The Sharknado Principle

I have had no real success selling books, especially novels. Having said that, I do have some ideas on self-published fiction writing which I'd like to share.

My idea is this: nobody deliberately buys self-published novels. You can sell them for 99 cents or you can give them away for free, but nobody deliberately goes looking for novels by authors they've never heard of.

One suggestion I'd make to anyone who is thinking about writing a novel is to sign up for Amazon Book Gorilla. This is an email you get every day offering free or reduced price books in the categories you select, many of them self-published. Read the descriptions of the books. You will get this email every single day, and very quickly you will see that there are a lot of authors writing the same books, and a very small number doing something really unique.

You can get many of these books for free, and in no time at all your Kindle will fill up with stuff that you'll never get around to reading. Life is just too short. You'll feel like somebody working at a publishing house assigned to go through the slush pile, except nobody is paying you to do it.

It isn't so much that these people can't write (you need to get a certain number of good reviews on Amazon before you can pay to list your book on Book Gorilla) but that you feel like you know everything about the book before you even start reading it.

The great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once said that he felt his greatest competition was not other authors, but beer. He imagined his readers asking themselves if they would rather spend the money on his book or spend the same amount of money on beer.

As a self-published author you cannot think of your competition as other self-published authors. You are competing with every author out there, living and dead, plus beer.

Take heart, though. If you are a NetFlix subscriber you can choose to watch from a lot of movies each month, including Academy Award winners and recognized classics with really big stars. In spite of that, many people each month choose to watch Sharknado.

I have not seen that movie and don't intend to watch it, but I can understand why somebody would choose that. The premise is so goofy it makes you want to check it out. It promises a viewing experience that nothing else can give you.

Back when people first started buying televisions in the 1950's the movie studios had to figure out how to compete with television. The big studios made epics that needed a really big screen and the low budget operators like Roger Corman made movies targeted to teenagers. Now every movie is made for teenagers but back then none of the big studios did that.

As a self published author I feel more like Corman. Nobody knows who I am, so the only thing I've got to sell is the story. I have to give the reader an experience he can't get from an established writer, and the reader needs to know that just by reading the book description. I have to give him Sharknado.