Self Publishing Is For Losers Excerpt: Give It Away
The following chapter, which is excerpted from the forthcoming Self Publishing Is For Losers, addresses in more detail (one of the many forms of) free advertising as opposed to paid. My advice–both that paid advertising can do more harm than good, in emptying your bank account without providing much in the way of reward–and the supposition it’s based on, that you can’t control your sales, are unpopular with some people. Because really, this isn’t the advice any of us want. We’d all rather hear that there’s an easy and certain path to success and that our hard work, vision, and ambition will be rewarded.
But the whole premise of this book, and of this website, is that my job isn’t to give you the advice you want but the advice you need. My goal, here, is to help you succeed. Because I want you to succeed; I want me to succeed. I want us all to make it and I believe that, if we work together, we all can.
Chapter Fourteen
Give It Away
So let’s say that, up until this point, you’ve been following our advice. You have an awesome website that you update regularly, with your thoughts on all sorts of interesting topics. You’re forging new connections with other writers and potential readers. You’re making a conscientious effort to limit your time spent on writing-related activities and instead to focus the bulk of your writing time on actual writing. You’re committed to building up your backlist, and with books of the highest quality possible.
Now what?
People are visiting your site, and reading your posts. They’re beginning to know who you are. But how do you convince them to read your books?
By giving them away.
Yes, really.
Many writers are extremely hesitant to do this, fearing that by giving their books away they’re denying themselves the chance at ever making any real money. This attitude is symptomatic of what’s known as the scarcity mentality: the view of life as having only so much. Only so much success to go around, only so much happiness. Give away a few free copies of your book, they reason, and you’re giving away your opportunity to ever earn those dollars. Unsurprisingly, people with this mentality have a very difficult time with the whole idea. Writing posts seems like doing something for nothing; tweeting seems like an equally pointless waste of time. And giving their books away, most of all, seems like failure.
You need to reject this mentality. This mentality will prevent you from succeeding. Instead of seeing other writers as colleagues and sources of support, you’ll see them as competition. Instead of being generous with your wisdom, you’ll guard it jealously in the fear that helping someone else will only help them to surpass you. And in so doing, you’ll isolate yourself.
You can’t succeed, if you’re closing yourself in like this.
So instead you need to adopt the abundance mentality. The abundance mentality is a worldview, which accepts that there’s more than enough success to go around. That by sharing of yourself—your wisdom, your time, and indeed your writing—you’re giving success to the world. Success that you’ll one day earn back, in spades. Whereas the scarcity mentality looks at success as something you take, the abundance mentality looks at success as something you give.
You are in charge of your own success.
Remember that, because it’s true.
Giving away free books, or sharing your wisdom about writing, or the publishing process, isn’t going to limit your success because you are in charge of your own success. Your success flows from you. From your attitude. From your choices. And when you realize this, you’ll realize too that sharing yourself with the world doesn’t limit you. In fact, quite the opposite: it opens doors to all kinds of new and exciting creative possibilities.
Ask yourself: are you worried that the ten, or even hundred books that you give away would have been the only books you ever sold? Are you hoping to sell just ten, or a hundred books? Or are you hoping to sell thousands? What are your goals for your career, not just for today or this week—but within the next five years?
The next ten?
Right now, you’re a newbie. Nobody is going to buy your books on the strength of name recognition alone. Nobody, that is, except maybe your mother. As far as most of the world is concerned, you don’t exist. And you’re not going to prove to them that you’re awesome by spamming them with ads—however fancy those ads may be.
Instead, your goal should be to show them that your writing is awesome. And the best way to do that is to make it as easy as possible for them to access your writing. Is asking someone to pay three dollars really that much different than asking someone to pay nothing? Psychologically, yes. Three dollars is a cup of coffee; on the other hand, everyone likes free. Getting a freebie makes people feel special, and the sheer fact of something being free makes it seem more exciting than it otherwise would. Like a present!
It’s a lot easier to get people to take a chance on you when you’re giving away presents than when you’re coming to them hat in hand and begging.
Think about how many copies of Fifty Shades of Grey had to circulate the internet before anyone even knew what it was, or who E.L. James was. Did making her writing free to read on various Twilight fan fiction websites hurt her sales? You decide: E.L. James earned an estimated 95 million dollars in 2013.
So what should you do?
First, at a bare minimum, I’d advise making the first at least five chapters of each book available on your website.
For some reason, many writers are convinced that doing so will prevent people from actually buying their books. Which, if that’s the case, then there’s something wrong with their books. Tricking someone into buying a book that they will then dislike is not a good marketing strategy and it certainly doesn’t make for repeat customers. Which you need, if you’re going to make a living from this.
Plenty of people buy a book, think well, this is terrible, and stop reading. And guess what: they’re not going to buy the next book in that series, or the other books in your backlist. Which kind of obviates the point of having a backlist, no? Whereas if someone really likes your preview, even if you’ve put up every chapter but the last, they’ll buy the book just to find out what happens in that last chapter.
In addition to making samples available on your website, you should also offer your book itself for free through Amazon.
When you’re enrolled in Amazon’s Kindle Select program, you can make your e-book available, for free, for limited periods of time. Which is a good idea all the time, but a particularly fantastic idea if you’re writing a series. Every time you release a new book in your series, you can celebrate by making the first book in that series free.
I do this, and it works. Why? Well, think about it: people who’ve never heard of me are that much more likely to read that first book if it’s free. Which is awesome for them, because they’re getting a freebie, and awesome for me, because it’s potentially introducing a new audience to my work. And, even better, if they like that first (free) book, then they’re all the more likely to buy the second—and third, and fourth—installment in the series so they can find out what happens. Far more likely than they would have been, if I hadn’t made the first installment so accessible. It’s the old drug dealer adage: the first hit’s free.
When The White Queen came out, the second volume in The Black Prince Trilogy, I made The Demon of Darkling Reach free for five days. The Demon of Darkling Reach is, of course, the first book in that series. During that time, I averaged somewhere in the 500’s (or above) per day; when I reached 3,000 free books, I stopped counting.
Which, yes, that’s quite a lot of books—which represent, at least theoretically, quite a lot of missed earnings potential.
Except it’s not money I, therefore, somehow missed out on making. The people who picked my book up for free are several thousand people who never would have heard of The Demon of Darkling Reach except for it having been free in the first place. My actual sales greatly increased after the free period was over, because my gamble paid off: people liked the book. It was, and is, a good book. Most of them went on to buy the sequel.
And that’s the false dichotomy: the choice wasn’t, make six thousand dollars in five days or lose six thousand dollars in five days but, rather, sell a handful of books because no one’s ever heard of you or help the world to know who you are. Worrying about your earnings potential before you’ve developed any name recognition is putting the cart before the horse; before you have name recognition, you have no earnings potential. Focus on letting the world know who you are and on convincing them that you’ve produced a quality product; worry about how many thousands of dollars you can make later.
Within days, my sales figures for The White Queen matched those of The Demon of Darkling Reach. I did end up selling thousands of books—books I wouldn’t have sold but for first achieving name brand recognition. But interestingly, within six weeks, many more people had purchased The Demon of Darkling Reach than had ever downloaded it as a free e-book.
This is the power of name recognition.
Remember that your goal, here, shouldn’t be to score a couple of bucks in the short term but rather to attract a passionate, committed reader who’s excited for your next book. These readers are, over time, going to make the backbone of your career. Courting them is the single best thing you can do to ensure long term career growth. If that means giving away a few books, then so be it. In the long run, you can only benefit.
Yes, this approach takes patience. Sometimes more patience than you’ll feel like you naturally possess—or can summon. Building a readership is not easy. And if succeeding as a writer were easy, then everyone would do it. Recognizing that it might be years before you have a readership sufficient to generate any kind of reliable income can be discouraging.
But the important thing to remember is that this is the key to your success. No amount of gimmicks can, or will, replace the fruits of these labors. Which, unfortunately, is something that a lot of writers just don’t want to hear. They want immediate results, not to spend months or even years building a foundation. That’s boring.
So instead, they spend money. What blows my mind is how many writers aren’t willing to give away even a handful of books, even to friends and family, but are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on advertising. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Why?
What do they think that advertising campaigns will achieve, that actually letting people read their books won’t?
Another mistake that writers make is spamming their readership—or, even worse, their friends and family—with demands that you need to buy this now. Do not, under any circumstances, do that. Make your book free to download; tell people it’s free to download. Maybe three or four tweets to this effect per day are sufficient. And then leave it alone. Do not put your loved ones in a position where they feel as though they’re supposed to carry you. Financially or otherwise. They are not running a charity and, if you take yourself seriously as a writer, you are not trying to start a charity.
The bulk of your book sales aren’t going to come from people you know, anyway. Or, indeed, people who follow you on Twitter. Those people already know who you are, which is one more reason that spamming your Twitter feed with pleas to buy my book is a mistake: you’re preaching to the converted. They’ll buy your book, or they won’t. All that pressuring them can accomplish is awkwardness and, at worst, lost relationships.
Rather, amazing as it may seem, your sales are mostly going to come from people who’ve never heard of you. People who searched Amazon, or wherever, for a good book to read and who just happened to find you in the process. Your goal isn’t to earn a few bucks off of Uncle Max, or to guilt your mom into buying twelve copies but to reach a completely new population of people who don’t know you and have no reason to care who you are.
Unless you give them one.
Which is what giving your book away accomplishes, in spades.
Once you understand this, you’ll have a much easier time with the whole concept of “free.”
