Self-Publishing Fiction - A Whole New Ballgame

Back in 2008, I wrote about self-publishing fiction, and my view was pretty negative. I wasn't a self-publishing naysayer by any stretch--in 2001 I made a significant profit on a self-published non-fiction book. At the time, though, it was pretty rare for a self-published book that didn't fit a specific niche with an easily-targeted market to generate a profit.

That hasn't changed.

Though self-publishing models are rapidly evolving and opportunities expanding, the bottom line is that most self-published books just don't sell a whole lot of copies. Some of the reasons for that include:

• A wariness about quality that makes some readers hesitant to take a chance on a new-to-her author if the book is self-published;
• Actual quality problems with a lot of self-published books--a self-published book isn't required to pass through an editor, and many don't.; and
  
• Writing a good book is the easy part compared with marketing and promoting your book amidst a sea of other titles.

One big thing has changed, though: the risk. Back in 2008, print on demand options (POD) were newer and more limited. The cost per book was higher and depending on the company you used, you might have a minimum order. That meant, in most cases, shelling out cash to get started.

Depending on the service you use, that may still be required. But there are other options, options that don't require you to invest a dime up front. When it comes to print books, even those options have drawbacks: your cost per book will still require pricing that's outside the typical range of a large publisher. For example, if I were to publish a 200 page romance novel through CreateSpace, Amazon's self-publishing POD division, I'd have to price the book at about $5.50 just to break even on Amazon.com. $5.50 is in range for a book like that, but if you want to actually turn a profit, you'll have to mark it up even further--and that's only for sales on Amazon.com. In the expanded distribution network that makes your book more widely available, the break-even price is about $8.15--far too high for a book of that length and type to be competitive, even without building in a profit.

So why have I changed my mind about self-publishing fiction? It boils down to Kindle Direct Publishing, the Amazon option that allows you to upload a book directly to the Kindle store. That's it. If you're just publishing the e-book for Kindle, you don't even need an ISBN. No up front costs, a little bit of formatting, a quick upload, and your book is available in the Kindle store.

Of course, no one will see it, let alone buy it. But it's there, quickly and for free.

And then the games begin.

I uploaded my romance novel, Homecoming, to the Kindle store on January 9. The day I uploaded the novel, I posted about it on Facebook (where I have a relatively small number of friends--I don't use Facebook for marketing), but didn't do any other promotion. A handful of people, undoubtedly all friends and relatives, bought the book over the next few days. And then nothing.

From what I've read, it seems that's the end of the cycle for many self-published novels. More for the sake of experiment than to revive this book, I agreed to the 90-day Kindle exclusive and offered the book free for 24 hours.

In that 24 hours, 1352 people downloaded the book.

"So what?" you might be saying. "You didn't make any money on those books." That's true. But that was okay with me, for a couple of reasons. One was that I have another romance novel almost done, and I figured that giving one away for free would be a good way to build an audience for that one...and the next, and the next. The other was that I suspected--though I was only guessing--that making the book available for free would make it more visible even after the free download period ended. That turned out to be true: the book started appearing in "people who purchased this book also purchased" and such, and strangers started to buy it.

It was only a handful of strangers; it was still nothing to set the world on fire. But an interesting cycle started. Because sales of most books in the Kindle store are so low, it only took a handful of books each day to boost my sales ranking. Oh, I didn't make it into the top 100 or anything; the highest ranking I've reached thus far was about 16,000. But that's apparently high enough to once again increase visibility. And that increased visibility draws a couple of additional sales, which in turn bump my sales ranking.

Right now, with no more effort than I've just described, I'm making about $12/day on the book. I'm not quitting my day job yet. But the sale numbers are increasing slightly every day, and even at $12/day this book is on track to pull in a few hundred dollars a month. That's certainly enough to have made it worthwhile to invest the five hours or so it took me to get the book formatted, uploaded, my account created, and formulate my strategy. And that's before factoring in the impact on sales of the next book, which will be available mid-February.

More to come as I see whether the numbers taper off or continue to grow, and how adding books to the mix changes things.

What I've Learned about Kindle Publishing Thus Far

Over the past few days, I've been paying close attention to whatever data I could gather regarding sales and ranking. Though this is conjecture based on incomplete data, it appears to me that of the 478,000+ books currently available in the Kindle store, nearly 400,000 don't sell any copies on the average day and another 40,000+ sell about two copies.

On the first day Homecoming was listed, I reached the top 8% in terms of sales ranking after selling just five books.

In a sense, this isn't surprising. We know that most self-published books, even in these days of easy and inexpensive self-publishing, don't make money. We also know that most people who write books and put them out there haven't given much thought to marketing and don't really know how to promote their books (or don't have the time to invest). And finally, not every book is going to sell copies through this one outlet every day.

This cuts both ways for those considering self-publishing to Kindle. On the one hand, it appears that you're not really in competition with 478,000 other books--at least, not if you plan to do some strategic promotion of your book rather than simply relying on browsers finding it in the Kindle store. On the other, it means that the vast majority of books--particularly fiction books that fall into broad genres like Romance or SciFi--will never be seen by the typical shopper. Even the edge that should go to new publications is lost because sorting by publication date yields several pages of not-yet-released books...so even if your book was published two minutes ago, it's likely to be several pages deep in the listings.

It's early in the game, and I will be doing quite a bit more monitoring and playing with different variables, promotions, etc., but thus far my conclusion is very similar to the one I offered about self-publishing in hard copy back in 2008: it can be successful if you have a niche topic that people are searching for, if your audience is concentrated, if your name or brand is already known or if you have the time and skills (and possibly cash) necessary to conduct your own marketing campaign. If not, only one element of the analysis has changed: if you use a system like Kindle Direct Publishing, it won't cost you anything to test it out.

Self-Publishing Fiction Revisited

Back in 2008, I wrote a long post about self-publishing fiction, why I'd always been against it and why I was nonetheless considering it.

In the intervening years, I never did self-publish that novel (despite a very successful history of self-publishing non-fiction) and I also didn't make much of an effort to get it published through traditional channels.

Usually, ignoring things doesn't make them better, but in this case that turned out not to be true. For authors considering self-publishing, we're living in an entirely different world from the one we lived in four years ago. That's true for a number of reasons: the growing popularity of e-books, the increasing availability of POD arrangements that don't require a huge investment from the author up front and, most recently, Kindle Direct.

So, I decided last week to take that old romance novel and make it available on Kindle Direct. The process was unbelievably easy; I set out to get it done mid-afternoon yesterday and it's live on sale right now.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll be writing a lot more about the process of uploading, marketing, and whether or not I'd recommend this route for publishing fiction--right now it's too early to tell anything except that getting a book formatted and listed is a breeze.

Raising a Writer

For as long as I can remember, my daughter has been telling me that she's not a writer. I have a friend who believes that she is; she asks Tori about her writing and Tori says, "I'm not a writer." My friend laughs because she is herself a writer who wishes she weren't, and also because she's a little bit psychic and she believes otherwise.

The thing is, writer or not, she's got words in her head. Not just words, either, but paragraphs, chapters, characters' entire lives.

Each morning, she shares her plan for the day. And every morning, it begins, "I'm going to write until noon, and then..." This evening, she wrote her first guest post for one of my blogs, though she already has a couple of blogs of her own. She's got the bug, whether she wants it or not.

This makes me wonder whether having words in your brain is genetic, or a function of all that early reading, or grows out of the way you relate to language in childhood or something else I haven't thought of. Somehow, I created a writer, but I have no idea whether I did it by reading to her or talking to her or teaching her to print at three or simply by sharing my DNA.

Re-Made in the USA

If there's one thing readers of this blog know about my writing, it's that it's eclectic: fiction, legal analysis, parenting articles, music bios, local newspaper reporting--for me, it's all about the words. Sometimes, though, it's also about the message.

Last fall, I had the amazing opportunity to work with author and international businessman Todd Lipscomb on his book Re-Made in the USA: How We Can Restore Jobs, Retool Manufacturing, and Compete With the World.

I will admit that before I started reading Todd's drafts and talking with him about the issues addressed in his book, I didn't give the trade deficit much thought. Sure, I knew it was a problem, but it was a problem that seemed a bit far removed from day-to-day life and the more immediate issues confronting the society I lived in. I couldn't have been more wrong about that disconnect, and I came out of this book truly wishing every American would read it before it's too late.

Wiley & Sons will release the book on April 12, and I couldn't be more excited. Work like this really drives home the fact that we're all given our talents for a reason, and there's nothing better than being able to put our natural abilities and acquired skills to work in service of a good cause. That's what the author did when he left a lucrative career to found a business selling only goods made in America, and I'm delighted to have had the privilege of helping him get the word out.

Bestselling Author Seeks to Reinvent Herself Again

If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you know that Jacquelyn Mitchard is one of my favorite authors. You may even know the story of how she set out to write her first bestseller, The Deep End of the Ocean, after she was widowed and left without a means of supporting her children. You probably don't know that thanks to a clever investment scam artist, despite having 8 bestsellers to her credit (or perhaps it's nine, now), Jackie has to work for a living just like the rest of us.

But that's okay, because once again she has a plan. She's set out to reinvent herself as a television talk show host. And reinvention will be her theme--people well-known and people unknown who have faced challenges, fallen (or been knocked down) and gotten up again to choose a new direction and carry on.

I'm sure it's much easier to pitch this sort of thing when you're a bestselling author, but Mitchard is approaching her idea just like anyone else and putting it out there for public reaction. You can watch Jacquelyn Mitchard's audition video at MyOwn.Oprah.com

You might be thinking (as I did when I first heard this idea) that Jacquelyn Mitchard has already had her "break" and it's someone else's turn. But as I've read more about her idea, I've become more convinced that she'll be delivering an important message--the same one that she delivered when she worked her way out of personal tragedy with a debut novel and that she's delivering now by identifying another road as yet untraveled and lacing up her boots. Check out the video, and if you agree please take a moment to vote for her.

Literary Choices

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a fan of lightweight fiction. It's true that The Sun Also Rises is my favorite book and that I adore C.S. Lewis. I'm currently reading a book of short stories by Shirley Jackson, and I recently bought a collection of Updike stories and two of Orwell's novels to revisit. But the kind of books I've just described make up, perhaps, 10% of my reading. I devour disposable fiction at the speed of light. Despite the fact that I have a full time job and a child to raise, a new Janet Evanovich or Robert Parker novel will be devoured in two days--one if it's a weekend. I'm not above stretching out a bubble bath long enough to finish an entire paperback.

While I've occasionally felt a little guilty about buying these $8 candy bars, I've never had any qualms about reading them. A well-turned phrase is a well-turned phrase regardless of the complexity of the story, and sometimes you just don't want to work at it. But this week I started trying to update my Shelfari shelf and I was in for a surprise. Since I started reading adult books in my early teens, I would conservatively estimate that I've read 3,000 books. There have actually been long periods of time during which I averaged about five books a week, but I calculated using an average of two per week. And after a lot of work, I've managed to get my Shelfari list up to roughly 400. And it's those little books I've been inhaling on the fly all my life that I can't seem to recall.

I know exactly which of Orwell's novels I've read; I remember the misplaced commas in Atlas Shrugged and the way Jane Austen used apostrophes in "hers". Ray Bradbury springs to mind, along with Salinger and Steinbeck. But do I know which James Patterson novels I've read and which I haven't? Can I even tell when I read the descriptions which of Lisa Scottoline's books I actually read and which I just scanned the jacket copy? No.

As a reader, that raises one set of questions, but as a writer it raises another. What is the goal in publishing a book? To make money? To gain fame? To achieve critical success? To bring people enjoyment? To change the way people think? To leave a lasting impression? Some authors, I suspect, would say "all of the above", while others (myself among them) might say that it was none of those things. The more important question in my mind is, "Does it matter what we set out to do?" That is, does the author who writes the kind of fiction that slides across my brain and then is gone set out to provide a delicious snack? Can one decide to write something more meaningful, or is that a question of insight and talent and whatever other intangible factors might have an impact? Should we even be asking these questions, or is it better just to write and take the result for what it is?