Self-Publishing: New Mentality, New Vitality, New Plan

A fresh start. Dabbling in self-publishing in 2012, going for gold in 2013, I learned a lot. It was stressful. I read a lot of blogs, tried serializing a novel, tried retail pricing, tried Kindle Select, tried perma-free...tried everything but writing another story. I made excuses: I blamed myself, I blamed the society we lived in. Finally, I just got over the whole thing and came full circle.

I remembered that I was drawn to self-publishing for one reason: freedom. I wanted to write the books I wanted to write and see if they could find an audience. In other words, I wanted every writer's dream. Instead, I went from worrying about what agents wanted to read to worrying about what kind of story would shoot me up the Kindle charts. I never fell for it though. I never could. When I sit and write society goes away. I only know how to write the story I have within me. I just stressed and worried every minute I wasn't putting pen to paper.

The beautiful thing is that once I run myself into the ground, I finally surrender. I stopped thinking about how I needed to bang out a novel every three month, how I needed to accumulate reviews, how I needed to please BookBubs so they'd take mercy on me and accept my novel for an ad. I finally said, "Screw it."

Once that happened, I started writing again. It may only be a page here and there, but it gets done. Sometimes I even write two. Sometimes three. I'm building myself back up. I get more sleep. I feel rested. I feel better. I don't binge eat ice cream. I remember the life I wanted to live, my idea of the writer's life, and I'm slowly fulfilling it. No time like the present even if everything suggests I shouldn't be taking it so easy. We all try to fight to peace, thinking a perfect moment will come once we have what we want. No, we create that moment. We don't fight for it, we lay back into it. We don't push; we surrender.

So with my new mindset I revisited the blogs I had read on self-publishing and found some new ones. No longer looking for a one stop solution I took it all in then came up with a plan that fits my personality, values, and budget. Everyone tells you what to do, but they don't ever consider who you are. They say write at least 3 books a month, make them as long as possible, set it for free, and if you don't like it...then learn to like it. A writer is supposed to be an individual, a creative entity with ideas, emotions and expressions, yet everyone says, "Get over it." I now reply, "No. I won't get over being myself. I couldn't even if I tried." If wanted to pander to some stereotype of the modern reader (usually white, heterosexual, and middle class), then I would just have kept trying to get an agent. I would let the industry in New York tell me what they want to read, what they think people want to read and write that. There was no point in trading one set of standards for another. Indie means independent, my chance to follow my vision, my rules. If I valued succeeding by other's terms over failing by my own, I would not have self-published in the first place. But I still have so far to go before a judgment can be made. And even so, I still feel more inspired, more hopeful now, then I ever did querying agents, knocking door to door, on a street that only had so many doors.

So first, I unpublished my novel. I'm starting from scratch. Smashwords implores writers to never unpublish. I don't care. Every day, I proof read 1-5 pages. I changed my frontis design. I contacted my cover designer and asked him to upgrade the ebook cover to a paperback cover as well. I want the most professional product I can create/afford. I imagine my book in bookstore. I'm dreaming big, but I no longer feel crushed by its burdening weight. Instead I feel free. Before, due to expenses (and being in a big rush) I just bought the ebook version then used a photo editor to create a black square with the promotional text as a back cover. Overall it worked out. Learning how to write copy was a new skill, and it took many revisions over many months to get it right. Now that I have, I'm ready to have it on a professional paperback cover.

Also, thanks to researching new blogs, I encountered a book formatter. I think I will give them a shot. I am proud of my design, but it will save me a lot of work to have someone else do it. The price is within budget. But I will see how they do for paperback design. There are some tweaks to my design I would like to see.

With pricing, I had joined the race to the bottom. I started at 2.99 with free Kindle Select promotions and hundreds of dollars in ads. Then after no results, I just set it to perma-free. I enjoyed waking up and seeing some movement, even if it was a copy or two. Overall, I had given away a thousand copies of my book over quite a few months. With the split version (first half free, second half priced), I had 4 sales. However, I got over it and just put the whole book back together and set it free until I could figure things out. Whatever I gained by seeing something happening, I lost in pride and self-respect. As I regained my confidence, reconnected to my dream to be a career writer, free just wasn't working anymore. I was ready to go retail. My book may not be perfect, but no one's is. How many times have I paid to read a traditionally published book that was generic and poorly edited? All the time. Heck, sometimes, I still fell in love with the story. My  book isn't perfect, but no one is better than me just because they were published by a corporation. Price is an economic function, not a judgment of quality. A 250 page novel can cost as much as a 1000 page novel with no regard of whether it's a classic, a dud, or even if it's full of typos. Readers pay for the chance to experience the work, to find out what's behind the cover. If they don't like it, they just don't buy any more from that writer/publisher.

I experienced this with making music. I work with a studio. If I don't like the music I still have to pay them. I hired them for a service and as long as they produce something, they get paid for their time and effort. I am not paying for quality. However, if their work does not meet my standards, I don’t recommend them to other songwriters, and I would never hire them again. If that makes sense to me, then why didn't I remember that when I became a writer? It wasn't easy putting myself on the other side of the dynamic, to move from customer to content provider.

I have the character and integrity to pen the best stories I can, to fulfill my vision on the page, to package my story in the highest quality book possible. I have the sense now to save my money (even if it takes a couple of months) to do it right and to find the best services I can while sticking to my budget. I do what I know I can, then find someone experienced and in my budget to do the rest. Sometimes, I have to make judgment calls. I may have to prioritize the big picture over the little picture. This happened with hiring an editor. The costs would be a thousand dollars or more. That's more than 2-3 months of savings for me. A lot of successful writers have mandated the necessity of an editor; yet when I checked their past blog posts they didn't have editors. First they became successful then used the profits to hire an editor. Ultimately, an executive decision had to be made. Is the book readable? Will a reader find so many errors that it corrupts their experience? Am I paying a thousand dollars just to have the occasional grammar error corrected? Is that worth it? The art of business, the business of art.

In several months I will relaunch my novel, my career as a writer. What next? More writing. I'm over feeling the need to constantly be doing something. I think that's how a lot of writer's feel. So many verbs. You have TO PROMOTE, TO MARKET, TO TWEET, TO BLOG. And all new writers ask the same question: HOW??????? Everyone tells you to use social media. But what's the point of posting messages to no one? How do you get people to like your page? And if you do, how do you then get them to buy your book? I did a facebook ad for a free book. I got a 116 likes, but no downloads. I couldn't even give my book away. Besides, don't you need to get readers first, then the readers who like you will sign up for your page? Wait, wasn’t the purpose of joining facebook to find readers? Why does everything feel out of order? It makes no sense. Whenever you ask a successful writer how they found readers, they either lie or have no clue. Writers who say they found readers on social media are usually wrong. The readers they already had joined them on social media and shared their posts and tweets. Most successful readers, when being honest, will admit their blog did not bring in enough readers to generate a living wage for them.

When writers tell the truth, they say things like, "I don't know how I succeeded. I posted a story and it just sold," "I don't know why Amazon chose me for a promotion," "I set the first book for free and it downloaded 25,000 copies. When it went back to being priced, it just sold." When people are active in generating their success, I really only heard two stories: They did a free promotion, spent several hundred or more on ads like Bookbubs, and so many free copies were downloaded that it became very visible in the Kindle Store. When the sale was over, people saw the book and bought it. The second story? A writer who was already very active in an online community (let's say for cat lovers), wrote a book about a cat, told their online community, and they all ran to Amazon to buy it. Finally, came perma-free stories. People tried the book, liked it, and bought others.

Those stories are all great. Any success story is great. But joining a community for several months, more like years, just waiting for the day you can finally tell them you're a writer, is deceptive and ridiculous. Usually, you just end up drained. If you are not into online forums, you shouldn't frequent them. It's disrespectful to yourself for wasting the time and disrespectful to the people who gathered there to share what they love. However, if you can generate a natural love for the forum and it share a passion in its topic, go ahead and put in hours and hours over months and years, slowly building a following. Personally, I couldn't do it. And thankfully, I don't think I have to. With self-publishing, writers can even promote and builds audience in whatever way suits their personality and values. It's wonderful. That's what I'm banking on anyway. But I've heard so many success stories, the possibility is a reasonable belief.

My issue with perma-freeing the first book of a series is that it gridlocks your series. If you write five books and Amazon discovers you, they can't feature you in a deal. But then again, waiting around for Amazon or Apple or Barnes and Noble to feature you just may not work for some. Heck, even I am not working with any expectation of that being a goal. You write, and if it happens...you celebrate. If it doesn't...so what? Keep writing, keep publishing.

So ultimately, I saw what was right in front of me. People post books, they sell. I, like so many, kept wondering HOW. But maybe that's the beauty of it. We don't know HOW, because it's not our place. We don't do anything. People say it's magic, but maybe it's just the internet. A writer publishes his/her first book, and it starts selling right away. Usually, the book doesn't sell at all. But the writer keeps writing. One day the fifth book is published and BAM the first sale. Then a second. Then it builds. Something is happening, but just because we don't know what it is doesn't mean it's dumb luck. It just means it's not actually on us to control. The greatest power we have is to write books and publish them as professionally as possible. If you want to write your own vision, go ahead. If you want to write want you think readers want to read, again go ahead. You are a free individual, to each their own. You control what you write, you control how good the book looks, you control where to distribute. Let the internet do the rest. At some point readers will encounter your novel. And readers are varied. You are no long subscribing to the limited tastes of the elite minority in New York. Readers will love you for being unique and radical, and readers will love you for following strict formulas. They will hate you as well. But the number of book lovers is so large that given time, it seems unfathomable that you can't find several thousand people to love you for being who you are, who you've chosen to be as a writer. Hundreds of agents confined to one subculture. Millions of readers shaping many levels of cuture. I'll take my chances directly appealing to the readers. They're the goal anyway.

So the internet is complex. We don't understand how it works, but it's science, not magic. We write books, they get posted under new release sections, and readers surprise us by buying our books. A handful of readers take that first chance on us. We can use discounts, free promotions, and ads to get things started or to accelerate success, but the foundation is the same: we write, we publish, and we set up more science (social media, newsletters) to further establish our success, to turn the seeming randomness of the web into something more orderly and deliberate. Once the algorithms do their thing, we get a chance to establish some control that is all our own when it comes to promotion. But social media doesn't seem to create success, it's another log on the already lit fire.

As I move forward, we'll see which path I am meant to take. It's like Billy Jean, you only know which way to go with each step. When you walk on one square, it lights up, you see the next one ahead. I may republish this first book, all professional and at retail price, and it may take off. And it may not. I publish the second book at retail price, and it may take off. And it may not. Third book... fourth book... fifth book... In general though, it's easier to lower prices than raise them. I will start at retail, then experiment with various forms of discounting, then with ad buying.

Maybe I'll bring in 2 or 3 sales a day for a month. Then maybe 10 the next. Zero the next. 250 the next. Maybe the books will lie dormant for a year. Or maybe, once the second book is out, I "magically" get chosen for a sale on Amazon. But it's not magic. The few sales I got kept me on the best sellers list long enough to catch the attention of Amazon's editors. They looked at my book. It was professional, and it was at a price where it could look good at a discount. It's happened. I've seen writers with two books skyrocket up the charts thanks to selection for an Amazon sale. That's what happened to A.G. Riddle.

How patient should I be, publishing book after book at 5.99 or 7.99 when other books are flying off the shelf at 3.99 and 2.99? There is no answer, because no one can predict the future. After ten books published and no sales, I may discount my first book or set it free and skyrocket up the charts, 10,000 sold. But maybe If I had just held out and gone for book eleven, BAM, 25,000 sold. You make decisions. You set a standard for success. If you are happy with the results, keep going. If you are unhappy, change it up. I'll discount the book when I'm ready, when I'm not happy with my progress. If I become unhappy after book 2, I may do it then. If it works...great. If not...keep writing and try discounting again with book 3. But maybe that first failed sale makes me happy with just writing, building my list. At the end of the day, we try to seem rational, but it's all beyond us. And we hate it. We want to control it. We aren't doing what's rational, we're doing what we want to do and justifying it with our own logic. Some are happy with organic growth, some want to work the system. Many have failed and succeeded either way. But as long as you are writing and publishing, you can never claim to have failed. You may lose the battle (a bad sale, a slow sales month, no sales at all), but the quest goes on. You've lost when you quit. But even then, as long as your books are published, there's still a chance you wake up twenty years later to a $50,000 deposit in your back account from Amazon: the science of writing in the Internet Age.