This is where I confess I’m a wussy. I’ve spent most of the last year (not all of it because there were significant medical issues, including a near-fatal drug side effect to deal with) hesitating on the edge of the sea of indie publishing, unable to motivate myself to write.
Given that traditional is done with me, this was the equivalent of considering giving up on my career of twenty years, and the only skill I’ve worked on seriously in my adult life.
There were reasons. The reasons just might have been completely wrong. And one of those reasons is important for the rest of you to know.
Some of the reasons are intensely personal. The aforementioned drug side effect, for instance. People with my odd form of auto-immune are often helped by singulair. I was too. Until I fell into a depressive spiral from which I could not pull up. Turns out I’m one of the 0.1% people who have a bad reaction to singulair.
Once that was fixed, there were other personal hurdles, including family matters — by and large good, but time consuming — which ate the first half of the year.
Once that was done–
The problem is that all through this, and in fact till this morning, I was struggling with some facts I couldn’t understand. It goes something like this:
- Traditional and Indie careers seem to have no point of contact. What I mean is, traditional mid list (or even high mid list, or even some bestsellers — though not all — ) authors who go indie seem to do dismally. At the same time, indie authors are bringing down serious cash and even getting serious name recognition.
- Most traditional authors who are dumped or leave the field seem to make a significant amount of their living from teaching. While I like teaching, I got into this to tell stories, and honestly it’s all I want to do.
- Except for Witchfinder, and that was 8 years ago and it’s a strange book, my indie publications the last two years have been oh, hum. In trad, I can count on selling 3 to 4k in the first month, usually, in indie, I was seeing first-month sales of 500 copies, with some additional KUL reading. Now sure, the things I have published, recently were mostly collections and recently a short novel, Deep Pink,which is also profoundly weird. And I get those aren’t things that sell normally. Still watching the counter go up to 500 had me scratching my head and going “I thought I had at least 1k hardcore fans.” Again there’s a long tail, and my publications have been one-off, and I won’t know what splash a full length space opera novel makes till I release it (end of January), or the next Dyce novel (end of February) but all the same, you know, it’s disquieting.
If it weren’t for the fact that I know several other traditional authors experiencing the same thing — leftists, centrists, and people who think politics is a strange dish we eat with onions — I’d think my problem is that I am profoundly politically tainted. I mean, if someone admitting they voted for Trump is enough for a twitter mob to try to drive them out of romance publishing, what does being an avowed anti-Marxist do to one’s numbers. (And yeah, sure, I could keep my mouth shut. Except I can’t. I have kids and will have grandkids (and have “adopted”, practice grandkids now) I’ve seen this movie before, and therefore I can’t allow it to continue playing and for the consequences to fall on those I love after I’m gone. My voice might do very little but it’s a voice, opposing the madness. At any rate, I was never very good at pretending or fitting in, and mean girls think they’re psychic and can “find” whatever they want in your books, as we’ve had proof lately.)
But what else could it mean?
It is at this point most traditional writers I know, particularly if they were always mid list (Represent!) sigh and say something like “I guess I never really had that much of an audience. There’s something in my writing that just doesn’t sell. Well, I’ll know the craft and people will pay for lessons/coaching. I guess I’ll do that.” Or you know, decided to start sewing stuffed dragons or stuffed Mr. Trashbags for a living. (Shhhh. It’s a hobby.)
Which, okay, fine, maybe it’s a thing.
Except that I’m sorry, I’ve met young, (thirty something) indie authors making a living after 1 year. I’ve looked at and read their (usually fairly short) books, and there is no magic sauce. They read like very young-in-writing authors, who will get better in time. Some of them are eminently readable but I have to turn off the part of my back brain that groans and goes “oh, hey, I used to do that.”
…. So, what gives?
Well, this morning I woke up with the solution. No, I don’t know HOW. My brain doesn’t work like a normal human being’s brain, which turns over things rationally and comes up with a solution. No. I think most of my IQ is in either my subconscious or my toenails or perhaps, given my peculiar form of getting drunk (I become annoying and exhaustively rational. Think Mr. Spock.) my waking mind got tired of blurting out truths others find unpalatable and therefore shuts itself down hard.
Which means my most productive insights come about something like this: worry at a problem for days, weeks or months or even years, (depending), and get nothing. Then suddenly while I’m doing something completely unrelated, or just woke up (or on the case of plot problems, often in my dreams) get the solution with startling clarity.
This morning I realized why your traditional career might give you a little boost (or a significant boost) in indie, but it won’t be at the same level starting out. And why even those who have dual careers need to start out again in indie, even while they’re still doing fine (and are sometimes megasellers) in traditional. And also why traditional publishers think the indie market doesn’t really matter and fail to understand the significance of ebooks.
Are you ready for this? Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: it is because traditional and indie play to fundamentally different sets of readers.
What? Do I mean paper and ebook? Do I mean non-KULL and KULL?
Yes, but no.
One of the things that has always frustrated hell out of midlisters caught in the funny house of traditional publishing is that traditional publishing ignores a VAST number of readers, and they’re the readers midlisters are most equipped to do well with.
They’ll tell you it’s not a vast number. It’s something like 5% of the reading public. And they’re right. Except that it’s 5% of the reading public that accounts for 80% of sales.
This is a known demographic. They go by many names from super readers to compulsive readers. To call us — yes, I’m confessing — by our real name, we’re story addicts. The threshold to be one is RIDICULOUSLY low: 3 books a month. I have no clue what they call people who in slow times average three books a week, and when on vacation or otherwise not busy can do that a day, but I know we exist, and I know I’m not alone. (Right, I’m not alone? Right?) We’re the people who sneak a book into the pocket of our formal clothes and panic because you can’t figure out how to sneak a book into your wedding dress. We exist, and we won’t live in the shadows anymore. I mean… ahem… whatever.
The point is that traditional publishing always ignore these people. There are reasons for it, having to do with production times and laydown. Traditional books follow a weird and convoluted trail to publication, a trail that takes scheduling with many people, and independent entities like stores. This makes doing even four books a year very difficult. Which means that most authors, be they big names or midlisters are locked into a book a year.
Then there’s the produce model of publishing: your book supposedly spoils or ages after being on the shelves for 1 week and gets returned after that. And then there is ordering to the net and a bunch of other things that seem completely insane to the rest of us, and which have essentially killed midlist but which cater to ONE audience: the people who read one or two books a year.
These are fundamentally and intrinsically different groups of readers: they read mostly on paper, for one. They usually buy their book in a bookstore (though with the scarcity of those, a lot have moved online). They often — though not necessarily — read as a positional good. I.e. they read because they think of themselves as smart people, and smart people read. I suspect as a whole they trend left-ier (because left politics are also a positional good in our society,) more display oriented, and tend to think of themselves more as “intellectuals” than your average book addict. They overlap with people who read less than us story addicts because they’re busy, have kids, are in a phase of their life when they simply don’t have much time to devote to reading, or reading is not their primary form of entertainment. These people don’t trend leftier, snobbier, etc, but they tend to only be aware of books when they’re pushed, or only pay attention when they have a marketing campaign telling them “read this”. For the very busy (I went through phases when I was rebuilding houses, and the kids were tiny. Keep in mind I’m an addict though, so to go without a fix I need to be insanely busy. But yeah, it happens.) this makes sense, as you want to be assured that book you just started is no going to come apart in the middle. A lot of us midlisters tap into that fandom as do odd-ball authors, mostly in the Baen stable, (for sf/f) or cozy authors for mystery who get enough push to hit that audience. (Or in midlister’s case, who are lucky enough to be found sometimes.)
It wasn’t always like that. In the pulp days, authors were known to put five, six, seven books a year, and have fans fall on them like starving puppies.
In fact, the pulp model is much like the indie model.
Those careers died/were killed slowly, and there’s a number of factors, but what put the final nail in that coffin (in my awareness-time as a writer who wasn’t published yet, but who was analyzing what she saw happening) were two governmental interventions (and no, I’m NOT just being a crazy libertarian, this was obvious and clear.) One of them was Bill Clinton’s (executive order? signing a directive? I don’t remember the specific model yet, and I want to register that a representative republic shouldn’t give anyone wholly ignorant of an industry the ability to interfere with it by such injurious means, period, and that we the people SHOULD have means of actual redress to stop these ridiculous regulations, beyond voting the bastards out) dictating that there should be some percentage of recycled paper in every book.
This completely silly — since trees grown for paper are trees grown for paper. No one is cutting down virgin forests to print books. (So this is the equivalent of “save the brussel sprouts.”) — but it has been proven extensively and conclusively that paper recycling and re-processing is more injurious to the environment than MAKING paper.
Also, since recycling paper is more expensive, within a month it took the cost of printing your common, run of the mill mass market paperback from $5 to $8. I was a new-mother at the time, and those $3 put most newly-printed mmpbs out of my reach. I went from buying a couple a month to buying maybe one very three months, and I had to have heard of the author before. The distortions caused by this killed the careers of a lot of mostly mmpb writers — those who write for the story addicts — and also caused distortions that included the rise of the goat gagger (books of more than 250k words) and making hard cover the most profitable format for the houses. Which in turn caused a whole lot of other distortions. I won’t go into those, which at any rate were amplified by Borders clever stupidity of ordering to the net, which all the idiots then copied. I’m not going into these because, a) I’m over 2k words and most of you are hungover and b) I start shooting green light from my eyes and foaming at the mouth.
Anyway, suffice to say as I said above it makes sense for the trad pub market as currently constituted to cater to the one or two books a year market. Which explains a lot of their choices, from the books they choose to promote, to their covers, to the fact that they tend to shed any writer to the right of Lenin, and shed us faster and harder if we’re minorities or women, or both (represent!) because as pointed out that market trends left-ier than the general population.
Which brings us to the story addicts. These poor souls can’t GO without books. I know. I am one. So, how did we survive?
Barely.
The dark years of the late nineties and the oughts tried our hearts full sore. There were actually groups of us online, in email lists and some sharing the same “I’m being driven from pillar to post” sad tales. We started buying used A LOT. Which involved reading books by authors who had since been shut down from no initial sales. Which meant that we would read two three books and break our hearts because there were no more. Or read books printed before we were born. And we expanded our genres because everyone outside a massive city eventually runs out of used books in their favored genre. (We almost all started reading romance, for instance, at that time, which given my groups is not a normal read for us. And some of us “ate” history books like m & ms, because they tended to be LONG, which meant more reading for the money. Also they’re usually priced cheap as used books.) And read marginal books to the end (and sometimes three or four times) because well, it was a book.
Which is why, not just as a writer, but as a reader, I say Thank G-d for indie.
You see, Indie by its nature, the fact that books are cheap (and a lot of us lunatics are subscribed to Kindle lending library, too) and that they are varied, but mostly THAT THEY’RE IN SERIES and series that are published two to three months apart for new installments, caters to the 5% who buy 80% of the books.
COMPLETELY different market from traditional. And one about which I can speak authoritatively because, again, I AM THAT market, or a typical member of it.
If you write anything remotely readable and non offensive in one of our genres or subgenres, (we can now be picky) we will find you and we will read you.
EXCEPT that it comes with a caveat: indie has a high cost in finding an author initially. Oh, not as high as trad is getting, by publishing a lot of utter crap, but still high. You will find that about 50% (and for some genres higher) of books you sample make you scramble backwards away from them going “dear Lord, no.” In science fiction I’ve found this often includes people who think they’re inventing the genre from scratch, or are adamant they’re not science fiction, while writing all the tropes… as if they were brand new and earth shattering (but enough about traditional publishing!), in romance and mystery they often include recent college graduates (I was one once) who think serious must equal “there are no good guys” or “no one is clean.”
Anyway, covers often warn you away from those, by being of startling inappropriate horribleness. BUT not always.
What this means is that you WANT series. Judging by ancient mythologies’ tendency to become convoluted soap operas, I suspect humans crave series, period, but indie reinforces that. I’ve been known to fall into a series and read it to the end even when it’s just “so so.”
If a series is actually good, and it has a lot of books? BLISS. I know what I’m reading that week.
This explains why a lot of the high-money makers in indie are releasing books every other or every month, in a series. (Though that might drive me insane, and I have a starting public, and I’m willing to give it a little extra time, too, so I’m going to run a few series to start with.)
So:
Trad pub and indie are marketing to fundamentally different people. Trad pub is not utterly blind, it just doesn’t cater to us, and never has.
In indie, you benefit from long series (even if sometimes what you put out any given month is a short story) and from publishing frequently.
And while some of your readers from trad pub will find you right away, it might take time for them to figure out you’re publishing in the new model, particularly if you’re still publishing traditional or if you’ve been silent for some years (as I sort of have, due to illness.)
So, your initial sales for your first indie books will be disappointing. This is almost inevitable.
But you still have the skills and the know how. If you’re writing for your fans and not the editors (and sometimes this takes a bit of mental adjustment, but you can do it. If you’re a long time writer, you’ve survived about a million changing trends, anyway.) you can be successful at this game. (Yes there are other things you can/should learn to ease your journey, like keywords. I SUCK at keywords. I suck like a hoover. But I know people who also suck and are making REAL money. By which I mean more money than most trad pub midlisters ever saw.)
You just need a serious publishing schedule (and to take it seriously) beta readers and editors you can count on and a decentish cover designer (I’m one of those. I’m getting better. I aspire to good, as I do in everything I do, but that takes time and practice, and it’s a career I never wanted, but which makes my life easier than dealing with finding artists.)
THIS IS POSSIBLE. You can do it. I can do it.
Or at least I’m going to try really, really hard, which is why I sat down with my husband and wrote a schedule for 2020 which would probably give most people nightmares, and which involves my learning to keep regular hours, not get distracted by things like house cleaning and learning (again) to produce reliably.
But you know, if my insight is correct (and I made the schedule before I had that insight, just based on what I see working) it should work.
Which makes 2020 the year of go big or go home.
Wish me luck. Or join me in the insanity. Whichever your inclination!
Let’s go!
Mad Genius Club 
41 responses to “Welcome to the Year of Go Big or Go Home”
[…] morning I’m taking the very unusual step of doing identical blogging here and at Mad Genius Club. Mostly because I think what I woke up thinking is important in different ways for the different […]
Wasn’t another problem was when the IRS decided businesses had to pay taxes on goods in warehouses?
Thus publishers had to empty their warehouses of “older books” (which caused problems for people wanting older books).
Yes. That was before Clinton’s idiotic order. It killed the spinner racks, etc. that accounted for a ton of the mmpb sales. But that was (I think) before my time, or it slipped under my radar at the time.
Which, were the publishers honest with us, both authors and customers, would have been nicely eliminated with the advent of e-books and POD publishing. There really is no need, other than in support of what arguably are a vanishing sales mechanism the brick and mortar bookstores, to keep any physical inventory whatsoever.
But then again, it would appear that trad pub are not even being honest with themselves these days.
Yup. Inventory could not be depreciated, only junked.
So they junked it, and the IRS collected less in taxes.
They also sell back inventory to dollar stores and to bookstores that sell remainders. Dollar stores even have spinner racks.
I trained as a writer in college, failed at fiction early in life and wrote non-fiction military history for 20 years. My last full length book is the definitive work on the Battle for Austria in 1945, at 300k words. That’s the kind of thing I’d grown used to writing.
Until my first novel in August 2016 I never thought of fiction as an option anymore. I’d written two books back to back on a whim (or divine intervention, if you’re so inclined). The first thing I did was print out a copy to see how much postage would be mailing it to publishers and agents, this was Dec. of 2015, which shows how out of date I was. When the book came out in August of 2016 I sold 4,000 copies in the first four months and wondered what the hell had happened.
So everything I have learned about today’s publishing has been in the last three years. One of the first things I learned is that Fandom is divided into two completely separate audiences. For example, go to any con across the country and ask a random sampling of attendees who Michael Anderle or Craig Martelle is and they go cross-eyed. They’ve all heard of David Weber and John Ringo, but not Chris Kennedy or Mark Wandrey. And yet all of those indies are selling thousands and thousands of books.
It’s just my opinion but I see a brand new hybrid world coming, where authors publish in both worlds. The old supply chain format that Books A Million, BN and the like are built around, supporting trad publishing, is creaky and, I think, doomed. I do see authors coalescing around new small presses that are essentially just indie authors forming a cooperative group for mutual benefit. And not just indies. Eric Flint and Kevin Anderson are leading the way in this, along with true indies such as James Hunter and his wife Jeanette. Shellah Kennedy and Joy Wandrey are using the experience of their husbands in SF and Fantasy to start their own Romance imprint.
The biggest difference I see between now and then, though, is the critical nature of self-promotion. The days of just writing books and letting the publisher do the rest seem gone, to me.
If the publishers promoted non fic, they didn’t promote fiction, except for a VERY few select books.
(And never mine.)
So, the game is the same. And see Laura above: your best promotion is to write a lot.
I disagree — violently — with you on small presses. Yes, I DO have some insight knowing a lot of people who run them.
Small presses are useless for indies, except for two things: Shared universes and anthologies. If you’re not doing those? DO NOT BOTHER.
I think we’ll have to disagree on this one Sarah. The small press that first published me I credit for having at least half the credit for whatever success I’ve had, run by a great writer named J. Gunnar Grey. Her content edits and covers made my books much better, and I get paid once a month.
BUT, having said that, I’m also publishing a lot of my own stuff now. Perhaps I am wrong and made a mistake in the first place, but everything for me is a learning curve.
There are some small presses for stuff like litrpg, which basically have brand loyalty because they are book deejays.
Yes, and as I said, you have to use them for shared universes. But other than that… they’re not going to do anything for you that you can’t do for yourself.
“Book deejays” is a very interesting concept.
It is. Dedicated readers with a certain “palate” who make a business out of putting their imprimatur on a books list. Not just reviews but keeping the list. You know “Bob’s list of great space opera.”
They’d need to be kind of natural editors or what editors are supposed to be: people in touch with what the majority of people want in a book. And they’d need to have a certain “flavor” to their preferences. Jim Baen was so successful because he chose according to his personality and people who liked what he liked found him. Most other houses are more generic.
Hell, someone could do that with a blog and time. And not only (probably) get all the books they ever wanted free, but maybe even charge a small amount to people to subscribe to their “list” (have older ones available, but allow people to subscribe to get the last six months, say.)
I could see a business model. Now we need to find people who’ll do it.
We’ve actually been developing a different thing (mostly because my own reading taste is so eclectic I’m not a good person to do this) where we help writers keep on track and keep deadlines. We’re going to try it on me, and might eventually make it available as a service for a small fee. (Like $40 a year small.)
“Book deejays.” I like it. Reminds me of Michael Anderle. Look him up sometime. He makes James Paterson look like George RR Martin. Anderle “co-authors” something like twenty books a month, and Amazon is apparently copacetic with this, whatever you or I or anyone else might think of this. 🤷♂️
The one non-advertising activity which I’ve found most promotes visibility and thus discoverability for indie authors is publishing. Sounds like you have a good, if arduous, plan.
Speed does seem to breed success, at least publishing/release speed. My best months are when I’m able to get a book a month out the door, or a book every other month if I’m alternating series. Since quitting Day Job is not an option at present, I can only manage that in early autumn, after a summer to write. (And this year . . . autumn releases might or might not do so well because of the political dramas IRL.)
I agree completely. It seems like the key to success is a rapid release schedule. Many voracious readers lose interest if there is more than a 3-month gap between books. My taking a year off from writing mil-sf, for example, cost me dearly; my follow-up series is selling about half as well as the last novel in the original one.
I’m planning to wait to release my next series until I have volumes 1-3 ready to go, with plans to release them at 45-day intervals. That of course means several months without new releases, which will kill my monthly income while those books are being produced, but luckily I have enough savings to cover that.
Note that we don’t necessarily “lose interest.” I lose track. For example, I just finished a book advertised as “a novella to start the series”. It was quite good (and I left a review saying so). By the time the next book comes out, I will have probably forgotten all about it. Unless something brings it back to my attention, that poor author is done making money from me. Not that I don’t want to read the rest, but I will have forgotten the first book existed, let alone that I liked it.
This is a YUGE! change from the old days. I remember waiting for the next Mercedes Lackey or Katherine Kurtz book and buying them immediately. I have no idea if either is even still writing; trad pub ebooks are just way too expensive. The last time I read Mercedes Lackey was a three-author collaboration with someone here. Heirs of Alexandria maybe?
Lackey is still active. Kurtz seems to have gone into retirement after the Adept series and “St. Patrick’s Gargoyle.”
I’ll wish you luck in indie, and more than that… I am down with a sinus headache fierce enough to make people think I must be terribly, terribly hungover right now, but later, hit me up for help on your keywords. (Cedar pollen is quite high today. I wish I’d had a drink to go with this headache.)
You *did* keyword Deep Pink with humourous, right? (there’s a tag for scifi/fantasy humor, and I’m hoping very hard you put it in, but you don’t seem to have keyworded yourself into that category, or “devils & demons”, or…)
Two reasons trad pub authors don’t do well when moving to indie:
1. Marketing. The extremely basic visibility stuff like “Hey! Cover signaling genre! Blurb is not the same as plot synopsis!” is a new learning curve, and many authors discount the importance of keywording for visibility.
I see this when I search authors I used to read trad: “I’m in the urban fantasy section in the bookstore, so I put urban fantasy, with no subcats or keywords. Why isn’t anyone finding me amoung the 60,000 urban fantasy books?”
2. “All my editors rejected this weird one-off book because they didn’t know how to market it, so I’ll put it out. Why am I not selling gangbusters like I do with my trad series books?”
Seriously. I understand that authors have books of the heart they loved that got trunked when they wrote on spec and no one would buy ’em, So it makes perfect sense to clean ’em up and put ’em out indie. (Can’t sell if not published!) But expecting oddball one-offs to sell at the same level… that doesn’t even happen to indie authors at the top of their game.
So, yes, publish your oddball stuff. But also publish your series! And most importantly… have fun!
My weirdbook did fine.
I think I put humor. I SHOULD run them by Kindle rocket, because humor and humorous are different, but kindle rocket was installed under a weird account and I can’t remember which. It’s been a long time. I’ll get to it.
*hugs*
I’m sure you’ve seen this, but in case you haven’t:
yeah. I have it printed out. I just ran out of keywords. There are ways to put up more, but I’ve forgotten the process.
But KDP rocket illuminates some things, like adding ebook to the keywords (not even joking) or “mystery book” makes you get a ton more hits. This is beyond bizarre.
I’m hoping to get 2 books plus some shorts or novellas out this year. I’m thinking about putting my shorts and novellas into a paperback, because some of my readers are dinosaurs who actually LIKE holding a book in their hands.
We’re the people who sneak a book into the pocket of our formal clothes and panic because you can’t figure out how to sneak a book into your wedding dress.
Ascendance of a Book Worm.
Gonna cross-post this, because while I couldn’t stand it it’ll appeal to others on Crunchy Roll for free.
“panic because you can’t figure out how to sneak a book into your wedding dress.”
And people like my wife and I, who put our wedding registry on Amazon when it was just books, because we had all the household stuff we wanted….. 😎
❤ ❤ ❤
I’m doing my best to get back in the game after two years away. My first big problem has been figuring out what had been causing every project to bog down and grind to a halt shortly after I get into it. When I pulled out a couple of finished stories that I gave up on rewriting right about the time the hypothyroid became severe, I’m starting to think that the brain fog was beginning to set in well before the physical symptoms. In retrospect, it’s looking like every time I’d come to a point where I had to make a decision about which way to take the story (even at a subconscious level), my brain just couldn’t deal with it. So I’d end up endlessly spinning my wheels, making notes that never went anywhere in hope of finally getting things moving again. Eventually I’d give up and move to another project with the hope that the excitement would keep me moving, only to have it bog down the same way. Lather, rinse, repeat, and pretty soon I’d start a project wondering how long it would take to bog down the same way.
Now that things at least seem to be getting moving again on the actual writing, my biggest problem is dealing with GIMP for preparing covers. It’s not playing nice with something, such that every time I run it, I lose the ability to print or to transfer files over the network until I restart the computer. Apparently GIMP does something to my computer that the UVerse gateway doesn’t like, and only a complete restart resolves it. Since right now I have a number of things open that I don’t want to have to quit to restart, I’ve been delaying starting GIMP and tackling the covers that really need to be replaced.
My hypothyroidism was so extremely slow in getting worse, I thought brain fog was “normal” and it set in at the beginning of my career, and it took getting almost dead to stop writing, but yes.
That’s the nasty thing about slow-developing chronic illnesses — they just sort of become the new normal, bit by bit, until you’re so bad off that you can’t function and realize that yes, there is something wrong with you, and it’s not just being lazy/scatterbrained/careless/whatever.
Now I’ve got so many things I started that I’m going to need to be careful to pick a few to concentrate on, or else I’ll end up in my old “three dozen projects and nothing finished” pattern. OTOH, the two unproductive years mean that I have a number of short stories that the rights have reverted on, that I can get polished and up if I’m coming up short one month.
Yep. That’s what happened to me, and it’s part of the reason this year’s schedule is brutal. I’m going to finish a lot of things, which is about 1/5th of things I’ve started.
Me, I’m sticking to my usual writing resolutions of writing more, finishing more and submitting more.
I’m pretty good on the speed, but dang, this year I _will_ start marketing.
To a fair extent, this issue is why the N3F now publishes The N3F Review of Books, namely it puts reviews of different sorts of authors in front of people. God knows, some of those people may buy something. We would be delighted to have your reasonably thoughtful reviews of your fellow authors’ books. It’s monthly. Here is a recent Table of Contents
Incorporating Prose Bono
September 2019
Novels
3 … Asbaran Solutions by Chris Kennedy Review by Pat Patterson
3 … Castaway Planet by Ryk Spoor and Eric Flint Review by Jim McCoy
5 … Deep Roots by Ruthanna Emrys Review by Pat Patterson
5 … Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett Review by Pat Patterson
8 … Gemini Warrior by J. D. Cowan Review by Declan Finn
9 … Justified by Jon del Arroz Review by Jim McCoy
11 … Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron Review by Chris Nuttall
12 … Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch Review by Pat Patterson
14 … Like A Mighty Army by David Weber Review by Jim McCoy
16 … Maxwell Cain: Burrito Avenger by Adam Lane Smith Review by Declan Finn
18 … Psychic Undercover by Amie Gobbins Review by Declan Finn
20 … Red Queen: The Substrate Wars by Jeb Kinnison Review by Jim McCoy
21 … Somewither by John C. Wright Review by Declan Finn
23 … Sons of the Lion by Jason Cordova Review by Pat Patterson
25 … Space Traipse: Hold My Beer by Karina Fabian Review by Tamara Wilhite
26 … Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik Review by Pat Patterson
27 … Sword and Blood! by Sarah Hoyt Review by Pat Patterson
29 … The Black Chamber by S. M. Sterling Review by Pat Patterson
31 … The Black Prism by Brent Weeks Review by Jim McCoy
32 … The Chaplain’s War by Brad Torgersen Review by Jim McCoy
33 … The Kitsune Stratagem by David A. Tatum Review by Jim McCoy
34 … The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie Review by Pat Patterson
37 … Uncompromising Honor by David Weber Review by Pat Patterson
39 … We Dare: An Anthology of Augmented Humanity Edited
by Chris Kennedy and Jamie Ibson Review by Pat Patterson
42 … When the Gods Fell by Richard Paolinelli Review by Declan Finn
Literary Criticism
43 … The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon by Moira Greyland Peat
Review by Tamara Wilhite
44 … View from the Cellar by R. W. Watkins—Review by George Phillies
Prose Bono
47 … A Tale of Two Writers by Robert Runté
51 … Art and Craft of Writing: Words on a Page by L. Jagi Lamplight Wright
LETTERS
52 … Heath Rowe
53 … Bob Jennings
END
I’ve been looking at another indie author, Jonathan Moeller. He agrees with a lot of what you’re saying here, and has been following that path for years now. I suggest checking out his blog, as he has been doing some podcasts on various aspects like covers, advertising and such. I found his analysis on advertising efficiency very interesting, YMMV.
http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/
Do you have a link to his advertising efficiency analysis? I browsed his site and it didn’t spring out.
This might be it:
Thanks. I agree with some of his analysis. I do know people who do well with Amazon ads, and I find them somewhat useful.
I definitely agree that one needs a series to make paid advertising worthwhile. My one trilogy is just barely long enough to come out with a little profit at the end of the day. It’s when readers try my titles in a different sub-genre that ROI improves.
One important additional benefit of using the BookBub CPM ads is that they are a good way to fix one’s also-bots. Actually, that’s true of the Amazon ads, too, if you take care to only target authors and books like yours. I, for example, write SF so I don’t target fantasy.
This podcast also talks about it, start at around 12:45
https://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/?p=12088
I have a friend who is using the ability to open pre-release sales on Amazon to force her to schedule. She points out if she slips she loses it for a year.
Thinking of trying it as a spur as well.
[…] Sarah Hoyt wrote an excellent post here, where among other things she discusses how an executive order mandating the amount of recycled content in paper killed off the Mass Market Paperback and perhaps the binge reader that were the consumers of MMPBs, because we were addicted, to reading: Welcome to the Year of Go Big or Go Home […]