Interesting bit about audience building

Passive Voice linked to an extremely dumb article about how self-publishing is hard. I mean, of course self-publishing is hard, publishing is hard, but the implication is that if you publish traditionally you just lie around eating chocolates all day while hard-working publishing professionals carry you around on a divan and fan you with palm fronds, plus there are some flat-out lies about things you can't do if you self-publish. (Like sell movie and foreign rights. Tell that to Hugh Howey.)

Of course the comments are mostly about how painfully stupid and ignorant the article is, but then (as they often do) they go off on an interesting segue, as two authors discuss how instead of writing a novel and then trying to find an audience (like meeee!), they instead found an audience (via writing fan fiction and political blogging) and then wrote novels that appealed to that niche. Neither author, it should be noted, actually planned to do this; it's just how things worked out.

But it's something to keep in mind if you are already writing a lot on a particular topic. You can't stray too far (like I doooo!), but there are plenty of, say, historians who also enjoy writing historical fiction out there.

Chatting and giving stuff away on Library Thing

So, the author chat is live on Library Thing until June 8th. Feel free to go there and ask me questions about pretty much anything--it can be about self-publishing or what I thought of The Avengers, I don't care.

Also, the Library Thing Trang giveaway is up, if for some reason you'd rather do that than use the Smashwords coupon. It goes until June 18th.

And I just want to say that Jeremy of Library Thing rocks my socks. There were some technical problems with the giveaway (which meant that there was--gasp!--a slight delay between me thinking, "Hmm, maybe I should do a giveaway" and actually having one up), and the cover is wrong, but you know, the attitude is right. Jeremy is like, "There's a problem with the cover, I'm sorry--we'll fix that ASAP," he's not like, "We won't let you use your cover, because we're claiming that it is impossible for us to swap out a JPG file." Very little drama, no rules that aren't actually real, and when things go wrong, people acknowledge that they have gone wrong and should be set right. Really, that's all I ask....

Progress report

Yes, progress marches ever on. I made the small changes to the cover of the paperback (next time I'm just going to do it all in one file so that the layer information doesn't get lost) and did a little work on the large-print edition. I also am starting some serious grunt work on this blog, changing interior links so that they all have the marysisson.com address. That's pretty much the ultimate beta job, no?

I'll probably start up on Trials again later in the week.

Interesting, if not exactly shocking

So, I'm doing a Smashwords coupon for a free copy of Trang (go here, the code is MC96E, expires July 1st). I Tweeted it and whatnot, but I wasn't expecting much of a response that way because I've done free Smashwords coupons before, so my feeling is, if you were interested in getting yourself a copy of Trang, you already did.

But I did do something new, which was to post about it on Kindleboards.

And there's been basically zero response. To a free book.

I'm not shocked, because when Derek Canyon bought an ad on Kindleboards, he sold only one book. Guess what he writes? Science fiction!

This is just another reminder to myself that the key here is targeted marketing. With science fiction especially, you have to find people who are willing to read it. Marketing to a broad audience just isn't going to cut it.

Speaking of finding people and free books, I think I'm going to do another Trang giveaway on Library Thing--it's been six months, the book has good reviews there now, and I'm trying to make sure that the people there who liked Trang know that Trust is out.

Decompressing.....

OK, enough of all that. Boy, it's a lot of work getting a book out!

I suppose in theory I should now run around and promote, promote, promote, but I think we all know that's not going to happen.

I will be doing an author chat Monday on LibraryThing--mainly to let the LibraryThing people know that there's a sequel out. And I posted a thing on Kindle Boards, which I'll bump when I'm allowed to bump it. So, you know, if you do either of those things and feel like saying Hi over there, please do.

Mainly, I'm taking a deep breath. And I'm going to see The Avengers tonight! It looks like Cabin in the Woods is still around, too....

There's still stuff I need to do for Trust--there's two very minor art changes I want to make to the paperback cover. We're talking, stuff that's not big at all, but because I now have fancier cover art, it's going to require some attention to fix it properly. Plus of course I have to finish the large-print edition, and make those same changes to its cover.

Buuuut I'm not going to chain myself to the computer for all this. It's more a mind-set thing than anything else. I need some balance back in my home life.

Trust is out!

Whoo-hoo! DONE!

The e-book is at Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords--$2.99 until July 1, when I raise the price to $4.99.

If you haven't read Trang yet, I'm giving it away on Smashwords until July 1--go here and use the coupon code MC96E.

(And, yeah, I'll be giving Trang away a lot, and eventually making it free. Trust is going to be holding pretty steady on price, if only because I am lazy, so....)

The paperback? It's supposed to be on Amazon fairly soon (and everywhere else eventually--I paid the $25 and put it on expanded distribution), but right now it's only on CreateSpace's site. My understanding is that they charge an arm and a leg for shipping, so I would wait if I were you. (Yes, I get a bigger chunk of the money that way, but remember how I'm in the Illuminati? Don't worry about it.)

So many details!

OK, the e-books are really, really finished now. I wanted to have good back matter, but you can't do things like link to where people bought the book with a suggestion that they leave a review if you don't have a Web address for it--the book has to be up before it can really go up. And then I had to upload new versions of Trang that have links to where you can buy Trust, as well as the sample chapters.

And then the Smashwords tech help people had to figure out why Trust wouldn't convert--the short answer is, Word Sucks, the long answer is, Word stuck a bunch of invisible crap in there (in other words, Word Sucks). So I pulled all the crap out of the Smashwords version, and then I took another look at the Amazon and B&N versions, and sure enough, the invisible crap is not so invisible in an e-book format. (I hate you, Word.) So I had to replace those things one more time.

But it's all good now--by tomorrow, which is the official release date (you didn't know that, did you? That's what I told the reviewers, anyway), the aboslute final versions should be the ones you actually get when you pony up for them.

I don't know when the paper book will be up. The Amazon international e-book editions are up already--better go link to them on my home page. Whee!

Trust is uploaded! Mostly!

I formatted the Trust e-books and uploaded them to Barnes & Noble and Amazon...but not Smashwords. For some reason, Smashwords won't take my Word file. At first I thought it was because I tried making my own clickable table of contents (if everything is labeled "Chapter 1," "Chapter 2," etc, Smashwords will automatically generate one, but I have one labeled "Epilogue"). So I trashed that (changing "Epilogue" to "Chapter 28: Epilogue"), but it still wouldn't take it. It's giving me no information whatsoever for why the conversion won't work, and I've done things like clip and paste into a new Word file (which usually helps on the many, many occasions that a Word file goes wonkus) to no avail. So I'm wondering if that's a problem on their end--maybe waiting a couple of days will help there.

And the Amazon file looks a little weird because Amazon took the "Normal" text (which isn't indented in Word) and indented it more than the indented text. It's fine as far as readability is concerned, but I've got a tweaked file ready to go. Also I forgot to include the word count (113,000, if you care) and the language advisory (whoops! Well, hopefully people will see that on the first book) in the descriptions, so I'll have to tweak that, too.

FYI I am indeed running that Early Bird Special--Trust will be $2.99 until July 1, when I will raise the price to $4.99. I also am doing a giveaway of Trang on Smashwords until July 1, despite the fact that they won't let me upload Trust--the coupon code is MC96E, and the book is all by itself over here.

You can be too even-handed

So I'm all jet-lagged and kid-weary and my nose keeps bleeding, but I'm going to post here anyway because when I came back I caught up on all my blog reading, and a couple of things stood out to me.

The first was a post by Dean Wesley Smith where he suddenly gets all agnostic and says that traditional publishing isn't so bad after all. (I guess that's true provided you can find a publisher willing to give you a decent contract--the only problem is that Smith can't.) This was written to agree with a post by Nathan Bransford, who seems to have decided that this is a good thing to harp on.

The other is a post by Robert Bidinotto (via PV) on the many, many advantages of self-publishing.

Compare and contrast! What bothers me about this whole, "Hey, guys, let's not harsh on traditional publishing; it's a big world and there's room for all kinds of people in it" thing is that it implies that the many, many advantages of self-publishing don't exist. Everything's groovy, everyone's special, everyone's children are above average.

Bullshit. There are serious issues with traditional publishers, not the least of which is that many of the industry leaders are being sued by the federal government and several state governments. Which happened because they looked at the future and couldn't see themselves in it. That is A Bad Sign.

One of the reasons why I liked Amanda Hocking's thought process about accepting a traditional-publishing contract was that she was very aware of what she was risking by doing so. She wrote (emphasis added):

[L]et's be honest - if I self-published the Watersong series on my own, I could probably make $2 million within a year or two. Five years tops. I am fully aware that I stand a chance of losing money on this deal compared to what I could make self-publishing.

She also noted that she probably wouldn't have taken the deal if she didn't have the safety net of several self-published books. She's not deluding herself that it's all going to be puppies and ice cream and unicorns: She's got enough income from self-publishing and her advance was large enough that everything could go to hell with her publisher and she'd still be fine.

Does that describe you? Does it describe most writers?

What troubles me about talking about traditional publishing vs. self-publishing like it's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other is that the people who will actually believe that are the new writers who know nothing about the industry. And new, non-celebrity writers are the most likely to not get anywhere: They are inherently undesirable to agents and publishers because they have no track record, and they're not the ones who will be getting the decent contracts.

I was a "new" writer when I started. I spent some six years trying to get something published traditionally. And I had absolutely nothing to show for it in the end--not a single thing. It was a complete waste of my time and money (and yes, it does cost money). And I've been writing professionally since 1992.

I decided to self-publish in Christmas of 2010. By January 2011, I had a book up. It was kind of a mess, and I had to fix a bunch of stuff, but fix it I did, and it now looks pretty good.

It's a year-and-a-half after I put up my first book, and I'll have another book up in a couple of days. So: Two books down in a quarter of the time it took me to get absolutely nothing done in the traditional model. Yeah, I haven't had big sales (nor did I expect them), but I have had some, which is better than having absolutely nothing.

And I have a book out. That's not just good for the old ego--since I have that book out, I can leverage it to sell my second book. Trang is a tool in my toolbox that I didn't have before. I'm in a better position now than when I released Trang a year-and-a-half ago, and my position will only improve as I release Trials and then Tribulations.

Hopefully that won't take six friggin' years, but even if it does, it will be six years that produce four books, not six years with absolutely nothing to show for them.

The thing is, as a new writer, even if you have your sights set on being traditionally published, you should skip the damned agents and self-publish! Again, look at Hocking--hell, look at the example Bransford cites as proof that it's all One Love in the world of publishing. The traditional process did absolutely nothing for these people. They got their contracts by self-publishing.

Self-publishing is productive. When you self-publish, you produce books. These books have value in the market--maybe not a lot of value, but still a lot more value than a fistful of complimentary and conflicted rejection letters. These books will sell your other books. These books will get you a contract, if that's what you want.

The rejection letters where people talk about how much they're looking forward to reading your book when it comes out? Amusing or irritating, depending on your mood, but totally worthless.

I'm back!

I'm back from the vacay--kind of exhausted right now, but anyway. Tomorrow I have the niece, but Wednesday I should be able to get the e-books up. I got the proof for the paper edition of Trust when I came back today and approved it.

Oh, honestly, Goodreads

So, you know how I was going to do a giveaway on Goodreads as soon as I got that cover problem sorted out?

Well, they're not going to sort it out. They can't possibly do that. I am, however, welcome to do a giveaway on Goodreads using the cover that got me my one and only one-star review. And to promote a giveaway that is sure to get me many more one-star reviews by people who feel mislead about the book's contents, I am very welcome to buy an ad campaign on Goodreads!

Ahem. Customer Service 101: DO NOT ask someone to give you their money in the EXACT SAME E-MAIL in which you tell them you don't intend to help them out. You have to give to get, got it?

Honestly. I see a Web site that has two major potential sources of revenue. #1 Advertising campaigns, which are bought by publishers and self-published authors, and #2 e-books sold on the site. If they can't update my cover (and not for nothing, but some people spend hundreds of dollars on custom art--and Goodreads is saying, No, you can't use that for promotions? You have to use the crappy placeholder art that didn't work, so you changed it?), what are the chances that they are going to effectively address my concerns if I purchase advertising from them or list a book for sale on their site and there's a problem?

So, yeah, long story short--not doing a giveaway on Goodreads. Sorry about that.

Your very own honeyguide

Jaye Manus has a great post on the competition among books. Obviously, there's a hell of a lot of books out there, so how are you going to stand out?

Well, as Jaye points out, you really aren't competing with all those books:

You might have written the very best ghost story in the history of the world, but if the reader is looking for a how-to book on plumbing, your ghost story will go unnoticed. Even if the reader can’t find the right how-to book, you’re still out of luck. They want plumbing advice, not ghosts. The how-to book is NOT your competition.

So, the key is to identify your actual competition, i.e., books like yours, and then start hustling.

I agree completely, and I would add that, once you find your actual competition, you should stop thinking of them as competition.

Think of them as honeyguide birds and yourself as a honey badger (seriously, click on the link and watch that video, it's awesome). Honeyguide birds are actually more than one kind of bird, but they all eat honey and other bee products. That's a lot easier to do if some other honey eater has ripped open the hive first, so they find hives and then lead other animals to them.

Terrific, huh? It's a symbiotic relationship--everybody gets more honey. Well, except the bees, who do kind of lose out in this scenario.

Readers who like your kind of book, however, are going to benefit. And, yeah, that's where I'm going with this analogy: Let's say you write Stephen King-like horror novels. So you market them to people who like Stephen King--he is your honeyguide! The readers benefit; you benefit.

Does Stephen King benefit? Well, maybe not, because he's been around for a while and has probably already saturated his market. But it's not going to hurt Stephen King--this isn't a parasitic relationship--because people can read Stephen King's books waaaaay faster than he can write them. He can saturate his market audience-wise--he can find every one who likes his kind of book. But he can't saturate it book-wise.

Even after he's eaten his fill of honey, there's some left for you.

Follow your passion...how, exactly?

A couple of interesting articles in the Wall Street Journal today about choosing to start a small business. Both are focused on the question, Should you follow your passion? And both note that there's not a simple yes/no answer.

The first article was written by a reporter who decided to start teaching tennis, a sport he loves. Unfortunately, it turns out that a lot of the people you teach tennis to don't actually love it--especially kids who are being forced to take the lessons. So....

When I was offered another newspaper job, I took it. I now understand that for me a dream job must feature creative tension and commitment. I'd rather be yelled at by an editor who cares about the quality of a story than ignored by a student who doesn't care about tennis.

The second article is more analytical (emphasis added):

People thrive when they find the work challenging, feel recognized for their abilities and have control over how they fill their time, [Professor Cal Newport] says. Adjusting the work to maximize those factors will rekindle passion better than matching your job to a pre-existing inclination.

Sometimes you can also discover new aspects of the job that you're passionate about. Mr. [Josh] Frey[, who started a baking business and was unhappy,] realized a lot of what he had enjoyed about working in a bakery had nothing to do with baking, such as connecting with people. So he saw that he could refocus the business and still be passionate about it.

He moved into an area that promised better and more reliable profits: promotional items and corporate gifts. He also began cherry-picking the parts of the job he liked and discarding the ones he didn't.What's more, he tapped into his love of mentoring with a side business that teaches entrepreneurs how to launch a career in the promotional-products industry. "I've never felt so aligned with what I'm doing," Mr. Frey says.

Of course he still bakes, and the author of the first story still plays tennis. And a career coach in the second story suggests people try "pursuing their passion part-time.... That way, they don't have to depend on it to pay the bills and don't risk losing their love to the daily grind."

I think this is all good advice, and it's important to remember that there is no one right way to go about being a writer.

I DIY with self-publishing. But I DIY with all sorts of things. I replace my own toilets. I do my own landscaping. I make my own lotion.

Why? Because I love it. My sister and I joke about it: If you're a little bit of a control freak and a little bit cheap, you will DIY everything you possibly can.

But I know other self-published writers who hire everything out. They're not stupid about it--they don't throw great gobs of money at the nearest flim-flam artist or anything. But they'd rather pay to have someone format their e-books than do it themselves. And that's totally fine. In both cases, we're cherry-picking the parts of the job we like, just like that former baker up there.

There are people like me who are going to be writing books from here on out. But there are people who like their day jobs very much, thank you, and also enjoy writing, so they'll crank out fewer books or write short stories or whatever. Once upon a time that was kind of a problem--publishers didn't want someone who just had one book in them. Now, who cares? Write what you like, switch genres, do fiction and nonfiction--it's all good. The work may be more difficult to market, but it's not like you get blackballed and your writing never sees the light of day, which was how things worked before.

It's so much more flexible nowadays. And I think in some ways that's disconcerting--after all, when that one fellow figured out that he didn't want to be a baker, that was probably pretty upsetting. It also means that there's no blueprint--you don't lock-step your way through steps 1-6 and voila! You are happy! But life doesn't work that way in the first place.

Progress report

I have finished proofing the large-print edition, entering text corrections and the art-corrections-that-cause-more-art-problems to the large-print edition, and entering text corrections for the regular edition. Then I uploaded the files for the regular edition to CreateSpace! Whoo!

Progress report

Some progress and some prioritizing.

I read through half the large-print edition--unfortunately, because it got laid out twice, there are art mistakes, and art mistakes are very time-consuming to fix properly. After taking a look at the calendar and my planned trip, I decided that the thing to do was to prioritize getting the regular edition and the e-books out ASAP, and to fine-tune the large-print layout last of all. I also realized that, because of the way the books are formatted, it would be easier to take the e-book text from the regular edition rather than from the large-print edition.

So, I input the text corrections to the first half of the regular edition, and the text and art corrections to the first half of the large-print edition, but I didn't bother to fix the new problems caused in the large-print layout by inputting the art corrections--again, I'll fix those later. (I'll probably have to print the whole thing out again--ugh.) Since the fixes to the regular edition were just text corrections and didn't screw up the layout, those chapters are good to go!

Progress report

I'm done laying out the large-print edition! Whoo-hoo! Barely under the page limit, too--with the front matter, 814 pages.

My upper back has really been bothering me, which has been happening every time I do a layout (and has been exacerbated this time around by a couple of landscaping projects I've been doing). I've been thinking that it's because my monitor is just not that big, and doing a layout requires really peering at the text, so I tend to hunch forward. When I get a new computer, I'll get a bigger monitor, but that probably won't happen until next year. Today I realized that I could also just move the screen closer to me--that's helped some.

Why it's good to look beyond Amazon for marketing

Both David Gaughran and Lindsay Buroker have guest posts from Edward Robinson about how Amazon calculates the rankings on its popularity lists. Both posts are worth reading, and if you're really interested, you should also read Robinson's many blog posts on the subject.

The gist? Amazon has changed its popularity rankings so that you get less of a boost from giving away free books via its exclusivity program. Also, cheaper books may get less of a boost than more expensive ones.

I was wondering if something like this would happen, because one of the things Amazon does very well indeed is enable book discovery. Compromising that to promote books from its own or allied publishing houses (like Barnes & Noble did for Macmillan) or to promote its exclusivity program is the kind thing that can really backfire with consumers. If Amazon's book suggestions are perceived as being unreliable or junky or skewed by some corporate agenda, consumers will just ignore them--and maybe if they're really annoyed, they'll go find another Web site that makes better suggestions.

Authors, I think, need to get wise to the big picture here: AMAZON'S ALGORITHMS CHANGE. They may change in a way that helps you, they may change in a way that hurts you, but they have always been changing and they will always be changing.

Focusing your attention on gaming the Amazon system is, at best, a short-term strategy. Expecting Amazon's algorithms to take care of all your marketing needs is a really bad idea.

You don't want to be like those companies that become utterly dependent on their Google ranking, and then Google tweaks the algorithm, and their entire business collapses.

And there's no need for it. If Amazon is helping you right now, that's great--it works and it's free and it's really easy. I can totally see why people get into the habit of thinking that this is the only thing they need to do.

But if you don't diversify, the rug can get pulled out from under you in an instant. If you don't make the effort to try out other forms of marketing, then if Amazon's algorithms stop helping you, you will know nothing useful. You will have no Plan B.