As I continue my rambling way towards self-publishing my series of crime novels this summer, I had the alarming thought last night, that I hadn’t yet uploaded my first two stories to my WordPress Cornish Detective website to make them available to readers as downloads.
How to do that? Should they be in MS Word (.doc) format or as a PDF…or, both? And, how does the book cover fit into all of this? I found two helpful articles about both formats, then spent three hours faffing around attempting to get the Word (.doc) version to appear on my site. I’ve moaned about the complexity of WordPress before on this blog, so I won’t go on. One of the problems with WordPress is that it’s regularly updated, as are the plug-in widgets that operate it, meaning that online advice about how to do things is quickly outdated.
Getting a blog about writing and a website on my books up and running has felt like the Labours of Hercules.
None of this activity feels like being a writer. And, anything I’ve read about WordPress hasn’t been reading for pleasure. As for my novels, they exist as intransigent digital files—it’s hard to think of them as books.
Weary with frustration, I shut down my laptop and went to bed with five books…I’m a promiscuous reader!
Laying there in the company of real books, that I could feel, smell and move around wherever I wanted them, I enjoyed the sensuality of the experience.
I’m dedicated to self-publishing eBooks this summer, with POD to follow if readers ask for it, but as an activity it feels as sexy as scrubbing bathroom grouting clean!
For the reader, Kindles and other eBook reading devices have advantages, such as anonymity and being able to store many titles, but they’re not alluring or likely to encourage conversation. These are paranoid times, with mass surveillance of the population, meaning we seek ways to preserve whatever privacy we can—including stealth reading.
As I continue with my self-promotion campaign via blogging, creating a website dedicated to my crime novel series and posting on social media, in preparation for self-publishing this summer, I was happy to come across an optimistic article written by Harry Bingham.
I like Harry, as he knows the publishing business as an author:
In the article What Fiction Decline? An Indie Author’s Asking, he makes astute points about the inaccuracies of many surveys of publishing, which ignore crucial sales figures—such as Amazon’s KDP—which Amazon doesn’t share with anyone. No one would take a survey of traffic seriously, if it only counted vehicles on two-lane and local roads, ignoring motorways/freeways, so why embrace doom and gloom when the Association of American Publishers and the Publishers Association in Britain say things are getting worse?
The fact is that nothing at all in my interactions with readers makes me feel like I’m selling horses to car owners. Indeed, if my email inbox is anything to go by, I’m selling horses to people who really, really like horses. The appetite for good, absorbing, well-written fiction feels to me as intense now as it ever did.
I was glad to read this paragraph: I’m still unsure about what I’m doing with self-promotion and self-publishing, but it feels more like progress than querying cloth-eared literary agents who either ignore me completely or only deign to reply after three months with a form letter of rejection.
People hunger for new stories, so perhaps I’ll find an audience.
Not everyone in the world of writing and publishing is nice.
These two articles by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware highlight the dodgy tactics used by supposedly respectable publishers such as Simon & Schuster;
It goes to prove how unregulated the internet is, with corporations such as Google and Amazon happy to take money from unscrupulous traders without checking what it is they’re selling. Just think of the plagiarism scandal on Amazon books.
Writing blogger Kristen Lamb recently posted a long article about the collapse and purchase of Barnes & Noble, which is worth a read if you’re confused about the current state of publishing and book selling.
It’s worth reading the comments below the article from writers and B & N employees. One of them mentions James Daunt’s appalling attitude to his Waterstones employees’ wages, which is confirmed in this article:
To see him as a saviour riding in to rescue B & N and its staff, customers and the writers that create its product is laughable. He’s a wealthy man out to make money from what he can, one of the 1% who rule the world who favour the best-selling authors who make the most profit. We all know the phrase “It’s just business”—which is doublespeak for “I’ve behaved appallingly to get what I wanted and there’s nothing you can do about it”—book-selling and publishing are businesses…the most vulnerable will be oppressed. That includes authors.
A few random thoughts:
*I’ve always been surprised that Amazon didn’t swoop in to buy B & N, but perhaps they feared further anti-trust investigations.
Seeing as how they’re establishing a bricks and mortar presence, it’s possible they’ll buy some of the old B & N stores.
* Although many people who work in the book trade love books, be they book-sellers, editors, literary agents, book cover artists or publishers, this doesn’t necessarily translate into respect or recompense for the writers on whom the whole business depends. For any surveys that show there’s been an increase in readership, most of the public are indifferent to books and their creators. As an author, it sometimes feels like everyone is against you—even those who are supposed to be on your side.
Writers are the foundation stones of the book business. If we’re not treated properly the whole building will collapse. Imagine if a supermarket chain decided to only stock the 100 best-selling food products, not promoting anything new or unusual. They wouldn’t last long but might start to sell novelty items to bring more buyers in, maybe have a café, as B & N did. If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, why should anyone buy it? That holds true for the author, their agent, the publisher and then the book shop.
* At the moment, I’m at a crossroads with my writing career. After being with Smashwords for years, I recently transferred to Draft2Digital. I’m happy with their efficient operation, but feel like my Cornish Detective series might sell better on Amazon. Some authors have made millions from being on Amazon.
But, I resent their controlling ways. Effectively, they’re an intelligence agency gathering information on their traders and customers. This blog is available for whoever wants to read it, but I don’t know who’s got access to it. It doesn’t fill me confidence to know that Amazon is spying on me.
I’m loathe to go exclusive with them for my crime novels. As someone says in reply to Kristen Lamb’s article:
...some authors have figured out a sweet spot to milk a good living out of KDP Select. That’s fine, but having all their eggs in one basket could come back to bite them in a massive way if Amazon arbitrarily decides one day to change the payout structure.
I’ve had some experience of their forceful marketing tactics when they suggested I participate in bundling my titles with other low-selling writers’ eBooks, which would have yielded me about 10c profit for each sale! Books are like light bulbs or bars of soap to Amazon.
* Instead, I’ll be staying ‘wide’ for my book launch this summer. I believe in Ernst Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful approach to economics and to living. I intend to market and publish at a manageable and personal level, going grassroots with my marketing, through local libraries, reading and writing groups, Cornish media, self-publishing my series via the D2D aggregator and also selling directly from my dedicated website.
Relying on faceless corporations and huge book store chains means I’d be giving away the tiny amount of power I have over my career. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t grab a publishing deal with one of the Big 5, as happened to James Oswald:
For now, though, I intend to self-publish in eBook format, not worrying about POD until it’s requested by readers.
Writing is a lonely task. Many of us yearn for the support and validation of signing with an agent, getting a traditional publishing contract or interacting with Amazon’s ‘experts’ to market our eBooks, but any of those can fail to provide what they’ve promised. Then what?
It would be lovely to see your novel on a book store shelf, but what if they don’t promote it all? What if the whole business fails? It happens, however big the company. Bosses stick their heads in the sand, pretending that all’s well. Even Jeff Bezos predicted that Amazon would fail one day:
Going it alone, I’m sure I’ll make mistakes, but they’ll be my mistakes—easy to correct—not impossible to negotiate with an algorithm on Amazon or whoever chooses what to stock in the revamped B & N.
One thing that’s not mentioned in Reedsy’s otherwise excellent article is a drawback of ‘going wide’—that is, using an aggregator to distribute your books or doing it yourself, publishing to Apple, Kobo, etc one by one. Should you change your mind, deciding to sign to KDP Select, then Amazon will insist that you take all your titles off whatever sites they’re for sale, before they allow you onto their hallowed ground. In theory, this should happen when you unpublish them on Smashwords or D2D, but in reality, it can take months and many emails to vendors before that happens—meaning your books are in the twilight zone, off most sales venues, but not on KDP Select.
At the moment, I’m contemplating removing my books from D2D to go with KDP Select for my Cornish Detective series, which I think makes commercial sense, but looks like creating loads more frustration for me.
No one said it would be easy (but, why does it have to be so hard?)
It’s as well to remember the old adage “if a thing looks too good to be true it probably is” when considering fantastic offers in the world of publishing.
This article by Anne R. Allen is worth a read, especially if you intend to self-publish:
I’m currently trying to get all of my ducks in a row to begin self-publishing my crime novel series, and I was wondering how best to tackle Print On Demand, so I appreciated what she said:
“If you choose self-publishing, you have to give up the fantasy of seeing your book in the window of your favorite bookstore chain.
It might help to forget paper books altogether. I often see newbies obsessing about choosing a POD company and getting bookstore distribution. But they’re worrying needlessly.
That’s because 90% of the successful indie’s profits usually come from ebooks.“
Even using respectable traders offering services that deliver, it’s easy to haemorrhage money. I’ve struggled to set up an author blog on WordPress, but at least I’ve done so for free. Feeling frustrated last night, wondering what I was doing trying to master which plug-in was the best to create a ‘splash page’, I totted up how much I could have spent to get to the same point, had I gone with a paid web service provider and bought premium themes and widgets, coming up with £575.
Some people think that paying for something is a guarantee that it will work, which is why there are way more thriving vanity publishers than there are prosperous authors.
As part of building an online author platform this year, I’ve been coming up with different designs for the covers of my five Cornish Detective novels, as well as monkeying around with Celtic style fonts and producing banners to go across the top of significant pages.
I favour IrfanViewto create images, as Gimp confuses me with its complexity.
I’ve been keeping an eye on trends in book cover design, mainly via the excellent The Book Designer website—site owner Joel Friedlander tackles more than just book design—his newsletter is worth subscribing to.
In the last year, there have been lots of covers with the title of the book in big capitals in separate blocks down the cover. It may just be a fad that passes, but it affected my design for the last novel I wrote. It opens with a murdered painter’s body being found encapsulated in a concrete statue in an underwater dive park. The statue resembles the Venus de Milo.
Trawling through copyright-free image libraries, I chanced upon a photograph that resembles the famous statue, so I used it as a basis for a cover. It needs finessing, as the face is obscured and I’ll try changing fonts and colours.
Researching book covers this morning, I stumbled upon a Latvian artist called Aniko Kolesnikova who produces book covers that are dazzlingly beautiful…collectible in their own right.
As part of building an online author platform this year, I’ve been coming up with different designs for the covers of my five Cornish Detective novels, as well as monkeying around with Celtic style fonts and producing banners to go across the top of significant pages.
I favourIrfanView to create images, as Gimp confuses me with its complexity.
I’ve been keeping an eye on trends in book cover design, mainly via the excellent The Book Designerwebsite—site owner Joel Friedlander tackles more than just book design—his newsletter is worth subscribing to.
In the last year, there have been lots of covers with the title of the book in big capitals in separate blocks down the cover. It may just be a fad that passes, but it affected my design for the last novel I wrote. It opens with a murdered painter’s body being found encapsulated in a concrete statue in an underwater dive park. The statue resembles the Venus de Milo.
Trawling through copyright-free image libraries, I chanced upon a photograph that resembled the famous statue, so I used it as a basis for a cover. It needs finessing, as the face is obscured and I’ll try changing fonts and colours.
Researching book covers this morning, I stumbled upon a Latvian artist called Aniko Kolesnikova who produces book covers that are dazzlingly beautiful…collectible in their own right.
As a veteran of querying—I sent off my 701st submission on Friday—I’m glad that I’m returning to self-publishing. I’m preparing to launch my Cornish Detective novels this summer, which means building an author platform. Getting two blogs together and deciding how to post on social media doesn’t feel much like being a writer, but at least I’m getting a prompt reaction. Querying feels like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea, hoping to be immediately rescued.
You might well think, that the less you ask for your ebook, the more copies you’ll sell, but that isn’t necessarily so. Shoppers for all types of goods, from books to wine to cars, have pre-determined limits on what they want to spend. They equate the price with the quality of the product—they want to spend £7.99 on a paperback, which is a big saving on the £15.99 asking price of the hardback—and they’re not going to demean themselves by looking in the charity shop, where the best-selling title they’re after is available for £1.00.
Wine lovers are price-driven, however much of an expert they claim to be. I’ve known many car and motorcycle dealers who were amazed at how few buyers haggle over the price of the vehicle. They’ve saved £10,000 and that’s what they want to spend, or that’s what they’ve calculated they can afford in repayments if they’re buying on a finance plan.
I’ve attended two business start-up courses, set ten years apart, where the tutors both told the story of a baker who made a disastrous price change to his sausage rolls. His were an inch longer than his only competitor in townbut priced at 25p more, so he dropped the asking price to one penny less that his rival, thinking to boost sales, in a more for less way. Sales plummeted, as customers liked paying that bit more for what they saw as a luxury product…they were treating themselves. I don’t know if this baker ever really existed, but he lives on in business studies.
I’m intending to launch my Cornish Detective series of crime novels this summer, so have been pondering pricing, while scurrying around trying to understand blogging and social media posting to create my author platform. I’ve praised James Oswald several times on this blog for his success story with crime writing. Oswald went from not selling many copies of his fantasy fiction, to writing detective stories set in Edinburgh, which he sold online, shifting 150,000 downloads in nine months. This led to Penguin offering him a six-figure advance. He’s been a best-selling author ever since.
When he started publishing online, James Oswald copied a trick from an Australian science fiction author called Simon Haynes who made the first book in the series free. James Oswald said:
The idea was that they could try it, and if they liked it they could pay me money for the rest of them.
A lot of people have asked me for information about how I did this, as they want to do it themselves. I always ask them how many books they’ve written, and it’s almost invariably just the one.
There is no point giving away your first book in a series if the next one isn’t immediately available (and ideally a few more as well).
If people like your work, they will want more, and they will want it now. By the time you’ve written and published the next book in the series, they’ll have forgotten you and moved on to the next thing.
I’m going to copy James Oswald copying of Simon Haynes, by offering my first novel Who Kills A Nudist? for free—accompanied by promotion of the rest of the series (four more books already written and ready to go) + links to my online presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and my blog.
Quite how attractive crime fans will find this offer, I’ve no way of predicting. I feel like a one-man band at the moment, making up tunes as I go along, about to fall off my unicycle!
Pricing books makes me think of how drug dealers and casinos get their customers hooked—give them a freebie, then jack the price up! Will anyone get addicted to my books?
How do you decide on what to charge for your books?
Have you found a sweet spot where the asking price generates more sales?
After the dodgy dealings revealed in the Social Media & Book Deals post, I came across a dissection of how easily Amazon’s bestseller status can be achieved:
Such duplicity is further proof that no one knows what the truth is these days. The meaning of words is altered so drastically, that sometimes they mean the opposite of their real definition.
