 For Authors: February 18, 2015 Issue [#6830] |
  For Authors
This week: Ebooks & Self-Publishing Edited by: Jeff  
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"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make
new things familiar, and to make familiar things new."
-- Samuel Johnson
Trivia of the Week: Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing allows you to upload your book to the Kindle Store easily and quickly. Books are usually live within 24-48 hours and you control most of the book's settings, including list prices. The standard royalty is 35% (which is more than most traditional publishers offer), and goes as high as 70% if you meet certain criteria (most notably, pricing your book between $2.99 and $9.99).
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EBOOKS & SELF-PUBLISHING
Self-publishing has been around for a long time. Pretty much as long as there have been proper publishing houses, there have been authors out there who have been determined - for a variety of reasons - to publish their own work. What's remarkable about the publishing industry, though, is how quickly it's changed in the past decade.
When Vivian wrote her "For Authors Newsletter (October 3, 2007)" , the survey she presented on self-publishing was primarily about printing one's own books and trying to get them into brick-and-mortar bookstores. To be fair, though, Viv wrote that newsletter back on October 2007... a month before Amazon even introduced their first Kindle e-reading device.
In 2009, Crys-not really here wrote her "For Authors Newsletter (November 18, 2009)" , which focused on self-publishing through LuLu.Com and PublishAmerica, back when both of those companies were part of the "print-on-demand" (POD) services that were considered the way to go with self-publishing back then. And keep in mind that "back then" was only about five years ago!
Here's a quick timeline of what's happened since then:
 2009: Barnes & Noble releases the Nook e-Reader.
2010: Apple releases the iPad.
2010: Kobo releases its Kobo eReader (sold at Borders).
2010: Amazon reports ebook sales surpass hardcover sales for the first time ever.
2011: Amazon reports that ebook sales surpass ALL printed book sales for the first time ever.
2013: Assoc. of American Publishers estimates that ebooks account for 20% of all book sales.
2014: Forbes estimates the global ebook market is worth $8.5 billion.
2015: AuthorEarnings.Com reports that 33% of all ebook sales are to indie self-published books.
What a difference a few years makes! At the tail end of the last decade, most people were still looking at self-publishing as an alternative route to publishing in print, as a way of selling the books yourself and/or getting the attention of a publisher who would then offer you a contract. Today, not only are ebooks a burgeoning market (print still has a healthy audience too, but there's no denying the increased popularity of reading a book on your Kindle, iPad, Nook, smartphone, etc.), but they're making it easier than ever to self-publish your material.
Over the years, the ebook market has introduced a variety of different strategies to sell its product (I'm going to stick with Amazon here since it's the platform I know best and it accounts for roughly 67% of all ebook sales in the United States). Since ebooks only require a very small bit of data on a device to store, you don't have to worry about printing costs or storage costs for placing large orders. Authors literally upload a data file to a website and then have a dashboard that tells them how many copies people have downloaded and how much money those copies have made them. Ebooks can be sold for as little as $0.99, or even given away for free through special promotions or price matching. Without needing to pay per unit for print-on-demand, authors can simply upload their work to Amazon or Smashwords or the Apple iBooks store for almost nothing, and copies can be purchased and downloaded by readers instantly. If we're talking absolute minimums here, there is literally no cost (other than time) to write a book. You can use a free word processor like OpenOffice or GoogleDocs, and upload the file using free wi-fi at a local library or your friendly neighborhood Starbucks... literally anyone with access to a computer has the tools they need to independently self-publish a book.
That said, this much lower barrier to entry has created problems of it own... mainly that anyone can publish their work, even when they probably shouldn't. 
As of the writing of this editorial, there are 3,226,635 items available in the Kindle Store. By most accounts, there are roughly 2,000 new ebooks added to the Kindle store every day.  With the glut of material out there, how does a newer or lesser known author ever stand out? Obviously, if your name is James Patterson or Nora Roberts or Stephen King, your books tend to float to the surface. But for an author who's trying to build an audience, how do they make sure that your book stands out above the other 1,999 offerings that are uploaded the same day? Or the 13,999 books that are uploaded the same week?
You have to invest in your book's success.
Just because you can publish a book for basically nothing does not mean that you should. Really quickly, let's go over some of the things that a publishing house does for a book between the point where they accept your manuscript and put your book on shelves:
 They pay to have it edited, sometimes multiple times. 
They pay to have it formatted (for print and digital).
They pay for artwork (like a cover).
They pay to market it.
In most cases, a publisher has people who work in these capacities on their in-house employee roster. But the reason why they take such a big share of your earnings is because they're still paying for these things (even if it's in the form of employee salaries) until your book starts to make them money. And as a self-publisher, just because you're side-stepping the traditional publishing route doesn't mean you should be side-stepping the traditional publishing model. Just because the publisher is out of the equation doesn't mean you suddenly don't need a good edit on your book, or passable formatting, or eye-catching artwork, or a plan to get your work out to the public.
If you want your self-published material to stand out from all the other self-published stuff that's out there, being professional is the best way to go about it. You need to separate yourself from all the other "oh yeah, I just wrote The End and clicked upload" authors out there and establish your work as a professional-quality project that you've invested time, energy, and even some money into getting right.
Here are some quick cost-saving tips for each of those expenses listed above:
EDITING. Find friends or family who know their stuff and will do you a favor by editing your manuscript cheap or even for free. Join a writer's group and agree to edit someone else's in exchange for help with your own. If you do need to hire someone, make sure the manuscript is as good as it can possibly be first; it's considerably cheaper to hire a technical proofreader to fix your typos and grammar errors than it is to higher a creative editor who is fixing story and character problems.
FORMATTING. Buy Scrivener. While all of the creative bells and whistles like creating index cards and writing different scenes in different files that are collected in a central place that also keeps your research and notes are great, here's the real value of Scrivener... you can instantly compile your manuscript into a print version, .mobi file (Kindle), or .epub file (Nook, iBooks, and pretty much everyone else). It also removes some of the pesky formatting issues that you sometimes run into when you're trying to convert Microsoft Word and other word processor files to an ebook format. Scrivener retails for $45, and is regularly on sale for $40 or even as low as $30. For less than fifty bucks, you have a program that can deliver properly-formatted ebook file formats in seconds.
ARTWORK. Find friends of family who know their way around Photoshop. Check with the Fine Arts department at your local college. Check DeviantART or other online communities for artists who might be willing to design you a cover cheaper than a professional, established graphic designer. In some cases, you might be able to get a discount in exchange for advertising the services of an up-and-coming artist in your book by giving them cover credit and linking to their website.
MARKETING. Build a social media presence for yourself. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and all the other social media sites are a great way to gain a following. You can blog or record a regular podcast. After cultivating a following, you can incentivize them to check out your work with limited-time discounts or giving away freebies. Talk to your local bookstore's event coordinator and set up a signing for which you can pay to print-on-demand a limited run of books for the occasion. Attend book fairs or other author events and come prepared with your author website or a link to your Amazon page printed on business cards that you can hand out. The possibilities are endless.
There is absolutely no question that publishing is a business. And if you're not going to go through a publisher or otherwise pay the business people to take care of that business for you, it needs to be something you take care of yourself. Your writing may be your art, but you need a strong business presence to make that art stand out from everyone else's art that's vying for attention.
It's an exciting time to be an author. The barriers to entry have never been lower, and anyone can publish a book as a result. You don't have to wait for permission from a publisher to get your work out there, and you don't have to have thousands of dollars in the bank to be able to afford to print them yourself. You can publish an ebook that people can download instantly. Just remember that the price to pay for low barriers to entry is that you're competing with 2,000 people a day who have the exact same idea. If you want your books to get noticed and hit those sales figures that'll let you quit your day job and write full-time, you need to be a self-publisher that's as invested in your own success as a traditional publisher would be.
Until next time,
Jeff
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EXCERPT: I spoke to other authors and they would discourage me from the self-publishing arena, saying it wasn’t the tried and true way to get published. I would also hear about the self-published, a big example was Chicken Soup For The Soul, that was now in the mainstream. What to do?
EXCERPT: Indie authors have many reasons for staying or becoming indie. Control is a major reason. Upon signing with a commercial publisher, authors most often hand over all control concerning how they can sell their work, what they can do with it (or with the characters), how the cover design will look, and how blurbs and cover copy is written. There is always the possibility of selling your book just to have it sit in a file somewhere unpublished, but as it's under contract, it cannot be offered elsewhere.
EXCERPT: I call myself a rogue writer because instead of going the traditional route of publishing, I self-published my first novel, The Price Of Eden. Now... there are people in this world that have no respect at all for self-published authors. They think that because we didn't allow some faceless editor at a fancy publishing house dictate every detail of our books that we are not worthy of being called, "authors."
EXCERPT: I write mostly poetry. I have never considered myself to be an accomplished poet. When I decided that I wanted to get some of my poems in print strictly for my myself and my family I sought out a POD publisher(print on demand publisher). I had read enough about traditional publishers to know that my chances of getting a poetry manuscript published through them was next to zero. If not zero. I was an unknown writer to begin with. I had never published anything before joining WDC. After being a member here for almost a year, I felt I was ready to take the next step with my writings - find a publisher.
EXCERPT: As I have already written in a previous blog/article, self-publishing is a lot of work. Some people will opt to do all or most of the hard work themselves. Others will decide to opt for the 'publishing' and 'marketing' packages offered by POD services, self-publishing services, and vanity presses. As with anything, the most important thing that you can do before making a decision is to 'do your homework.' Self-publishing and picking the best POD company for yourself is no different. Below I outline a few things to take into consideration before making your final pick.
EXCERPT: I attended a session at Ravencon with Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Michael Ventrella, among others. Kevin and Rebecca have been published by traditional New York publishers for years and Kevin has a large out-of-print backlist which he’s self-published as ebooks. He’s making more money on those backlisted ebooks than he ever did when they were in print. However, he’s a platform, a large audience of readers, who know his “brand” and are fans who want to buy those books for their ereaders.
EXCERPT: I want to open this piece with a humble confession: I started writing with less than nothing. My writing skills were so rusty that it took me two years to work my way up to nothing before I could make any real progress. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and I have found that in the writing business fortune favors the persistent. The ones that get published might not be the best; they are the ones that refused to quit in the face of writer’s block, mediocre efforts, and scathing rejections. Who knows how many magnificent manuscripts languish in trunks because the writer gave up on publication.
EXCERPT: A few months ago, I participated in a workshop on how to create an ebook. It raised the question, did I really want to create an ebook with the free software available online? Prior to that time I participated in a book fair and shared a table with an Indie author. He was a technical editor in professional life and very tech savvy and happy to self-pub all his books, epub editions included. I asked him about the process for someone like myself who was not as tech savvy.
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Feedback from my last newsletter about writing in multiple genres:
Tileira  writes: "I think an author should always write what they want to write. If you prefer one genre, or your muse comes to you from one genre, there is nothing wrong with that. You become a specialist. If she flits in with all different kinds of shiny baubles for you to play with and you want to pursue all of them, do that.
Publishers and agents worry about the brand, about the name, about selling things regardless of whether they get read or not. Let them worry about that and establish a pseudonym if you need to. But there is definitely a benefit to writing in several genres even if you never publish them. There are elements of each genre which can feed the way you treat a story from another. Romance is the in/famous one which can slide into pockets inside many others or wear another genre (romance plot inside sci-fi horror, or a romance book with a sci-fi action plot). Horror is another, sci-fi and fantasy are two sides of a coin. Don't try to write something which is all things to all people, but let your experience with a different genre colour that scene, or this chapter.
And have fun. If you enjoy writing a story and learning it as it evolves, someone will enjoy reading it. There's no point in worrying about the market until you've got it drafted."
Couldn't have said it better myself. I totally agree! 
Joto-Kai  writes: "In general, diversification is as essential to development as specialization. A western writer who learns romance might be able to better vet the dynamics between characters. A sci-fi writer who writes more down to earth dramas might find a better understanding of what makes a story interesting. And on. But that's just me, philosophizing. And what good improving your writing if your marketing sputters into obscurity?"
I've always been fascinated by the difference between people who are adept at a variety of tasks versus those who take the time to truly master a single one. I'm not sure I've got the temperament to so completely focus on one thing that I become one of the best at it, so I suppose the best I can hope for is to go the other direction and aspire to be one of those people who are pretty good at a lot of different things. 
monty31802 writes: "Fine points surely made, thought I was way off but I have been writing for over 50 years and have tried most and settled on what I like best."
That's great that you've settled into what you really enjoy writing. I'm still trying to figure that out myself. 
Elfin Dragon-finally published  writes: "With regards to writing in multiple genres - I think it's an authors decision on whether he/she would be able to. I started out with just fantasy & poetry but after roaming around on this site I've found that I have the confidence to expand some of my short story ideas into more sci/fi aspects. I know it will be difficult for me as it's not my usual genre but I welcome the challenge now. I think as many of us read & enjoy different genres it would be remise of us to not at least try a short story or two in something we're not use to as I have to see if we at least can learn something different. Who knows, at the very least we may come away with something to add to our usual writing."
I love the challenge of new genres. I love participating in WdC contests that offer the opportunity to write in a genre that I'm unfamiliar with, and I definitely enjoy reading multiple genres. I suppose it's just a matter of being willing to put in the hard work of getting good at another genre before you subject your regular readers and fans to it. 
jim1184  writes: "Excellent news letter. Great topic. I missed the survey. I like the different perspectives of the authors. I read and write different genres. Some how I, recently got hooked on space operas. I write fiction combinations fantasy and mythology combined. I have written some military fiction / adventure. My reading is all over the place. I wonder how many people fall into that category or do the majority read just one or two genres. I have a friend who only reads tech manuals, but he is nuts. Ok I am sliding off topic here maybe for another letter. Thanks for this one Jeff, it was great and thought provoking. "
Thanks for writing in! I know a lot of readers who will only read one particular genre of choice. They might be romance readers, or mystery buffs, or science fiction fiends and rarely read anything else. Then again, I know a whole lot of people like myself who are, by contrast, open to reading just about anything. If someone were to go through my Kindle, at any given time they'd probably find everything from classic literature to nonfiction to erotica.
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