Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 119

Stop Focusing on Follower Count: 5 Better Approaches for Improving Social Media Use

Photo credit: ansik via VisualHunt.com / CC BY

Today’s guest post is by Andrea Dunlop (@Andrea_Dunlop) who offers social media consulting for authors.

As an author and social media marketer, I spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection of books and social media. I also know intimately the fatigue and overwhelm that comes from feeling like you have to be not only creating great work, but forever seeking new and ingenious ways to promote it. The quickest way to tire yourself out in this process is to set your eye on the wrong target, creating a Sisyphean struggle that is more likely to leave you feeling defeated than accomplishing even the most modest of marketing goals.

When I ask most clients what their goals are in hiring me, I usually get some version of “to get more followers and sell more books.” I encourage them to think both bigger and more deeply about social media. Here’s why: You know those folks you see on Twitter who have 20,000 followers, but are following 21,000 people? This is a perfect example of when follower count becomes absolutely meaningless as a metric. How could anyone have even the tiniest interactions with that many people on a regular basis? They can’t.

Numbers are helpful as a part of the picture; I’m all for tracking follow count, engagement, web traffic, conversions, Amazon ranking—these are all helpful indicators of progress. But becoming too obsessed with numbers ignores the social aspect of social media. Would you walk into a party with the sole mission of making twenty new friends? More likely, we go into social situations (even those specifically meant for networking) hoping to deepen our connections with our existing circle, meet some new and interesting people, learn some new things, and open the door to future opportunities and collaborations. Here’s how this translates to your strategic social media efforts as an author.

1. Conduct market research

In ye olden days before social media, more of marketing was guesswork. But now there’s so much data on who’s reading, buying, and talking about which books, it’s mind-boggling. Before your mind gets too boggled, here’s how to drill down and get some helpful insights:

Start with a list of ten or so books that fall into the category of what we industry types call “comp titles”—books that have a similar audience to yours.
Look up these titles on social media, as well as Amazon and Goodreads. This will give you a concrete idea of who your audience is and how they’re discussing the books, as well as what else they’re reading, and what else they’re interested in.
If you’re in the pitching stage, this can help you find and research agents and publishers (most of whom are active on social media).
Once your book is on sale, this can help you narrow your audience by looking at people who bought your books and seeing what else they bought, giving you real info on which books share an audience with yours: if you see several that pop up again and again, read them! It’s an amazing opportunity for insight into how readers are interpreting your books.

You have many more marketing tools at your disposal than authors in the past. Don’t overlook them.

2. Connect with influencers

You’ve probably heard of influencer marketing, but what is it and how can you use it? Influencer marketing sometimes refers to massive global brands paying thousands of dollars to an Instagram star with a million followers for product placement, but it can also work on a much smaller level. Many brands take advantage of the potential reach of bloggers, You Tubers, and podcasters who’ve built sizable followings, and authors should too.

First, let’s define an “influencer.” Really, it’s anyone on social media who has a following they’re regularly engaged with. One of the things I love about social media is that it makes “word of mouth” marketing—that much ballyhooed but often elusive magic—visible and quantifiable. You can see people getting excited about things their friends (or “friends”) love. Obviously, the bigger the person’s following—so long as it’s a truly engaged following—the more reach you’ll get, but don’t discount those who have a smaller but engaged audience. Check out places like the #bookstagram hashtag on Instagram to find a plethora of these folks. A word to the wise: These relationships are most meaningful when built over time, so be present by engaging (liking and commenting on posts), so that you’re not reaching out of the blue when you pitch them.

3. Network with other authors

Authors as a collective community are crucial to all of our careers. We need support when we’re starting out, and often, we rely on each other for things like blurbs, joint events, spreading the word, and even just support and commiseration in this difficult and often lonely business. It’s easy to reach out to fellow authors on social media: it doesn’t feel invasive, and lest you doubt the power of these connections, I will tell you that two of the guests at my wedding last August were fellow writers who I originally met via Twitter. It used to be that unless you lived in a big city, your opportunities for networking with authors and book folks was limited. Not so anymore. Use social media to support your fellow authors if you want them to do the same for you.

4. Create opportunities by just showing up

There is something I like to call the “serendipity effect” of being on social media. These are the difficult to quantify but very real opportunities created by being a regular contributor to the social sphere. Because I’m active on social media, I get many more opportunities than I would otherwise. Clients, speaking gigs, introductions to people who’ve made my professional and personal life better in myriad ways, have all come my way simply because I’m on social media and being myself. Being on these platforms makes me approachable. Likewise, when I’m looking for speakers for an event I’m working on, professionals to collaborate with, and authors to feature, social media is often my first stop.

5. Create fans and evangelists

Fancy tactics aside, I believe that the audience for a book is built reader by reader. Survey after survey shows that people mostly get book recommendations from their friends. So how do you make it happen? Here’s something I’ve observed in the year since my book has been on the market: the readers who I have some kind of meaningful interaction with on social media—for instance those who’ve been giveaway winners or even whose posts I’ve commented on—are much more likely to spread the word that they loved the book, post a review, etc., even if I don’t specifically ask them to do so.

When you’re wrapped up in the publishing world, it can be easy to forget what an accomplishment it is to be an author, and that it’s special to readers to hear from you personally. Many people on social media don’t live in New York or Seattle or any place they can go and see authors in person, so it’s meaningful to hear from someone whose work has moved them. And since connecting with readers is kind of the whole point of publishing books, it makes sense to use your social media as a natural extension of that work.

I’m on a mission to get authors to have fun with their social media, so if a festive hat and a cocktail help, have at it! Just not too many cocktails: remember, the internet is forever, and every good party guest knows when it’s time to call it a night.

You Don’t Have to Finish Every Story You Start

How often do you abandon an early draft?

I have abandoned far more drafts of personal essays and short stories than I’ve ever completed. In fact, the ratio is rather embarrassing—maybe twenty starts for every finish. Sometimes I bore myself and lose interest, other times I find a fundamental flaw in my premise. Maybe most often I just lose track of time, and by the time I return to the piece, it doesn’t feel relevant any longer.

Writer David Ebenbach discusses the wisdom in abandoning a draft—in not seeing it as wasted time, but as an inevitable part of the creative process that produces great work. He writes:

[In some] cases I had to write several stories that were about more or less similar things (all about dating, say, or childhood confusion) until I found one that was worth sticking with. This observation was a revelation to me. I’d been worried about how many of my stories were falling by the wayside, but…I needed to write them not for their own sake but so that I could eventually get the right angle on the material.

Read his full essay, Try, Try Again.

For more from this month’s Glimmer Train bulletin:

Your Family, My Family, and the Human Family by Doug Crandell

All In by Kimberly Bunker

5 On: Elizabeth Marro

In this 5 On interview, author Elizabeth Marro (@EGMarro) discusses her good writing days and her bad writing days, literary vs. commercial fiction, and what she learned from the sale and marketing of her first novel.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Marro  is the author of Casualties, a novel about a single mother and defense executive who loses her son just when she thought he was home safe from his final deployment. Now she must face some difficult truths about her past, her choices, the war, and her son. A former journalist and recovering pharmaceutical executive, Betsy Marro’s work has appeared in such online and print publications as LiteraryMama, The San Diego Reader, and on her blog. Originally from the North Country region of New Hampshire, she now lives in San Diego where she is working on her next novel, short fiction, and essays. Casualties, published in February 2016 by the Berkley imprint of Penguin Random House, is her first novel.

5 on Writing

KRISTEN TSETSI: Say you’re having a bad writing day. What, for you, is a bad writing day? And what builds your confidence, gets you excited to write?

ELIZABETH MARRO: A bad writing day is a day without any writing at all in it. Even if all I manage to do is scratch out a line or solve a problem in my head as I walk or vacuum the house, the day is not a lost cause. There are days when writing is a lot of staring at the blank page, but that’s fertile time and it takes a bit of sinking into.

The days that are really tough for me are the days that involve re-entry after a period of spending time away—always for good reasons, but nevertheless, away. I get through those re-entry periods by diving in and enduring the discomfort that lasts for a day or two. Nothing builds my confidence like getting in a thousand words, even really bad ones. The other thing that works is getting out into the world after spending the morning writing. I get excited to write when I hear something, see something, realize something that I can use.  This can be an offhand comment by a total stranger, a glimpse of a setting or a scene, or an unusual name that I can’t stop thinking about in the obituary pages. I find a lot of inspiration in the obituary pages. My dad’s wife has begun to save the ones from her local paper and send them to me. I love that.

Do your story ideas begin with plot, character, or message in mind? If it’s been different depending on the story you were telling at the time, did you find your writing process or experience changed from one to the next?

I begin with people and a question that’s been bothering me. With Casualties, the characters presented themselves early in shadowy form and developed over time. The question they would grapple with is one that we all have to grapple with: how to live when the worst has happened and how to live with the decisions we can’t undo. With the novel I’m now trying to write, the people are again on the scene along with their arcs and the key “what if” question that got me going on it. The plot, I’m afraid, is not as clear as I’d like it to be, but that happened with Casualties, so I have faith.

You said in an interview for the San Diego Tribune, when asked whether you had a personal connection to the military that helped inform Casualties, “Nope. I’m part of that 99 percent that’s on the other side of the fence looking across at this unfamiliar territory.” How easy or how difficult was it to get inside the mind of someone who’d had the experience of seeing their child go to—and be away at—war? How did you do it?

I would never say that climbing inside the mind of another human being—even, or perhaps especially, a fictional one—is easy, but it is worth every minute of trying. The easier part, perhaps, was tapping into my experience as a single mother and all the feelings that come with the thought of losing a child for any reason. These feelings were not easy to live with but they were accessible. We don’t get through life without losing people we’ve loved unless we are very lucky, and I was able to recall my own grief and the grief of those I’ve known well.

I did spend a lot of time reading articles, blogs, and books written by or about parents of children in the military. I would read every one of the names of the fallen that were printed in our local paper or the New York Times and think about the families left behind. It is impossible to do this and not feel deeply. In the end, the feelings of helplessness, loss, and grief are as universal and they are individual. I don’t think they are necessarily altered by how that loss happens.

An oft-expressed opinion of literary writing is that it’s not very accessible to a wide audience. An equally oft-expressed opinion is that commercial writing lacks a certain amount of artistic attention.  What is your opinion of accessibility vs. artistic expression and the importance of either/each?

When I was younger, and by that I mean off and on from my twenties to as recently as 2003, I thought these distinctions were important. I thought I had to know what kind of writer I was and live there. I lost sight of the fact that while publishers and writers think this way, most readers don’t. They pick up a book and they either keep reading or put it down.

Some books work better than others. Some readers love to be presented with a book that asks more of them. I’ve just finished I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine, who wrote the entire novel as first chapters. In his hands, this experiment worked beautifully, and I loved how he gave us a character, her world, her revisionist history, and the “real” story with every new beginning. This wouldn’t work for every reader and wouldn’t be natural for every writer, but as a reader and a writer, it woke me up, it delighted me. I hated for the novel to end. I found it both artistic and accessible.

On the other hand, I have been at war with James Joyce’s Ulysses since I was in college. I fall in love with Joyce’s sentences and then resent the hell out of him for making it all so difficult for me to get lost in the pages of his novel. For me it is the most difficult to access novel I’ve ever encountered. In this case the artist left me behind, and I don’t love that. I have vowed to attempt Ulysses yet again after receiving some helpful advice from a writer and reader I respect to just treat it as though I’m walking through a city; to resist trying to connect dots. We’ll see how it works.

But life is short, and large-scale commercial success for most writers is elusive. I think we should read and write what we want and find our audiences.

In an email exchange we had some time ago about writing, age, and when (and whether) to just STOP, we discussed the different ways in which success and failure are determined and the role age plays. You wrote, “There are all kinds of pressures that are tied to the expectations we have of ourselves at different ages.” What pressures are you experiencing, and what, for you, determines success or failure?

When I was younger, the pressure was so great it often stopped me in my tracks. I could write for newspapers and I could write for my later job in pharmaceuticals, but the short stories I wanted to write, the novel I hoped to write, never got fully underway.

While some of this was due to the demands of having a job, raising a child, and trying to figure out life, most of my problem was fear. My expectations of myself were huge, and my fear of failure was in direct proportion to that. I was in my twenties and I wanted to be one of those amazing women who did everything, when what I really needed to do, and couldn’t until much later, was focus. Luckily, I was gathering skills, experience, material, and confidence in other aspects of my life. These all came in handy when I was ready to focus on the writing. The fear factor fades significantly when you hit an age when it is “now or never.” Also, by that time, I’d survived a few big failures and realized that they weren’t the end of the world.

The only real failure then—and now—is failure to try.  Lately, the pressure comes from the only deadline that matters, which is trying to write all the things I want to write before my life is over.

5 on Publishing

Describe how you felt in the first weeks following the publication of Casualties, and then how you felt six months later. How long does the high last? What is expected of you in those initial weeks and months? How long does it take for the high to end, and what does that feel like when the crash comes (if it ever does)? What thoughts—whether fears or ambitions—does the crash (assuming it came) inspire?

I remember it all got real when a Massachusetts friend sent a photograph of my book the day she bought it. This happened to be the day before the official launch day. The clerk in her local Barnes & Noble went into the boxes of newly arrived books to get it for her. When I saw the photo, I was thrilled but also a bit frightened. The book was out in the world now and there were no do-overs.

There was a kind of physical and emotional crash in the late spring, three months after the launch, but I think this was because I spent a big chunk of April 2016 on a self-scheduled tour in the Northeast. I basically took the book home with me and saw people who have known me all my life. It was nearly three weeks of jet lag combined with the joy of being with people who really showed up for me and brought lots of friends. That required a bit of sleep and retrenching, and I found that writing, showing up at my desk each day, helped a lot.

Six months later, the fear was long gone and what remains is a steady glow that comes from contact I’ve had with readers. They’ve written, they’ve invited me to book clubs, and I’ve loved seeing what the story becomes once they’ve read it. Things are calmer, now, and that nice steady glow remains.

What were some of the more difficult editing choices you had to make that were suggested by either your agent or your editor, and were there any you disagreed with? If so, how was that handled?

Most of the tougher editing choices were made with my agent. She is largely responsible for getting me to rewrite my ending or, rather, take it a bit further. I loved working with her and trusted her because she never asked me to do anything that I wasn’t comfortable with, and she always got me to think about what would make the story stronger.

My editor was very good, also, and there were few changes and even fewer areas where we disagreed. I was very fortunate. The real killer for me comes when I read parts of the book now and see all kinds of things I want to fix or change that never came up. I’m saving my observations so they can help me with the new project.

What did you learn about contracts, whether with an agent or publisher (or both), that authors new to the traditional publishing world should be aware of or look for in their own contracts?

The publisher happened to have a very long and detailed contract that they may have changed by now. When I received it, the agency had already made recommended changes. The first thing I did was read the entire thing and mark every place where I had a question about the contract and/or the changes made by the agency. Everyone should do this even if it is a struggle. My agent is also an attorney, so she was able to translate quickly any passages that were confusing, and she was quick to follow up on concerns or questions with the publisher.

The basic arrangement was pretty standard, and I knew that I would not be able to make substantive changes in the financial arrangements. It’s very difficult to do, but I would have loved to have the commitments and responsibilities spelled out more clearly. At the end of the day, I knew much of the responsibility for promotion would end up with me.

I recommend reading everything you can about this. There are tons of articles out there. Frankly, much depends on how important certain things are to you and how much leverage you have. If you are a first-time author without a lot of leverage you may find it difficult to control the selection of the cover art, for example, or financial arrangements. The most important thing to be aware of going in is the relationships you have. Know who is on your side and do everything you can to help them. This includes making communication easy and open with your editor, responding quickly to problems, initiating discussions with the publicist, and thanking everyone regularly.

It is easy for some nervous, introverted authors to lose sight of how life can be really stressful right now for the folks in the industry. Ultimately the editor, the publicist, and others work for the publisher, not for you. You are all a team with common goals, and it is important to keep that in mind.

As you write your next novel and look toward future publication, how much thought do you give to whether small (or medium) presses, Big Five publishers, or self-publishing will best serve you financially and creatively (and personally)? If someone were about to shop around their own novel and didn’t know what to do, is there any advice you would give them based on your experience?

I don’t spend much time thinking about that right now.  I will once the novel is ready. I had a pretty good experience the first time around with a traditional publisher, but I think the novel itself will help determine the best approach. I’m open to all of them.

I would say keep an open mind. The thought of being published by a major publisher is seductive, and a major publisher can do a lot to help distribute the book. However, unless you are at the top of the priority list, you will not get tons of help with promoting the book. You may not get the same level of attention from a busy editor, and unless you are a very big author or a debut author the publisher has decided to support in a big way, you have no real leverage when it comes to negotiating.

With a smaller press, I’ve heard it can be more of a partnership both on the editorial and marketing front. If you decide to self-publish, then, of course you have much more control over everything from editorial to pricing. I, for one, wanted and needed the help of a publisher to handle the distribution and to launch me into this world. It takes significant resources to do this right, and with the limited time I have in life for writing, I want all the help I can get with that part.

Is there anything you wish you had done more or less of, marketing-wise, in the weeks leading up to and following the publication of your book? If you invested in publicity, did that investment pay for itself in book sales? If not, how did it advance your book in other ways?

I don’t regret any of the things I did. As I move forward, I will continue to look for opportunities to meet or connect with larger numbers of potential readers at one time. This can range from setting up talks to creating other events with organizations whose members may have an interest in me or my novel’s subject.

I’ll also spend more time doing things that feed both writing and promotion—more essays, more writing, more collaboration with organizations I admire and want to support to create events that help us all. It can be very stressful to think about marketing and promotion—there is always the feeling that you should be doing more. When I engage with others in projects that support us all, it just feels more sane and grounded. That said, any author should be prepared, I think, to take on the job of selling her book, because that is today’s reality.

I learned lots of lessons about marketing, and I’m still learning them. I really didn’t know what to expect from any of the activities I did. My biggest problem, I believe, was that I went to market with a loyal but very small reader base. (They did amazing things for me and I love each and every person who has been there along the way.) It was clear to me that every promotional investment is enhanced when you have a larger base, so the upfront investment of time and care, there, I believe are very important. The best advice I’ve received so far and am struggling to follow is to learn which social media platform your audience uses the most and live there, don’t try to live on all the platforms at once.

Try to resist the comparison game, but do try to learn from what others are doing. And be patient. Lauren Cerand, one of the consultants I spoke with early on, was the one who explained that this is truly a marathon, not a sprint, and that there is a lot to do after the first few months after launch.

I do wish I’d started to develop a presence with readers months/years before the book, but I was glad I invested in some professional publicity help in the months and weeks leading up to launch. I spent a good deal of my advance on publicity and promotion. It is a bit misleading to try to answer the “recouping” question by measuring the effectiveness of publicity and promotion with book sales since I don’t make any money on the book until my advance is paid back. The promotion puts me deeper into the hole, if you look at it that way. On the other hand, it is possible to gauge the impact of certain efforts on sales since the publisher shares the sales data with me and I could, cautiously, correlate some activity with sales increases and lack of activity with lower sales.

My main goal for the promotion I’ve been doing is to find as many readers and sales as I can to pave the way for my next book. I worked with one very traditional publicist with a great reputation and lots of relationships, and I consulted with two others whose background and expertise were in online and newer forms of promotion. And I was glad I’d connected with a fabulous group of fellow authors, old and new, who were launching their own books. We were able to help each other shorten the learning curve for each other. They all helped me gain visibility for my book and I learned a ton about what to do and how to do it myself.

Knowing what I know now, I would invest less on certain activities and more on others. I’d like, for instance, to have invested more in Facebook advertising and other areas which offer the ability to target and connect efficiently, leaving more time for writing. I have spoken with one novelist who was published traditionally who funneled the bulk of her spending into Facebook advertising over the past year. I saw some encouraging results in an experiment I did late last year using it. I discovered and connected with more readers at one time than I had in the past. I also learned that a large majority of these readers prefer ebooks, which is great, but on Amazon, for example, the Kindle version costs more than the hard copy.

I don’t have control over pricing or discounting of my books, so certain things I’d like to have tried and still hope to try, such as running a limited-time deep discount, are out of my hands—this, combined with targeted advertising, would help a lot.

The good news is that it is never really too late to support the book. The traditional publishing and bookselling world moves on pretty quickly after a launch, but there are things you can continue to do throughout the life of the book to find readers. I’m actually working with a group of women to present a panel about this very subject at Bindercon LA the first weekend in April. It’s called “Life After Launch: How to Balance Book Promotion and Writing for the Long Haul.” I’m looking forward to learning as well as sharing what I’ve managed to glean along the way.

Thank you, Betsy.

Why We Should Pause Before Mocking the Mall of America Writing Residency

Mall of America / photo by Jeremy Noble

In my keynote talks at writing conferences, I frequently point out some of the innovative ways—across publishing history—that writers have supported their art and engaged in business activities that are sometimes seen by their contemporaries as commercially crass and low status. One of my go-to examples is Mark Twain, whose bestselling book was peddled door-to-door, and more recently, Alain de Botton, who once held a writing residency at Heathrow airport (which produced this book), and whose work has exemplified some of the wonderful things that can happen when you’re open to art informing business and vice versa.

Earlier this week, I saw mention in my social feed of a new writer-in-residence opportunity at Mall of America, to celebrate its 25th birthday. But the mention wasn’t an enthusiastic presentation of an opportunity that might play to the strengths of some writers. Rather, it was framed more as: What writer in his right mind would ever raise his hand for this position? The tone was one of mockery and incredulousness, because, obviously, writers and malls don’t mix, and no “real” writer would sit in a mall and write or produce something of value in such a capitalist context. And even if you could, how debasing!

I can’t look into the souls of the Mall of America marketers or PR team who conceived of this idea, but let’s assume some good faith intentions here, with a meaningful desire to see a writer manifest some work of creative or artistic value out of this residency that reflects on the environment and community of the Mall of America. Warby Parker and its ilk shouldn’t be the only commercial ventures “approved” for involvement with writers and the literary community. (For those who are unaware of the literary ties of Warby Parker, read this). Given the decline of malls and the related decline of the middle class, a curious and thoughtful writer might be inspired by this opportunity. After all, the mall is becoming a place of the unhip, as evidenced by more art photography devoted to its cultural decline.

While I’m sure Mall of America isn’t looking for a writer to poetically give expression to its impending decay, a writer should still find this a rich moment in time to immerse herself five days in such a place—and have more reflection than will fit into 150 words, three times a day, over five days (the requirement of the residency). I do wish the Mall weren’t claiming all rights to the work produced during the residency, but given the overall offer—expenses paid, $2,500 honorarium—it’s not a bad deal. Is it a worse deal than working a three-month internship for no pay at a literary journal with a tiny circulation? In my professional opinion, no. I’d find the Mall of America writer the far more interesting person to talk to, and more demonstrably interested in examining and creating for the greater world they live in, rather than the too-often insular literary world.

I might even argue that it is incumbent upon writers to take these opportunities seriously and to apply, because writing for and among the literary cloister (or isolated garret if you don’t like your fellow writers) is one of the harmful myths about how writers should act and behave in the world. Writers have some responsibility to cultivate a culture that’s exposed to and engaged with art and artists. One might argue a writer on display in a mall isn’t an appropriate means of exposure or engagement for art, but again, I think this falls back on outdated or at least not-useful ideas about what writers are “supposed” to be like.

Before joking about these opportunities as hellish, we should pause to consider how prone the literary community is to mock or shame those involved in “low class” opportunities, particularly those that might appeal to people from more diverse backgrounds. As someone who grew up in rural Indiana, I spent far more time in a mall as a young person, partly because no bookstore could be found within a two-hour drive except for the one in a mall.

Writers have something to gain from interacting with the more diverse audiences found at a mall, and mall goers similarly have much to gain from having writers in their midst. Just because a venture is sponsored by a business does not make it automatically opposed to a writer’s existence or ideals. Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, in her wonderful book on Jim Henson’s career, writes:

There is a saying that goes like this: “Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore the most dangerous.” In order for Henson’s art to have the universal power it did, this mixing had to include “the establishment”—what we could call “the business class.” But today—especially with Generation X and Millennials—serious artists often refuse contact with business. Large numbers of liberal arts graduates bristle when presented with the corporate world, rejecting its values to protect their ideals….Yet Henson’s work suggests that it is possible to heal America’s split personality.”

The Mall of America residency isn’t going to be an appropriate opportunity for even a majority of writers. But it’s the right opportunity for someone, and I hope that it helps not only support their art, but that it accomplishes something we very much need right now: a feeling of connection and community.

How Crowdfunding Allows You to Experiment Outside Your Genre

Photo credit: Chris Devers via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Today’s guest post is by Emily Grosvenor (@emilygrosvenor), a magazine journalist and author of The Ultimate Guide to Kickstarting Children’s Books.

We are not all Neil Gaiman. We can’t all just write in whatever genre we want, whenever we want, and hope our audiences will follow us there. Established writers can’t often—and probably shouldn’t—publish far outside of their area of expertise. It’s a fast way to alienate your existing fan base.

But if you’re a creative author who absolutely has to write a children’s book or a young adult novel, or an inspirational how-to, crowdfunding allows you to experiment outside of your genre for a project you want to see out in the world.

When your fans don’t overlap

It’s the curse of the multi-potentialist, the authors who could excel in more than one genre. Imagine a scenario where you are an established crime fiction author who trades in blood splatter and crime scene repartee. But you’ve got this burning wish to see your idea for a children’s book about a computer coding bunny out there in the world. You even have a text for it moldering away in one of your computer files. You find yourself between projects and looking for a short-term change.

Unless you have the authorial Midas touch, the kind of style so compelling and universal it pervades all of your books across genres, your readers will not follow you to your bunny story. If your Twitter feed floods with bunny pictures and coding talk when readers expect serial killer personality breakdowns and hard-boiled dialogue, you will soon find yourself with a branding problem.

Crowdfunding as the answer to multi-potentialism

We no longer live in a world where writers have to shelve creative projects in perpetuity because they fall outside of their existing brands. You can continue to serve your existing readers while finding new fans for this new work through crowdfunding. The process will challenge you to rethink how this new work connects with an audience, but working with an existing platform to engage a new set of fans can allow you to genre switch and get that must-exist story out in the world.

Indeed, on the Kickstarter platform, having an existing brand is almost totally unnecessary. If you are familiar with The Book, The Cook and The Hook model of marketplace analysis in the publishing industry, you’ll find that your back story as a writer and motivation for writing your book—the story behind the book—is far more important to attracting the social proof for your project on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites than your existing track record of publishing traditionally and your well-honed author platform. Crowdfunding truly levels the playing field in “The Cook” category, making your passion for your project and the impact you want to have on readers more important than an existing author brand.

You will still need to create quality work, with exceptional design and a compelling cover and, if you’d doing children’s book or other illustrated work, great interior pictures. Readers can tell in an instant whether a project is presented professionally and compete alongside traditionally published books. But you will be finding ways to show that the book needs to exist in the world and gathering a built-in group of co-creators.

What Kickstarter backers want

In my year talking with Kickstarter creators, backing projects on the site, analyzing what works and what doesn’t, making my own children’s math picture book, and writing a book about the process, I’ve learned a lot about what compels Kickstarter backers to spend almost twice as much as what it would cost to buy a similar book in a store. Remember: Kickstarter backers are paying for the experience of co-creating a book. While a few readers will really just want the book itself, many more are along for the ride because they are interested in the process of book creation and want to support a niche-y project that might not fly or be given a chance in the wider marketplace.

Take my own book as an example. I am a magazine writer and memoirist who wrote a math picture book, a category I didn’t even realize existed before I went on Kickstarter. There, I connected with an audience of math play advocates who became my book’s greatest champions, during the campaign and afterwards, when I published my book out in the world beyond crowd-funding.

Here’s my list of what Kickstarter backers want:

A great book. Kickstarter backers want a thoroughly unique book idea that has never existed before, thoughtfully and professionally presented.

Empathy. Backers tend to love a book that addresses some of the issues faced by highly intelligent and/or marginalized people. You’ll see a lot of books about coding, girls and science, bullying, and stories I categorize in the “being different” category. Kickstarter projects are also a great way to move the needle on social issues such as diversity in books. See this children’s picture book about a transgender child.

A great creator story. Kickstarter’s creator videos allow authors to connect their motivation for writing a particular story to an audience. The project’s backstory can sometimes be the story unto itself. I’ve seen so much done well here—a father who wrote a story with his daughter (major daddy/daughter feels on that one), a mom of three who is pursuing a childhood dream, a book drawn by an illustrator with his foot, or this book by a woman who gives tours of Beverly Cleary spots in Portland. The point is that your personal reasons for writing this book matters, in a big way.

A context for use. Not enough writers think about how their book will be used in a reader’s life. Kickstarter backers are looking for a real emotional or intellectual takeaway for readers. Sometimes it’s as simple as a parent backer who wants to get her daughter interested in coding. Sometimes it’s a mixed race family who wants books that represents their own families, families that aren’t being served by traditional publishing. Sometimes you’ll find a subculture of dragon fans who can’t resist buying every book out there on dragons. In all cases, because you must market your campaign yourself, Kickstarter encourages writers to think about what role their book will have in readers’ lives. The answer isn’t always so simple for fiction—young adult, for example, isn’t a robust category on Kickstarter—but workbooks, children’s books, graphic novels, and projects with a visual component do well.

Smart books for smart readers. If you spend any time at all on the site as a creator, you will soon discover that regular backers are idea mavens who relish the experience of bringing something new into the world. My own backer list included a Google executive, an major international consulting firm manager, a three-time game creator, a New York Times journalist, and, ahem, a popular expert on publishing. If these very smart people back you, they believe in you and your work. That’s a real relationship that upends the traditional writer/reader interaction. For the first time, you have actual information about who’s reading your work.

An experience. The best creators shape the campaign to give backers a reason to feel invested in the project. Sometimes that means having a say in questions of production or offering little Easter Egg gifts along the way for interested backers. They want committed creators who are open to collaboration and take feedback seriously. For traditional writers, this can revolutionize how they interact with fans. But if you’re a lone wolf type it might be your personal nightmare.

Pretty much every writer ever has imagined a scene where they sit in the highest tower of the castle writing in solitude while a wealthy patron pays them to do it. Crowd-funding is neither so simple nor so easy, but what it will do for writers experimenting across genres is give you a chance to connect with

new fans who can be your cheerleaders, your co-creators and your champions as you take this experimental project into the marketplace. Chances are excellent you’ll learn something in the process that will be useful to your bread-and-butter writing projects.

Note from Jane: If you’re interested in crowdfunding a children’s book, then be sure to check out Emily’s guide, The Ultimate Guide to Kickstarting Children’s Books, which is also available as a PDF download.

Where to Find Opportunities to Teach (and Supplement Your Writing Income)

Today’s guest post is by Eric Maisel, who is offering an online class next month on how to run your own writing workshop.

I love running writing classes and workshops. I teach my deep writing workshops all over the world, in places like Paris, London, Rome and Prague and at conference centers like Esalen, Kripalu, and Omega. I also run writing classes online: a favorite of mine is the one I teach about the importance of place and setting in writing. Typically, I run my deep writing workshops as five-day workshops, though I’ve also run them as weekend workshops, one-day workshops, and half-day workshops. I quite love it!

If you’re a writer, you likely need to supplement your income, since few writers can make a living just by writing. One excellent way to supplement your income is by running a workshop, class or retreat.

While it may prove important for you to run classes, workshops and retreats because the money they bring in helps you survive and permits you to continue living the writer’s life, their value goes far beyond that. They can prove the place of connection for you, your best way of being with other human beings, and a place of real excitement and satisfaction. Once you embrace the idea that running classes, workshops and retreats might be something you actually love and not just a revenue stream and a way to help you cobble a life, you may feel your enthusiasm grow. And a place of actual love they can be!

While you may wish to run your writing class, workshop or retreat completely by yourself (and I highly recommend it), you may also want to consider partnering. Here are some of the options.

Workshop centers

You could apply to a traditional workshop center like the Esalen Institute, the Omega Institute, or the Kripalu Retreat Center and ask to be a workshop leader and to be added to their many offerings. These workshop centers typically provide participants with all meals, many extras (like free yoga classes, free meditation classes, beautiful grounds, etc.) and advertise widely, both by their online presence and because they still (as of this writing) send out print catalogues, in some cases to half a million people.

There are many upsides to teaching at one of these workshop centers. They are likely to fill the workshop from their advertising, which is a great help if you don’t have a large email list, they take care of all the details (like payment, lodging, food, etc.), they provide you with meals and lodging at a beautiful location, they pay you reasonably (on the order of $100 to $200 per participant, meaning that if 20 participants sign up for your week-long workshop, you will make between $2000 and $4000 for the week), and it is a relatively prestigious thing to be able to say that you teach at a place like Esalen, Omega or Kripalu.

The major downside is that they are likely not to want you if you do not have a rather large reach already—and if you haven’t already been running your own successful writing classes, workshops and retreats. So in all likelihood you will have to run your own workshop a number of times before they will be interested in you. Another minor downside is that you must keep to their daily workshop schedule, which may not exactly match your vision for your workshop. (A typical daily schedule is 9 a.m. to noon and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.)

It of course does not hurt to ask. Reach out to a workshop center that interests you—there are many of them around the United States and around the world—pitch your workshop, and see what happens. I have taught at many of these—Esalen, Kripalu, Omega, Rowe, Hollyhock, etc.—and I have found it a great experience.

Colleges and universities

You can sometimes teach your class at a junior college, community college or university as part of their roster of extended education programs or, of course, you can try to become a part-time or full-time faculty member. Needless to say, trying to become a faculty member of a writing program is beyond the scope of this article. But you might look into extended education possibilities if you live near a college. I taught a specialized class for about a dozen years at St. Mary’s College (in Moraga, California) as adjunct faculty, teaching returning adults (most typically firefighters and police officers) how to write life experience essays that would garner them college credit. Opportunities of this sort may exist in your locale and you might want to check them out, though they typically do not pay well and of course involve you in the institution’s bureaucracy.

Non-degree writing schools

There are many small and large writing schools where you may be able to become one of their faculty members. Many of these are online (such as Writer’s Online Workshops, Gotham, or MediaBistro); some exist in physical locations. I taught for some years at a small writing school in a quirky house in a quirky San Francisco neighborhood run by a woman named Jane who shepherded the entire operation. The rooms were so small that you could only run a class of 12 or smaller—and 12 was really tight. Jane’s “thing” was shoes and the rooms were decorated with high-heeled shoes and other excellent oddities.

The upside to teaching at a writing school is that they tend to advertise and promote well enough that you will have (some) participants for your class, though it’s rather likely that you will also have to market and promote in order to fill your class. The downside is that they typically pay rather little and often demand that you have a lot of interactions with students (in old-fashioned language, “a lot of papers to grade”)—more interactions than you may either like to do or feel are really necessary.

On balance, teaching at a writing school, whether physical or online, like teaching at a junior college or a university, may serve you and you may well want to look into the possibility; but I’d strongly consider teaching under your auspices first a few times, to see how that feels and to see how that goes.

Hybrid venues

Consider bookstores, New Age gift-shops, libraries, community centers, and other venues where classes and workshops are offered as part of what they do. Typically they do only a little advertising and promoting (usually by including your offering in the long list of offerings that goes out to their newsletter subscribers), pay very little, and tend not to fill their offerings up.

If the venue is good at what they do, this can be a decent opportunity: I taught fairly regularly at a bookstore in Marin, California that was good at advertising and promoting and so my class with them did tend to fill up (that is, a dozen or more folks tended to show up for each new class). But offering your workshop, class or retreat on your own is likely a better bet than going with a venue that does not specialize in classes and workshops and that does not do much advertising or promoting.

Running your own classes

You can run your workshop, class, or retreat yourself. There are fundamentally four ways that you might go about this:

You might run it in your own home: literally or metaphorically in your living room.
You might run it in your town or city, renting space at a nearby college, yoga center, church, library, event center, office complex, etc.
You might run it far away from your own home, in some locale that you and participants would like to visit, like Paris, London, Rome, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Taos, etc.
You might run it online.

The main upside to running it yourself are the following: you keep all proceeds (minus expenses) and you get to run it exactly the way you want to run it, for as many days as you want to run it and for as many hours each day as you want to run it. The main downside to running it yourself are the following: you must make all the arrangements yourself, handle all of the details yourself, and market and promote well enough that you have customers.

I believe the upside trumps the downside and that it is a good idea to try to run your class, workshop or retreat by yourself a few times before looking into other options.

Note from Jane: Eric is an excellent teacher, and he’s offering a 9-week online course on Run Your Own Writing Workshop ($225) that starts March 6. Learn more. He also has written a guide: Start Running Writing Workshops, Classes, and Retreats.

9 Statistics Writers Should Know About Amazon

In partnership with Porter Anderson, I write and edit The Hot Sheet, an industry newsletter for authors. Over the last year, here are some of the most important things we shared about Amazon that every writer should know.

1. Amazon’s print book sales grew by 15% in 2016—as estimated by Author Earnings. This gain was primarily driven by Amazon’s own discounting on print. 

To the extent that print is “back,” one can connect it to Amazon’s discounting. Since 2013, the traditional book publishing industry has enjoyed about a 3% increase in print book sales. However, print book sales have grown largely because Amazon sold more print books. Barnes & Noble’s sales declined by 6% in 2016, and sales from mass merchandisers (Target, Walmart, etc.) also declined. 

2. Ebook sales at Amazon increased by 4% in 2016 (again, as estimated by Author Earnings), despite Big Five ebook sales declining. Nielsen’s Jonathan Stolper said at Digital Book World, “Price is the most important and most influential barrier to entry for ebook buyers, and the increase in price [at publishers] coincided with the decrease in sales.” Any talk about digital fatigue, the consumer’s nostalgia for print, or a preference for the bookstore experience isn’t supported by the sales evidence—which Author Earnings’ Data Guy was eager to point out. If print is back, it’s partly because consumers are unwilling to pay more (or about the same price) for an ebook.

3. Eight of the top 20 Kindle sellers in 2016 were from Amazon’s own publishing imprints. Amazon now has 13 active house imprints. In 2016 alone, it’s believed Amazon Publishing released more than 2,000 titles.

Furthermore, Amazon is the largest publisher of literature in translation. In 2014, AmazonCrossing surpassed all other US imprints and publishers in releasing translated fiction. In 2015, it published 75 translated books, 50 more than the next biggest publisher, Dalkey Archive Press.

4. Amazon has an estimated 65 million US Prime members. The most popular Prime feature remains free two-day shipping in the United States. Prime memberships are now believed to account for $7 billion in revenue each year, and a recent survey showed that Prime memberships are popular with the more affluent.

5. Amazon owns and operates three bricks-and-mortar bookstores, with five more on the way in 2017. They’re relatively small (3,500 square feet); the average Barnes & Noble is ten times that size. All the books are face out, so the emphasis is on curation, and no prices are listed. Prices are variable and depend on whether the customer is an Amazon Prime member.

6. When it comes to print book sales for the major publishers, Amazon represents roughly 50% of the pie; wholesalers, libraries, and specialty accounts are 25%; Barnes & Noble is in the teens; and independent bookstores are about 6-8% of the print book market.

7. Kindle Unlimited (KU), Amazon’s ebook subscription program, is estimated to represent about 14% of all ebook reads in the Amazon ecosystem (according to Author Earnings). KU costs $9.99/month and is strongly dominated by self-published books—none of the major publishers participate. KU’s biggest US competitor is Scribd.

8. Amazon is adding 100,000 jobs in the next 18 months. Meanwhile, other bricks-and-mortar retailers are suffering. Read more about this trend in the New York Times.

9. Audible’s customers are estimated to have listened to 2 billion hours of programming in 2016, double the 2014 figure. (Audible is owned by Amazon.) Audiobooks are the largest area of growth for the book publishing industry, and Audible is the No. 1 retailer in the US of audiobooks.

If you enjoyed this post, take a look at The Hot Sheet and sign up for a 30-day trial.

So You Want to Teach an Online Writing Course?

Photo credit: joe bustillos via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-SA

My first exposure to online writing education—for adults outside of degree programs—was Writer’s Online Workshops, a division of Writer’s Digest. Prior to that, my experience and prepared curriculum was entirely centered around the traditional classroom.

As I gained experience managing and evaluating online education through Writer’s Digest—and teaching online courses myself—I began to field more questions from authors who were curious about doing it themselves, but didn’t know where to start. And so I came up with the following tips.

One big caveat is that I am not an expert in curriculum design or creative writing pedagogy (either online or offline!). So I invite those who have more formal study and knowledge to share suggestions in the comments.

The primary motivation for adult writers who take online classes is to:

Acquire new skills
Complete a writing project (be motivated and be held accountable)
Get personalized feedback and instruction

People also appreciate the immediacy of online education in serving their needs. Freedom and flexibility are often critical for adults deciding to take an online course—more important than even price.

A course’s success depends greatly on understanding or anticipating the needs of students, creating and delivering material that leads to learning and engagement, and thus producing the outcomes they most desire.

Deciding What to Teach

Here are some starting questions for those who have never taught online before.

What will the course focus on? If you’re new to online teaching, choose a class you’ve taught multiple times, where you have confidence in your approach and knowledge base. It’s also easier from a marketing perspective to teach topics you’re well-known for, that you have demonstrated success in, or that you know would interest your community or clients.
How long will the course run? Unless you’re enthusiastic about “boot camp” style courses that run in a weekend or a week, I recommend a minimum of four weeks and a maximum of twelve weeks. You could also choose to create a self-study, but this post focuses on writing courses with a specific start and end date. (The best writing classes have interaction and engagement with an instructor who can offer feedback/critique.)
How much personal attention will be offered? This would include critique/feedback, live office hours of some kind, forum discussion, or even an in-person component. The more interactive the course, the more expensive it generally is, but obviously the more time the instructor must commit.

Course Benefit and Structure

With writing courses for adults, it’s important to focus on what the students will achieve or have in hand at the finish line. The course might focus on one large-scale project (first 25 pages of a manuscript, a completed essay or story) that is worked on and submitted to the instructor for feedback; or it might focus on completing a series of smaller assignments. While readings can help illustrate important principles or lessons of craft and technique, any energy devoted to group discussions about readings are almost never a good use of student time and energy.

Most online courses are best when there’s one goal, focus, or lesson per week. More often, and students won’t be able to keep up; less often, and students will become disengaged.

All courses to be effective must incorporate regular opportunities for Q&A with the instructor—basically, office hours. I recommend about one live session per week, whether through text-based chat or audio/video conference.

Course Lessons or Lectures

An online writing course can’t just rely on student production of material for critique. The instructor needs to provide writing instruction in some form, usually on a weekly basis. What constitutes a lecture can be very flexible. It might be:

A live video conference session using software such as Zoom (and recorded for students who can’t attend). This is usually the most intimidating for new online instructors, as well as experienced—it’s more or less like doing a live webinar. I don’t recommend that you be merely a talking head, but that you have visuals to share, and budget plenty of Q&A/break time.
Recorded audio or video lessons using software such as Camtasia or Screenflow. 
Written lecture: using PowerPoint or Keynote helps incorporate visuals (preferable for some types of material), but text only can work well.

Always build in next steps or actions. Students will learn better if they’re given a specific task or action after watching a lecture or series of lectures. Make them put what they’ve learned to work, or get them writing. By incorporating action steps into your curriculum, you will see satisfaction skyrocket, because people feel like they are accomplishing, creating, or learning something. Progress toward goals is very inspiring.

Course Community and Discussion Area

Students will find a course more valuable if they meet other like-minded people with whom they might even continue a relationship after the course ends. For this to happen, the course needs a discussion and community area for posting. The easiest method by far is to create a private Facebook group for the course, but you could also create a private WordPress site with forum capability through a plugin such as BBPress.

Instructor Critique and Engagement

Instructor feedback or interaction is critical to a writing-focused course. A critique can be written or audio recorded and delivered in private, and/or done in a more traditional workshop manner, where all students can see and benefit from observing the instructor’s critique of the work. 

I’ve found that—unless students are in a university program—it’s very hard to mandate that other students give feedback. And usually, it’s not desirable to mandate feedback unless the students are insightful in giving it. Good feedback doesn’t happen by accident, and writers need training in how to give it, which may be outside the purview of the course being taught. In any event, in most non-degree writing courses, the students are seeking the insights of the instructor, and not the other students.

Student satisfaction is often tied directly to how they feel the instructor interacted with their work, their forum/discussion posts, and/or their questions during office hours. Responding in the forum or otherwise being present in the forum, proactively posting questions and doing check-ins, and in general “showing up” is vital. Students can tell when you’re phoning it in, or just posting lessons then disengaging.

Protecting Instructor Time

I recommend two levels of registration for any class involving critique:

Basic registration: All curriculum, lessons, community discussion features, instructor office hours or Q&A opportunities, plus a basic amount of critique/feedback
Premium registration (usually limited in number): Everything in the basic, but allows for more material to be critiqued, more revision and feedback, or more one-on-one time with the instructor

Students love having a choice because they may not have the time or ability to produce a large amount of work during a particular time, and/or may be mainly interested in the curriculum.

Recommended Technology

I favor the following tools for online courses.

I use the Zippy Courses plugin installed on WordPress. When students register for a course, they receive login credentials and can immediately access any curriculum made available prior to the official course start date. Zippy allows you to pre-load lessons and assignments and schedule them for release on specific days. There are other teaching platforms available—some with wonderful features—but (1) they’re probably more expensive and (2) they may not support having specific start and end dates to your course. For me, the latter is essential if you want all students to go through the same experience together with you, and if you want to avoid doing a self-study or a continuous course that’s always open for enrollment.
Zoom: This is a simple teleconference tool ideal for office hours or even live lectures. It allows everyone to see and hear each other (assuming you have a webcam), plus you can share your screen and do text chat. Students can dial in through a phone number for audio only, and you can record sessions for students who miss. 
Camtasia or Screenflow: both are excellent tools for recording audiovisual lectures but require purchase.
Private Facebook groups work great for the discussion and community aspect of an online course because nearly everyone is familiar with it and logs in at least once a day.

For Video-Based Lectures or Lessons

These are some of the principles I encourage you to adopt.

For audiovisual lecture delivery: Hopefully, you already use PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, or some other slide-based presentation tool to accompany your lectures. If not, I suggest you develop slides unless you have other visuals. Ideally, your lecture doesn’t consist solely of audio with a static visual (or a talking head); this leads to student boredom and distraction. Use summary lists, imagery, graphics, and other visuals to reinforce the points you’re talking about. Images help engagement a lot. When you can’t think of anything, add a cat GIF. Attention will skyrocket. (Only half joking.)

Break up your lecture into 3-6 minute increments. If you’ve ever used Lynda, you know the model. It’s less daunting to tackle a video lecture when things are broken down into their smallest steps or components. (For efficiency, when you record a lecture, you can certainly do it all in one take, while giving yourself a pause between lessons or sections. Later on, using Screenflow or Camtasia, you can break up a long video into the intended lessons.)

For live lectures, build in question breaks. Almost every live lecture should leave 5-10 minutes at the end for student questions. I also build in at least one additional opportunity for students to ask questions. This would ideally be halfway through, but you should base it on when you think the most questions are likely to arise (e.g., during the most confusing or complicated material). If it makes sense, build in a third break for questions.


Rather than using your computer’s built-in external microphone, you may need to purchase an external microphone for best possible results. Apple’s standard-issue earbuds—the ones with a built-in microphone—also work very well.

Find an enclosed room where you will not be interrupted. Unplug your phone and turn off your cell phone ringer. If necessary, post a sign on the door that says, “Recording in progress.” There is nothing worse than being distracted during a live session or recording, trust me.

Be prepared to share your slides in PDF form. This will depend on the nature of the session, but one of the first things students will ask for is a copy of your lecture. If you’re uncomfortable doing this, you should prepare a handout with the key ideas, lessons, resources, websites, or tips from your presentation. Having something in writing, like a tip sheet, is very helpful with online courses, so that students don’t have to search through recordings to find that 1 minute when you referenced a particular resource.


It’s Your Turn

If you’ve taught online writing courses, I’d love to hear what has worked (or not) for you and your students. And if you’ve been a student in an online writing course, tell us about any positive experiences—what made the course valuable to you?

Using Online Education as a Pre-Publication Marketing Tool

In my latest column for Publishers Weekly, I discuss the potential of online education for book marketing, particularly prior to publication. I mention three distinct strategies:

Create a free email-based course leading up to your book release.

Create a free webinar series leading up to your book release.

Offer an interactive online education opportunity to readers who buy your book by a particular date.

Read the entire column.

How to Get Your Book Distributed: What Self-Published Authors Need to Know

Photo credit: The City of Toronto / CC BY

Note from Jane: This post is part of a 101 series on self-publishing. Visit this post for background on how to self-publish.

Distribution used to be the biggest challenge that self-published authors faced in selling their work—at least before online retail came to dominate bookselling.

Today, the most important thing any author needs to know about distribution is that more than half of all book sales (regardless of format) take place online. Self-published authors have the same access to online retail distribution as the major publishers. This access is also largely without upfront costs, making it straightforward for any author to begin selling their book at Amazon, the No. 1 retailer of books in both print and digital format.

You do not have to hire an expensive self-publishing service to get your book distributed through Amazon and other online retailers; you can secure distribution on your own at little or no cost for both your ebook edition or print book edition. Here’s how.

Ebook distribution

Once you have ebook files ready to go (EPUB and/or MOBI files), you have a choice to make. Would you rather deal with each online retailer directly, or would you rather reach them through an ebook distribution service?

Working directly with online retailers usually means better profits, more control, and more access to marketing/promotion tools (but not always).
Working with ebook distribution services usually means giving up a percentage of your profits to the distributor, in exchange for the centralized administration and management of all your titles. Some ebook distributors can also reach outlets you can’t on your own, such as the library market, and may offer you helpful tools to optimize book sales and marketing.

The good news is that you don’t have to choose between working directly with online retailers and using ebook distributors, since it’s rare for any distributor to demand exclusivity. For example, you could choose to work directly with Amazon KDP to sell your ebooks on Amazon, then use an ebook distributor such as Draft2Digital or Smashwords to reach other retailers. Or you could choose to distribute directly to Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and Nook (by using their do-it-yourself portals), then use Smashwords to capture the rest of the market (such as Scribd and libraries).

You could even choose to use two ebook distributors. For example, you might sign up with Pronoun (because they offer the best royalties on Amazon ebook sales), but then add in Smashwords to get the library market that Pronoun doesn’t cover.

Bottom line: There’s no one right way to go about it, since it depends on your time and resources, your books, and your marketing strategy. You can also change your mind at any time (although not without some administration hassle and sales downtime).

Print book distribution

Print book distribution is fairly straightforward if you’re making use of print-on-demand technology to print your books, rather than investing in a print run (where you produce hundreds or thousands of books at a time).

Print-on-demand printing means that your book isn’t printed until someone orders and pays for it; when an order comes through, one copy will be printed and shipped to the customer. If books are printed only when they’re ordered, that reduces your risk, but it also means that you’re probably not going to see your books sitting on bricks-and-mortar retail shelves nationwide (or even regionally)—that’s the drawback.

However, don’t assume that if you do a print run, that means you can get distribution into physical retail stores. First-time self-published authors rarely have a sufficient marketing and sales plan in place (or a sufficient track record) that would justify bookstores ordering and stocking books on their shelves. Also think it through: If you did invest in printing 500 or 1,000 copies, do you already have customers or accounts that you know would purchase those copies? Do you have speaking or event opportunities where you could sell them? If not, it’s probably best to go with print on demand. You can always order print-on-demand copies at a reasonable unit cost if you want 50 or 100 copies on hand to sell at events.

Print-on-demand distribution

Assuming you’ll go the print-on-demand route, then you have two key distributors to consider:

IngramSpark, a division of Ingram, the largest book wholesaler/distributor in the US; distribution fees cost about $60 per title

CreateSpace, a division of Amazon; no upfront fees

Again, as with the ebook distribution decision, you don’t have to be exclusive with either. You can use both and benefit from both. I recommend that authors use CreateSpace to distribute their print books strictly to Amazon (do not choose their “extended” distribution), then use IngramSpark to distribute to the universe outside of Amazon (bricks-and-mortar bookstores, including Barnes & Noble, and more). This will maximize your reach and your profits from each sale. It does require buying your own ISBN numbers from Bowker—you cannot use a CreateSpace-provided ISBN with any book you want to distribute via IngramSpark.

A key difference between IngramSpark and CreateSpace: CreateSpace offers a range of paid services to help you prepare printer-ready PDF files. These files are required to make a print edition of your book available and on sale through retailers. (PDF files consist of an interior file and your cover file.) IngramSpark does not offer any editorial, design, and production services; you have to come prepared with your files ready to go.

Both services allow you to purchase copies at unit cost plus shipping. My book, Publishing 101, costs about $3.60 per unit if I want a copy, plus shipping. There’s nothing to stop you from ordering 50 or 100 copies at a time if you want to sell books to local or regional stores on consignment.

If you really, really want to encourage bookstores to order and stock your print-on-demand book: Make sure you use IngramSpark, and set the discount at 55%, and make the books returnable. This will reduce your profit and also risk returns, but these are the industry standard terms required if you want bookstores to place an order.

The end result of using either CreateSpace and/or IngramSpark is that your print book will be available to be ordered by nearly any retailer, as a print edition, and available for sale through their online storefronts if they have one (such as barnesandnoble.com).

How to distribute when you have a print run

If you do invest in a print run and are comfortable fulfilling orders from your home or office, then you’ll need to sign up with Amazon Advantage to distribute and sell your print book through Amazon. It costs $99/year and they require a 55% discount off the retail price. You must also pay for shipping your books to Amazon.

As far as reaching other retailers with your print edition, it’s far better to use IngramSpark’s print-on-demand service. If that’s not a possibility for you, then you’ll have to find a formal distributor who can help you, and that’s a difficult challenge for the first-time author. IBPA has some recommendations of who to approach.

Parting advice

A self-published author can quickly get their print and ebook distributed to the most important online retailers by using just a couple services, all of which have no or very low upfront costs. Don’t be fooled by expensive self-publishing packages that claim to distribute your book to thousands of outlets. Today, the most critical distribution is within the reach of each individual author at no cost.