How Much Does Self-Publishing a Book Cost?

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Lindsay

It’s become quite trendy to self-publish of late. No doubt, it’s a combination of the new ease and affordability of getting one’s book out and of the success stories (John Locke, Amanda Hocking, Hugh Howey, etc.), showing that people can not only use the internet to reach a broad audience but can even out-sell the big houses. If you’re new to the world of self-publishing, you may wonder how much you can expect to spend for a chance to play the game (or simply get your book out where friends and family members can find it).

I’m going to talk about the primary ways to get your work out there right now (print-on-demand paperback publishing and e-publishing) and how much things costs, but I want to say up front that there are very few things you have to pay for. If you DIY it all, you can upload ebooks to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, etc. for free, and it’s a matter of a few dollars (ordering proofs and paying for “extended distribution”) to publish paperbacks through POD sites such as CreateSpace.

Be wary of all the businesses that have started up and want to charge you big dollars to self-publish (even some agents and Big 6 publishers are jumping into the newly lucrative area). Some of them will charge well over a thousand dollars, and that won’t even include help with editing. There may be some people who have no interest in micromanaging the small stuff and want to simply hand their manuscripts over to a business and let them do all the work, and that’s fine, but you want to make sure you’re not paying a whole lot for services that are free or inexpensive. More on that later. First, let’s talk about e-publishing versus paperbacks.

E-publishing and E-book Creation Costs

As I said, it doesn’t cost a cent to upload your ebooks. For most stores, it’s a matter of filling out a 2-3 page wizard and uploading your ebook file and cover art. Here are the places where you can upload directly:

If you don’t have a Mac and/or you’re not in the U.S., you can also upload your ebooks to Smashwords and use them as a distributor to get into B&N and Apple along with smaller stores that don’t have dedicated self-publishing platforms (i.e. Sony and various mobile phone platforms). Smashwords is also a store in its own right and attracts a lot of international readers, in particular (they don’t add VAT fees or anything else the way Amazon does).

Ebook Formatting

You’ll note that I mentioned .mobi and .epub files. You need to convert your MS Word, Mac Pages, Scrivener, or other word processor file into these formats so that e-readers can display them. Many of these stores offer conversion programs that will handle this automatically (usually requiring a Word file as a starting point — sorry Mac people). However, the results can be clunkier than you’d wish. Many independent e-publishers choose to handle the formatting themselves or hire someone to do it by hand (depending on who you talk to, fees typically run from $50-$150 for full-length novels — if you have a lot of pictures, it’s more work for someone and will cost more, but you shouldn’t be paying heaps of money for this).

For formatting, I’ve worked with Ted Risk at Dellaster Design and Paul Salvette at BB Ebooks. They create much cleaner and more compact files than the conversion programs, and, yes, I’ve had people tell me they notice the difference (especially when reading on phones) when I’ve cheaped out and used a conversion program or someone who doesn’t create the HTML files by hand.

If you want to save money and format your books yourself, check out Paul’s extensive tutorials. He even has ebook formatting videos on YouTube.

Recap for formatting cost: $0 for DIY to $150.

Cover Art Design

Yes, even an electronic book needs a cover. These are the pictures you see in Amazon when you browse the ebook store. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, a good cover can make a huge difference in sales. A bad cover can send people running, because the amateur look screams “self-published” and not in a cool, I-love-to-support-indie-art way, but in an OMG-if-the-cover-sucks-can-you-imagine-what-the-writing-must-be-like way.

That said, there are indie authors who have done their own covers and saved themselves a lot of money. They may have spent $20 or $30 for some stock art, but everything else, they did on their own. If you have a design background (or a friend with a design background), this may certainly be a possibility.

If you really want to compete with the big boys, however, and have hopes of selling a lot of books, it may be worth hiring someone to handle your cover art, creating something with a professional look that you could easily imagine seeing in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Costs can be as inexpensive as $50 for someone who’s just going to use stock art and does design on the side (check the Kindleboards Yellow Pages for a list of folks) to $500-$1,000 for a custom illustration such as indie fantasy author David Alastair Hayden has for his Wrath of the White Tigress.

Do you need a custom illustration? It’s up to you (the trend is going away from them, at least for ebook covers where people usually only see thumbprints of the artwork when they’re browsing). Browse through the top sellers in your genre at Amazon and see what publishers are doing right now.

For most of my covers, including all the ones in my sidebar, I’ve used Glendon Haddix over at Streetlight Graphics. His wait-list has gotten longer of late, so you’ll want to book early if you want to use him, but he’s quite affordable at $200 for cover art and $300 for paperback cover design (which also comes with an ebook cover).

Cover art costs: $0 (DIY) to $1,000 (let me point out that if you go with an ebook-creation business that handles all the details, you’re not going to get a custom illustration by an artist — you’re probably going to get something using stock photography — so just realize that when you’re deciding if their fee is worth it).

Editing Costs

I highly recommend hiring a professional to at least proof-read your manuscript. If you know grammar isn’t your strong point (i.e. you don’t have Strunk & White memorized and you haven’t taken a writing class since high school), you’ll probably want someone to copy-edit your work. If your manuscript hasn’t gone through peer review in a writing workshop or other type of critiquing forum, then you may want to pay for developmental or substantive editing. I’ve written a blog post that goes into more depth on what these different types of editing are and how much they cost.

Honestly, substantive editing is so expensive (thousands of dollars), that, as a self-publishing author, you’re probably better off finding a workshop and/or good beta readers (other writers, not friends/family) to critique your work. That’s what I’ve done. I only pay for proof-reading, and I go through Shelley Holloway for that.

Now, do you absolutely have to pay for editing? Having seen how many typos and such slip through my work, even with beta readers and a professional editor, I cringe at the idea of putting work out there that hasn’t been through that process, but if you absolutely have no money to spend on this, then, no, you don’t have to pay anyone. AutoCrit (editing software) is a less expensive alternative I’ve heard a few authors recommend.

Cost: $0 to thousands (for deals and offers more in the couple of hundred dollar range, again check the Kindleboards Yellow Pages)

Total cost to get an ebook out there: $0 to $500 (bargain basement editing, cover art, and formatting) to a couple of thousand (professional copy editing, custom illustration, and formatting). It costs me around $1,500 to put out a new novel with the bulk of that going to my editor. I paid about $400, though, to get my first ebook out there two years ago.

Unless you have money to throw around, I think it’s a good idea to start as inexpensively as possible. Once you’re making money from your books, you can invest more. Now that I’ve published a number of books and built up a readership, I’ll usually earn back my expenses in the first day or two of a release.

Okay, what about paperback self-publishing?

The first thing you want to ask is if you even want to invest in this. Most indie authors are making 95%+ of their earnings from their ebooks. It’s possible to sell ebooks for less than traditional publishers; this isn’t the case with print-on-demand paperbacks.

My paperbacks run between $11.99 and $12.99 and that’s with making them as inexpensive as possible (meaning I don’t make much from each sale). Compare this to the typical $8 mass market paperback. It’s true that my books are 6×9 inches and more like a trade paperback than something you’d pick up at the grocery store, but it’s still unlikely that someone is going to purchase them when they’re not already fans of my work. I did a post earlier this year on whether print is worth it as a self-published author.

If you do want to hold a hot little paperback in your hands, here’s how it works and what you can expect to pay:

Editing is the same as above. For cover art design, you’ll need someone to do a spine and back cover as well as the front cover you use in e-publishing. This may add $50-$100 to the cost of cover art design. It’s another area where some people just do it themselves.

Formatting is a little different, and I’m not that familiar with the process. Glendon Haddix (my cover guy) does my paperback formatting as well, and I believe he uses InDesign. I’ve heard of folks doing things themselves, though, so this is another spot where you can save money if you want to learn the ropes on your own. Overall though, this shouldn’t cost more than $100 or $200 max.

As for the actual publishing, at CreateSpace (these are the guys I use) it doesn’t cost anything to create a print book. They make their money when it sells. They’ll even give you a free ISBN. You’ll probably want to order a proof of the paperback before you send it out to the world, and that costs about $10, including shipping. You may also want to pay the $25 for extended distribution, which makes your book available in Barnes & Noble and other online stores besides Amazon.

With POD publishing, there’s no option that will get you into brick-and-mortar stores unless managers specifically order your books. You can go into your local bookstores and lobby to make this happen (many sellers, especially independents, like to feature local authors). You can also work the library angle. Check out this interview I did with a librarian to see how to make that happen.

Read the fine print if you go with a book-creation business. They use the same POD companies that you’ll use if you do it on your own, and it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll have a package that will get you into brick-and-mortar stores either. Most small presses don’t even get books into those stores. And you know what? It’s not a big deal. So much book buying happens online these days that this is the way to promote. I recommend focusing on e-publishing and only worrying about paperbacks if you get to the point where people are asking for signed copies (and are willing to pay for them) or if you want to “just because” and have the extra couple hundred to spend on the process.

Are self-publishing services ever worth it?

I know some people simply want to hand a Word file over to someone else and let them take care of things (I know this because people have emailed me and asked if I do this — the answer is, heck no, it’s enough work just handling all of my novels!). Since I’ve overseen everything myself since Day 1, I can’t speak from personal experience, but I have seen BookBaby recommended, and their rates seem reasonable to me. They’ve been doing this for a while, too, so they’re not fly-by-night. Check out their rates before you sign up with another outfit, just so you have a basis for comparison.

One of the things that prompted me to write this post was a recent article about Simon & Schuster stepping into self-publishing and offering packages starting at $1,500 (for children’s books) and going all the way up to $25,000. Yes, $25,000. You’d have to sell a buttload of books (far more than most indies ever do) to earn that money back. “In return, authors will get a range of services, like having access to a speaker’s bureau that will help find speaking opportunities and a video production department that creates and distributes book trailers.” I’ll tell you straight up that book trailers don’t sell books and that speaking is for non-fiction authors, specifically for those who wish to establish themselves as authorities in a field and who have $500 courses to sell as well as books (when speaking, you’re not engaging a large enough audience to sell many books, so you have to sell larger ticket items to fewer people).

This isn’t meant to slam S&S or any other businesses getting into the self-publishing arena (hey, if there’s a market, exploit it); I just want to inform you that you needn’t spend a lot of money to self-publish and that most, if not all, of these businesses aren’t going to include editors or high-end covers, the only things that are really worth paying big money for, in my opinion. When it comes to book promotion, it’s a DIY thing these days, for almost everyone (even those with Big 6 publishers), and online is the way to go.

If you browse through my “book marketing” and “social media” categories, you’ll find lots of help when it comes to promotion. I’m very specific about what’s been working for me and what’s been a waste of time. I also have some old podcasts up (and hope to add more eventually!) at Savvy Self-Publishing.

All right, thank you for reading this monster post. Now get out there and publish something!

Posted in E-publishing | Tagged , , | 54 Comments

5 Tips for Getting More Likes and Participation on Your Facebook Author Page

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Lindsay

My Facebook Author PageIf you’re like most authors these days, you’ve been told that you need to be active on social media sites, especially Facebook with its 1 billion users. At least some of those people must be part of your target audience, right? (If you haven’t made an author page yet — and this is different from your personal Facebook account — you can read about how I made my first one a little over a year ago).

But what if nobody visits your author page? What if nobody comments? Does it matter?

I’m sure there are authors doing just fine without Facebook, but here’s what more likes and participation can do for you:

  • Increase awareness of your “brand” on Facebook (especially when people share your posts with others you wouldn’t have normally reached).
  • Help sell books (I have readers who won’t sign up for newsletters and who don’t follow blogs but who are on Facebook, so they depend on my announcements there to know when new releases are out).
  • Keep your name in readers’ minds in between books.
  • Allow you to easily interact with readers and build a sense of community.
  • Send traffic to your blog, interviews, book excerpts, etc.
  • Publicly show agents/publishers (if you’re hoping to find them) that you’ve built a platform/fan-base.

Though I may not be a Facebook rock star with a million followers, I’m having some success with my author page, at least in terms of interaction and bringing traffic to my site. Here’s what seems to be working for me:

How to Get More Participation on your Facebook Author Page

1. Step 1 is to get some likes for your page.

There’s little chance of Facebook users seeing your updates if they haven’t given you a thumb’s up. This isn’t to say that you should be out there lobbying for likes from strangers (in fact, don’t do this, as there’s no point in extracting likes from people who haven’t read your work and, er, liked it, as they’ll be indifferent to your updates).

The folks you want to stop by are those who’ve read and enjoyed your work (and might want to read and enjoy more of it someday). The easiest way to reel them in is to put your Facebook link at the end of your ebooks and ask them to stop by.

Don’t assume they’ll automatically think to look you up online. With e-readers, though, it’s easy for them to check out a link right from their device. You can include your blog address, newsletter sign-up page, and other social media links in your afterword too.

2. Post regular updates.

People only see recent updates in their Facebook news feeds. If you haven’t posted this week, you’re not going to be on anyone’s radar.

Also, if a long time passes without users interacting with a particular news source (AKA a certain author’s page), that source will fall off the radar. Past likes or not, you’ll have to pay for “promoted posts” if you hope to pop up before those people again, and then it’ll be in the form of an ad. In other words, the more people often you post, the more likely people will see the updates and interact with them.

Some people recommend daily updates, but I think three times a week is sufficient unless you simply adore posting on Facebook. These don’t need to be novel-length entries either (and probably shouldn’t be). Anything from a quick question to a few sentences is considered normal on the site.

3. Post images and videos.

I admit I’ve never done a video (maybe someday), but I’ve heard many social media gurus recommend it, and I can see the potential. I have posted book covers and fan art, and those are almost always the posts that get the most likes, most comments, and most shares. (Shares are great because there’s an opportunity for folks outside of your regular fan base to see those posts.)

4. Pose questions or ask for feedback.

If all you ever do is make announcements (i.e. the new book is out, the cover art is done, I’m working on a new short story), you might get some likes and comments, but not nearly as many as if you pose a question or otherwise invite a response of some sort. Remember, the more people interact with your page, the more likely it is that your announcements will continue to show up in their feeds.

5. Be fun and interesting.

You can certainly post the day’s word count or announce that you’ve sent your manuscript off to your editor, but think of posts that might be more fun for those who follow your page. Out of the bazillion pages on Facebook, why should people visit yours again and again?

I’ve posted humorous excerpts from projects I’m working on, links to character interviews and other “bonus extras,” and I’ve offered folks chances to participate with my world-building in small ways. For example, I just did a post asking for ideas on naming a type of pastry that’ll appear in a novella I’m working on. I got a lot of fun suggestions, and I imagine people who saw that post will smile when they see the “emperor’s buns” mentioned in print.

There are lots of things you can do on Facebook to increase the participation on your site, and they needn’t be big time sinks. I can’t think of many weeks where I’ve spend more than 5-10 minutes maintaining my author page. For this small investment of time, you can reap a lot of benefits.

If you have any other suggestions for increasing participation, please let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

How Do You Improve Sales at Amazon UK, Apple Overseas Stores, and Other International eBook Sites?

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Lindsay

When I first got started e-publishing (two-year anniversary coming up), I was mostly worried about selling books at Amazon. Everybody said they were the big kahuna (and they are). I did upload my ebooks to Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and, through them, Kobo and Apple, but there didn’t seem to be much information out there about how to increase visibility in those stores and sell more books. And international sales? Nobody was talking much about the possibility of those (other than through Smashwords, which sells ebooks in any format to anyone who will buy).

Apple International Ebook SalesI wasn’t too concerned about this until I started thinking about becoming a full-time independent author, AKA ditching the day job. I didn’t want to depend on one revenue stream, not if that money had to pay all the bills. As lucrative as Amazon can be, one never knows when they might switch the tables (dropping to a lower royalty rate or putting your account on hold for some reason or another), and then where would you be? (This is one reason I’m not a fan of signing up for KDP Select and Amazon exclusivity.) So, I thought it was important to increase sales in the other stores and maybe even the overseas versions of those stores.

Easier said than done! I’ve heard of some folks having success by participating in forums for different e-readers (i.e. the Nook Boards and Mobile Read) and for different counties (such as the UK Kindle Users Forum), and I did dink around on these sites in the beginning, chatting and giving away coupons. In general, though, I find forums to be a time sink. You can spend a lot of hours there and earn few, if any, sales. I generally only recommend forums for people who enjoy being a part of that sort of community anyway.

What did make a difference for me, especially with Amazon UK and the international Apple stores, was having a book permanently free on those sites. I’ve talked a lot about this before, but I made my first Emperor’s Edge book (and eventually my first Flash Gold novella as well) free at Smashwords about a year ago. I had the freebies distributed through their partner sites, and Amazon eventually matched the price.

What took longer, but did eventually happen, is that Amazon UK (and DE, ES, IT, etc.) price-matched the ebook to free as well. That’s when I started seeing sales of my other books in those stores. It was a similar process for iTunes. It’s taken a while for the free ebooks to percolate through, showing up in the international Apple stores, but I’m now selling books every month in Apple AUD, DKK, GBR, etc. and am making between $1,500 and $2,000/mo overall in overseas sales.

With many of these sites, it’s very much a $40 here, $20 there kind of income. If I tried to target each of these countries individually through forums or paid sponsorships, it’d be a tall order. But the free ebook is an advertisement itself (as we’ve discussed, it works best if it’s a Book 1 in a series), one that doesn’t require me to spend extra time or money on promotions. People around the world are getting new e-readers and browsing the free sections of the various stores to find goodies.

Some folks (usually authors) still sneer at the idea of putting out freebies, but most public libraries have limited ebook catalogs, so I believe more and more readers are using the free book sections on the various stores as the equivalents of libraries. They are places where readers can try new authors at no risk. And then, if they like what they find, they go on to buy more.

I do want to emphasize that it takes months (it did for me anyway) for a free ebook to find its way into the international stores, maybe even longer at Amazon, since you’re waiting for their price-matching bots to come along. This isn’t going to work if you only want to make your book free for a limited time. This isn’t to say you can’t make international sales without having a free ebook out there, but it’s certainly what made a big difference for me.

Have any comments or other suggestions for authors hoping to sell more in the international stores? Please comment below and share them.

 

Posted in Tips and Tricks | 30 Comments

My Experience Advertising My Ebook with BookBub

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Lindsay

We’ve talked about advertising here before — in fact one of my earliest posts covered my experiments with buying Goodreads ads — and whether it’s an effective way to promote one’s books. In most cases, it’s not worth it, with sites charging more than you have any chance of making back in sales (especially for those of us writing in niche genres with smaller readerships). There are, however, some popular blogs that charge a flat fee to reach thousands of subscribers, and the sheer numbers can make buying advertising from them worth it. Authors may see hundreds of sales on a sponsorship day, as well as residual sales due to increased visibility in top lists at Amazon.

Pixel of Ink and Ereader News Today are popular sites right now, but all the indie authors out there know they’re popular (and effective), thus meaning a long wait to purchase an ad (if the sites are open to new sponsors at all). I’ve had good results advertising on both sites, but that was last spring, and I haven’t seen opportunities come up in a while.

Bookbub is a site that first came on my radar a couple of months ago when they ran my free book, The Emperor’s Edge, out of the blue and sent me an email to let me know about it. EE had an extra 3,000 downloads that weekend. Considering EE has been free for almost a year and usually only sees that many downloads in an entire month, it was very noticeable blip.

I checked out Bookbub in more depth and found they have tens of thousands of subscribers and rather than sending a generic email to all of those subscribers, they let people sign up based on their reading preferences and will only send out links to appropriate books. So, if you’re a science-fiction author, you buy an ad that will only go out to SF fans, and you only pay to reach those people. Unlike many other sites, Bookbub isn’t Kindle-only, so you can include links to Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Apple, etc. as well as Amazon.

Since EE received a nice boost from the mention, I decided to buy a spot for Encrypted, one of my non-free ebooks. It’s one I haven’t spent much time advertising because it’s a stand-alone with a limited audience. As I write, Bookbub’s SF/F category has 70,000 subscribers and it costs $85 to advertise a free ebook and $125 for a non-free one. (Here’s a link to all of their categories and rates.)

It’s worth noting that Bookbub will only promote deals: “BookBub promotes books that are free or at least 50% off their usual digital price. It’s rare for us to feature books with a deal price of more than $3.99, and the greater the discount, the more likely we are to accept a listing.”

I usually sell Encrypted for $3.95, so I lowered it to $0.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble for the weekend of the ad. I was going to do Smashwords as well, but forgot until the ad had already gone out (I’d wanted to change the SW price, because I was worried they’d send the update out to their distributors and then I’d get in some price-match limbo with the book stuck at 99 cents at Amazon for the next four months).

Lowering the book to 99 cents, of course, dropped me into the 35% royalty rate at Amazon and B&N, meaning I’d only make 35 cents per sale. I’d have to sell about 375 ebooks to break even. I wasn’t sure if that would happen or not. I don’t generally write stories that appeal to a broad audience, and I think it takes a special romance-SF/F-thriller-mystery-geeky-heroine-loving person to find the blurb for Encrypted appealing.

That said, I ended up selling about 450 extra copies of Encrypted that weekend. For the only time in the book’s life, it made it below a 500 Amazon sales ranking (a brief stay, but still cool). It peaked at 200-something.

About 50 of those 450 sales came through Barnes & Noble, which made me wish I’d been able to list links to all the stores out there, but, as I mentioned, it’s not feasible to run a weekend sale at stores where you can’t upload the ebooks directly.

By the end of the weekend, sales had slowed down, and I raised the price back to $3.95. The sales ranking has been gradually rising, and I’m sure it’ll be back in its normal 20,000-ish range before long, but it did sell more copies than average in the week after the ad ran.

For those who may be thinking the 99-cent price tag alone may have accounted for extra sales that weekend, I don’t think this is the case. I experimented with a 99-cent price point for the book before, just to see if it would make a big difference, and it didn’t, not without additional promotion.

Overall, I found the Bookbub spot worth paying for and appreciated that the wait was only a week or two, as opposed to the months-long (if ever) wait we’re seeing with some of the other more popular sites right now. Bookbub was much more effective than the Kindle Nation Daily ad I tried earlier in the fall (which was for an advertising spot on their book lending site) — it didn’t give me a noticeable blip in downloads. At all. Ditto for advertising on the Kindleboards. I suppose the word will get out that Bookbub is working, and it’ll be booked solid before long, too, but for now… go for it.

Posted in Advertising | Tagged , , , | 40 Comments

From Small Press to Self-Publishing with Laura Hunsaker

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Lindsay

If you’re an author trying to decide between self-publishing and pursuing an offer from a small press, you may want to read today’s interview. We have Laura Hunsaker, someone I first noticed on Twitter because of the shirtless, muscular men strolling across her profile. As she says, “I write about Hunky Highlanders and Hottie Scotties. I create Steamy Time Travel Romances that warm up the night, and leave you craving more.” She started out with a small press but has recently jumped into self-publishing. I’ll let her tell you the how and why:

Interview with Laura Hunsaker

You published your first book, Highland Destiny, through a small press, right? Can you tell us a bit about the experience (i.e. what the publisher brought to the table and if you were pleased with how things went)?

At the time, I didn’t know another way, self-publishing has grown in leaps and bounds in the past few years. One thing I liked was that I had someone who read my manuscript and said, “Yes, we love this, we want to publish this.” It was awesome, since I was so new to the publishing world, to have someone willing to put forth the effort into my book. They knew what the audience would want, and helped me out with many of the niggling little questions I would think up at 3am.

One thing I didn’t like is that there was virtually no promo done. I did all of my own promo. Luckily I’ve been a book review blogger for a few years and was able to at least have a leg up on the reviewing aspect, but it made self-publishing that much easier, since I already did my own promo.

You’ve recently self-published a short story, Highlander Reborn. What made you decide to give the indie route a try?

Honestly, I was tired of waiting. I know that sounds lame, but seriously, I had a novella (Highland Games) that I submitted in the spring to 5 publishers, and as of now, I still haven’t heard back from 2 of them.

New Concepts Publishing asked for it (and they’d like to publish the whole Magic of the Highlands series) so it will release in December through NCP, but the point is that I’d still be waiting if I hadn’t accepted NCP’s offer.

In the meantime I had an 8K word short that I’d written for a submission call, and I was sort of annoyed at the publishing industry. So I asked around to a few authors and decided to go for it! It has been an amazing experience and I have been very happy with the results (and the lack of waiting).

Will you compare the two experiences for us? I imagine there are some things you liked about self-publishing and other things that having a publisher was nice for.

One thing that’s nice about being traditionally published is that so much is handled by the publisher, rather than the author.

With Highlander Reborn, I had to find an editor, find an image site, buy the image, hire a cover designer, and then format it. Ahh, formatting, the bane of my existence! Lol

With NCP all I had to do was write and then fill out an art form for my cover. But, at the same time, I accepted NCP’s contract in June and haven’t received edits or seen the cover yet.

I’m seeing more and more authors pursuing a hybrid model where they self-publish some of their titles and work with a traditional publisher for other stories. What do you think of this strategy? Do you think you’ll pursue such a route?

I think this is one of the smartest things authors can do. When you self-publish, you have so much more control over everything from cover to the release date. I loved the whole experience. In fact I’m already working on my next self-published novella and I can’t wait to talk to the cover artist again. Oh, but I will hire a formatter next time. I hated that part of self-publishing.

But it’s nice to have some things coming from a publisher as well. It can help create a fan base. There are readers who favor buying ebooks strictly from certain publishers, and publishers can get your works out to readers who might not otherwise have seen your book.

Why don’t you finish up by telling us what you’re working on next and, if you know, how you’re planning to publish it?

Sure! And thanks for having me. 🙂

I’m working on the next full length novel called Highland Betrayal for my Magic of the Highlands series, and that will be through New Concepts Publishing. But I’m also working on my next Nightkind novella that will be self-published.

 You can check out Laura’s work at Amazon or visit her site for more details and other book links. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Posted in Interviews / Success Stories | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

New Short Story (Enigma) Available

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Lindsay

If you’re looking for something to read, I’ve just published a new short story featuring Tikaya and Rias from Encrypted.

Here’s the blurb:

After surviving ancient booby traps, deadly puzzles, and torture-happy imperial marines, cryptanalyst Tikaya Komitopis can’t wait to return home, even if that means explaining to her family how she came to love Fleet Admiral Rias Starcrest, the empire’s most notorious commander and the man responsible for the decimation of her people during the war.

Tikaya and Rias believe they’ll have several calm weeks at sea to mull over the problem of irate citizens and horrified parents, but the ship they board is on the run. The captain has acquired a mysterious stolen artifact… and the owners want it back. When he learns of Tikaya’s background, he urges her to decode its secrets, implying her life—and everyone else’s—might be forfeit if she fails.

Engima is a 15,000-word short story set after the events in Encrypted.

It’s available for 99 cents from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords (iTunes and other stores coming soon).

Here’s a preview to get you warmed up:

Part I

Point 1: Rias saved my life, and I never could have escaped my kidnappers and those blighted ruins without his help.

Professor Tikaya Komitopis nibbled on the end of her pencil while she considered her first argument. Her toe bumped against a sharp rock, interrupting her musings. Writing while traversing a goat trail across a mountainside in Northern Turgonia had its downsides.

A frosty wind blew down from a snowy peak to the left, tugging at the pages in her journal. Not far to the right, a cliff dropped hundreds of feet into the sea where foamy waves surged and churned, their temperature equally frosty, she wagered. The only warm thing in the land walked on the trail ahead of her. Rias navigated the rocky path with easy grace, though he possessed a broad-shouldered, six-and-a-half-foot frame that should have belied agility. For a long moment, her gaze lingered, admiring that grace, and other attributes as well.

Tikaya caught herself and snorted. If you want to continue enjoying that view in the future, she told herself, you’d best get back to the list.

Counterpoint, she wrote, anticipating her family’s response to Point 1, you never would have been in danger if his people hadn’t kidnapped you in the first place.

Yes, that would be the first argument her father made, if she got him to speak at all. He might be too busy fuming and glaring at Rias to utter words. That was if she could somehow get him past the port authorities and out to her family’s plantation to meet her kin.

Point 2, Tikaya scribbled, he’s been exiled from the empire and holds no further loyalty to the emperor. If we allow him on our islands, he could become an advisor and invaluable ally.

Counterpoint: Whatever he is now, he was Fleet Admiral Sashka Federias Starcrest during the war, a war in which thousands of our people died because he and his cursed emperor thought it’d be nice to have an “outpost” in the middle of the ocean.

Tikaya grimaced. Maybe making a list had been a bad idea. She was coming up with stronger counterpoints than points. She craned her neck and stared up at the blue sky, searching for an answer amongst the fluffy clouds drifting past. All she saw were puffs of her own breath crystalizing before her face.

Her toe caught on a rock, and this time Tikaya tripped, the rucksack, canteen, longbow and quiver strapped to her back colluding to undermine her balance. Only luck—and copious flailing—kept her from pitching face-first to the ground.

Rias halted. “Are you all right?” It was at least the three hundredth time he’d had occasion to voice the question in the last two weeks.

“Yes.” Tikaya had no doubt that he would have caught her if she’d fallen and was glad she hadn’t needed such a rescue this time. Not that she minded falling into his arms—quite the opposite really—but she liked to do it on her own terms. She adjusted her gear, pushed her long blonde braid over her shoulder, and straightened her spectacles. “How do you manage to so effectively think and walk at the same time? I know your brain is as busy as mine.”

He might be retired, however forcibly, but she’d caught him designing ships and engines by the campfire several nights.

Rias plucked her pen out of a clump of tenacious weeds growing from between two rocks. “I don’t imagine it’s the thinking that’s causing you trouble.”

As he held out the pen for her, Rias offered a warm half-smile. The gesture always gave him a boyish mien despite the silver peppering his black hair, the laugh lines at the corners of his brown eyes, and the old scar bisecting one brow. He, too, carried a rucksack and weapons—a marine-issue dagger and a muzzle-loading rifle instead of a bow—but he wore the gear as if it weighed him down no more than a shirt.

“Perhaps so,” Tikaya admitted.

“Fortunately, I can offer you a possible solution. You may find it easier to think aboard a ship.”

Rias stretched an arm toward the south, and Tikaya blinked at the realization that they’d reached something more than harsh wilderness. Granted, the town of Tangukmoo might be just as harsh as the surrounding lands—indeed, the log and hide cabins, gambling halls, and taverns spreading out from the docks lacked a posh, civilized appearance—but the ships in the harbor lightened her heart. Even the abstemious nature of a cabin at sea sounded delightful after the nights spent sleeping on cold rocky ground.

“Any idea how we can pay for passage?” Tikaya asked.

“I can volunteer for employment as a fireman in the boiler room.” Rias took out a collapsible spyglass and perused the harbor. “Hm, make that as a seaman.”

Even without magnification, Tikaya could see that most of the vessels had masts rather than smokestacks. She smiled. “Are you sure you know how to work a ship that doesn’t come with an engine?”

“Of course. I can sail anything.” Rias lifted his chin, and Tikaya might have teased him for letting his Turgonian arrogance show, but he winked and added, “Even wooden toys in the tub.”

“That doesn’t sound like a difficult feat.”

“It is if there are a lot of them and they’re engaged in mortal battle with each other while cannonballs fly.”

“Cannonballs?” Tikaya asked. “In… the tub?”

“I carved them from the soap bars.”

Tikaya imagined an eight-year-old version of the former admiral, orchestrating this conflict in the washroom. “I’m sure your parents appreciated that.”

“It did mystify Mother for a while until she discovered me at the task.” Rias lowered the spyglass and pointed to the harbor. “We have a challenge.”

“You say that in the way other people might say we have a problem.”

“Most of those are fishing and whaling vessels. They’ll be plying the coast and the Durtan Sound, not heading south. Our two options are a Nurian merchant vessel and a schooner of indeterminate origins. The schooner lacks the size and armament of a typical brigadier or pirate ship, but it shows signs of having been in a battle—or at least fired upon—recently.”

Those limited options definitely sounded like a problem to Tikaya. “The Nurians would kill you for all the trouble you caused them in the war, and pirates might try to steal the priceless artifacts we took from the ruins.” Artifacts she planned to take to the Polytechnic for further research, not hand over to high seas marauders.

Rias’s eyebrows rose. “Should I be concerned that it’s not entirely clear which would be more objectionable to you?”

Tikaya grinned. “Well, I have been passionate about archaeology and philology since childhood. You’re a more recent interest.”

“I believe the answer to my question is yes, then.” Rias collapsed the spyglass and returned it to his pack. “During our long sea voyage, I shall have to see what I can do to raise myself from interest to passion in your mind.”

Tikaya swatted him as he led the way down the goat trail again. His sense of humor always warmed her heart. She wondered if it was significant enough an attribute to earn a spot on her list of arguments. Reminded of the task, her grin faded and she stared glumly at the page. Would her people ever be able to see him as something other than an enemy? What if she was risking his life by taking him back to Kyatt? More than once, she’d considered going home alone and promising to meet him at some foreign port where they could start a life together, but the thought of saying goodbye to her family forever brought moisture to her eyes.

“This passion that I’m going to bestir in you,” Rias called over his shoulder, “it requires that we stay together.”

“Oh!” Tikaya wiped her eyes, put away her journal, and hustled to catch up. “I thought you might be planning to do it through love letters or poetry sent from afar.”

“Alas, we Turgonians are a military lot, not known for our literary prowess.”

“Just so long as you can convince any would-be pirate thieves to leave us and our gear alone.”

“I’ll keep you safe.” This time when Rias looked over his shoulder, his humor was gone and his eyes were intense with the promise.

Yes, Tikaya thought, but who was going to keep him safe?

* * *

 Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Smashwords | iTunes | Kobo

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How Do You Maintain Steady Book Sales at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.?

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Lindsay

Whether you’re self-publishing or releasing a novel with a traditional publisher, when you first launch your book, you’re excited to promote it. You jump onto forums, you get active on Facebook, you blog, you guest blog, you sign up for book tours, you try and fail to get onto Oprah, etc. And, we hope, you see a payoff for your efforts. Amazon, in particular, makes it easy to monitor your results with sales rankings and up-to-the-minute sales reports (available for authors self-publishing through the KDP platform).

But what about the months and years after you release your book? With ebooks, a title need never go out of print, but it’s not doing you any good if people aren’t finding and buying it.

On Amazon, if you can hand-sell your first 1,000 books or so, their algorithms kick in and help with the promotion (your book may appear in some category Top 100 lists and it’ll show up in the also-boughts of other authors’ books). But even once-popular books can and do fall off the radar. Sometimes that fall is steep, too, if the author doesn’t continue to promote the book. Now that I’m coming up on two years of publishing, I’ve seen a lot of this.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Ridan Publishing was making waves by taking its newly signed authors to the tops of the Amazon bestseller charts. Marshall Thomas’s Soldier of the Legion Series was one of their hits with sales in the tens of thousands a month for a while. As I write this, the first book in the series has a sales ranking of 60,000+, meaning it’s probably not selling even a copy a day now. I’ve seen other authors, who sold fewer books during their peak periods, fall much farther, to 500,000+ sales rankings or more.

So, what’s the secret to maintaining steady sales at Amazon (and Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords, etc.) month after month? I won’t pretend that I have all the answers, but I’ll share what I’m doing here. I’ve gradually increased my sales over the last two years and, at Amazon, tend to sell 400+ books a month of each of the titles in my core (Emperor’s Edge) series. During book release months, I’ll do better, but I can’t bemoan steady sales that pay the bills every month. My sales at Barnes & Noble and the other stores chug along too.

Here are three tactics I’m pursuing to keep sales going:

1. Don’t “check out” after the launch

This one’s obvious, but I see it all the time. If you get tired of promoting your book after the first month or two and completely abandon all of your marketing efforts, it’s natural that sales are going to decline.

So how much work do you have to do to keep that from happening? You’ve already put the effort into getting a big boulder rolling, so you needn’t continue on at full steam (I’m full of locomotive references today, aren’t I?), but you do need to put a little effort into keeping that boulder rolling.

Here’s what I do (none of which take more than a few minutes a day):

  • Seek out occasional advertising opportunities — Some indie authors poo-poo on advertising because it hasn’t worked for them (they haven’t broken even), but it’s the easiest and least time-consuming marketing you can do, and it can pay off if done correctly. I advertise the first book in my series, which, through price-matching, is permanently free at Amazon as well as in other stores. If a number of people go out and download it in one day (which is what tends to happen when advertising on a popular site), I not only get all of those people to give my series a try, but this moves my book up to the first page of the Top 100 free ebooks in epic fantasy. There, other people browsing Amazon are more likely to notice it. This gives me a nice boost in downloads for a while, and some of the people who like the freebie gradually buy the other books in the series. A one-day sponsorship on a popular ebook site can increase my sales for a month or two. Here’s a list someone put together with the best book sites out there right now (some of them only promote free ebooks but others have paid sponsorship options for non-free ebooks).
  • Update my Facebook author page about three times a week — As I’ve mentioned before, at the ends of my ebooks, I encourage readers to come say hi or “like” me on Facebook, so there’s actually someone keeping an eye on that page. Being active there (and trying to get others to interact with my comments) can bring a trickle of potential new readers by (when people post comments on your page, their Facebook friends will see those comments and maybe check you out).
  • Stay active on Twitter — I’m not big on posting constant promo tweets (though I’ll plug something when it’s new), but by interacting with readers and posting interesting links that people “retweet,” it’s another place where new people can find out about me. In my bio, I tell people exactly what I write and have a link to my blog and also to my first ebook at Amazon.
  • I post regularly on my blog — I used to think I was blogging for the sole purpose of selling books, and that does happen to some extent (I use affiliate links, so I can tell how many sales originate here), but I’ve come to realize that the benefits of blogging are less tangible. By being out there in a (I hope!) helpful manner, I get people interested in helping me out in turn. I’ve received quite a bit of free advertising, in one way or another, because I’m out here, talking about my journey and offering advice for other authors. I’ve been mentioned on other people’s blogs, podcasts, and I’ve had my books plugged on other people’s sites. If all you’re doing is writing and publishing books, these opportunities might pass you by.

2. Publish often

With each new book you put out, you’ll increase the doorways people can find into your world. Someone might stumble onto your fifth book, enjoy it, and go back and buy everything else you’ve written. When you publish more often, your regular readers are less likely to forget about you as well. A lot of authors just assume that people will remember them, and remember to check for new releases, but voracious readers go through books like chocolates at Halloween, and you’re just one of many authors they’ve tried this month.

How much do you have to publish? Well, that’ll depend on what’s feasible for you. Not everybody can fit in thousands of words a day (and I question the overall health of you people claiming to do 10,000 words a day, ahem!), but you can be a prolific author if you can manage to write 1,000 words a day. That’s a full-length novel every three months. Even allowing for editing time, that should allow you to produce two novels a year and perhaps some shorter works as well (shorter works are excellent for keeping your name out there and giving fans new material in between novel releases).

I’ll admit that 1,000 words can seem like a lot in the beginning (it did for me — my first novel was about seven years in the making!), but there are lots of tricks out there for improving your productivity as a writer. Perhaps the most basic thing I’ve found is that, like anything, it gets easier with practice. Another perk with writing more quickly is that it’s a lot easier to keep an entire novel in one’s head when working on it over a couple of months as opposed to a year or more. When I took longer, I’d forget what I’d written in the first half and end up having to go back to re-read often.

3. Have your work out there in many places

I know, Amazon’s KDP Select (which requires exclusivity) has been the soup de jour this past year, but there’s a lot to be said for rejecting the short-term gains that may (or may not) come with granting a merchant exclusivity in favor of the be-everywhere approach to marketing. The more places you are, the more ways there are for people to stumble across your work.

In my first year, I didn’t make much at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, or Apple, and I made next to nothing from Kobo and Sony. These days, those stores combined still don’t come anywhere close to my Amazon earnings, but they are significant enough that I wouldn’t want to leave that money on the table. In these last few months, I’ve reached a point where I could make a modest living as an author even without Amazon. Of course, I hope Amazon will continue to give me the lovings for years to come, but it’s comforting to know that I don’t depend 100% on them. Also, it’s worth pointing out that I sell just fine there without being in KDP Select.

In addition to being in all those other stores, it helps to have a free offering. I’ve already talked about how I use my free Book 1, so I won’t go into that more here, other than to say getting that freebie into Apple and Barnes & Noble, in particular, has made a huge different in my overall sales there.

All right, another monster Monday post. Do you have any tips you’d like to add insofar as maintaining book sales month after month?

Posted in Book Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | 37 Comments

Is Becoming a Best-Selling Author a Matter of Luck?

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Lindsay

A couple of days ago, I saw a video review of The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World on The Creative Penn. I needed something to listen to on a road trip anyway, so I picked up the audio version of the book. Joanna already did a nice review of it, so I won’t summarize it here, but one of the ideas was that talent and hard work only get you so far in business (including art, music, and writing). You need a serendipitous moment here or there (AKA a lucky break) in order to succeed in our rapidly evolving world.

For authors, the ultimate sign of success is often considered hitting the bestseller lists and hanging out there long enough to sell a million (or more) copies. This doesn’t mean you can’t make a perfectly nice living as a mid-list author (something that is more possible than ever in the world of independent e-publishing right now), but that’s not quite the same as rocketing up the charts to fame and fortune. True, that’s not something to which every author aspires, but, especially in today’s economy, one can certainly understand the desire to not simply make a living but to be “set for life.”

But can a bestselling book be manufactured? Is there a formula that, with enough practice and talent, an author might follow? Or do the stars need to align in just the right way for one to reach such lofty heights?

The Click Moment author, Frans Johansson, suggests it’s the latter.

Among other examples, Twilight gets a mention in the book. As we all know, the series took off without precedent. Stephanie Meyer wasn’t an experienced author with years of practice penning novels; in fact, she hadn’t been writing much at all before getting an idea for her story and going from there. She wasn’t well-versed in vampire lore and made things up as she went. Johansson even points out that much of the series’ success might be attributed to Meyer’s lack of knowledge, which allowed her to tackle things from a fresh angle. Had she been better versed in vampire lore and gone with the accepted norms, she couldn’t have written the same story, the one that resonated with so many teenage readers and rocketed her up the charts.

Stephen King is also used as an example in the book. He had some early success, then was able to build on it until he reached a point where his name alone could place a new release on the bestseller lists. But, Richard Bachman, a pen name King used early on (because his publisher wouldn’t allow him to publish more than one book a year) failed to have that early break-out moment. The Bachman books, despite being written by the same author with the same storytelling talents, failed to gain traction until it was revealed that King was Bachman.

In these cases, as well as many others, it seems that some serendipitous moment caused a tipping point in the authors’ careers, and it is that moment, rather than simple hard work and talent, that allowed them to achieve bestseller status.

So, what does that mean for the rest of us? All we can do is hope to get lucky?

Well, yes, and no. Johansson argues that randomness and luck do play a part in success but that we can set our selves up to be in a position where luck will be more likely to strike for us.

How we can improve our odds of becoming a bestselling author

1. “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” – Herb Kelleher (AKA Write a Lot!)

Johansson uses that quotation in the book, and I caught myself nodding. The more books you write, the more chances you have of hitting it big with one.

As some of you know, I used to build content-based websites and monetize them with affiliate programs and Google Adsense (that was the old day job). I must have made about twenty sites over the six or seven years I was making a living doing this. I read up on SEO and learned about the various keyword research tools that let me see exactly how many people were searching for which terms on Google. I also knew how to find out how much advertisers were bidding for clicks on ads in the various fields (so I could estimate how much I would earn for each ad click originating on my site).

All that science should have meant that I could pick a winning website topic every time and turn each one into a cash cow. It’s true that none of them failed utterly, and they all ended up making at least a dollar or two a day, but perhaps one in five would make much more than that, and one in ten might make more than a hundred dollars a day. The thing is… I couldn’t, despite all that research, accurately predict which sites wold take off. A random link from a popular blog (which often resulted in links from many more blogs) could make a site overnight. Or one particular topic might resonate with people, and word-of-mouth marketing would come into play. In other words, some sites got lucky and others didn’t.

When it comes to novels, I think the lesson is that most of us aren’t going to hit it big with one book. But if we write ten or twenty books, the odds are much better of one become a hit. One thing I pointed out in a post on JA Konrath’s $140,000 earnings month is that one or two of his 30- or 40-odd titles were responsible for the majority of his income. (There’s a chart on that post, showing his sales numbers.)

So, if we hope to become bestsellers, we must not only write well, but we must write and publish lots to increase our odds for success. Johansson calls this making a lot of bets and suggests we should also minimize the size of those bets. If you’re not the fastest writer, this might mean trying some novellas and shorter works (Joanna from the Creative Penn link above is planning to try this). It might also mean publishing a number of potential series Book 1s before committing to a six-book storyline, thus to see which series has the most potential to take off. There are doubtlessly numerous ways authors can pursue this philosophy.

2. Don’t try to follow a formula or use current trends as an indicator of what to write

Hollywood, for all its money and power and experience, can’t predict which scripts will turn into blockbuster hits and which will flop. That’s why they buy so darned many; they’re also hoping to “get lucky.”

New York publishing houses can’t predict which books will become hits either. They try their darnedest to manufacture them, but again and again they’re surprised by what actually takes off. When they’re regurgitating popular formulas, it’s not necessarily in hopes of creating a bestseller, but rather in putting out a middle-of-the-road style of product that’s proven over and over again that it can be profitable enough. These folks are usually as dumbfounded as you and me when something like 50 Shades of Greys takes the world by storm.

As we discussed, one of the reasons Twilight may have been such a hit is because Meyer made up her own versions of vampires through sheer ignorance of the precedents in the genre. She was essentially an outsider, and, in being so, brought fresh ideas to the table. This is actually a fairly tried and true concept. Sometimes the most brilliant ideas come from people outside of a field, because they haven’t been trained to think in a certain way. There are sites out there (and I forget the name or where I read about this, so someone please post more details if this rings a bell) where huge companies with staffs of brilliant engineers, scientists, etc. post problems on the web with rewards for those who can solve them. And the most random, sometimes utterly unskilled, people solve problems that eluded teams of specialists in the field.

So, what does this mean for us as writers? Johansson suggests we go places and do things that have nothing to do with our core work, thus to open ourselves up to moments and experiences that will give us unique ideas. He mentions talking to random people, traveling and experiencing different cultures, and going to conventions and conferences in fields outside of our niches.

For authors, I think, too, it’s important to read widely in areas that have nothing to do with the genre in which you write. When I was in my teens, I read nothing but medieval fantasy for a few years. And the stories that I wrote at the time were medieval fantasies that sounded a heck of a lot like all the other stories I was reading. I won’t claim that I create the most original worlds these days either, but I do find a lot of fun plot ideas from reading real-world history and listening to podcasts on a variety of non-fiction topics. I’ve found that travel can indeed inspire ideas, and you don’t necessarily need to cross the world (something we authors aren’t always rich enough to afford!); an hour drive and a tour of a small town with an interesting history can also stir the imagination.

3. When something seems to be working, exploit it!

Once one of your bets pays off, and you have a winner, take advantage of that. Write more books in a similar vein.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to wait for a book to become a bestseller. If one of your titles sparks better reviews and more fan mail than the others, it may make sense to launch a series based on that book. This may be Step 1 in creating a bestselling series.

Each of Stephen King’s books becomes a bestseller because he’s built up a fan base of readers who know they will get what they expect when they buy a new King book. If he’d decided to bounce around between genres and write something different each time, he might have been, at best, a one-hit wonder. But, by writing the same types of novels each time, novels that have proven popular for him, he’s created, as Johansson calls it, a self-reinforcing loop.

Final thoughts

Though I can see many of the points in the book, and often found myself nodding, it’s hard for me to give up the belief that a savvy author could gradually work one’s way up to bestseller status without some random bit of luck suddenly turning a book into a phenomenon. If one can put out good stories and build on small successes along the way, gradually gathering more fans with each successive release, it seems that one would eventually hit a tipping point (caused by X number of fans buying a new release on Day 1, and thus propelling it into visibility on bestseller lists) regardless of lucky breaks. But perhaps that would only result in one becoming a popular author and not a bestselling one.

Your thoughts?

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