Interview with…Me: 1,800 Ebooks Sold in June and Other E-Publishing Topics

I’ve hosted quite a few interviews with indie authors over the last few months, and, in a narcissistic fit, I thought I’d “interview” myself today. The questions have either come through the contact form on this site or via blog comments and are paraphrased (though you’re welcome to claim one in the comments if it sounds familiar!).

The impetus for this post was me reaching one of the goals I had when I started e-publishing. Back in December, when I published my first ebook, there were quite a few blog posts and forum lists sharing names of indie authors who had made it into the “1,000 ebook sales a month” club. Through some unspoken agreement, this number seemed to indicate success as an indie, so I figured it was a good goal.

Thanks to the awesome folks who have downloaded my ebooks (and told others to try my work!), I hit that mark in May, and then did even better in June, after releasing my third full-length novel, Dark Currents.

Now, this is a modest success compared to what some independent authors are seeing (I just finished reading John Locke’s How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!), and it doesn’t represent great wealth (less than 800 of those ebooks sold for more than $0.99), but, hey, a goal’s a goal, and I know many folks finding this blog are just starting out, so I’ll share some of what I’ve learned here.

I hope something’s of interest!

What’s the secret to selling ebooks?

If there are any secrets to becoming an overnight success, I sure don’t know them. Most indies I’ve come across who are hugely successful today started slowly, having unimpressive sales for the first 6-12 months, and then reached a tipping point where they were selling enough to get into bestseller lists and start getting recommended all over Amazon. We all dream of that day!

I’ll try to give a couple of useful tips though:

Get more books out there.

This means there are more doorways into your world. Don’t get hung up on not being able to write that fast. Lots of people are publishing novellas and short stories as ebooks. If you’re someone who had his or her eye on the traditional route, you’ve probably made some short story sales to magazines and anthologies over the years. Check and see if the rights have reverted back to you yet. You may very well have a number of stories that could be turned into ebooks right now.

Another perk of having more books out there is that there are more opportunities for sales from “repeat customers” (AKA those totally awesome readers who enjoyed your first book and want to grab the rest).

Market smart, not hard.

Yeah, you can sell books by “tweeting” 50 links to your books a day, having thousands of posts on e-reader forums, and spamming the Kindle Facebook page, but these are activities that don’t have lasting effects (forum posts, tweets, etc. get buried with time, so you have to keep repeating your efforts). They’re also tactics that everyone else is doing (nobody ever made it big doing what everyone else was doing). Ideally, you want to do something once and reap the rewards again and again. Read my recent post on high vs. low level book promotion techniques for ideas.

One example would be giving away a free ebook. As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I did a short story with an excerpt to Emperor’s Edge at the end (the short has the same heroes as the novel), and that was the first small break for me.

I also like advertising on Goodreads because it doesn’t cost me much, but it’s resulted in book sales and, more, it’s resulted in lots of people adding my books to their “shelves” over there.

Though it has less obvious results, I like guest blogging too (though I’m finding myself with less time for it these days). Every time you leave a post (with a link back to your site) on someone’s blog, it’s a little vote for your site in the eyes of the search engines. If you maintain a blog of your own, this can grow to a huge source of traffic over time, and some of those readers might just become buyers of your books.

What are your thoughts on pricing ebooks at $0.99?

Well, since I’m doing it, I can’t very well be against it! I think it’s a fair price for short fiction, which explains most of my 99-cent price tags, and I also think it’s a good way to draw readers into a series, which is why I lowered Emperor’s Edge (a 105,000-word novel) to 99 cents in May. Though the book didn’t become an on overnight bestseller (sales roughly doubled), it resulted in more sales across the board for my work. As I mentioned, that’s the month I first broke 1,000 in sales.

I don’t think you have to price ebooks at $0.99 to sell them (EE was $2.99 up until that point, and I hit the 1,000-total-sales mark for that book in April), but I think it can be effective as part of a marketing strategy.

Aren’t you devaluing yourself and your work by pricing a novel at $0.99? At $0.35 earnings per sale you’ll never even make minimum wage….

I always scratch my head when people bring hourly wages into this. We’re entrepreneurs, guys, not hourly or salaried workers, and we’re creating intellectual property that can pay us in perpetuity — we’re not trading an hour’s work for an hour’s pay.

Ultimately that means you’ll probably make squat in the beginning (you know the saying about most businesses taking five years to turn a profit…if they do at all), but there’s no ceiling on what you can make down the road.

There are people out there selling 10,000+ copies a month of their $0.99 novel.

There are others (the more likely road to success) selling a mix of novels and novellas and short story collections at different price points with some titles doing extremely well and others doing less well but still making money. They may not be blockbuster sellers, but these authors are able to make a living from their body of work (I’m not there yet, but I can see the potential, and how cool would it be to make a living as a fantasy author? Yeah, pretty cool!).

Ebooks, remember, need never go out of print, so when you’re writing a novel it’s not about what you earn in the first month or year but what it can earn over its entire lifetime.

Why did you choose to e-publish instead of seeking an agent and a traditional publishing house?

I’ve received this question a number of times, and I have to admit it’s flattering (since it often comes with a “hey, I think your stuff is good enough to be published normally” kind of tag). There are a few reasons:

1. My lack of patience and disinterest in busy work. I didn’t want to deal with the rigmarole of writing query letters, writing a synopsis, researching agents, emailing agents, waiting weeks and months for replies to query letters, etc, etc. etc. Seriously, you could write an entire new novel in that time. And I don’t write in “hot” genres or even easily defined ones, so I didn’t expect a lot of agents to be shoving each other aside for a chance to represent me. Even if you get an agent, that’s no guarantee your book will appeal to a publisher.

2. Independence. I haven’t worked for anybody else since I got out of the army ten years ago, and nothing about being in the army convinced me I enjoy answering to higher powers.

3. Money. This wasn’t one of my original reasons, but it’s certainly become a factor. As it stands right now, you’re a heck of a lot more likely to be able to make a living as an indie ebook author than you are as a traditionally published novelist who shares a big chunk of the earnings with middlemen. Also, you can get your work out there into the marketplace much sooner, so it starts earning you money sooner.

I should say, too, that I didn’t see the choice to go indie as an either/or option that would last for all eternity. I’m starting out this way, but maybe I’ll look for an agent and a publishing deal down the road if the stars align correctly. I believe without a doubt that once you’ve made a name for yourself and proven you can sell, you’ll find it a lot easier to find representation and a publishing deal.

What’s the hardest part of being an independent author?

I imagine every author would have a different response to this, since it’ll depend on what your strengths and weaknesses are and what you enjoy doing.

There’s nothing I hate doing, but I’ve experienced the most grief over cover art. I don’t know anything about design, and I never know what to ask for with this stuff. I also (and, yes, I’m saying this in a whiny pouting voice) think high fantasy has got to be one of the hardest genres to do cover art for. Thrillers can get away with some stock picture of a knife with blood spattered across it, and, bam, you know exactly what kind of book it is at first glance.

Okay, there’s my least favorite thing about being an indie. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things at least. 🙂

What’s the best part of being an independent author?

Okay, nobody has asked me this question, I admit it. But I thought it’d be a fun one to finish up on.

I’ll share a couple of “best parts.”

Calling the shots.

Hey, if your first cover sucks, you get to try again. Traditionally published authors are stuck with covers they hate all the time, and they still have to carry that eyesore around to sign at conventions.

You get to play with price and experiment with blurbs and marketing strategies to your heart’s content too. You also have final say on whether the story gets published as is. I do sometimes miss having the expert input of an actual publishing house editor, but I’m not sure I’m the kind of person who would always appreciate what might be mandatory “suggestions.”

Seeing sales as they happen.

This can be a blessing and a curse, but Amazon and B&N (through PubIt) update sales stats as they happen. Sure, you can get obsessed and spend too much time checking them, but the real benefit here is that you can see which of your promotional tactics are working.

You also know exactly where you stand at any given time. I’ve had traditionally published authors ask me what a sales ranking of such-and-such correlates to in book sales at Amazon. These guys have to guess how well they’re doing because they otherwise won’t know until royalty checks come in.

I know I’d find it harder to stay motivated about marketing if I only got a royalty check (and any clue as to how well my efforts are paying off) twice a year or once a quarter or whatever it is. Ouch.

All right, that’s probably enough for my first “interview” with myself. If you have questions, let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading!