Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, has some very interesting predictions for 2011. Read it here and then come back. I have some opinions, as always.
I’m going to take his predictions one at a time.
#1… Mark believes ebook sales will rise. Yup, I agree completely. It might even be higher than 20% by the end of the year that he suggests. Most everyone thought we would hit 25% in late 2012. I think we might be ahead of that pace. We went from 1.5% to over 9% this year, a 600% increase. Just doubling next year will get close to Mark’s suggested 20%.
#2… Mark suggests that agents will play a part in the coming year and I also agree. Agents have no choice, for the most part. They need to move their clients and try to take a piece of the pie in some fashion or they will be out of business. And they will use this possible new way as a factor in negotiations. Mark was not talking about the current status of agents and all their problems, only that they would play a part with their bestsellers and that I agree with.
#3… Mark thinks that more larger authors will be reluctant to part with erights and I agree, and I think this will be a fight, a major fight in the coming year or two. Traditional publishers must have the erights to make a book worthwhile and authors don’t want to give up erights because of the value-added feature of getting 60-70%. And as Mark noted, the possible different structures. Most larger name and old-time authors I know are scrambling with our backlists to get them up. And both Kris and I have pulled back books that are original and were on the market to do them ourselves. So I agree with Mark, but think this will be a major fight to watch.
#4… Agree, but sadly. Unpublished writers will find it easier to get books in print and for some it will work. But alas, for the vast majority their books will sink without a trace, the same as getting rejections from major traditional publishers. In the old system the driven writer kept writing and submitting, but this new way will cause even more discouragement than rejections caused. My fear is that the new road to success is very muddy at the moment and we’ll lose generations of writers as this path clears. Mark is right, but I don’t like it and think we’ll lose a large generation of writers because of it.
#5…Agree, royalty rates for electronic books will come up for writers. They already are. Again, another fight that will be fun to watch.
#6… eBook prices to fall. Yes, I agree, because I know Mark was talking about the $15.99 and that range prices for books that the traditional publishers have held the line on. Books will settle in at the range between $2.99 and $9.99, for the most part, with the work coming from traditional publishers being at the upper end. Beginning writers will use the lower end and thus the price structure will start meaning something by the end of the year in relationship to quality. The lower end and free will also be used for promotions by everyone. Mark is right, the prices will come down under ten bucks, a good thing for books, not so good for traditional publisher’s bottom lines.
#7… Customer is king is what Mark said. I completely agree and traditional publishers will start reverting back to the days early last century when that held and they sold directly to customers through catalogs and mailing lists. This next year they will start selling directly from their own web sites and so on. Publishers will also start developing online stores and even brick and mortar stores which will give writers yet another reason to go traditional path. We’re starting to see this, but watch for it to ramp up in 2011 and 2012.
#8… Mark says the international market explodes. Already seeing this with just my short fiction, selling in five major areas through Apple and two so far with Kindle, with that increasing. This is one of the huge upsides coming for us all as international e-sales boom.
#9… Not a clue what Mark meant by “Discoverability” and how that will be different in 2011. This is nothing new and has worked in traditional publishing throughout history. No reason for it to change in electronic books. Readers find a book, tell friends, pass it on, and the author wins. Not sure how Mark thought such books as Harry Potter built, but they were “discovered” by fans. So nothing new here. Just more of the same.
#10… Mark is right about the DRM, and using DRM is just stupid, and needs to be tossed. And I agree that the traditional publishers, run by law departments, won’t abandon DRM in 2011. Not because they don’t want to, but for legal reasons. Sadly.
Mark Coker is very smart and on the leading edge of this new world for books. And my hope is that he becomes richer than Bill Gates from Smashwords, because along the way all of us authors using his service will also become rich. Mark, just don’t forget about us out here and sell out to a big publisher. That’s my fear for 2011 is that the big money starts trying to control this flood. So Mark, as long as you hold on and keep up the fight, the rest of us win as well.
Thanks, Mark! Great predictions.
@Laura
Re: Self-publishing vs. *good* publishing deals. I agree with you there. I was one of the little sh*ts who once showed my ass on a blog post you made, with regards to validity of self-publishing. (I apologize about that, by the way. I could have been a lot less whatever I was there.)
I think people tend to compare the little money most people make self publishing with what you could get if you got a *good* deal.
But most people don’t get a *good* deal starting out now. And while one might get a good deal “later”, publishers don’t grow authors like they used to and a lot of authors never get a second deal.
To me it just seemed like a lot of crap to go through to, even with a good deal, lose control over cover art, content, digital rights, etc. etc. Because with the exception of Amanda Hocking, who seems to have something like this set up, I’m not aware of publishers who want to buy print rights *without* also claiming digital.
To me, things are changing way too fast to ever part with my digital rights.
Plus I am a control freak. I don’t want someone else saying what my cover is going to be. I know how I want my covers to look and I pay a pro to do them. I also want to release books on *my* schedule. Am I saying that my choices are “better” than a NY pub’s choices would have been? Nope. But they are my choices for my work.
My argument has always been that you can make a living doing things independently. It’s hard, but so is everything else in this business.
But I do agree that for most people they would make more money with a good deal than self-publishing. Hell, I might even make more money with a *good* deal than self-publishing. BUT, my definition of a good deal is probably much much higher than most people’s bar for a good deal. It’s very subjective and dependent on where someone is now. Also, there are other factors to consider besides just the amount of money. I love self-publishing. It feeds the business side as well as the creative side of me, and I think if I wasn’t calling the shots, I’d climb the walls.
People told me I could not make more than pocket change self-publishing. They may still be right about that in the long term. I’m not a fortune teller. But in the short term, at least, they were wrong. And if I am smart in how I handle my business and keep growing as a writer, they may be wrong in the long term, too.
I think all this goes back to the stuff both you and Dean have said on this blog about how awful writers are “in general” at business. You can give a writer a good deal and they can still make stupid business decisions and screw it up down the road.
People who understand money and business, and are always trying to grow and have “some” level of writing ability… those people have always had better odds, no matter how they publish.
I want to always be indie because I really hate how some people do well on their own, then get a big deal and the first thing that trips off people’s tongues is: “Well, they would have never made it without that big publisher.”
If Amanda Hocking ever takes a deal, people will start saying that about her. But I don’t buy it. If she keeps going how she’s going over the long term, Amanda will be a star no matter which way she publishes because the distribution structure is changing and ebooks will someday dominate (in my opinion, at least.)
We’ve seen indie bands and filmmakers who have become big in their own right “without” a studio or record deal from a big megacorp. I think as time goes on, we’ll see some of the same with authors. Would I love to be one of those authors? Of course. Will I be? If I’m really lucky and work my ass off. Maybe. I know there is at least a chance, however small.
But I could be content if I just kept making a living doing what I love. At this point, if I can develop staying power, everything else is really gravy.
@Dean, that’s awesome with regards to Apple! I would love to be able to start doing better on some of these other places like Apple, Sony, and Kobo.
Zoe, I’ll tell you, it shocked us. We even went looking through Australian sites to try to figure out what caused the surge for Kris. Hundreds and hundreds of copies of just sections of the Freelancer’s Guide. Great fun. And I sold numbers of stories, more than on Kindle, actually, in Europe, Canada, and Australia. I LOVE this new world, I hope everyone is clear on that. (grin) I have worries for new writers but for writers like me and Kris, this is suddenly pure gold.
Thanks for clarifying, Dean. The way I figure it, midlisters have more flexibility now if they’re willing and able to take charge of their careers, returned rights, backlists, and dropped series, and newbies, wider avenues to get lost in thanks to epublishing. I aim to hedge my bets and do both epublishing and regular publishing, as well as getting in plenty of good old fashioned practice. I fail to see the downside of doing both and hedging one’s bets, as long as one keeps writing and keeps learning.
FWIW, I think I started reading Dean well before Laura R commented about agents and got sucked in to letting us pick her brain–heh–and saw that while she and Dean are friendly, they are indeed just two long term pros who have had different careers with some common problem areas (agents, for one) who are willing to share their wisdom about said problem areas. Thankfully!
Both in public and in private, one thing that a lot of old pros who are posting backlist and watching the numbers discuss is, “Why does one of my titles make tons or money, and another of my titles just sit there?” I think Konrath has commented on his blog a number of times about this: the difficulty, so far, in figuring out how/why some e-books by an author sell better than other e-book by the same author, even if they’re in the very same subgenre and presented in such a way that you’d expected their sales to be very similar, rather than stunningly different.
This is something discussed a LOT among pros these days (with curiosity, interest, and a desire to figure it out and benefit from it, rather than with frustration or despair), and I know a couple of writers who have theories they’re working on and experimenting with (trying out experiments to improve the sales of some books that are lagging behind others for no as-yet discernible reason).
This sort of dichotomy, which I’ve seen so many people with quite a few books in the e-market now talk about, is a common enough phenomena that I think it is clear real-world evidence that, at least so far, readers do indeed seem to be choosing e-books differntly than they choose traditional print books in retail. I find it quite interesting and keep watching and listening, hoping to learn more–and hoping to benefit from other writers’ experiences and experiments beforehand, as long as I am (anyhow old how) lagging way behind on my planned schedule to post my own backlist. (In addition to stalling on my Photoshop lessons lately–just have other things to do–I’m sort of not really looking forward to proofing about 2,000 pages of text that has to be proofed before it can be e-published, since I do not have the COPYEDITED versions of these MSs, but only the final draft that got sent to the copy editor. Still, the laptop should keep me warm during the cold winter months ahead…)
Anyhow, I find the new (and so far, mostly unknown, theorized, or guessed-at) dynamics of how and why e-books and backlist e-books sell a lot or do not sell a lot… all quite interesting!
Laura, yeah I’ve seen that happen already on some stories and novels of Kris’s and been in a number of discussions on that same topic with other professionals. There clearly is something going on, but no one seems to know what as yet because this is all so new to all of us. Very weird, that’s for sure.
Yeah, it’s weird how some people are having success with some venues and not others.
I haven’t sold a single copy of anything through smashwords or their premium distribution (even though I’ve been listed through them for months now). But I sell a few copies of a month of my stories (without any marketing at all) on amazon. It’ll be interesting to see if that changes when I have a novels and more work available. I’d like to see sales through Apple etc, but so far, nada.
Dean,
Is the “brushing aside” you get from new authors on the traditional publishing path or indie authors? It seems indies just want to be accepted as being on a path that is “valid”, so there is a lot of defensiveness in that for a lot of people in the beginning.
I think also that a lot of people don’t realize how they’re coming off. Case in point… once I got into an online argument with a big name author. The author felt that I was dismissing everything she’d done, etc. etc. I wasn’t trying to do that. My position was simply that she’d been in the business for decades and when she started, publishers were more interested in “growing an author’ and now you have so little chance with a traditional publisher before you’re out on your ass. (Which was knowledge I acquired from midlist authors who had been in it, some having started over with multiple pen names, as well as agent and industry blogs. Though in hindsight maybe agent blogs weren’t the most credible thing on the planet. Live and learn.)
It seemed to me that odds for a debut author were MUCH stronger with a platform built in, and one way to get that platform might be to go indie.
My position wasn’t even that traditional publishing was bad or wrong, or that NY publishers were ogres. Or that trad authors were meanie poopieheads.
To me it was obvious that what worked for “big name author” may not work for authors just now starting out. But she got VERY irked with me, accusing me of all kinds of attitudes that I just didn’t have. I said about twenty times I wasn’t doing that and hadn’t intended that, but short of groveling, we just weren’t going to get anywhere.
I didn’t “get” that this was an annoying kind of trend that a lot of long-term pros see. And I can see where having been in the business for a long time and working and actually showing yourself to have staying power, that people brushing you off like you don’t know anything… would be very annoying.
I didn’t feel (and still don’t) that I was doing that, but now, having heard this issue mentioned many times, I can understand why it was a hot button topic and why she felt that way. I basically stepped on a land mine I didn’t know was there.
So it may be a case of defensiveness and someone just starting out wanting their way to be seen as acceptable.
I think also there is an education gap. Indies are going to only know about traditional publishing what we hear second hand (even if from reliable sources), same is true for trad authors who aren’t doing anything indie, with regards to the indie path. So then we have people berating people on the opposite side of things for not understanding something. When if we’re indie, we need to be a little less strident about what is or isn’t going on in trad pub, and if we’re trad, we need to be a little less strident about how being indie works.
Because just like a lot of us who aren’t traditionally published have a limited understanding of all the ins and outs of working with a NY publisher, so to do a LOT of trad pubbed authors not have the slightest understanding of the history of self-publishing (actual self-pub, not vanity pub) or how being indie “actually works” in practice. There is a lot to learn and it’s not just a bunch of impatient nitwits, which is how many indies feel they are perceived by those who’ve attained the “holy grail” of NY.
Indies often feel like the discriminated against minority, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn some mutual respect on both ends of the table. If we (meaning indies) whine and pitch a fit every time someone doesn’t understand us, it won’t lead to greater understanding, it’ll just widen the divide.
Zoe, you have a point, but I don’t think it’s what you wanted to make.
Indie published writers (you know, like me and Kris and Mike Resnick and soon Laura and Kevin J. Anderson and on and on and on) are just fine understanding what it takes to become an indie publisher. For heaven’s sake, I taught a class in October with Scott William Carter (another indie published author who also sells to New York) to teach about 35 pro writers how to become indie publishers. There were more traditionally published novelists in that room than I think have been in one place outside of a convention or conference. Just because we are traditionally published doesn’t mean we don’t understand what it is like to be indie published. In fact, most of us who have been around a long time know very well what kind of problems the indie-published writers are tackling. You know, because they are becoming publishers.
What makes me laugh at the attitudes is that suddenly just because someone chose to only go indie, they must defend their little castle from all of us evil traditional published writers, who are, by the way, also becoming indie published and doing just fine and not defending any imaginary gate.
I’m just glad Laura pointed out to me that I was being sort of closed minded in not realizing such beginning attitude wasn’t only in writing, but in all professions. I think I sort of knew that, but really didn’t KNOW that. (grin) It helps me understand things a ton more.
And honestly, I don’t mind being someone a beginning writer would rebel against. Means I made it to a certain level of success. (grin)
@Laura, a couple of thoughts.
Regarding those of inexperience disregarding the experienced – yes, I concur – it’s true everywhere. I spent twelve years in the infantry, and it’s even true there. Don’t fret about those novices who ignore or belittle advice from the experienced, however. I find that, generally, they are not around very long. In some fields, this is more spectacularly demonstrated than in others (failure to follow advice is still common enough even in professions where such actions are *lethal*, not just career-busting).
Regarding trad pub “good deals” vs indie pub… I don’t know. I just heard some advice from a couple of pros whom I respect (here, you and Dean) saying that there is valuable experience to be won through the process of working with an NYC editor on a book. OK. I buy that, it’s shelved, and will factor into future decisions.
But I’ve read another pro show data that the average first advance for SF is about $6k, and only a couple thousand more for fantasy. And after a few books, it tends to float more to the $10-12k level. So – some math.
You trad pub, and get a nice $10k advance. Your agent gets $1500, leaving you with $8500. Your book sells enough to make back 3/4 of your advance, leaving $2500 to be soaked up by ebook sales over the rest of the ten years your publisher has the rights (hopefully, they don’t retain erights forever!).
Your ebook sells a nominal 100 copies a month. That’s very low end for a polished, pro-looking ebook. Very, very, VERY low end. But suppose it stays that low. Your publisher sells it for $9.99, and you get 17.5% of that (25% of the 70% your publisher gets), or $1.75 a book. You earn out that advance after 1428 ebooks, or 14 months, and continue on to sell another 10572 ebooks over the ten years, for royalties of $18,501, of which the agent gets $2775 and you get $15,726.
Total income on the book: $24,226.
Now, if instead you self publish, let’s say at $4.99 – you price lower to grab some attention that way. You bookshare editing with another author, and you pay $250 for a nice cover from an art student. The book is well edited, looks sharp, and still for some unknown reason only sells 100 copies a month, 12,000 total over those ten years. You make $3.49 per book, for a total of $41,916. You had a few expenses – but even supposing you dropped a grand on editing instead of having another author do it, you’re still making over $40k on the book, at least $16,000 more than the trad pub book.
And this is with ridiculously low sales.
And the numbers get more disparate, not less, as sales go up. Want to see what they look like if the book sells 1000 copies a month for ten years? ($175,822 for the trad pub vs $419,160 for self pub).
I’m all for getting help improving my craft, but it seems to me like even $16,000 is an expensive correspondence course.
(And all of this is ignoring that Mike Stackpole and a bunch of other fairly bright people are predicting that at least some of the bigger publishers are going to go out of business sometime in 2012. If that’s true, then submitting right now is a bit like Russian Roulette – because if the house that picks up your book happens to go under before you get to print, what happens to your book?)
Oh, Kevin, trust me, you don’t want to really know what happens to a book that is stuck in a publishing bankruptcy or shut-down. Nothing pretty, I can tell you. Which is another reason seasoned midlist writers never pay attention to older books, but always focus for the most part on the next book. What can happen to a book in traditional publishing is just flat ugly. Part of doing business.
And yes, your numbers are spot on the money and I’ve done them numbers of times. As my friends will tell you, I love doing the math on anything, usually ten times to make sure I haven’t missed something, and I have done that exact math you used. So no issue there.
And lots of professionals behind the scenes and over lunches have had talks on this math, and the question “What will a traditional publisher be able to offer us shortly that we can’t do ourselves?” I have heard that exact question come out of at least thirty full-time professional’s mouths, many who have never heard of Joe Konrath. There are answers to that question. The biggest answer to that question for someone like me is promotion for all my self-published books. Second is access into the shelves of the bookstores. Granted, that’s going to change as well, but at the moment traditional publishers still control 90% of all books sold and about 99.9% of the remaining 10% (electronic sales).
But that question is starting to haunt the smart people in New York as well. It’s a scary question to be honest for them. Some have their heads in the sand, but other companies are starting to ramp up what they can offer authors. So this is changing New York. And it will change the stupid agent system in time as well. Yeah!!
The key number your forgot, of course, in your math is that you get a decent amount of those sales from bookstore sales, and when you get your rights back in ten years, as you said, your book can go up and keep earning for you after that as well. With a jump in what the bookstore sales gave you.
And one more thing you forgot, because here we are all writers who want to take care of ourselves. But 95% of all writers want someone to take care of them, and indie publishing is just not suited for those writers. And most of them will be left behind in a decade because it will be required for the most part to self-publish even if you are selling to New York.
And one other thing. Why sell into the lowest paying genre in publishing, only above literature in pay scale, and not much. Why not just sell the book to a larger house, never call it science fiction, and let them give you some decent money for it? Calling a book science fiction in this market is pretty much telling a publisher that you don’t want much money. Why do that?
Dean wrote: “Laura, that is a shocker to me as well. I also thought this was sort of just a new-writer thing. Interesting to know it is just a human nature thing. ”
I probably should’ve extrapolated before, from related experiences. (But I am a slow learner.)
One of the things I got so very, very tired of as a longtime volunteer and then as an officer in a national writing org was the all too-too common experience of seeing members who had never done any of the work coming up with either a demand or a suggestion… and then getting angry at those of us who DID do the work when we replied/explained (a) it had previously been tried and hadn’t worked, or (b) it had previously been tried, had worked for a while, but then had stopped working because of changes conditions/circumstances and therefore was no longer a viable proposition, or (c) it wasn’t a viable proposition because of reasons x, y, and z (which reasons were well known to those of us who did the work, precisely BECAUSE we did the work), or (d) actually, we were doing it, we had repeatedly announced we were doing it, and we had repeatedly invited HELP in doing it–and would this person like to help?
All such responses produced anger and outrage and snideness on more occasions over the years than I could possibly count.
I have no problem at all with someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about who pitches a complaint or suggestion and then, when receiving an informed reply/explanation from the people who actually DO know what they’re talking about, says, “Oh. I didn’t know that. Thanks for the explanation.”
What I have a HUGE problem with, though, is the remarkably and tediously common tendency of such people, instead, to GET ANGRY in the face of informed, experienced answers, and to complain that their brilliant ideas should be encouraged and explored rather than smothered with such discouraging replies by people who are “not open” to “innovative new ideas from fresh sources”–sort of ignoring that fact that if you’re suggesting something that’s already been tried and didn’t work, or that’s already been explored and can’t be implemented, then your ideas aren’t actually new, and your sourciness isn’t all that fresh.
And if these run-ins were just with ME, well, fine, maybe I don’t get along with people. (No argument there.) But they’re not and never have been just with me. Far from it. Such run-ins occur again and again, between various people who have no experience working for the org and various people who DO have such experience. And I think that’s actually a very, very common dynamic of writing orgs (at least all the ones I’ve been in, anyhow). So it makes sense that it’s a common dynamic of other non-profit and volunteer groups. And thus not shocking that it’s a common dynamic in many other walks of life, too.
But, yep, not bright enough to have extrapolated until now, I was indeed surprised to hear my two friends, in very different fields from me (and also very different fields from each other) complaining about the EXACT SAME PHENOMENA which I and so many of my writer friends experience all the time in dealing with new writers and aspiring writers and writers with virtually no professional sales, etc. Which phenomena is so well exemplified in the account you’ve just given of that letter you received, Dean, “about how I didn’t know what I was talking about, how this letter-writer had six books up and sales were great at 99 cents and how dare I say any different. This letter writer KNEW, just KNEW more about e-publishing than I did.”
Experience is amazingly undervalued by people who don’t possess it.
Okay, Dean, I got your issue – and to be honest, I’m gobsmacked that people reacted that way. I never meant to present it as anything more than a quick sampling. It wasn’t random sample or a scientific survey – it was a voluntary poll on one forum, for goodness sakes. It’s a minor indicator, not something for people to measure themselves against. (I didn’t notice you’d asked for the details.)
To repeat the context: in talking about The eRace, someone asked about what sort of point level someone might expect to see some “decent” money, say $1000. Your estimate seemed high compared to what I’d been hearing and seeing at Kindleboards, so I decided to find out what the numbers were among the people I’d been talking to.
I went back to check and it was a sampling of 45, and now that that the last couple of people finally answered, the number of people making over $1000 has dropped to just over 35 percent.
The breakdown is as follows:
1-5 books, less than $1k: 22
1-5 books, more than $1k: 10
6-10 books, less than $1k: 3
6-10 books, more than $1k: 4
11-15 books, less than $1k: 1
11-15 books, more than $1k: 1
16+ books, less than $1k: 0
16+ books, more than $1k: 1
I hope that’s not as scary as I led people to believe.
If that poll alarmed anyone, though, and they want to know “what am I doing wrong?” they should be asking the people who are doing well at it. They may not actually know, but they can tell you what they did. Then you can, and should, compare it to your own experience. Maybe they’re lucky… but maybe they’ve done some things others haven’t tried.
I can say this: no answer is universal. Some books are easier to sell than others. Some authors have a niche which is already well established on Kindle – like a little pocket of success. Some books are like my mystery western, where every review begins with “I don’t normally like westerns, but….” and which just got an award from a popular reviewer, and I’ve seen a clear jump in sales of my other books as a result, but not that one.
Which leads me to ask Dean – what makes you so sure of the Kindle demographics right now? I have been doing a lot of reading on the Kindle Communities, and other places where kindle fans congregate, and it’s pretty clear to me that those readers don’t buy books at all the same way we are familiar with. I described what they’ve said about how they read and buy earlier. And I’ve noticed myself how I have significantly changed my habits, even though I’ve read ebooks for years. Amazon has changed the game with their completely integrated and automated downloading of samples and use of affiliates.
It may be a small sampling, but it appears to me that the indies who are succeeding are taking advantage of that difference in habits.
Thanks, Camille. To be honest, those numbers really, really excite me!! Thanks!
Honestly, Camille, I guess I wasn’t clear but I am saying NO ONE knows what makes anyone buy books on electronic devices yet besides the old traditional things of a good cover, a great blurb and a great hook in the opening sample. Same as any book. But this is just too new. I’ve read two studies on this so far done for traditional publishers and both have concluded the same thing: Too early, too off-balance in types of readers, to know anything for sure yet.
They do know a couple of interesting facts. High-level readers, meaning people who normally buy a lot of books, are early Kindle and iPad users and have bought even more books than they did before. Average readers who normally don’t buy many books a year were not jumping into e-reading devices yet. At least until this holiday, which many are now saying has been a game-changer, but we won’t know that for sure until the summer as numbers track. But more average readers got into the mix this holiday than before.
They know the color Nook is making a huge difference, they know that some magazines are jumping in sales as people sign on electronically for magazines, then drop the electronic editions to sign up for the paper editions. (Unexpected trend….not sure if it will hold.) They know the iPad has made a monster difference, with the iPad closing ground on the Kindle, but still a ways back in second. However, the Sony Readers and Nooks are jumping because of their ability to be found in just about any store and their price.
Anyhow, this year will be a flood of information and studies as the big publishers try to wrestle this all to the ground and understand it. And make changes to try to stay with it.
And thanks for detailing out your poll. I love it and those numbers excite me.
If you count collections and short novels, (I assume you don’t count short fiction) I know one more data point for your survey. Author with 16 plus books makes over 1 K per month. So that’s two at that level. None under. Very interesting.
Again, thanks!!!
But, one point I wasn’t clear on Camille. The person I gave you the numbers for is not an indie author completely. This author also publishes with New York and does Indie publishing. I assume you were not making this exclusive to Indie-published only, just the income on Indie books. Hmmmm, that make sense? This author makes a huge living at selling through New York, but also has backlist up of over 16 books and is making over 1 grand per month on JUST indie-published books.
Absolutely agree with the bookstore thing, Dean. I see books that are up on the top 50 of a genre bestseller ebook list, and there is zero advertising for them just about anywhere. But they are in bookstores, and it makes them more visible – so even an unadvertised first novel sells more ebooks, simply because it gets that boost.
Not sure how long that will hold, though. Borders is on the rocks right now. And with ebook share growing fast, the bookstore closures might start even sooner than the mid to late 2012 timeframe that folks had been predicting. If a book is accepted by a publisher *right now*, will the bookstores still be a factor in two years when it sees print? I don’t know. Probably much less a factor, at least.
“Why sell into the lowest paying genre in publishing, only above literature in pay scale, and not much. Why not just sell the book to a larger house, never call it science fiction, and let them give you some decent money for it?”
Well, that stopped me cold.
Er… For some reason, I always sorta thought that if your book had spaceships in it, you kinda had to market it as SF. To SF publishers. Um. Have I run into a myth? =)
Big myth, Kevin. Just pitch your book as an adventure or a coming of age or a moral tale or a thriller and… and… and let the publisher’s decide. Bill Gibson and so many others are not published as science fiction writers, why should you? And for heaven’s sake, there are a ton of science fiction in different parts of romance if there is a love interest in the book, or if the main character is under 22 why not go young adult and make even more.
You can’t tell what people are going to answer, no matter what the instructions, but this was supposed to be ONLY Amazon and ONLY self-published. (I didn’t say anything about CreateSpace POD so I don’t know if people included those numbers or not.) I also described your point system, and said if they had short stories, they could count 5 of them as a novel, and small collections as a half novel.
If ever there was a situation where you could apply the term “herding cats” it’s trying to get a straight answer out of an indie writer, but I think this one they mostly got. (I just did another poll about how many had been traditionally published, and man, that one was a crazy time defining terms….)
Oh, if it is only Amazon, then scratch off the person I suggested. The money from that person is coming in from all sorts of places. But not all from just Amazon.
Again, no way of explaining why the same book on Amazon with more readers and devices doesn’t sell as well with the same blurb and cover as it does on Pubit. Strange business this new world.
Since you laid your numbers on the table, I guess I’ll lay my own.
First I’m curious, though, as to where you arrived at the $1.75 a month figure for your short stories. Yes, short stories are a small market, and 99 cents is a premium price, but did you have anyone else’s numbers to give you a guess, or did you just pull it out of the air?
As for my numbers:
I have been writing since 1982. Yes, I started with Clarion – yikes! That blew my mind, and I took quite a while to get my feet under me. Most of my novels I wrote specifically to quiet the internal editor (which as you can imagine was on steroids after being a rank beginner at Clarion) – I tended to choose my genre and concept to make them intentionally unpublishable. I have published maybe 20 short stories in the intervening time – mostly for children. I am not famous. I don’t have a following. Most if my actual experience in writing/publishing comes from being a first reader, mainly of screenplays.
I have three self-published novels up so far – a melodrama which takes place in a non-fantasy imaginary world, an old fashioned Ruritanian swashbuckler (juvenile), and a non-historical western whodunnit. I have two 99 cent collections of my previously published short fiction. (One I just published a couple of weeks ago.)
I wouldn’t exactly call this prime material for attracting an audience. I would say that, of people who have ever been professionally published and who have some idea of editing, I am rock bottom in terms of likelihood of sales.
From memory: I started out at about $3 per book per month in spring, but since the 70 percent option, I’ve averaged closer to $8 per book per month. Each month varies widely. Also I sell a few books at Smashwords every month, and I’d guess another buck or two per book from there. It’s hard to tell if there’s a trend because October was my worst month, and November my best.
Frankly, I have to say that if someone is doing worse than I do (and they’ve been professionally published and their work is properly edited, AND they’ve been at it at least as long as I have if not longer) they probably should be wondering what they’re doing wrong. (Unless, like me, they are contrarian about subject matter.)
I know I’m making myself sound really bad, but you can look at my work and tell me if you think I’m no portraying the commercial possibilities of this properly. (You can get samples, or I’d be happy to send a smashwords coupon to anyone who wants to check it out.)
But I’ll tell you this: I love my work. This is what I want to do. It’s what I want to READ. I know from SEO writing and other things that this is how it works – you have to be in it for the long haul, and it doesn’t hurt to fool around for a while and learn the ropes at first. This year I’m kicking it into gear. We’ll see what happens.
Camille, I got the number from saying that the bottom ACROSS ALL SITES not just Kindle is selling each short story five times per month. Average, since some stories will sell ten or twenty or thirty and others none. So 5 x 35 cents is $1.75. I figured that was bottom, considering that there are so many sales sites, that would be saying it would sell one copy on every third site, and I wasn’t counting at the time when I started using that math number overseas sales. To be honest, it hadn’t occurred to me.
So I have 30 stories and I hope they average $1.75 income per month, which is how I got that number. Thankfully, they are doing a ton better than that bottom number. On average. I have some that sell better than others.
Bu with my method and thinking, quantity is critical. More products, just as with any other publisher, smooths out the bumps. It’s why Bantam Books doesn’t just publish one book per month.
Thanks for sharing your numbers. Actually I find them encouraging also. This is all so new that long run is the way to face it.
And wow was that Clarion back in 1982 a long time ago. I was the worst writer out of all 20-some of us. Part of me is glad all those stories except the one Damon bought off my dorm room door were destroyed in the fire. I would hate to even glimpse them by accident. (grin) What was even stranger was going back as an instructor in 1992. Really, really weird on the other side let me tell you. (grin)
Oh, and one more thing about the survey – when I said only self-pulbished, I meant the books. We definitely had people who are also publishing traditionally in the survey.
I would like to do a much better designed survey in the future.
And finally (I’m getting sleepy) -
My comments about buying habits weren’t meant to be a comment on WHAT people buy or how much, but HOW they buy. If you talk to Kindle users, you’ll find that ease of sampling has changed how they look for books. They talk about it all the time. Kindle users are sample-maniacs. They see everything as a shopping opportunity. They don’t wait until they get to the books store or even to the Amazon page.
It’s an infectious disease brought on by the technology – you get click-happy.
This is something that the successful indies take advantage of – making sure there are click and sample opportunities in as many places as possible.
@Dean All I know is that there have been a lot of trad pub authors who frame indie pub in a way that is way outside the actual experience for most of us to make it seem more lame or more daunting than it actually is. Many seem to have no clear understanding that there is a long tradition of self-publishing that isn’t vanity publishing. Many conflate the various forms of self-publishing. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. I just know they do it. I don’t know why they do it.
I have a hard time believing most who haven’t gone indie (nor have wanted to) have bothered to do much research on the topic beyond the naysaying stuff to reassure themselves they’re on the “right path”. (Though to some degree I’m sure I did the same thing when deciding I didn’t want to go trad.) And I don’t necessarily fault anybody for that. I mean I haven’t dug into comic book publishing to see what that’s all about. Why would I? It’s irrelevant to me.
You have the experience of having run a publishing company before and being an editor. You also are teaching people how to do some self-publishing stuff, so you’re associating with these people who are eager and willing to learn how to do things. Not everybody is. Which is okay.
You said:
“What makes me laugh at the attitudes is that suddenly just because someone chose to only go indie, they must defend their little castle from all of us evil traditional published writers, who are, by the way, also becoming indie published and doing just fine and not defending any imaginary gate.”
I don’t think it’s so much that indies think trad authors are evil and can’t or shouldn’t do what we’re doing. But there have been many trad pub authors who have pooped ALL over the very idea of self-publishing. So, yes, we get a little bit bristly when people who were formerly pooing all over us and our “illegitimacy”, claiming we are lazy fake authors etc, have decided that NOW they’re going to indie publish, too. Because they see the potential. A great many of them have thought they were “better” because they had a “real publisher” first even while reading our blogs teaching them how to do this crap.
I have no issue with trad pub authors deciding they want to do some indie stuff. In fact, I think it’s great. The more established authors who put books up on the Kindle, the more I can blend in with those people instead of being assumed to be “self-published drek”, since I assume every reader doesn’t do a publishing background check on an author before they buy them.
If my covers and descriptions are professional and my writing is quality, no one will be looking at my price and lumping me in with whatever poor experience they’ve had with “self-published books”. So rock on. Let me blend in with some pros at the $2.99 price point.
I’m just not going to be super rah rah about any individual who thought I was a big idiot 2 years ago and now wants me to show them how to put their book on Kindle. That’s all I’m saying. That disrespect cuts BOTH ways. And the only way to end it or lessen it is if we ALL try to stop pointing fingers and saying: “Well he said… well she did…” because it’ll never end.
A good first step would be not making generalizations about “traditionally published authors” or “indie authors” as a whole. If Suzie Q. Author does something obnoxious, let’s not make it about everybody else in that group. That’s the only way it’ll stop being indie vs. trad.
Zoe, you are forgetting the history of publishing. I did a chapter on it in Sacred Cows. Up until the middle 1940s, self-publishing was a respected and accepted way into publishing. Then from that period until just two years ago, it was laughed at by any major publisher and all major writers because of the way it was done by “vanity presses” that were, for the most part, scams pure and simple. And the books sucked for the most part as well, and when they didn’t, it was always news.
So less than two years ago things started to make this shift and you can’t be surprised that many writers are still stuck in the vanity press thinking. It took me almost a year to get past it as well. Kris and I never published our own work at Pulphouse and the publisher of F&SF almost killed Kris’s career by forcing her to send him her stories first, so to the outside world it looked like she was buying her own work. That attitude is deeply entrenched because almost no one working and writing now remembers the business before 1945.
So you indie publishers, now me included, need to give the naysayers a little slack and understanding that they are coming out of their training and it takes time in publishing to move anything. I am, frankly stunned, at how far and how fast this issue has moved to accepted and respected, considering 63 years of being EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE FOR GOOD REASON.
Never discount history in trying to understand what is happening in publishing. History always repeats in this business. Sometimes in disguise, but it always repeats and this new change is no exception.
Regarding the dismissal of experts, I’ve seen a kind of evolution in my own thinking since the late 90s, when I first started trying to sell stories. Growing up in the academic world I had a great respect for expertise, but was also used to experts (professors and grad students on their second or third doctorate) being very accessible: as people whose business was disseminating their opinions, their expertise could often be had in exchange for a little respect and a cup of coffee.
When I started out trying to sell my stories–round about the same time I started working freelance as an a/v producer and cameraman–I slammed up hard against industry opacity. I didn’t know what questions to ask–worse, I didn’t know how to find people of whom I could ask the questions I had.
With so much “advice” available in Writer’s Digest books (there wasn’t much that was easy to find online at that point), much of it contradictory and swaddled in magical thinking and motivational rehtoric, I got bitter quick. In the space of a year, I built up a good solid store of resentment and paranoia about pouring hundreds of hours of work into trying to understand and operate in industries that were closed shops. I’d never seen a closed shop before, and I decided that people who had made it obviously didn’t know (or remember) a thing about how to break in without patronage or nepotism. And, never having attended a conference or convention, I didn’t know that there were actually places where pros were accessible and often willing to help.
Turned out to be a very self-defeating attitude, and it only took another year to notice that the DIY field was populated primarily (though not exclusively) with people who had written off success as a bad idea while secretly dumping money into the latest “shortcuts” book.
About the same time I met a trio of people in line for a movie who had gray hair, bad attitudes, and no patience for DIY bullshit. Not that they didn’t do things themselves, but they knew very well how to use their hard work ethic and apply it in a productive way–and they were kind enough to take me under their wing in various capacities. One became a long-term business partner. One apprenticed me in audio engineering from electrical theory to mastering. Another has offered reality-checking advice about publishing over the years. And in the ten years since, with a lot of sweat, I’ve acquired a small-to-middling amount of expertise in fields I used to only dream about. Most importantly, I now know how to ask useful questions.
That experience, plus the ongoing experience with people in the DIY movements, have led me to forumlate Sawyer’s First Law of Apprenticeship: When you want to master something, don’t look for enthusiasm and charisma–they’re nice, they’re comforting, and on their own they are worth precisely nothing. Look instead for people with grey hairs and hard-earned bad attitudes (i.e. hard-asses, not assholes).
Ignorance breeds resentment, and ignorance is the defining feature of any newbie. At the same time, a profound amount of arrogance is required to survive in any demanding field. Combine the two, and you have a recipie for the kind of self-defeating dismissal Dean and Laura and Camille and Zoe and Scott have been talking about here. The DIY fields are littered with gurus whose primary successful attribute is the ability to package self-righteous resentment as enlightenment.
For what it’s worth
-Dan
Well, Amanda Hocking posted her December numbers on her blog, with screen shots. She definitely isn’t lying, and I’d say that even by Dean’s estimation, she’s making fantastic money. Of course, nearly 6 figures in one month is pretty good money by any measure. It’s kind of cool to get to watch a sort of weird evolution of a bestseller in a way that is a lot more open than bestsellers usually are. (Her books, btw, in my totally humble opinion, are pretty darn good, so I can’t say her success surprises me at all. What does surprise me is that, given the subject matter of her work and the timing (Twilight, Vampire Diaries, etc), no one in traditional publishing took her on when she was still querying and trying to go that route. Boggling.)
But even at the lower ends of this, as Dean points out, with time to build and more writing and more stuff out there, the numbers get pretty awesome. I’m very curious how this will pan out as more and more late adopters get e-readers and the e-readers themselves become cheaper and better.
That’s true, Dean. But I’m clearly not the only person forgetting it, LOL. If everybody else was remembering there wouldn’t be so many stereotypes bandied about.
The bizarre subterfuge is something that I found really hard to get a handle on. In the romance/erotica genres there was/is Ellora’s Cave, which turned into a fairly successful e-publisher. I *think* it was only later discovered that the founder was also publishing her own books under a pen name. And this is complete speculation, but I got the sense that there was all this other stuff going on, largely because this person wanted to self-publish. But it wouldn’t be “respectable”. Ugh. Just ugh. WTF is that? LOL. And I got that sense because of the large numbers of “small presses” that had a self-published author as a founder… conveniently hidden behind a pen name. (It’s amazing how big your imprint can grow when you make up a dozen pseudonyms for yourself working in different departments.
)
I can understand all the vanity pub crap, but what I can’t understand is why those who were taking self-publishing seriously were getting wrapped up in so much BS to make it seem they weren’t doing that. When you act really ashamed of something, it just makes people believe that you’re doing something worthy of guilt.
You’d think we were talking about starting brothels or selling stolen kidneys on the black market instead of self-publishing. I think it’s important for people who self-pub well, to not *hide* that they are self-pubbed. Because that hurts everyone else doing it.
Even more confusing was this idea that we had “independent publishing” but it was NEVER author as publisher (at least not openly, not without subterfuge and having to publish other authors). And when I would say I was indie publishing I would be snidely told: “No, you are self-publishing”. And I was like… “Um, no… I’m pretty sure I’m doing EXACTLY the same things you’re doing, except I ‘manufacture my own product’”. *twitch*
re: slack, point well-taken. It took me a good long time to get out of the mentality where I thought “self-publishing was for losers who couldn’t get a real deal”. (Yup, even Zoe had that attitude back in the before time. But I still wanted to do it so I had to leap over that big wall of cognitive dissonance.)
I’m surprised the stigma is lessening so fast, too. Though I’m equally surprised some days that people are arguing this issue. With the growing number of success stories, what is there to argue about?
I think part of the lessening stigma is because this sudden influx of people saying: “I’m an indie author” with something resembling pride. And when enough of those people saying it can actually write and sell, then people think… “Hmmm, maybe the method of publication doesn’t necessarily determine the worth of the work.” Ya think?
@Dan
“The DIY fields are littered with gurus whose primary successful attribute is the ability to package self-righteous resentment as enlightenment.”
It seems like a lot of this stuff gets fueled by anger, and when you run out of it, you forget what you were doing to begin with. So the anger has to keep being fueled, because it pumps people up and drives them to action. Granted, any counter-culture movement is going to have some anger/resentment because of whatever way in which the group feels they are being brushed aside. But it gets tiresome. A lot of pro-self-pub sites/blogs are really anti-trad-pub sites/blogs. There comes a point where you have to decide what you’re for instead of what you’re against. Everything being constantly framed as a battle gets tedious.
>>In my case, early in my career, I worked with an EXCELLENT editor who, in the course of several 10-page and 12-page revision letters, taught me a great deal about my craft which I have applied ever since. <<
Laura,
That's exactly what I hope to get from an editor at some point. My goal is to keep writing and turning things in, but I can't learn anything from form letters. If I had an editor point out something that needs to be adjusted, I think I'd start to have success.
The problem isn't 'wanting to do the work to correct the mistakes,' the problem is 'not really knowing where the mistakes are or how to correct them.'
What I'm trying to do now is to read and analyze what other pros are doing and learn from their storytelling. My hope is that in my experiments I will catch an editor's attention and get a personal rejection back with some food for thought, but that could take years of stumbling around. In this I am most stereotypical– I want to figure out what's wrong and now, not later.
Either way, every new project I write gets a little better (in my opinion) so I'll just have to keep at it and hope for the best.
Andrew, you would be stunned at how many places you can find that kind of help. You have never lived until you’ve had Hugo Award winning editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch spend a week beating on your fiction and helping you get better. Or had Denise Little, long-time editor, tell you why your story wouldn’t sell and what to do. And I’m not too bad at it either in the novel and short story workshops, considering I have six Hugo nominations on my wall for editor as well. And around the country there are top places and top editors giving their time to help new writers. Patrick and Teressa, two top editors also run a series of workshops doing the same. And Kevin Anderson and Dave Wolverton and Eric Flint run a workshop trying to help.
So if you are really wanting feedback, trust me, there are places to find it.
Editors working for a traditional publisher are not in the business to train writers, their job is to put out a line of books. You are looking in the wrong place for feedback. Sometimes over the years you end up with great feedback from top editors. But you can’t expect or even hope for it until you are at a place where your craft is good enough to sell and your story hits their line. Then you can learn from what they do to help you fine-tune your book for their line.
And for heaven’s sake, never pay a “book doctor” to help you. Ever.
Camille,
I have no idea what overall stats show, I only know what my own poll shows, and not one of the Kindle owners I queried read anything, or spent a minute searching for new writers who indie published.
Polls are funny things, and we could both be completely wrong. Much depends on the questions you ask, and how you ask them.
I can only say for certain that this is the case with all the Kindle, and Sony, readers I know. If they have to pay for something, they want a trusted name attached.
And I’m only talking novels, not short stories. I see very different results when I ask about short stories. But novels, nope, they don’t want to pay for a name without a history, or a name without a commercial attachment.
I’m the same way. There are already too many books out there that I want to read. My print TBR pile numbers in the thousands, and my eBook TBR pile stands at just over a hundred. I simply have no trouble finding more books than i can reader by writers I’ve heard of, or writers with a history that makes me believe I’ll like what they write.
I simply have no need whatsoever to go to an unknown indie writer for a book. Short stories, yes, I’ll take a chance, if the price is low enough. But novels, no. They cost more than I’m willing to pay based on the quality I’m like to receive.
It’s the short stories an indie writer sells that will convince me to try one of his novels. . .or not. Usually not, I confess. I have a read a LOT of indie books, or as much of them as I could stand, because I didn’t have to pay for them, and after hundreds of efforts, I’ve found two, one novel and one collection of short stories, that wowed me enough to make me part with dollars. Most of the rest made me wonder why on earth this person ever thought about being a writer.
In fairness, the collection of short stories was one of the best I’ve ever read. Period. Anything else that writer publishes is going to be mine before the pixels are dry. And the novel was good, one that should be, and I think will be, picked up by a commercial publisher.
But that’s it. As a writer, I think and hope one way, but as a reader, my options are already sufficient. More than sufficient. I have far too many choices, not too few. I simply do not need a new source of writers, or of books.
Likewise, while my options are many, my book buying dollars are few, which means I need to have very strong reason to believe I’m going to like a writer before buying one of his books. I’ll gladly pay thirty-five bucks for a Stephen King hardback, or fifteen bucks for a Stephen King eBook, but I won’t pay four bucks for a book by a writer I’ve never heard of, who has no publishing history, and no reason to make me think anyone passed judgment on his book before it was published.
I’ve had my Kindle since August. I bought it so I could see what my upcoming indie ebooks would look like. I’m rather a stickler for proper formatting, and neither the “Kindle for PC” nor the DTP “preview” were useful for more than quickie checking. I have read a number of books with the Kindle, though. New toy and all.
That said, I still use my local library as main source of books I read. I use my Kindle to grab samples of books to see if I want to request them from the library. Or if I want to buy them if the library doesn’t have a copy.
I didn’t use sampling much the first couple weeks I owned my Kindle. I bought books sample-unread…and I don’t expect to ever do that again.
I’ve only finished one indie published book I’ve started. It had writing issues, but because I enjoyed the setting and the story (in that order) I let those slide. That’s 1 out of about 3 that I’ve purchased. Since I started sampling, I’ve not bought one indie book.
On the other hand, I don’t finish every trad published book I start either. In print or ebook form. I would say that the % of abandoned books in this category is about 50%.
I’m a demanding reader, and probably not typical. Especially since all but one of those indie books I couldn’t finish are selling really well. So they’re not bad books, necessarily. Just not my taste. I doubt I would have even sampled them if I hadn’t seen the authors posting in the various forums.
So…yeah…what is the “typical” Kindle reader like? I have no idea.
-David
Oh, trust me, folks, if there was a typical reader, New York would have figured that out a half century ago and pointed all books that way. Not having a typical reader is exactly what makes this business so much fun.
Cheers
Dean
James – My info isn’t from a poll. I really think such a poll would have to be a lot more widespread than I could do, plus it’s a rapidly changing target, so an extensive poll would be a snapshot of a moment anyway. And as I explained, the Kindle people I’ve talked to don’t LOOK for books, and in a poll they would tell you that. What you say is correct… but it’s far from the whole picture.
What I’ve been doing since I first got interested at the beginning of the year is to find places Kindle people congregate. I don’t just talk to my friends. (Most of whom read on an iPhone or paper anyway.) As a matter of fact, I try to use myself and my friends as more of a jumping off place to talk to others. “I found lately I’ve been doing X, do you do that?”
If you hang out where people are talking about their Kindles – about the problems they have with a certain case and how to reset it and how certain models have a problem with the keyboard – you’ll find they talk a LOT about how their habits have changed since they got their kindles.
One of the things they talk about is that they don’t have to look for books any more. For instance: It used to be that if they were reading, say, Dean’s blog and he mentioned one of Kris’ books, they would think “I’ve got to remember that.” They might click on it and order from Amazon, but because of limits of supersaver shipping, and messing with shopping carts and all that, most of them still bought books a separate activity from reading a blog. But now they tend to just click through right way, send a sample, and back to reading. It’s free, no muss no fuss. And it’s fun, because it’s like you got a new remote controlled whatsis, and LOOK, you can do something with it with just a little click, while doing something else.
To repeat they don’t BUY that way. They just sample – and the resistance is lower for sampling than buying.
The other thing that is becoming common is for Kindle users to buy themselves a gift card every month to enable spontaneous Kindle purchases – to help them keep to their budgets. Before, they would go to the bookstore or make a separate purchase, and they’d naturally notice when they were overspending. But since so many of them no longer buy in such a planned way, but in smaller purchases at any moment, how to control spending became a really big subject of discussion.
I’m like you. I actually don’t have time to read that many books any more, and I have a very limited budget, and I’ve got tons of old classics and favorites I like to reread. So I am very careful about what I spend my money on. (And I don’t even own a Kindle – I read on an iPod Touch.) But sampling is free. And cool. The Kindlers taught me that right away.
This spring there was a debate in the writers area of Kindleboards about whether long samples were any use. I mentioned how I thought sampling was popular. A guy didn’t agree, but he wanted proof – so he did a poll in the reader’s area. I was shocked by just how extreme the love of sampling turned out to be. Most people not only considered samples to be essential, but they also liked the longest sample possible and read the whole thing, even on a book they intended to buy.
Now this doesn’t mean that this makes them like and trust indies, or any author they are unfamiliar with. Of course not. There’s still way more books out there they don’t like than they do.
What it does is give word-of-mouth even more power than it had before. Instead of reading a review, deciding if it’s worth remembering or bookmarking, then shopping deciding if they want to buy it. They read the review and instantly sample, and don’t have to think or worry about any decision until they know if they like it.
And when Kindle enthusiasts get together, that’s something they talk about extensively.
The one other thing I’d like to say… you guys talk about early adopters. Guess what, that period has passed. A lot of the new buyers are a different group altogether. And the first thing they ask (other than “how do I reset my Kindle?” and “why did it freeze up when I downloaded fifty million free books?”) is “Why are books so expensive? I thought I was going to get cheap books?” (At which point everybody starts screaming at each other about the Vile Agency Model, and then start directing the newbie to free and cheap book recommendation sites.)
These people are the big time library users and used book buyers. They are high volume readers, too, but they have not been on the radar of the publishers and booksellers. This group is un-studied, but imho, worth studying.
It’s kinda fun to watch the evolving show, actually. (Just be careful about admitting you’re an author, and especially how you mention your book.)
Camille
James, another thing to consider… I did a survey last month of a few genres, and a decent number of the “top 100 bestsellers” in the “released in last 90 days” ebooks categories on Amazon were indie published.
But you’d never know it from looking at them.
Sharp covers, as good as anything “trad pub”. Decent to good writing. A pro-sounding publisher name listed as the publisher. Book available in print and ebook form. Usually more than one book available.
For the folks who take their work seriously, it is very, very hard for someone to figure out if they were published by NYC, or out of someone’s living room. Without a background check of the book and some serious web searching, the reader will never know which it was.
And that’s the bar to shoot for, I think. That’s the level of professionalism to which self-publishers should aspire. And that’s where quite a few of the most successful ones *already are*. So readers might well be saying they don’t read self-published books – but might have, and not known they did.
Boy is that right on the money, Kevin, especially with covers of New York publishers changing to what many indie-publishers already knew, and that’s large name and large title and art that doesn’t get in the way so it can be seen at a postage stamp size. Browse a book rack now and you’ll see most of the new releases have gone to that feature. It’s difficult to tell an indie-published book from a traditional published book, especially if the author keeps his or her mouth shut and has a publishing name besides their own.
Lawrence Block, grandmaster of mystery, is doing a ton of self-publishing of his older books and just this week outed a pen name of his that no one had found before. He’s doing many of his hundreds of old novels as Lawrence Block writing as (Pen Name). And he’s doing all the work for the most part. His series are still in New York and he’s a Times Bestseller, but also an indie publisher. Just as I am. And Kevin J. Anderson is, and Mike Resnick is, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch is, and so many thousands more traditionally published writers are. That has to mess with some indie publisher’s minds who think they are doing something special and different.
I’ve got to take issue on #4. Why the heck is it sad again?
Here’s my situation. I’ve written novel #1. It’s surfing the slush pile, picked up a few boilerplate rejections, the usual.
That doesn’t bother me.
What does bother me is that I’m trying to improve my craft, and write things people want to read and buy.
The biggest hurdle isn’t the lack of sales, it’s the lack of feedback. I’m trying to get this book in the hands of experienced writers and/or editors, who can tell me what to do better next time.
The only professional options I’ve seen cost hundreds of dollars per weekend (Dean’s classes) or per month (a local “writer’s group”). Right now, I don’t have those hundreds of dollars to spare.
However, for far less than that, I’ve self-published the manuscript, and it’s slowly selling (to friends and family) and I’m slowly getting more feedback about what worked and what didn’t.
I’m also learning what I can really do to market a book.
To me, this is all good.
Right now, I can afford that time, while I can’t afford a class, whether it’s good or bad.
So no, I don’t think it’s sad for people to self-publish. They just have to do it for the right reasons.
What I do think is sad is aspiring writers floundering with lack of feedback, trying to improve their craft without knowing what they are already doing right, and paying lots of other people to give them advice that might or might not be useful. That’s the current system, and as a way of learning a trade, it’s about as inefficient as it gets.
heteromeles, never mind, it’s been discussed to death already and I’ve made my point a few dozen times on that.
And it is no one’s responsibility that you can’t find help but your own. Don’t expect it to come from editors. Not their job. I couldn’t afford the help either when I started. But I went and got it anyway. I found a way.
And I don’t think it’s sad that people self-publish. Why would I, I am doing it myself. I just find it sad that some writers will put up their very first book, get discouraged and go away. Writers who might have made it through the old system. But at the same time, some writers will make it that would have never made it through the old system. So down the road twenty years there will be a new breed of long-term writers. And not a person on this planet knows what that will be or the repercussions of this change on the new generation of writers. No one. We’ll know in hindsight in twenty years.
Dean: I don’t think that will mess with the indie publisher’s heads. After all they all worship Joe Konrath, who may have given up on trad publishing just in the past few weeks or so, but who is definitely a guy with a traditional background. Plus a lot of the other idols are flirting with traditional contracts on the side.
I do find it really hard sometimes to get across to readers that a good portion of “indie authors” are actually traditionally published authors putting up backlists. There are some people on the Amazon Communities who were pretty rabid about how rotten all this self-publishing was. Of course, a number of them don’t know that they’ve been buying self-published books all along….
But that’s all changing really fast.
In thinking of the past year, and looking forward to the next, I couldn’t help but think the famous line “You ain’t heard nuthin’ yet!”
Which, of course, came from The Jazz Singer, and were the golden words that ushered in another sea change in the movie industry 83 years ago. (I ended up blogging about it.) Although now that I’m thinking about it, with Borders announcing that they will delay payments to some publishers, etc., maybe I should have quoted All About Eve – “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”
Just saw this article linked from Konrath’s blog:
http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/PWxyz/?p=3945
Short form: Borders is withholding payments from “some publishers”, and at least one big six has suspended shipments of new books to Borders.
Ouch.
This connects back to what I was saying earlier… Mike Stackpole has predicted that the standard print publishing model would collapse in June 2012… With this sort of accelerant, we could see that pushed forward some. Borders carries $450 million in returnables. If they go under this year, those all equate to a net loss for the publishers involved, which is huge. Even if they only start doing mass returns to pay debts, that’s still all loss.
I know the publishers are working hard to prep for a big change in business model, Dean, in no small part because of your wife’s excellent articles on the subject. But I wonder how many are ready for it if it’s forced on them in 2011?
This sort of thing just makes me feel like publishing traditionally is more risky than ever.
Laura mentioned Forward Motion Writers as one possible online writing group. As a member for several years I can attest to the great information, discussion, live chat, critique areas, novel exchange groups, challenges, prompts and other resources that the site offers. It is founded on the idea of paying forward to other writers as you learn. It was started by Holly Lisle many years ago.
In recognition to the changes in the publishing industries, the site has just started up a new Indie Publishing board, which I was tapped to help moderate. It’s just getting started, but we hope to develop the board into a place to help other Indie publishers/authors get through the maze of what is out there.
Also, we have a fantastically active writing chat on the site. Where people actually write in complete sentences and netspeak is quickly squashed (what a concept. Practice writing while in chat).
Other online sites I can think of that I’ve had experience with:
Critique Circle: this is for all genres, with a focus on critiques. From what I’ve seen the few times I’ve used it, it’s open to all genres. For critiques, you must critique in order to be critiqued. The only downside to this site that I saw the last time I visited was that there seemed to be a lot of teenagers and beginning writing. But there are also some very good critters.
Critters.org: For science fiction, fantasy and horror. Active site, active critiques. Like critique circle, you must critique in order to be critiqued.
Here is one I haven’t tried, but sounds interesting. Kait Nolan started a new site called “Crit Partner Match” which tries to match up writers for novel exchanges.
(By the way, I tried to insert links, but the blog software wouldn’t let me post it. Thought it was ‘spammy’)
Thanks, J.a., for the great sites. Very much appreciated. And I love the lack of net speak.
And what Laura said about Hobby writers. Exactly.
And Big Ed, I really like your attitude. A lot! Thanks.
Kevin, I see what you’re saying but you’re making a lot of assumptions in that argument that I either disagree with or else think are very unreliable (as in: they’ll only be true occasionally, not often or consistently). Such as, the quality of a new novelist’s book edited on an exchange basis with another new novelist will be worth reading or continue selling 100 copies per month after it gets weak reader-reviews and while it’s floundering without any sort of marketing support or critical recognition (even from reader reviews) in a vast sea of professionally published and self-published books, many of them at such similar prices that the $4.99 price tag is not any sort of advantage.
WHich is not to say your example couldn’t happen. It’s possible. It’s also possible that Patrick Rothfuss’ example could happen: Your first book sale gets a hefty advance and, after heavy editing by a very experienced, skilled, hands-on editor (which is indeed what he got; we have the same editor, and she is indeed very good at what she does), your book gets tremendous marketing support and becomes a much-lauded bestseller, as well as (via your agent) an international bestseller with sales in over 20 countries.
No, not likely. But it DOES happen.
So does this (I ate dinner with one such writer two months ago): Your first book gets a three-book offer from a house which is known for sticking with writers and building audience over time. Because of the other demands on your time (which this writer certainly has), writing is -all- you can handle, not also packaging, promotion, chatting on Kindle boards, etc.
And this happens, too (to quite a few people I know personally): You’re a midlist author who is making much better money in advances that so far -anyone- (or at least, anyone you know personally and consider credible) has quoted to you in terms of e-book earnings, and your books get top cover artists whom you couldn’t possibly afford if self-publishing, and your own self-published e-book old backlist sales are a nice bonus, as are the earnings on the books you never sold to a publisher but are now sprucing up and releasing as e-books, and you’re Really Really Happy about this new form of income… but it’s nowhere near what you’re making in advances from major houses for your new books.
Here’s another possibility: You’ve got one genre or series or set of books you’re able to sell to a major house, and another which you’re not (I pitched sooo many books early in my career that I never sold), so you can experiment, benefit from both avenues (one of which simply did not exist when I was a new/young writer), and see what the results are. Keeping selling one set of books to a major house, and self-publish another set, and watch your results over time.
I also am not convinced that MORE CHOICE is what most readers are looking for. I’ve read numerous articles in the past few years (usually with regard to consumer goods, rather than specifically about books) wherein study after study shows that people feel paralyzed by too MUCH choice. In an article I read 3-4 days ago, the SMALLER quantity of choice offered for each product is credited as one of the reasons Trader Joe’s is successful: Their customers like choosing from only 10 brands of peanut butter, all of which are good quality, rather than choosing from 35 brands of peanut butter at a superstore. (I didn’t even realize it until I read this article, but I am such a person exactly, so I completely understand this.) So I think as e-readers proliferate and soon everything ever written down, including someone’s reminscience of their favorite backyard picnics, is being self-published as e-books… There will be a benefit to being professionally packaged and promoted to a level of name recognition in a huge sea of selection, in a field (books) where the majority of readers in our time have always chosen their reading material from the bestseller lists, because they WANT to choose from 10-20 already-vetted books rather than choose from 50,000 titles that they don’t know how to differentiate. (And it’s no good telling me they’ll learn to rely on reader chatboards. Most of my friends, for example, have full-time jobs, travel for work, raise kids, care for elderly relatives, AND try to have social lives, so they want the choice of a book to read to be easy, immediate, and high-profile, not something they have to lurk online to learn about.)
This is not to say that self-publishing is a dead end. It’s to say, I think there are SO many variables that the math in your argument is unreliable.
Or, to give another example, a friend of mine reported to me with delight the e-royalties she made in the final months of the year. So far, it’s 1.5% of what she’s earning this season in royalties from a major house (which royalties are what she’s earning on top of what she’s earning in US advances and foreign advances).
This doesn’t mean the backlist e-books aren’t self-publishing. They weren’t earning ANY money, and hadn’t earned money for years, before she self-published them. So this is great news and she’d delighted. But the gap between those earnings and what she’s earning with her publishers certainly doesn’t create any rational temptation to self-publish her next frontlist book rather than sending it to her professional publisher.
Then again, that math isn’t consistent across the boards, EITHER. Which is why there is no Right Answer. For example, I know a writer whose e-book backlist earnings are such that this writer is seriously contemplating self-publishing a frontlist book, since they think (with good reason) they’ll make more money that way. But unlike your example, this writer has got actual evidence, rather than a theoretical formula. They know how much they ARE currently making for a specific type of book in both types of venues–just as my friend in the above example also knows.
This means in each case, whether sending the next book to a publisher or self-publishing it, the writers in both examples are working off real information and real-world experience which is suitably specific (the information applies to their own books, to specific types of their own books, and to their experiences with specific publishers). And their rational conclusions are totally different: in one case, it’s better to stick with a publisher; in the other case, it may be better to self-publish -this- specific book (but this writer isn’t contemplating self-publising books which have been or can be placed at houses where the math is different than it is in this instance).
Laura, spot on the money how each author, each book is completely different and thus brings up very different outcomes. Exactly!
Back about a year ago I had just spent a wonderful day with eight or so other professional writers learning how to get a short story up on Kindle. Now understand, I was only six months away from leaving the church of Luddite and this was exciting and great fun. And so I put up a few short stories of mine and Kris’s and then watched the numbers for a few months and went, “Yeah, so….”
But then I did something not many people tend to do. I sat down and asked the science fiction question, “What if…”
What if the short stories sell only five copies total per month across all the dozens and dozens of different outlets and electronic stores? How much will that make? ($1.75 per story per month.)
What if Kris and I have all our backlist short stories up? How much will that make per month? ($1.75 x 600 = $1,500.00 per month)
What happens if we also sold a line of 5 story collections for $2.99? And those sold five copies per month each total across all sites. How much would that make. $2.99 x 65% = $1.95 x 5 sales = $9.75 per month per collection.
What would happen if we had all the stories in five story collections? 125 collections x $9.75 per month =$1,218.00 per month.
And what would happen if we sold ten story collections at $4.99 per collection and sold five of those per month total across all sites? $4.99 x 65% = $3.25 per collection x 5 = $16.25 per month per collection.
What would happen if we had all the stories also in ten story collections? 60 x $16.25 = $975.00 per month
So just putting up our backlist of short fiction, with no novels, and with bottom-line sales (our sales so far are way, way above those bottom numbers) we would make after they were all up, which would take a few years, we would make $975 + $1,218 + $1,500 = $3,693.00 per month. Or over $44,000 per year, all from short stories that are now just sitting in file cabinets doing nothing.
See, Kris and I have a different math, different circumstances. We don’t expect others to be like us, but you can see why we are pushing on this. And who knows what the novels are going to do. Or POD. We’re just starting on those now. But at the same time, we are still going to New York traditional publishing. In fact, Kris has two different novels coming out in May under two different names. And I have one under another name that I just saw a wonderful trailer for done by the publisher. Great fun.
But we plan on combining the income from traditional publishing and electronic publishing to make freelance fiction writing a lot smoother of a profession. Maybe level out a few of the bumps and make more hills. )
Thanks to everyone for the tips on the online groups. I have been checking all of them out, looking for the best fit for me. I wanted to wait and thank everyone at once instead of interrupting the great conversation that has been cranking along here!