Write Good or Die (8 page)

All right, this is just a basic outline for
the author email newsletter. Go subscribe to various writers'
newsletters to see what they're doing. Some of the writers are very
personable and chatty while others simply announce a book when it
comes out with a brief, nice note. Still others get more elaborate.
The more valuable the information you offer readers, the more
subscribers you'll get.

Douglas Clegg—http://www.douglasclegg.com

###

31. E-Gads, 2009! Publishing E-pocalypse or a
New Age?

By MJ Rose

http://www.mjrose.com

As we come to the end of 2009 there’s only
one thing we know about the future of publishing—it’s going to keep
changing. Like it or not, no matter what industry you’re in and how
hard you try to hold onto the past, fighting change is not only
futile, it’s often what kills you.

When Change is Pain

The changes we’re in the middle of are cause
for alarm for many people:

Kirkus is gone.

Fifty-four percent of people now find out
about books via online ads. (Yes ads! Not reviews.) Sixty-seven
percent of people buying a book didn’t know what they were going to
buy before they walked in the store.

There are millions of readers who post about
what they’re reading on their blogs and social networks like
Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.

People can read e-books on their iPhones on
line in the supermarket, go home, turn on their Kindles and be
instantly synced up.

HarperCollins has an online slush pile called
Authonomy. Harlequin has a similar testing ground called
Carina.

And Steven Covey, author of
the perennial backlist bestseller
Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People
, just
gave exclusive rights to his e-books to Amazon and not his
publisher.

Bookstores are publishers and authors are
publishers and publishers are bookstores.

And yet, the one thing everyone seems to fear
the most is Amazon’s slashing e-book prices and selling them at a
loss.

Last week almost all the major publishers
announced they would be holding back e-book releases on select
titles until three to four months after the hardcover release.

Now? The time to have gotten involved in
timing and pricing was two years ago before when the Kindle came on
the market. When experimentation would have made sense. When there
were no precedents set. But to do it now?

Kassia Krozser at Book Square blogged that
the way some agents and publishers are reacting is fetishistic: “We
must worship the all-mighty hardcover,” she wrote, “without
worrying about the actual impact to overall sales. Without even
considering the reader. Of course, why would publishing ever
consider the reader?”

Why indeed?

As someone who has spent her life in
advertising doing endless research about the end user, I’m
continually shocked by the lack of information publishers have
about readers. And even worse their lack of concern about the info
they don’t have.

E-books vs. Hardcovers

There is a lot of information about readers
that is key to what the future holds and how it’s going to play
out. And we need to be paying attention to it.

For instance, 40 percent of hardcovers are
either resold online two or three times or lent to friend and
family two to three times. Or swapped two or three or more
times.

None of those transactions pay a penny to the
publisher or the author.

But e-books can’t be resold. Or borrowed.
(Barnes & Noble’s Nook offers publishers the option to lend
once, but few allow it.)

So, on the one hand, you have an e-book that
is priced to sell and sells more copies because of it.

On the other hand you have a hardcover few
can afford that is re-read/re-sold or swapped several times at no
profit to anyone.

Publishers say they are afraid that low
e-book prices will devalue the “book,” so their solution is to hold
back e-books and not release then when the hardcover comes out.
Agent Nat Sobel, in a plea to publishers to hold back e-book
releases said: “In just a few years we have seen electronic sales
of bestsellers go from 2 percent to 12 percent to 15 percent of
total sales. Next year, they may constitute 20 percent. Who knows
where this will end once bestsellers are on cell phones,
Blackberries and the like?”

Does that mean we should punish excited new
readers?

And if we do, don’t you think they’ll notice?
The consumer isn’t stupid. She knows the difference between a
hardcover, a mass market and a digital file. She knows you’re
withholding one version to try to cash in on another.

Moreover, from a marketing perspective it’s
not smart to make her wait three or four months to buy the e-book
because the e-book reader is part of a buzz machine that is one of
the most potent we’ve ever seen.

Early adopters are also the first to talk up
a product or service—or in this case—a book. That’s why movie
companies have free screenings. It’s why publishers have always
spent so much on reviewer’s copies. But media is fractured.

There are 60 percent fewer reviews than there
were five years ago. Even Oprah is going away. We don’t have
identifiable groups who set trends and talk up books, movies, and
restaurants anymore—we have hundreds of thousands of savvy
consumers.

E-book Readers Make Noise

People who read e-books are not only early
adopters, they’re active online tweeting and blogging. They’re the
social networkers who turn things viral, who make noise.

And noise sells books.

At a time when the marketing dollar has
shrunk to mere pennies and few books get any meaningful advertising
once co-op is taken care of, can we afford to keep the buzz machine
quiet for four months?

Plus, if you hold back e-books, then you need
to market hardcovers alone and then re-market the e-books four
months later and then re-market paperbacks four months after that
because we know you can’t count on the reader to remember books
they heard about last week let alone three months ago.

My company, AuthorBuzz.com, recently
conducted a poll with 200 people who own e-reading devices. Every
one of them reported they were buying at least two times more books
because of their e-purchases. Some reported a 300 percent
increase.

No matter how bad at math I am, I know
selling 3,000 books at $10 is better than selling 300 books at
$25.

Don’t we want more people reading more
books?

Be Not Afraid

The inescapable truth of doing business in
the 21st century, according to author and CEO of BookTour.com,
Kevin Smokler, is that you have to give the customer what they
want. “There are more of them than there are of you. Should you
choose to make it difficult for your own purposes, said customers
will simply abandon what you are offering them and go
elsewhere.”

Yes, it’s a scary time.

If we lose the one-two punch of hardcover
releases followed a year later by a mass market or trade paperback
release, it might affect our advances but that doesn’t mean we
won’t be able to earn a living as writers.

It could mean we sell some work directly to
readers. Or that our agents become entrepreneurial managers who
help us find other kinds of paying gigs.

It might mean that more of us have to keep
our day jobs longer.

But based on how much authors are doing now
to market their own books, advances need to be re-adjusted and the
royalty structure needs to be restructured anyway.

As Mike Shatzkin points out on his blog,
authors might notice that the digital world offers alternative
sales channels that don’t involve traditional publishing—especially
at a time when traditional publishing isn’t so traditional anymore
and publishers are expecting authors to do more and more
marketing.

What’s not scary is that people haven’t
stopped reading. They’re just embracing more ways to read the
printed word—whether it’s ink or e-ink. And nothing matters more
than that.

We won’t be facing apocalypse as long as we
are forward thinking, embrace change and find a way to work with
it. We will be doomed if we cling desperately the old models simply
because that’s the way it always worked.

I’m a founding member of ITW—International
Thriller Writers. In 2007, one of our board members, the amazing
crime writer David Hewson, suggested we abolish dues and find
another way to support the organization financially. At first the
board balked. No writer’s organization had ever made it without
dues. That’s how it was always done. How could we do something so
crazy?

Hewson’s answer became ITW’s motto: “When we
imitate we fail. When we innovate we succeed.”

ITW is succeeding and publishing can succeed,
too, as long as we don’t try to preserve the past at the
expense of the future.

M.J. Rose—http://www.mjrose.com

###

32. KINDLE SALES: 30K EBOOKS IN 11 MONTHS

By J.A. Konrath

http://www.jakonrath.com

I uploaded my first self-published ebook for
Amazon Kindle back on April 8, 2009.

As of this morning, March 4, 2010, at 9:23
a.m., I've sold 29,224 ebooks.

I'm currently selling $1.99 ebooks at the
rate of 170 per day. That means I'm earning around $120 per day
just sitting on my butt. If this trend continues as-is, I'll earn
$43,800 this year on previously published short stories and novels
that NY print publishing rejected.

But I don't expect this trend to continue
as-is. I expect it to explode.

In July, Amazon is doubling royalty rates for
self-publishers, going from 35% to 70%.

I have no doubt, by the end of the year, I'll
be making $5k per month on Kindle. And that's probably a low
estimate.

So how am I doing this? What's the
secret?

Here are my guesses as to why I keep selling
well.

1. Being known.
I already have some name recognition from my print
books. There are half a million books of mine in print worldwide,
and some of those readers go looking for me on Amazon and find my
self-pubbed Kindle titles.

2. My blog.
I have a blog called
A Newbie's
Guide to Publishing
where I often talk
about ebooks. That blog gets over a thousand hits per day, and some
of those readers wind up becoming ebook buyers.

3. Low price.
I've found the sweet spot for pricing to be $1.99,
though that will go up to $2.99 when the royalty rate changes.
Perhaps I could make a bit more money selling at $2.99 now, but
that would mean some fewer sales, which would negate:

4. Being on the Kindle genre
bestseller lists.
The bestseller lists are
chances for browsers to find you when they're looking for
well-known books by well-known authors. In my case, they'll buy a
Stephen King, James Patterson, or J.D. Robb, see me next to that
author for only $1.99, and it's a one-click impulse purchase. It's
worth a lower price to stay high up on those lists. Last week I had
ten titles in the Police Procedural Top 100. I believe these lists
become self-fulfilling prophecies. The more you sell, the more you
sell.

5. Word of mouth.
Or in this case, word of Google. If you Google me,
you get a lot of hits. Lots of folks link to me, review me, read
and recommend me. I did a lot of self-promotion for my print
career, and that foundation still stands in over 100,000 mentions
on the world wide web. This extends to Twitter and Facebook, and
the kind folks who retweet and link to me.

6. Promotion.
Strangely, I don't do much self-promotion for my
Kindle books. Especially compared to my print books, where I've
signed at over 1,200 bookstores. I've posted my titles on a few
Kindle forums, done a few Amazon blogs and Listmanias, and been
lucky to get a lot of reviews and a few mentions by the mainstream
media. But for the most part, my Kindle promo strategy has been
hands-off. In fact, I know that Kindlers hate too much blatant
self-promotion, and will label you a spammer if you toot your own
horn a lot.

7. Cross Pollination.
It's no secret that I write scary books under the
pen name Jack Kilborn. I want all JA Konrath readers to know this,
and all Jack Kilborn readers to know he's really JA Konrath. So
I've tied the two names together by writing the novella Truck Stop,
featuring my series character Jack Daniels, and my villains from
Afraid and SERIAL. I wrote SERIAL with Blake Crouch, ensuring his
fans discover me. I wrote novellas with Tom Schreck, Jeff Strand,
and Henry Perez, to make sure their fans know who I am. And I
recently put ebook excerpts from my other titles in the back of my
ebooks. Plus, I'm now trading excerpts with Robert W. Walker to
hook even more readers. Remember my
Virtual Paper blog?

8. Decent stories.
Name recognition and cheap prices only go so far.
If the ebooks aren't any good, sales will drop off. Not only should
the writing be stellar, but the Kindle formatting should be
perfect. A great story with terrible word formatting won't sell.
Period.

9. Good covers and product
descriptions.
I just improved some of my
covers, and saw an immediate uptick in sales. I'm also constantly
adding to/tweaking my book descriptions. I've found that more
information leads to stronger sales (as opposed to teasers with
less info.) I also make sure my first line of description is "Only
$1.99 for a limited time." By announcing the low pricing is
limited, I encourage impulse buyers.

10. New content.
Every few months I try to add another ebook to my
Kindle store. The more books you have on Kindle, the greater your
chances of being discovered. And if someone discovers you, and
likes you, they'll buy more of your ebooks.