Write. Publish. Repeat. (The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success)

by Sean Platt

That didn’t work especially well, so most recently they’ve completely abandoned the weekly release schedule and now only sell their serialized projects as full-season packages. Each

A somewhat related change that triggered widespread panic through the indie community was a rule change initiated by Amazon that severely impaired the ability of huge blogs to promote free e-books. Authors reliant on free downloads later translating into paid sales (see above) ran in circles screaming that the sky was falling. To make things worse, Amazon was, at the same time, changing their website to hide their Top 100 Free lists so that free books became much, much less visible to casual browsers. So what, right?

Our standard M.O. was to make our books free for the first three days so that our faithful readers could snap them up, leave reviews (to give us some solid social proof for later buyers’ eyes), and seed those books in the customers-who-bought-this-also-bought-this lists of as many shoppers as possible. It

critical mass: People who’d never heard of us would see the book at the top of a free list and download it. Abracadabra, brand-new readers. That change decimating

We simply abandoned the tactic of making the book free for the first few days and asked how else we could implement the same strategy. We asked, “How can we reward our regulars, maximize reviews, and get those books into the right hands?” And the answer became our next tactic.

(In case you’re wondering, our follow-up tactic was to price books at 99 cents for the first three days, and these days we tend to discount only to $2.99. Because

most of our books as of right now are normally priced $4.99 and up, this was a good loyalty discount and had pretty much the same effect. But in the end, paid strategies worked even better than free promotion because only people willing to open their wallets bought the books. Free-seekers are different from even 99-cent purchasers, and this new tact...

We may be immersed in the world of self-publishing, and in that world, e-books are king, but it’s not how everyone reads. That will change over time, but as things stand now, not everyone understands, likes, or is remotely interested in reading on a screen. A large proportion of readers out there still will only read on paper, at least for now. But while that’s true, you as a self-publisher may not really care. You could knock yourself out trying to reach those people with print only, but it’s probably not worth it. According to the “80/20 Rule,” this is firmly in the 20 percent. You may be worried that you’re missing a lot of readers if you ignore print, but consider it from both sides: not just the

Print, as a primary reading medium, is on its way out. Thinking of print sales as a significant income generator is likely a poor use of your time and is — at best — an attempt to grab a slice of a rapidly diminishing pie. My

print from day one. Why? Because while we feel that print isn’t worth most writers’ time as an income generator, it can be very worth it for other reasons. We’ll go into these in more detail later, but a few are: to hand out as promotional pieces, to reward or satisfy your hardcore fans, to sell at in-person events,

print books), or to provide contrast that makes the e-book version look better, and therefore helps it to sell. Again, we’ll go into this later, but briefly: If you have both a Createspace print version and an Amazon Kindle version of your book, the price of your Kindle book will show as a discount from the print book’s price

— a small sleight of hand that makes your e-book version ...

inexpensive to buyers. It will also anchor your e-book with real page numbers (making it seem longer) and will make your book’s buy page more complete (making you look ...

Price, packaging, presentation, intelligent upsell offers, and customer service still follow the same guidelines as they always have.

If a good book ended on a cliffhanger, both readers would want to know what happened next, and were therefore more likely to read the sequel.

would feel motivated to buy a box set of three books if the set cost less than the three books purchased individually. As you read through the rest of

Nothing is wrong with you. And dammit, nothing is wrong with us. Nothing is wrong with promoting your work, being proud of the stories you tell or the information you articulate, telling people about your work, or encouraging people who already like your work to get more. This book isn’t an advertising brochure. It’s the most helpful guide we could possibly write, and we hope it has the side benefit of making our other books sell better. If you find yourself resisting the idea of “selling” — which, rest assured, is an absolutely essential talent for an indie author

Have you ever gone to see the sequel of a movie you liked, or ordered dessert when the waiter offered it after your meal? Have you ever Super-Sized your Value Meal? Those are all examples of an upsell — another “dirty” marketing word. Yet you probably don’t regret any of those transactions. You might, in fact, have appreciated the chance to get more of what you already knew you liked, often at a preferred price. Shocking! We could beat this to death,

but you get the point. In valid, non-sleazy salesmanship and marketing — which is the kind we practice and the kind you’re going to learn a bit later — everyone wins.

In an ethical sales transaction, the buyer and seller should be equally pleased. Each party should feel like thanking the other.

nothing more than letting people who might like your product know it exists — and, ideally, giving them some sort of a deal that makes the offer better for the potential buyer. If you ever find yourself

There are exceptions, of course, but you don’t want those readers anyway. People who would turn a book down solely on the basis of its pedigree and nothing else are like people who would treat a person differently because of the color of her skin. You can’t please those people. One of our core tenets (and we’ll detail this later) is that you should always cultivate your tribe and not worry at all about those who don’t jibe with your style. This is simply one more example. By and large,

The great majority of readers care about authors, not publishers.

Many self-published books do look like total crap, and readers don’t like books that look like crap — indie or not. It’s the “looking like crap” they don’t like, and one thing traditional publishing seldom gets wrong is appearance.

edited, poorly presented, badly formatted, full of typos, meandering, uninteresting, and full of flat characters. You know … things that any self-respecting author, independent or not, should do everything to avoid. Before we

Giving your readers the best possible first impression is essential. If you look professional, readers will go into your book anticipating a professional reading experience. They will be mentally pre-programmed to expect the very best from you, and will therefore be more likely to overlook little things that might otherwise have bothered them.

If, on the other hand, readers buy your book in spite of it looking completely amateurish, they will go into it anticipating a shoddy, half-assed reading experience. These jaded readers will be mentally pre-programmed to expect the worst from you, because who else but a total slob would post a terrible cover, fail to capitalize and punctuate properly in their sales page synopsis, and price at less than

a dollar with no clear and obvious reason (like a limited time sale) for doing so? “Real” books and “real” publishers would n...

There’s a state we call “flow” that you want your readers to experience when consuming your work. Flow is a Zen-like state where the reader is reading … but almost unaware that they’re doing so. Instead of seeing words, they’re seeing your characters and what they’re up to. They’re feeling excited, or nervous, or sad, or happy, as if they were there. I once almost closed a book and decided not to read further after being freaked out by the intro (House of Leaves) and felt my spirit sink when I realized a disturbing truth (Catch-22). That’s flow. Your story stops being words for your

reader and becomes a world instead. The worst thing you can do

to kick a reader out of flow by reminding them about the words they’re reading. There are many ways to do this (an unintended WTF moment is never good), but the most obvious — and easiest...

use an incorrect word, that will stop a reader. If you omit or misspell a word, that’ll do it, too. If you have a sentence that’s too long and convoluted to make sense, the reader will be forced to back up and unt...

Pauses shatter flow. No matter how good you think you are at spotting typos, confusing sentences, unclear story lines, and other things that may break reader flow, you simply won’t be able to see them all. Looking at the big picture, your reader may not understand certain things about the story as you understand it, and hence you may not have thought to fully articulate their thoughts. Looking at the micro level, you’re going to miss typos because your brain, which is familiar with how the text should read,

will fill in what’s missing or incorrect. Your reader

won’t miss them,...

and if you have too many, your work will look sloppy at best, and disrespectful...

Before publishing any file, you should open it using a suitable reader and leaf through everything leading up to the

story, a few pages of the story itself, and everything after the story. Check the cover image, the table of contents (to ensure that you actually did include the entire story; if you fail on that one you’re going to look like a jerk). Click on your links and make sure they go where they should. Or, for print books, remove all links and replace them with text equivalents. I’ve seen plenty of print books with back-matter

I’ve found that the easiest way to do this step is to store (and output) your project files in a cloud storage space like Dropbox, then install several reader programs and Dropbox (or whatever) on a mobile device like a tablet. You can navigate to each of the book files in Dropbox, choose to open them in the appropriate program (the Kindle reader for Kindle files, something like the Kobo, Nook, or iBooks app for all .epub versions), then go through them that

Don’t skip this step, or phone it in. Pay attention, look for and/or click on everything. It’s easy to screw up, and you’ll look like an amateur if you do.

you should always obey the story and go where it wants to go. We don’t bring business into our creation process at all.

This bears repetition: You can’t please everyone.

evangelists. The best way to create those true fans: Turn your back on a certain section of the market who will never fit that criteria. That might be a shocking way to put it, but the less shocking and equally accurate way to say it is that in order to appeal strongly to your best readers, you must be and remain authentic. This is hard, because it means that you must stand firm

even when people disagree with you.

When we first described our scattershot product catalog, it led to one of the biggest debates our podcast has seen, with tons of listeners weighing in. Most said we were idiots, that we should stick to a single genre so as not to confuse readers. They said we’d lose readers if we did what we were planning to do. But our reply was that no matter what we did, we’d lose readers. All we were doing by standing firm was choosing to be authentic to our multiple-interest selves,

and stayed in one genre, we’d have attracted single-genre readers and lost those who preferred variety. Worse, we would have been stuck there. We wanted to be known as storytellers, not authors of a particular genre. Both scenarios would result in gaining some readers and losing others. The difference was that the latter (single-genre) option would have left us frustrated and denying our most authentic passions and interests.

Sean and I are like monkeys, unable to stay in one tree.

The more authentic you are — and the more vehemently you hold to that authenticity — the more true fans you will eventually accumulate. We know we’re turning some people off. But we’re really turning on the right people for us.

Stephen King in On Writing.

If you ever get stuck, ask yourself what happens next, then next, then next. Don’t get an idea for a situation; develop the arc for your story. Pretty much every story goes like this: Someone is complacent, they face a challenge, the challenge nearly beats them, they find a way to conquer the challenge, then emerge changed at the other end. There are variations and anti-stories of course, but those are time-tested standards. Make sure you have at least a basic idea of your elements before starting if you have even the slightest doubts about your ability to reach the end.