Audience Building Is Not For Sissies

One of my authors, Brian Knight, sent me a link to a blog post from an author named Stephen Leather in the UK. It was a very interesting article—I recommend that you read it (go on, I’ll wait).

One of Mr. Leather’s major points is that an author with a large fan base can sell a $0.99 ebook, which can then be purchased as many as 6,000 times per year over 10 years, and will make him $21,000, or about $4,250 per day for 5 days of work writing the thing in the first place. Since a $0.99 ebook has the potential to make so much money per year (and since potentially an author, writing 5 days out of every 7, can produce 50 such ebooks a year), an author doing nothing but writing short fiction can make over $100,000 per year. (For those of you who are math challenged, $0.35 x 6,000 x 50 = $105,000.) What outstanding (I dare not say, incredible) numbers. I want some of that, and you should too.

He also goes into detail about how publishers, agents, editors, and large booksellers are becoming increasingly irrelevant. After all, if an author can become a millionaire working for themselves, what in the world do they need to voluntarily give up much if not most of their profits to a publisher for? As an author, I couldn’t imagine giving away $52,500 to a publisher when they are (or, more importantly, aren’t) doing something that I can do for myself.

But I am also a publisher, so I have a separate and distinct point of view that needs to be included in the discussion. I’ve already talked about authors publishing before they are ready, so let’s skip that part. What I feel is important here is the subtext of Mr. Leather’s statements. Remember, an author with a large fan base can see those kinds of numbers. But what is an author with a small or non-existent fan base to do?

I’m going to use Brian Knight as an example here (sorry, Brian). His Butch Quick novella, Big Trouble In Little Boots, is available at Kindle for $0.99. It is an excellent story, well told and funny… and not one copy has been sold this month. Mr. Leather implies that he should have sold 500 copies by the end of the month. Where’s the problem?

The problem is that Stephen Leather has a “large fan base,” and Brian Knight does not. Mr. Leather’s debut novel was published by Collins (before they became Harper Collins), and I’ll bet you a dollar that the publisher put in more of its own money and effort to promote the book than Mr. Leather did. It used the review and media contacts it had developed over the years to get an audience interested in his books, his writing, and him. And now, Stephen Leather can go around the world telling authors that they don’t need a publisher, using the money that his large fan base provides him to finance his continued efforts.

I think Stephen (may I call you Stephen?) isn’t being hypocritical so much as simply displaying selective memory. His talent gave birth to a writing career that is paying him well, but he has forgotten the midwife (the publisher) who got him through the birth in the first place.

The fact of the matter is, building a large fan base—or any fan base—is not for the weak-hearted. It takes time, effort, contacts, and most of all, a lot of money to be successful. Publishers, if they do nothing else, have the resources to build a large fan base for an author. If the author tried to do that by themselves, they could end up spending far more time and money than they can reasonably anticipate receiving from selling their writings in the foreseeable future. Also, most publishers are in the business of publishing, whereas authors are often just in the business of paying their bills by any means necessary—including working at a straight job for a living. Authors are at a disadvantage when it comes to aggregating the resources necessary to build that ever elusive “large fan base.”

When I finished reading Stephen’s blog post, I posted a response… and Stephen replied back. Here is his reply in its entirety:

“It’s complicated, Steven. There’s no doubt that having an established fan base helped sell my self-published eBooks. But there have been plenty of writers who started with a zero fan base and have sold hundreds of thousands. You have Amanda Hocking in the US, we have Kerry Wilkinson and Nick Spalding in the UK. You’d need to ask them what they did to go from nowhere to stellar stellar sales in a matter of months but my view is that if you write good books and a lot of them and offer them at a reasonable price, they will sell. My advice to any writer is that they should first approach a publisher. As you say publishers can do a lot to promote an author and to help with the production process. But if the closed club that publishing has become won’t let you in, then you should try self publishing. If you want to lean about my career, drop by www.stephenleather.com ”

Honestly, I think that is a very balanced response. Stephen doesn’t seem unreasonable or defensive. And I agree, if you have tried everything to get published by every publisher you can find, and you still can’t get a contract, self-publishing may be the way to go (again, see my post, Don’t Publish That Book!). But to dismiss the entire publishing industry because there’s money to be made out there without publishers/agents/editors and even booksellers just seems a little too narrowly focused to have a good correspondence to reality.

Stephen says something else that is, in my opinion, inaccurate. He names authors who have successfully built a fan base for themselves without the intervention of a publisher. Undoubtedly this is true. But those authors, again in my opinion, owe their success to “going viral.” Basing one’s career on going viral is like expecting to win the lottery every month when the bills come due. Yes, it can and does happen. Someone will win the lottery every time they turn that big wheel. But, honestly, what are the odds of it happening to me, you, or anyone we know. So, the allure of going viral may always be there, but for an author who wants to make a living writing stories, there should be something a little more tangible to their plans than, well, hope.

So before you burn your publishing contract like a draft card in the 1960s, consider that a decent publisher is marshaling their resources to help you become the uber-successful author you always knew you could be. And when you are rich and famous, you too can claim you did it all by yourself. Until then, don’t forget to send birthday cards to your publisher/agent/editor (and if you know the date, to your bookseller as well).