

Gravity Forms. Gravity is hands down the best plugin for building advanced and feature-rich forms on your site. If you add Stripe functionality—also available from Gravity at an additional cost—then you can accept credit card payments through your Gravity Forms. Just make sure your site is secure (has an SSL certificate) before you accept payments directly through your site.

Akismet . Essential for stopping comment spam and might even be pre-installed for you.

Image Widget. This is a simple plugin that easily allows you to add images to the widget sections of your website (usually the sidebar and footer).

AMP. Google search prioritize results that are mobile friendly, so everyone should have a site that looks great and works well on mobile devices. One way to do that is to optimize for AMP (Google’s initiative to make websites load fast on mobile). The AMP plugin accomplishes that without you having to know or do anything fancy.

Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP. This makes sure that the AMP plugin plays well with your Yoast plugin, plus gives you customization options for AMP.

Comments – wpDiscuz . A long time ago, I used Disqus for comments, but the load time and reliability weren’t so great. This is the solution I chose, and I like it much better.

Email Address Encoder . This ensure that spammers and other bad actors can’t scrape your email address from your website.

Redirection . This helps manage 301 redirects and keeps track of 404 (page not found) errors. Basically, this means that if permalinks of my pages or posts change for some reason, I can redirect people easily and quickly.

A Few Others I Like


Magic Action Box Pro . This premium plugin creates call-to-action “boxes” at specific places on your site—e.g., at the beginning and end of every blog post or static page, or wherever you manually add it. If you consistently have a range of books or products to offer your readers, you’ll love this. Try it for free by downloading the “lite” version.


Relevanssi. If you’ve been blogging for a long time, or have large volumes of content available on your site that people need to search/sort through, Relevanssi is an invaluable plugin for helping streamline the search functionality of your website.

User Role Editor . If you manage contributors to your site, or use outsiders to help edit or manage your content, this plugin can help you manage what permissions they have behind the scenes.

OK, now it’s your turn. What WordPress plugins can’t you live without?

Self-Publishing a Debut Literary Novel: The Actions, The Costs, The Results

Today’s guest post is by freelancer and novelist Nicole Dieker (@hellothefuture).

On May 23, 2017, I self-published my debut novel: The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000. It’s a Millennial-era Little Women that follows three sisters from 1989 to the present; the second volume, which covers 2004–2016, will release in May 2018.

There’s a lot about my book that is, shall we say, extraordinary. (Someone had to.) I funded the drafts of both volumes through Patreon; 61 supporters contributed $6,909 over eighteen months in exchange for two draft chapters per week. I queried the first volume in the traditional publishing market, and after hearing multiple agents say that the writing was very strong but that the book was “too quiet” to be marketable, I started asking myself whether I could market the book on my own.

This wasn’t as ambitious an idea as it might seem; I was in my fifth year as a full-time freelance writer, which meant that I had a large network of media contacts and an established group of readers and followers. My freelance work also meant that I knew how to pitch and promote myself, and I had the social media outreach and community-building skills that come with contemporary freelancing.

Plus, I’d already “earned my advance” through Patreon. I knew that I had readers who were both excited about this book and willing to pay for it.

So I spent several months researching the self-publishing process and planning my own marketing and publication strategy. It turns out that there’s a lot of information on how to self-publish a book, and a lot of advice regarding marketing, social media, and so on—but there aren’t as many case studies showing how well these publication strategies work.

Which is why I’m giving you my own case study. Everything I’ve done so far, along with the costs and the results.

I’ll start with the most important statistic first: as of this writing, I’ve sold 167 ebooks and 118 paperbacks, and my royalties and earnings total $803.90.

Here’s how I got there.

Social media

I currently have 3,439 Twitter followers, 1,303 Tumblr followers, and 20,000 Medium followers. (I’m also on Facebook, but it’s more of a personal space than a professional one, and I’m just starting to build a platform on Instagram.)

I’ve been actively promoting The Biographies of Ordinary People on all of my social media streams, first with the Patreon project and then with a weekly Medium column titled This Week in Self-Publishing, in which I quantify the publicity/marketing work I did over the past week and tally up my expenses.

Despite my large—or at least Medium-sized—platform, only a small percentage of these followers ended up buying my book. Like, less than one percent small. And, although I continue to actively promote my novel on my various social networks, I find that the same small group of people are always the ones liking, retweeting, and commenting. As much as I hate to admit it, the vast majority of my followers don’t seem to be paying that much attention to what I do.

That said, many of my readers are very supportive and have done the work of buying my book, sharing my book on social media, reviewing my book on Amazon and Goodreads, and requesting my book at their libraries. It’s worth noting that I didn’t find these readers through social media; they’re either part of my in-real-life social network or they follow my freelance writing on The Billfold or The Write Life. Which means that social media, in and of itself, isn’t as useful of a promotional tool as everyone makes it out to be? I’m not sure.

Email list

My TinyLetter has 105 subscribers and a 74% open rate. When I launched my TinyLetter, the majority of hits to my book’s sales page either came directly from TinyLetter or from my website; I no longer get hits to my book’s sales page through TinyLetter, probably because everyone on the list who wants to buy the book already has. I do, however, use the mailing list as a way to communicate upcoming readings and events.

The people who interact with me on TinyLetter are the same core group of supporters who interact with me on social media. Although my mailing list undoubtedly drove some sales, I’m still marketing to the same group of people who would very likely have bought the book through a Twitter link if it hadn’t been available through a TinyLetter one.

Professional editorial reviews

I paid $924 for three editorial reviews: Kirkus Indie Reviews, BlueInk Review, and Foreword Clarion Reviews. (I also submitted my book to Publishers Weekly, but they did not elect to review it.)

Foreword Clarion gave me five stars and called The Biographies of Ordinary People “deeply satisfying.” Kirkus and BlueInk also gave very positive reviews, and I was able to use sections of all three reviews in my promotional and marketing copy.

I’m not sure these editorial reviews increased my sales, but I’m pretty sure not having the reviews would have hurt my sales. A self-published literary fiction book needs a set of editorial reviews the same way it needs a good cover or a well-designed interior. It’s just part of the package. (However, if you’re writing genre or more commercial fiction, it may not be worth the cost.)

Book blogger reviews

I reached out to 17 book bloggers who were actively requesting literary fiction books for review and got two responses. I’ve heard that it’s a lot harder to get book blogger reviews than it used to be; the most popular bloggers are inundated by review requests, and self-published authors are also competing with traditional publishers that can offer advance review copies of the hottest new book.

It’s also harder to get book blogger reviews because so many book blogs are abandoned or dead; I scrolled through lists of “best book blogs” and “most popular bookstagrammers” only to find that at least half of them were now defunct.

One of the bloggers who agreed to read my book lived in the UK, so I spent $38.87 to send her a paperback copy. Many of the bloggers I contacted preferred paperbacks, which I am happy to provide but which is also an additional expense; every time I purchase a case of 20 books from IngramSpark, for example, it costs me $156.90.

When I start doing pre-release work for Volume 2, I’m going to skip the individual pitches to book bloggers and pay to put my book on NetGalley instead. I skipped NetGalley this time around because it isn’t cheap—it costs $699 for a six-month listing plus a space in the NetGalley Newsletter—but I’d like to figure out how I can make it worth the listing fee.

Media placement

I was able to write articles and guest posts about The Biographies of Ordinary People for five different publications, all of which were already part of my freelance network. I also appeared on four podcasts. (If you’re interested in the emotional side of my self-publication process, you should should read the essay I wrote for The Awl: Never Write a Novel With an En-dash in the Title.)

I can directly correlate sales bumps to nearly every post or podcast. They aren’t very large bumps—two sales here, five sales there—and I’m guessing that’s for two reasons: first, because I was still working within my established network, and second, because I was writing more about the publication process than about my book. This attracts a slightly different audience: writers instead of readers. Not that writers aren’t readers, but they aren’t reading these types of posts to find new books to buy; they’re reading them to learn how to sell their own.

Bookstore appearances

So far, I’ve been able to book three bookstore appearances:

A well-attended launch at Seattle’s Phinney Books
An August 4 reading at Portland’s Another Read Through
An August 11 event at Missoula’s Fact & Fiction that also features author Kayla Cagan and musicians Marian Call and Seth Boyer

I also tried to book a reading in New York City, but got turned down by every bookstore I contacted.

The Phinney Books launch cost me $207.10 to put together, which includes the celebratory cake and wine and the “co-hosting honorarium” I paid musician/podcaster Molly Lewis to record the event and lead the Q&A. Phinney Books has sold 15 copies of Biographies so far; most of them at the event, plus a few to people who couldn’t make it to the book launch but still wanted to buy their copy from Phinney Books. (We love our independent bookstores in Seattle.)

The Another Read Through event cost $40 in event fees and $140.27 in book printing and shipping costs. Like many indie bookstores, Another Read Through accepts self-published books on consignment: I pay to get the books printed and shipped to the bookstore and we share the profits. There’s also the cost of getting to Portland, which is $40 roundtrip by bus, and I still have to figure out whether I’m providing snacks.

The Fact & Fiction event has cost me a $214.40 plane ticket to Missoula and a $97.37 hotel room so far; there will also be a $60 Lyft ride to and from the airport, meals on the trip, and we’ll very likely have snacks at the event.

I’m giving you all of these numbers to illustrate that I’m not making any profit on bookstore appearances; I’d have to sell 50 books at the Fact & Fiction event just to cover the cost of the hotel. But doing readings is a good way to connect with readers and to support an independent bookselling community—plus it gives you a lot of great photos to put on social media.

Bookstore distribution

Even though I just wrote about the importance of supporting indie bookstores, I haven’t yet started to focus on bookstore distribution. I do have a list of bookstores that I’m planning to reach out to—all indies—and I hope that my sales history, my appearance history, and my reader reviews will help convince them that The Biographies of Ordinary People would be a good addition to their shelves.

I anticipate that I’ll be fronting a lot of consignment costs as I send my book out for distribution, and that I won’t necessarily make a lot of money—which is why I’m going to be strategic about the bookstores I choose and not try to paper the entire country with my paperbacks. If my book becomes popular enough that additional bookstores want to distribute it, they know how to contact Ingram Book Group.

Library distribution

I published my ebook through Pronoun, which offers library distribution through both OverDrive and Bibliotheca; I also signed up for distribution through Library Journal’s Self-E program.

My readers have also been reaching out to their home libraries and requesting my book, and I keep getting emails and social media messages letting me know that another library has elected to stock my paperback. The Multnomah County Library in Portland recently started lending my book, which I find particularly touching because that was my first library as a child.

Library distribution, like the use of libraries themselves, has come at no cost to me—and it gives readers who might not buy the book the chance to read it, which I appreciate.

Awards

I’ve submitted The Biographies of Ordinary People to be considered for three awards:

The Foreword Indies, because I already know that Foreword likes my book
The BookLife Prize, because Publishers Weekly is an industry leader
The Pulitzer, because they are specifically looking for large-scale literary fiction about American life (and yes, they accept self-published novels)

I also plan to submit to the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Awards.

So far, I’ve spent $228 on award submission costs, plus $34.43 to ship my books to the Foreword Indies and the Pulitzer; I’ll spend another $300 on the IPPYs and the IBPA awards, plus shipping.

I won’t know any of the awards results until next summer, although I have already gotten my Critic’s Report from The BookLife Prize, which includes the following blurb that I can use in my book marketing:

Dieker writes with unrepentant honesty about the human condition, crafting the story of the Gruber family with subtle narrative tension and the central claim that every life is worthy of a biography.

And yes, after sharing that blurb, I got a few new sales.

Advertising

I’ve spent $637.80 on advertising; I sponsored the Seattle Review of Books twice, and was in the BookExpo issue of the New York Review of Books’ Independent Press Listing.

The New York Review of Books approached me almost immediately after my five-star Foreword Clarion review, and I was flattered by both the source and the invitation. I hadn’t yet realized that having a well-reviewed book—and/or having enough money to pay for editorial reviews—meant that I would be approached by multiple publications looking to fill advertising slots. (I have turned all subsequent invitations down.)

I don’t believe the NYRB advertisement resulted in any sales, even with the BookExpo distribution. The first Seattle Review of Books sponsorship correlated with a little over 20 sales, and the second sponsorship correlated with 5 sales. I didn’t earn enough to pay for the cost of the ad in either case, but my sponsoring the Seattle Review of Books is more of a community-building thing, the same way that reading at indie bookstores is a community-building thing. I’m not in it to earn money; I’m in it so we can both get more readers.

Giveaways

I ran one Goodreads Giveaway, during which I gave away five signed paperbacks. I followed the advice I had seen online and made my giveaway global, which meant that I spent $126.83 to ship books literally around the world.

My Goodreads Giveaway completed very recently, so I haven’t seen any reviews from the giveaway winners yet. (Reviews aren’t guaranteed, but people who receive giveaway copies often choose to leave reviews.)

I do plan on running another Goodreads Giveaway on Volume 1 shortly before Volume 2 releases, but I will probably limit entrants to the U.S. and Canada to avoid another $100+ shipping bill.

Paid email promotions

I paid $35 for a BargainBooksy promotion that included my book in a daily email sent to 93,000 readers interested in literary fiction.

This has been my single most effective marketing tool. On the day the email went out, my Amazon sales ranking hit #16,507, which is the highest it’s been since the day I announced the pre-order. My sales ranking stayed at or just below that level for two days as people continued to open the email and purchase the book. I never made it into the Top 100 in any category, although I did make it to #120 in Literary Sagas.

The campaign correlated with 28 sales and $75.18 in royalties, which means it’s the first marketing tool that’s actually earned a return on investment. (It also means that being at #120 in the Literary Sagas category doesn’t necessarily mean selling that many books.)

I’m allowed to run one BargainBooksy campaign per month, and I have already marked my calendar for the next one. I also want to take advantage of similar email promotions like the ones offered by Reading Deals, BookSends, The Fussy Librarian, and—of course—BookBub.

BargainBooksy was the first big out-of-network step for me; the people who ordered my book online were already fans and followers, and the people who will attend my readings are likely to know me in some aspect. It’s clear that I need to continue to work out-of-network if I want my sales to grow, which means I need to do some more strategizing.

What have I learned?

Maybe that this is what success looks like for a debut literary fiction novel from a self-published author with a medium-sized online platform. The only thing that hasn’t been successful about this process are the (relatively) low sales; the editorial reviews have been great, the reader reviews have been great, the bookstores are happy to host me, the libraries are happy to stock me, and nearly everyone who’s read the book so far has asked me how soon they can read the second one.

When I started my “how to self-publish” research project a year ago, I knew that it was going to be a volume game—which is one of the reasons why I divided my novel into two volumes. The more books you publish, the better you get at the publication process; you also make more sales, in theory, because now you have a backlist.

I’ll publish The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2: 2004–2016 next May, and I’m already excited to see how I can revise my publication strategy. I don’t see myself spending less money—I’m still going to purchase editorial reviews and buy cases of books—but I do see myself spending less time on stuff like “checking book blogs to see if they’re still active.” The biggest work I need to be doing right now is expanding my readership, because that’s what’s going to keep Volume 1 sales active until it’s time to release Volume 2.

After that, I guess I’ll have to figure out what to write next.

5 On: Dario Ciriello

In this 5 On interview, author Dario Ciriello talks about breaking writing rules, what publishing other writers taught him about the business, and how little he as a writer cares about what other writers think.

Dario Ciriello is a professional author and editor as well as the founder of Panverse Publishing. His fiction includes Sutherland’s Rules, a crime caper/thriller with a shimmer of the fantastic; Black Easter, a supernatural suspense novel which pits love against black magic and demonic possession on a remote, idyllic Greek island; and Free Verse and Other Stories, a collection of Dario’s short science fiction work.

Dario’s 2011 nonfiction book, Aegean Dream, the bittersweet memoir of a year spent on the small Greek island of Skópelos (the real Mamma Mia! island), was an Amazon UK travel bestseller. Drown the Cat: The Rebel Author’s Guide to Writing Beyond the Rules is his second nonfiction work.

In addition to writing, Dario, who lives in the Los Angeles Area, offers professional editing, copyediting, and mentoring services to indie authors. His blog is at http://dariospeaks.wordpress.com.

5 On Writing

KRISTEN TSETSI: Nabokov, Hemingway, Douglas Adams, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown. These are authors you’ve said broke one or more tried-and-true writing rules. What rule did each writer break?

And: What rule of writing do you think many new writers misconstrue? For example, I see writers getting irritated about, “Write what you know,” and responding with something like, “Whatever. Like I’m going to know what it’s like to be in a spaceship!” What I’ve always understood the rule to mean is, “Write what you can honestly speak to,” whether love, loss, or death—because not having known love, or loss, or death will likely make the writing ring false.

DARIO CIRIELLO: Let me say, first, that I’m neither an academic nor a critic, just a layman author.  And when, in Drown the Cat, I mention these writers breaking rules, I qualify it with, “Some of these are good writers and others arguably mediocre.” Last of all, it’s been decades since I read some of these. All that said, here’s how I see it.

In Lolita, Nabokov took on a very edgy subject—pedophilia—and compounded his hubris by writing the novel from the point of view of the pedophile. And he pulled it off! It’s true that may not be breaking actual writing rules, but he certainly took huge risks. Some of his rejections were horrific.

But between taking on such taboo material, writing the boldest story, and his incredible stylistic chops, how could he not have been a success with readers?

Hemingway stripped the language down to its chassis and created his own style. I’d call that breaking the rules, wouldn’t you? In the process, he changed English prose forever, and not for the better, in my opinion. All I hear when I read him are the thuds of his repeated conjunctions. Still, the man could tell a story, and readers responded both to that and to his fresh, spare, style.

Douglas Adams—well, for one thing, he didn’t give a fig about genre or category. I’m thinking particularly about the first of his two fabulous Dirk Gently novels, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which is a mystery-whodunit detective novel featuring time travel, alien robotic monks, and ghosts, among much else. In today’s publishing climate, had he not had the huge success of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy under his belt, I’m not sure he’d have got the novel published; the marketing people would be whining about not being able to fit it into a category.

J.K. Rowling is interesting. One could legitimately call her prose mediocre—she’s wildly  fond of adverbs (did you see what I did there?) and adverbial tags for a start, and her control of viewpoint slips here and there in the Harry Potter series. But she’s such a good storyteller that none of it matters, at least to the huge majority of ordinary readers. Which rather validates a lot of what I talk about in my book.

The rules Dan Brown breaks include the few I think should be inviolable. His writing is full of said-bookisms, clichés, and bright purple prose, the characters painfully one-dimensional.

As for what rules authors misconstrue, my go-to favourite is Show, Don’t Tell. There is, as John Crowley luminously put it to a class I was in, an entirely false dichotomy here, since all fiction is telling. Otherwise it would be called storyshowing.

The result of blindly following this particular “rule” without thinking it through is that writers drive themselves mad and bore the reader to death by trying to dramatize, in onstage action and dialogue, scenes that could be far more effectively and economically handled another way. Because they’ve had the tyrannical Show, Don’t Tell dictum pounded into their brain by so many writing books and blogs and fellow authors, they’re terrified to summarize anything in narrative, even things that don’t need to be dramatized. So you end up with wooden scenes which really have no goal other than to impart something…it’s like passive drama.

What nobody’s ever explained to the poor dears is that so much can be done using strong interiority, aka free indirect speech. If you narrate from deep in a character’s head and get really visceral with judgment and attitude, the material will feel just as shown as though it were onstage and dramatized in a scene—often more so.

Open with action is another minefield that many writers, especially young males, misunderstand. Every first reader and editor in the world has seen countless manuscripts that start with a fight or some wild action, and they’re awful. Open with character in movement and immediately set up questions would be a better adage, and even then it needs qualifying. The purpose of an opening is to keep the reader reading, and unless you give them something to care about and want to know more about, it’s all over before it begins.

You write in the first chapter of your recently released writing guide, Drown the Cat, “I’m a genre writer. Although I make every reasonable effort to write well and polish both story and prose over several revisions, my primary goal is to entertain the reader. I don’t give a damn what the literary establishment thinks, or, for that matter, my more rule-obsessed peers: my goal is to deliver a story that hooks the reader and keeps them turning pages, leaving them with a feeling of having been on a great ride when they finish the book. That’s all that counts. And anyone who believes that exposition and adverbs and an occasionally redundant word are going to kill a book needs a reality check. Write to your readers, not other writers.”

I agree that readers want a good story. However, aren’t trimming exposition and eliminating unnecessary words and finding an inventive way to convey (for example) “nervously” part of the work of someone who identifies as a writer?

Before I became a writer, I had a successful twenty-five year career as a decorative (“faux”) painter and colourist. What I learned was that once you’ve mastered the technicalities of craft, it’s not that hard to do a perfect job. What’s harder is to do an appropriate job, one that’s precisely calibrated to your audience and to the material you’re working with.

To your specific points, I’d say it’s not either-or. Many adverbs are vague and do weaken prose, but they exist for a reason. Consider the phrase, “She mostly agreed with him”; this might appear as internal dialogue in a character’s head, and what it means is very clear—that she was in general but not complete agreement. The adverb “mostly” conveys the meaning with economy and minimum fuss, and any attempt to eliminate it will likely involve a good deal more wordage and burden our prose: or we could go down the really silly path of replacing mostly with pretty much on the grounds that you eliminate the –ly adverb (insert eye roll here).

But more generally, the problem is that everyone wants black-and-white rules and absolutes. It’s a laziness, they don’t want to think. With exposition, for instance, two sentences of boring or poorly-timed exposition can stop a reader dead; but good exposition, delivered at precisely the right moment in strong, compelling character voice, slathered with judgment and attitude, can hold a reader spellbound for pages.

We also shouldn’t forget that so much of this is passing fashion, and that the internet-echo-chamber thingy polarizes and amplifies everything. Take for instance the current obsession over the innocent conjunction, “that” (e.g., “I think that it might be time.”). I’m endlessly amazed that the same people who militate so strongly against this word appear entirely deaf to things like Hemingway’s repeated, thudding “and.” Yes, “that” is sometimes redundant but—like the serial comma—never does harm and is often useful for style, rhythm, flow, emphasis, and specificity.

Finally, a book needs at some point to be finished. If it’s important to the author to obsessively buff every verb and metaphor in their novel until it’s a unique, flawless gem, all well and good. Take Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The language is breathtakingly beautiful, and you just want to re-read and savour and enjoy every sentence. But, my God! does it get boring. I know one professor of creative writing who—like me—couldn’t even get through the first book, though he wanted to. It’s not just about the language.

Again, it’s about story and most of all, it’s about the reader. They’re the ones paying the money, and the vast majority want a good story written acceptably well—that’s why J.K. Rowling has sold over half a billion copies of her work, adverbs and all. That’s not to say we shouldn’t put our best foot forward and strive with integrity for good craft, but let’s not lose sight of why we write. Above all, let’s give the tired literary vs. genre debate a decent burial.

In Drown the Cat, you compare a book to a painting: “Painters are typically left to work undisturbed, and the finished product is the way they see it.”

Agree. And painters can sell their work on the sidewalk without being stigmatized, but self-publish a book and in some circles you’re still considered a hack.

That said, it’s not fair to contrast writers and painters at one end of the creative spectrum without addressing something at the other end that I think about, sometimes: How do you feel about revising a story years after it’s been released to the public? A painter, for example, won’t (as far as I know) tweak a shadow or lighten the blush on a cheek ten years after completing a painting in between sales from one party to another, but a writer can sneak in and rework a paragraph after a decade and re-release the book. Would you consider that change to a paragraph a just revision, or would you call it cheating, messing with the integrity of the original product?

You’re right, there’s still—despite repeated successes and breakout—a huge stigma attached to self-publishing, or indie publishing, as it’s now more euphemistically termed.

I’m generally with you on not revising or tweaking past work—I don’t do it, though the temptation sometimes arises. But honestly, why do we even need to judge these things in the first place? I don’t buy into the wider question of needing to be right and to hold hard positions. The entire thrust of my book Drown the Cat is to make writers question and think through everything for themselves rather than sell them my opinions or beliefs or process. I don’t adopt belief systems and ideologies of any sort for a reason: because as soon as you do, you stop seeing reality. And that’s what a lot of the writing rules that get endlessly parroted in crit groups and on the web and in writing workshops are: belief systems and dogma.

What was the trickiest part of writing a memoir when you were working on Aegean Dream? Were there memoirs you’d read before you began that helped you shape your own?

I’ve read very few memoirs. But since the tragi-comic true story related in Aegean Dream had all the characteristics of a novel, right down to scheming antagonists, unrequited love, and exotic locales, I wrote it like a first-person novel, with strong viewpoint and a lot of judgment. When I write, I don’t write for categories or a specific audience, and honestly don’t concern myself with genre expectations or the way other authors work. Whether fiction or nonfiction, I simply write my truth, tell my story, as honestly as I can.

As to the trickiest part, that was the emotional component, the reliving in great detail of a ruinous, painful year, albeit there was a lot of joy and wonder, there, too. I wrote the first draft of the book in the first three months after our return from Greece, and the wounds were still raw. Anger and frustration at what had happened to us and the way things had turned out were primary drivers, and of course there was some catharsis. The fact that the book did very well indeed in the year following publication, and is still selling a little six years later, went a long way to healing the scars.

You began as a science fiction writer and moved on to thrillers. What attracts you to these genres, both as a writer and as a reader?

I’ve loved science fiction, with all its heady possibilities and its potential for dizzying wonder, since I was a child. Today, science fiction is everywhere, and permeates everything. It’s no longer confined within the boundaries of genre, and science-fictional ideas have even permeated mainstream literary work. Curiously, the genre itself, though, has suffered in the process. Overall, the general quality of writing in the field has improved enormously, but it seems to me that the magic has largely gone from the field. The reasons for this—at least in my opinion—are many, and would require an interview all to themselves; many top authors and editors insist the genre is healthier than ever. But you no longer have to define yourself as a science fiction author to incorporate science-fictional ideas into your work.

I’ve also always liked thrillers, or at least a subset of them, which I label “intelligent” thrillers. By that, I mean fast-paced, exciting stories which nonetheless incorporate truths about the human condition and in which the author’s prose and character work are of a high standard. John Le Carré and Stephen King, especially in the latter’s more psychological work, fall into that category for me. I like story and drive and energeia in a novel as a reader. As an author, nothing makes me happier than hearing that my novel kept a reader up late because they had to keep turning pages. I mean, that’s power, right?

More seriously, as an author, I love to explore ideas that interest me in depth at the thematic level rather than just have three hundred pages of empty action. You can have both, and incorporate elements of the fantastic to boot. And if you can take your reader on a wild ride along the way…well, what’s not to like?

5 on Publishing

Aegean Dream was represented by an agent for a time, but when it didn’t sell, you self-published. Did the inability to find a publisher affect how you went forward with your second book, or did you simply decide after having experienced self-publishing with Aegean Dream that you enjoyed the process?

Excellent question. I published my second book, the novel Sutherland’s Rules, in 2013, two years after Aegean Dream. By then, I’d learned enough about the publishing industry in its historic form to know that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. And I’m not just talking about the majors, either.

Enjoy may be too strong a word—indie is a damned hard road to take—but at least you eliminate most of the variables and have infinitely more control. Luck is still a big factor, and nobody controls that. But as an indie I’m not at the mercy of anyone’s whims, whether first readers, agents, editors, cover designers, the internal politics of a publishing house, or the narrow vision of non-creatives in a publisher’s marketing department. And it doesn’t take me a year or eighteen months to get a book into print once it’s done.

That said, indie isn’t for everyone. It’s a very personal choice, and probably an equal die roll either way. I know several authors who crave the validation of a trad pub deal, and that’s fine. Some people get lucky with their agent, their editor, and their publisher. But I’ll remain indie, and enjoy the freedom that gives me.

When you began your publishing imprint, Panverse, you were interested in publishing writers who might have difficulty publishing elsewhere. What did publishing other writers teach you about the publishing business overall? Did it confirm or disprove any beliefs about traditional publishing that you might have adopted during the Aegean Dream experience?

Undoubtedly. It confirmed for me that traditional publishing, from agents on up, pass on far too many good authors and fine novels. Industry professionals are prone to forget that what readers want isn’t necessarily aligned with what the publishing industry sees as good fiction. And with the ongoing squeeze of the mid-list and the dwindling support—I’m talking marketing and promotion, but even copy editing—for the vast majority of new authors the traditional publishers do sign up, it’s gotten much worse since.

As an example, my first foray into indie, in 2009, was the annual publication of a series of science fiction novellas (Panverse One, Two, and Three). Among the stories featured in Panverse Three (2011) was Ken Liu’s searing work, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.

Liu was just starting to sell at the time, but this unique and provocative novella was clearly considered too risky for every pro market out there: he wasn’t yet a huge name, and though the science fiction magazines tend to be very open to newcomers, novella slots are few, and editors like to give them to big name authors.

But here was a core science fiction work about the horrors perpetrated on Chinese prisoners by Japanese forces in the camp known as Unit 731 during the 1930s and 1940s, edgy stuff that raised huge questions, like, “Who owns history?” And with its externally-narrated documentary approach and cool examination of the rhetoric of denialism, Liu was breaking a raft-load of rules and taking enormous risks.

As an unknown paying a tiny fraction of pro rates, I was well aware that any good story landing in my slush pile had been rejected everywhere else. But I can tell a diamond from a piece of coal, and besides, this was a story that had to be told.

I published it, and the novella was nominated for the Nebula award that year (it didn’t win, but another of Liu’s stories, The Paper Menagerie, did). The previous year, another Panverse novella which had been rejected everywhere, Alan Smale’s A Clash of Eagles, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and has since been developed into a successful trilogy which has  garnered starred reviews.

What was the greatest challenge for you as an independent press when it came to publishing the work of others, and was it the same challenge that led you to stop accepting submissions?

Mostly the sheer workload. It just became overwhelming. I was first reader, editor, and copy editor, which meant a full pass through each novel three or four times; I worked with graphic designers and authors on cover art and layout; I did all the formatting for each platform, both print and digital; I tried to get each novel noticed and reviewed, not easy when you’re an unknown and competing against 300-400 other books published every single day; and on top of that, I had a part-time day job. Plus my own writing got put on hold. In the end I decided my health, sanity, and married status had to come first. I’m proud that I quit when I did and didn’t let things go sideways, as too many small presses do. I never (thanks to my wife’s accounting skills) got behind on royalties; I returned all rights to my authors, and I’m still friends with all of them.

Still, in that eighteen months or so, I single-handedly published four books by other authors. It was a valiant effort, but I see now that without a team and at least a few hundred thousand dollars behind you, launching a small press with the aim of publishing novels by new authors is a fool’s errand.

Do you think thrillers have better sales potential than other fiction genres in the self-publishing marketplace?

No, I don’t. Actually, what has the best sales potential of all is nonfiction.

In fiction, whatever the latest hot subgenre in Romance happens to be is probably where the best sales potential lies. A few years ago it was paranormal romance, and that’s still hot. Romance has an addictive quality—and I mean no slight by that—for its readers. And look, it’s just fun. I enjoy the occasional romance myself, especially romantic suspense or thrillers.

Truthfully, I don’t concern myself at all with sales potential or marketability in my fiction. I write what I  want to write, and I believe that’s what the sincere writer should do. The brutal truth is that the chance of anyone making anything approaching a living as an author is so very, very small; no matter how good or hardworking you are, there is, as in all the arts, a not insignificant amount of luck involved.

And knowing that, and accepting it, is very liberating for me, because it frees me to write the books I want to write and tell the stories I believe need to be told. As the great musician and composer Branford Marsalis put it, “I don’t care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would never have written don Giovanni, Charlie Parker would never have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do.”

What’s the most valuable lesson you learned, having published others and having self-published, about approaching blogs, podcasts, review publications, etc.—both good (at least try this!) and bad (never, ever do this! = embarrassing, newbie mistake)?

I’d say that, as in any other field, you have to start at the bottom and build your resumé. You need to produce good work, put in your time, network, build a readership, become known and trusted.

I don’t really have any advice for brand new authors approaching bloggers and the like, because I’m not very good at marketing cold calls; plus, I understand just what a deluge of queries and requests to review, etc., everyone in the business gets. Most of the bloggers and podcasters do it for the love, and the brutal truth is that ninety-point-something percent of first books are going to be at least substandard, if not downright awful. And professional reviewers have trouble just staying abreast of what “name” writers are publishing. There are just so many books published each year—perhaps a third of a million a year just from trad publishing, and more from indies—that nobody can get close to keeping up.

The best I can offer is to suggest approaching people with both respect and humility. Don’t attach novels, excerpts, brags, or anything: keep it brief and polite and show that you respect their time and professionalism.

I also believe there’s an intangible aura of quiet assurance that only comes with time and experience. After five books of my own and some moderate success, most people I approach now actually reply to my emails or queries—five years ago nobody did. I think that’s the single most important thing: you have to put in your time.

Thank you, Dario.

The Marketing Rule You Can’t Forget

Today’s guest post is excerpted from Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts by Ryan Holiday, published on July 18, 2017, by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2017 by Ryan Holiday.

When I work on a project—with clients, but particularly with my own writing—I start by acknowledging a blunt but important truth: Nobody cares about what I have made. How could they? They don’t know what it is. And if they do know, still the average fan cares a lot less than I would like them to care. This too is undeniable—how can they care much about something they haven’t experienced the benefits of yet? They haven’t spent years living and breathing this thing like you have—not yet anyway.

Accepting your own insignificance might not seem like an inspiring mantra to repeat at the outset of a marketing campaign, but it makes a big difference. I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego—and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.

I remind myself: People are busy. They have no idea why they should care about this thing. No one is eagerly awaiting it as if it were the sequel to a blockbuster franchise (and even if it is—you’re far better off pretending it’s not and working just as hard). People have been burned too many times before by other people who didn’t take as much pride in their craft as I do. It is my job as the marketer of my work to make people care, and that’s not going to be possible if I start with any illusions or entitlements. Instead, I’m going to start fresh. I’m going to win my readers, customers, and fans for the first time, one person at a time, all over again.

The only way your thing is going to be a success is from hustle, from energy, and from the plan you put together. The only way the job will get done—to make people care—is if you do it.

This is something I’ve had to tell multimillionaires, celebrities, bestselling artists, and people with millions of YouTube subscribers. I’ve had too many clients who assured me of their magic bullet—a high-traffic blog, a friend who works for ______, their close relationship with [insert show], their millions of fans—and that because of this they were all set. They blew off opportunities or dismissed great ideas, all because they were too conceited, distracted, or busy to make marketing a priority. Then, a few months later, I’d see them come back to me with the bad news: Their brilliant game changer/disruptive technology/once-in-a-lifetime/sure thing/[insert your own egotistical hyperbole here] launched to crickets. It’s all so unnecessary.

One client, rich enough to travel by private jet, wanted to appear on a handful of very influential podcasts to promote his first major work in a long time. After securing the placements, I talked him through the scheduling. He interrupted, “I’m busy. Can’t I just get them all on the line at once and record all the interviews together?” No, I said. These people aren’t here for whatever scraps you’re willing to throw them. You may be important in your world, but they are important in theirs. We have to treat them with respect—we have to respect their audiences, just as you respect yours. Thankfully, he agreed to do it right, and we reached several million people with an investment of just a few more hours of time.

Another client had a penchant for brainstorming big, aggressive marketing ideas that his team would help him execute for a book launch. But then he never executed any of them, declining to cough up the budget or make the time because everything else seemed to be going well. The book debuted at number two on the list instead of clinching the top spot he’d wanted. The worst part? The narrow miss ate at him, even though it was perfectly avoidable.

What would that hustle have gotten him? A few more people who cared. A few more people who were able to learn about his book through the thicket of pings, posts, Tweets, shares, and all other manner of digital noise that assaults us each day.

A recent study found that when you visit the Facebook News Feed, more than 1,500 pieces of content are vying for your attention. There is, in other words, a 1-in-1,500 chance of even seeing a desired customer.

The mark of a future perennial seller is a creator who doesn’t believe he is God’s gift to the world, but instead thinks he has created something of value and is excited and dedicated to get it out there. Guess what? A sense of entitlement is not how you’re going to reach them. Hunger and humility make the difference.

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts is a meditation on the ingredients required to create classic books, businesses, and art that does more than just disappear. His writing has been translated into 28 languages and sold over half a million copies worldwide while his creative firm, Brass Check, has worked with companies like Google, Taser and Amazon. You can join the 80,000 people who get his weekly articles.