With a pin-pin here, and a pin-pin there

Lindsay Buroker had a recent article on using Pintrest. Once again she takes something I would never have considered doing (Pintrest? For a book?) and notes that with, oh, about 30 seconds of effort you can have a presence on yet-another social media site.

And in one of those serendipitous things, another social-media savvy person I know (who works in the nonprofit sector) linked to this graphic about Pintrest's demographics and how the people on there like to spend money (especially on food, it seems).

The focus on food and the fact that the site clearly skews toward young mothers makes me a little skeptical that it's worth doing for books like mine. (Of course, if I were writing, say, women's literature with recipes, this post would be about how I'm already on Pintrest.) On the other hand, there is Buroker's (eternal, and eternally valid) case that, "I didn’t have to work very hard for those visitors." So I think I will get on there eventually.

Ah--"I didn’t have to work very hard for those visitors." Her lodestone and mine....

Progress report

The roof was completely finished today (and there was much rejoicing). The gutters still have to happen, but I'm assuming that will be done tomorrow, when I'm looking after the kid anyway.

Other than that, it's been a lot of focus on the Trang audiobook this past week (even on days when the roofers couldn't work, I still had to get up at the crack of dawn in case they did come, so writing was just not happening). Audiobook work is a good beta project precisely because it's repetitive and not especially creative, so I can do it when I'm too sleepy or distracted to write. But the downside is that it does get pretty boring after a while, especially because events resulted in my having a whole lot of noise removal to do.

So today I was looking at that pile of files and going, NOOOOO!!!! but I set the timer and did a slog in the theory that it wasn't like I wasn't going to have to do it all later if I didn't get some of it done today. And I completed noise removal on the first half of Chapter 6, so yay for me.

I have a line to re-record there, but I assume gutter replacement is no less noisy than roof replacement, so I'll do that and the fixes on the first five chapters after that work is done.

And I'm going to be very happy to get back to writing, especially because I think I sorted out how to start the book.

The beginnings of later books

One of the things I did with Trust was go to great lengths to make it accessible to someone who hadn't read Trang. Since I haven't been able to write this week, I've put a lot of thought into how to do that with Trials, because the current opening would be of zero interest to someone unfamiliar with the other books, and I wanted to fix that.

It's been surprisingly difficult to work out (although I think I have a fix now), so I've been wondering if it was even worth doing, since it is book three of four--shouldn't people who haven't read the first two books expect to be left behind? But that line of thinking was recently debunked for me by a fellow author. This person is writing a VERY long series, and there was a production glitch with, oh, let's say book #23 that didn't affect the text, so they gave the defective copies away to a random group of people that included me.

It's not necessarily the kind of book I'm interested in, but I'm always on the lookout for presents, so I tried giving it a read. And it reads like this:

MO: Did you hear about Jo?

BO: Jo? You're asking me about Jo?

MO: Well, I thought you had a right to know--Jo is thinking about visiting Akron.

BO: Mother of God!!! Not Akron!

MO: I know it sounds crazy.

BO: Especially now that--he can't be thinking of Akron!

MO: Well....

BO: And--he's not thinking of taking Ko to Akron, is he?

And on it goes. There is never any attempt to explain to the reader the nature of Bo, Mo, Ko, and Jo's relationship, or why going to Akron is such a big deal.

I'm planning to struggle through, but I have to say I'm not optimistic that it will get better for me. Since I'm not enjoying the book now and probably won't be able to, the chances of my buying the first book in the series for someone else are quite slim.

So much for that working as marketing.

In contrast, take Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books. I have read the entire series, and in every one last one O'Brian manages to 1. tell you who the major characters are, and 2. orient you to the world of the 18th-century British Navy.

By book #18, did I need this information? No, I did not. In fact, I'd skim or skip those sections. Did that put me off the books? Oh, hell, no. I was hooked. It didn't matter to me if I had to jump over most of pages 3-4 to find out what those two were up to!

Likewise the Vorkosigan Saga--when, say, Miles' cousin Ivan gets introduced, I'll breeze right over the part that explains who he is, exactly, because I already know. I know it because I've read all the Vorkosigan books, so clearly, I don't resent it.

My point is, you never know how someone is going to get into your books. (And even with series I really like, often I'll let a year or two lapse between books, so refreshers are welcome.) A paragraph I skim over hardly even qualifies as a minor annoyance. Feeling like I've walked into a party and no one will give me the time of day, because they're all so excited to be talking to each other again? That's a lot more irritating.

Progress report

The roofers finished the roof today, although there's still gutters and some miscellany to do. I listed to the MP3 files through Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook and found some fixes.

I also realized that I can't really create a final MP3 file, because different audio- and podiobook outlets have different requirements. It was worth generating these MP3s so that I could give them a final listen with earphones, but given how many different versions I'm going to have to generate. there's no point in doing more than a spot-check of the MP3 files I actually release.

Progress report: Pay-attention-to-that-language-advisory edition

The roofers are here! The cats are freaking! I tried doing noise removal on the first half of Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook, but the banging is just too much--I'm going to try listening to the MP3 files on my earphones instead.

Oh, and I got another 1-star review on Amazon by someone who quit after the first page upon seeing profanity. At least 1. he did not insult me, and 2. he acknowledges that he should have noticed the language warning. But he also says that he "read the blurb up through 'Heinlein.'" Um--where does "Heinlein" appear, exactly?

(I actually do like me some Robert Heinlein, and it is social sci-fi, but I hate Starship Troopers, and I know a lot of so-called Heinlein fans are actually Starship Troopers fans. Which means that they don't like books with actual stories in them, so I assume they wouldn't like Trang. Or pretty much anything else Heinlein wrote.)

I do honestly think people who don't read a book have no standing to review it (not just MY books--every book, and play, and movie, and song, and piece of visual art. The sad thing is, there are "cultural critics" who strongly disagree), but I did not report this guy's review. Mainly because he's a lot less infuriatingly sanctimonious, but also because, once again, I think it will help ward away the prudes and attract the literate.

Progress report: Compression edition

The weather remained unchanged, so I was able to finish re-recording the messed-up lines in Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook.

And then I compressed it. Have I ever explained dynamic range compression? No, I have not, and that's because I'm not entirely sure what it is. Here's the Wikipedia article--it's full of terms like "side-chaining" and "attack and release" and "flux capacitator," so maybe you can understand it, but I can't. I just set my compression tool to what ACX tells me to and let 'er rip.

My guess from working with it is that dynamic range compression basically does what it says: If you imagine a range of sounds from very quiet ones to really loud ones, compression adjusts all those sounds so that they're all at medium level of loudness. That's helpful in getting rid of clipping and fixing any places where your voice gets timid. It also just generally helps keep the volume constant, so that nothing's inaudible but nobody's ears get blown out.

Compression is less helpful with breath sounds, which it makes louder. That's why you always do your compression before you do your noise removal.

A quick note about January and Trust

So, since I enrolled Trang in KDP Select, I had one set of free days in late December and another set a few days ago. As I've mentioned, I have given away scads of copies of Trang.

That's all well and good, but it's not like I can make money giving away free copies, right? In my accounting, free copies are not tracked and don't count.

But sold copies count. How has giving away so many copies of Trang affected sales of Trust?

Well, they've had quite the impact! We're still not talking huge numbers here, but in January alone I sold 85% as many copies of Trust as I had in the last six months of 2012 (Trust came out in June). And that percentage is probably a hair smaller than it should be, since presumably some of December's sales happened after the late-December giveaways.

But of course I lost revenue on sales of Trang, right? Actually, it's been a good month for Trang sales--not as good as Trust sales, but good. (Let's hear it for the also-bots!)

Of course, if I make Trang permanently free, then I'll completely lose any chance to make revenue off that book, and as it sells more, that becomes a tougher call. On the other hand, all this is happening because Trang had free days! So I'm still confident that free is the way to go.

This makes me laugh, but not in a good way

PV linked to this article, about how Amazon's 70% growth in e-book sales is actually really bad news for the company and e-book sales in general. In fact, as Edward Grant pointed out, once again double-digit growth in e-book sales has magically becomes a reduction! 

Got that? SEVENTY PERCENT GROWTH is reason to swig down a bottle of antifreeze. I'm sure Jeff Bezos will get right on that. After all, remember what a 34% growth rate looks like? So sad....

Meanwhile, over at Publishers Weekly, publishers are arguing that a 5% growth rate in the sales of paper books is fantastic!!! (OK, fine, it is actually a nice number for a mature industry.)

Having worked in publishing, I know that many people in it are not great at math. But I would think that even my fellow English majors would realize that there's a HUGE difference between a 70% rate of growth and a 5% rate of growth, that one segment of the market is growing much faster than the other (helpful hint: the one with the bigger number is growing more), and (stay with me here) growth in a market is not a decline.

Pigs fly! And Amazon releases sales info!

Here's some FASCINATING news: Amazon released a teeny, tiny bit of information about e-book sales! (Via PV.) OMG! This is especially exciting to the people in Hell, who also received a glass of ice water.

What did Amazon say? That e-book sales increased 70% over the past year!

So, here's the score so far on e-book growth in 2012:

Amazon: 70% increase

Publishers: 34% increase

Barnes & Noble: 13% increase

Just looooook at those numbers. Looooook at the big fat gaps in growth rates.

Look askance at any projection that relies on just one of those growth rates.

A good link about editors

Kris Rusch has a good post on editors--what kind you actually need, what kind you can probably replace with insightful beta readers. I've done a couple of posts on the subject, too. She talks about having a proofreader go over your layout after a copy editor goes over your manuscript--I've done fairly well by laying out my book first and then having a single person do both jobs at once. Saves money, anyway.

Progress report

It's raining today--hard enough that the roofers couldn't work, but not so hard as to create a lot of noise. So I figured I'd better record while I could. I recorded Chapter 7 of the Trang audiobook, the warning for Chapter 1, and a quick fix of a flub I had come across while looking for something else on Chapter 4. I also re-recorded enough of the flubs in Chapter 6 to divide it into two halves--the first half I can work on without re-recording, but the second half will have to wait for another quiet day, because I'm bushed.

There's a person in my Meetup group who does a lot of voice work, and she suggested that it's a good idea to stand while you read. I'd already found that it's easier to read chapters if the microphone is high and you have to sit up, so I thought that sounded like worthwhile advice and did that for Chapter 7 today. I don't know that it's actually going to make me louder--that pretty much is handled by input volume and compression--but it meant less restarts because the chair made noise, and I think it's easier to stay well-placed at the microphone that way.

The bad old days

The Passive Voice has this link to a post by a writer who wasted five years of his life and career with a literary agency, but who still thinks getting a literary agent is a really good idea.

(Think about that one. "I wasted five years of my life shooting heroin. You should totally try it--it's the best!" ETA: OK, now he's getting sucked into the PV comments and hopefully is beginning to realize that There Is Another Way. Run to the light, Scott! Run to the light!)

The thing that really makes me wince about his post is that he has a little pep talk about how writers should feel free to contact their agents about stuff:

[W]e writers usually are introverts, and the idea of bothering anyone (especially someone that promised to make us rich and famous), is just too nerve-racking an idea to consider.

What if I said something that ruined everything? What if I make them change their minds? Our creative minds will reel with horror possibilities that could all occur because of one simple phone call or e-mail.

OK. Do you know why people think that you risk total rejection every time you contact a traditional publisher or agent to ask what's going on?

Because it's true. Or at least it was when I was doing it.

How true was it? Well, when I was first submitting Trang, I submitted it to a large sci-fi publishing house that didn't require an agent. Thinking about it later, I decided that I didn't want to submit it to them after all--it was too niche for them. I knew that big publishing houses took forever, and I didn't feel like waiting years for what was basically guaranteed to be a form rejection. Under the unwritten rule of traditional publishing, I couldn't possibly submit my book to more than one publishing house at a time--only agents were allowed such a privilege. As a lowly author, I would need a rejection from this publishing house before I could submit Trang to another.

So I sent the publishing house a letter saying, I'd like to have a decision on my book.

I got my form rejection shortly thereafter.

I should note that my letter was perfectly polite--publishing is a small world, and I didn't want to get a reputation as a scary crank. But, as I knew it would be, a simple, polite request was treated with extreme prejudice, and I got my rejection.

There is so much wrong with that story, isn't there?

I seriously doubt anyone at that publishing house ever even read Trang--the letter was a lot shorter. But the letter nonetheless gave them something everyone in traditional publishing is looking for--a reason to reject a book. Remember, traditional publishing is no ordinary industry: It is an industry forged in an environment of scarcity. That makes it extremely risk-adverse.

Which is a huge problem for you the writer, since you basically are the risk. That's why you get treated like crap: Chances are, you're career kryptonite.

Why would you want that? Why? When I hear people say, "I finished my first book, and I'm sending it out to agents," I want to throw my body in between them and the danger, the way you would if a small child ran past you toward a busy street. I yammer on about how you'll be in a better position to negotiate if you self-publish first; what I'm thinking is, Nooooooo!!!!! Don't do it! Noooooo!!!!

As Laura Resnick writes in the PV comments:

The problem [with agents] is not specific individuals whom you can readily avoid by taking down their names.... The problem is the business model–and the sh*t the writers keep putting up with from agents as the “normal” s.o.p. of the biz....

Thoughts on targeting ads

As I mentioned, the latest Facebook ad campaign was less efficient than the one before--I had a lot of people clicking who didn't download the book, unlike the last time.

So, how did I target differently? And why do I think it was so much less efficient?

The last time, I targeted two groups: Science-fiction fans who liked stuff I thought was similar to mine, and Kindle owners. It will tell you how naturally adept I am at this that the group that I didn't think to target until the last minute and that I basically targeted by accident, the Kindle owners, responded the most to the ad.

This time around I targeted Kindle owners and many more science-fiction fans. I got many more responses from the sci-fi crowd. Unfortunately, as I've noted, overall that response was more clicks than downloads.

I can't determine which group responded which way, but I'm going to guess that the Kindle people did more of the downloading, and the sci-fi people did more of the looky-looing.

Why? Well, to my way of thinking, the average sci-fi fan is, you know, interested in science fiction. So when they hear of a new book, they go check it out.

How do they check it out? They click (and I pay).

Then once they get to the Amazon page, they see that, yeah, if you've got a Kindle, that book's free. But does Joe Sci-Fi Fan on Facebook actually own a Kindle? Maybe, but maybe not--he'd click anyway, because he's interested in sci-fi.

If Joe doesn't have a Kindle, well, then Trang is $13.99! Oy! That's a pretty penny for a book you've never heard of by an author you don't know! Maybe Joe should get a Kindle. Maybe not. Maybe next Christmas? He'll think it over. In the meantime, he's on to other things.

In contrast, Bobby the Kindle User on Facebooks (they are distant cousins, both members of the storied o'Facebook clan) definitely has a Kindle and is able to pick up that book.

What he's not going to do if he's not interested in that kind of book is click on the link. Period. There are a lot of free books on Amazon, and after an initial phase of gobbling up tons of free books, most Kindle users get way more selective--they realize that getting a bunch of free crap still leaves you with a bunch of crap.

In fact, that greater selectivity probably contributes to looky-looing from the Kindle users as well--Bobby likes sci-fi, decides to check the book out, and then looks at the EIGHTY BILLION unread sci-fi novels on his Kindle and says, Never mind.

But I do think that it's likely that most of the looky-loos came from the sci-fi side. I think the difference between the two campaigns supports that hypothesis, and logically it seems to make sense.

Looking ahead to when I make Trang free everywhere, the nice thing is that you can target different retail populations on Facebooks. I don't know how this works for other online advertising platforms, like Project Wonderful or Google AdWords, but Facebook's targeting is extremely precise. You name the group--Nook users, Smashwords fans, even Sony Reader users (both of them!)--and you can pick it out and market just to it.

Progress report

I finished editing Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook--uf. The sucker is almost 50 minutes long! I'm definitely going to have to split it into two for a podcast! Not shockingly, my reading toward the end of the chapter is mighty mumbly.

The roofers are coming tomorrow and will be here all week. Which is a very good thing, but it also means I'll be getting up at the crack of dawn and there's going to be a lot of ambient noise...oy. We'll see if anything gets done.

Obscenity, thou heaven-born maid!

So, we were discussing that stupid review by that sanctimonious idiot who didn't read the book description, and now that I've calmed down a little I think I'm OK with it staying up. I'm also totally OK with it getting yanked--the bonehead didn't actually read the book, which I think disqualifies any review. But if Amazon doesn't respond to my request for it to be pulled, I'm not going to push it.

Why not? Because three people already marked it as "helpful," and it's now the "most helpful" critical review. And you know, it IS helpful! If you are too fucking stupid to read the book description and heed the clearly-stated warning about the book's language, that review is going to help you heaps. A review complaining that the book is science fiction and written in English might also help.

If you are sufficiently literate to read the description, that review will give you a good laugh. You might even think, "Ah, so morons don't like this book. I'm not a moron--I like it already!"

I think that's better than moving the warning higher up in the description. I don't want the gist of the description to be Trang: A Novel of Obscenity, Containing Many, Many Very Bad Words. For one thing, despite what that patronizing piece of shit thinks, I did not write the book so that I can use bad words and prove that I am cool, so I don't think it's fair to the book to make the profanity sound like a major theme. For another, I once worked a job where I dealt with the general public, and my experience is that the people who are too dumb to heed a warning sign are also too dumb to heed a really big and obvious warning sign.

I am, however, going to record a language advisory and put it in the first chapter of the Trang audiobook. That strikes me as prudent--people who like to listen to stuff hopefully will process spoken information a little better. Although I'm sure some won't.

(If you're curious, what really frosts my shorts about this is that I feel like I've met people who don't like profanity halfway. I put a warning in there because I don't feel like it's my place to judge a bunch of people I don't know whose attitude toward language differs from mine. And what do I get in return? I get repeatedly insulted by a complete stranger.

Fucking asshole.)

More talk about e-book share

From an article in today's Wall Street Journal about Barnes & Noble's plan to close stores comes some more information by publishers about e-book sales:

Bertelsmann SE & Co.'s Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books, says e-books now make up about 22% of its global sales, up from almost nothing five years ago. The head of a major publishing rival says he expects e-books will be as much as 50% of his total book sales in the U.S. by the end of 2014. Digital books already account for 60% of this publisher's sales of new commercial fiction, a key category for the nation's largest bookstore chain.

Notice how much the percentage of the market that is e-books varies depending on where you sell and what kind of book you sell. Fiction + U.S. = e-books e-books e-books!

Second set of free days: Postmortem

So, the second set of free days is over. On the one hand, it went quite well--two-and-a-half times as many free copies were downloaded as last time, and I got up to #2 on the science fiction:series free list!

On the other hand: Well, let's just say I paid a lot more than two-and-a-half times as much for the Facebook ads!

It's my own fault--I wanted to see what would happen if I really let a campaign run. (I can afford to be dumb with money on occasion.) So I set the budgets and per-click bids high, I broadened the groups that I advertised to, and I never brought down the per-click bid in the course of the campaign.

The result was a LOT of clicks. Wow. Many more clicks than last time.

But fewer of the clickers actually got books--I paid for a whole bunch of looky-loos. (Clicky-cloos?) Before I had many more downloads than clicks, and the volume of downloads tracked the volume of clicks pretty closely, suggesting that last time most people who clicked went on the grab a copy of the book. So I feel comfortable in blaming too-broad targeting: This time around, I managed to reach a lot of people who were interested enough to click, but not interested enough to get the book.

So: Keep your targeting tight--the temptation to broaden it is always there ("Maybe this group will like the book!"), but move slowly and skeptically (unlike meee!) into any area that isn't tried-and-true.

What's the takeaway for me? Since I do intend to have Trang go free, I'm glad to know that I can push the levers and have a result--and now I know which are the more-efficient levers.

Remember my advice to keep the per-click cost as low as possible? Standing by that one. Also, it's interesting to note how much the relative worth of your per-click bid can change. I bid the same amount that I wound up bidding last time, but this time it bought me far more exposure, presumably because there was less post-Christmas advertising to compete with. Likewise, the Goodreads ad was shown to ten times as many people Saturday as Sunday, presumably because more people happened to be advertising Sunday. So, definitely keep close tabs on results and drop your bid if you can.

I have one last free day before Trang gets out of KDP Select, but I'm not going to advertise on Facebook this time--I actually got an ad into BookBub! That surprised me because last time I tried they didn't even reply to me (of course, that was around the holidays, plus I thought something was off with the scheduling calendar), and this time I had the anti-profanity brigade pulling down my overall rating (did you know that if you've been to university, you aren't allowed to cuss?), but they accepted the ad anyway. Maybe that bit of controversy was just what I needed....

Progress report

So today, in keeping with Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook's general theme of being an enormous pain, it took me probably six takes to fix a bad voice match toward the end of the chapter. It's a place where the narration resumes after Shanti's been going off. The idea with Shanti's voice is that she sounds like I do after I've had a couple of beers--I recently watched Better Off Ted (VERY funny), and Shanti sounds surprisingly like Linda, which makes me wonder if that actress had the same idea. Anyway, the problem was that character voice essentially contaminated the narrator's voice, and today, when I haven't been doing Shanti, I could not for the life of me match that voice. I was about to just go ahead and re-record the entire end of the chapter, but instead I decided to try talking through my nose just a little, and that seemed to do the trick. It's not perfect, but it's not glaringly obvious that the line is looped in like it was before.

In any case, it's done (yay!), and I also edited a big hunk of Chapter 6. Which is a loooong chapter....

Halfway through the second set of free days....

So, I got it together earlier this time around, and Trang is up to #3 on the science fiction: series free list on the first day, instead of not getting there until the second. Yay that.

What's going on that's interesting? Well, just about no one is clicking over at Goodreads--there's no question I'll have to let that campaign run for quite a bit longer to use up the pre-pay. Which is fine, actually--I wasn't going to renew the campaign for the full-price book over on Facebook, so I might as well let Goodreads run. The click-through rate is somewhat lower on Goodreads than on Facebook, but the main reason the number of clicks is so much less is that the Goodreads ad has reached about 1,200 people today, while Facebook ad has reached about 140,000 people.

And I got a one-star review on Amazon because of the bad language. The person was shocked! shocked!! shocked!!! that a book described as containing "some really bad language" would contain...some really bad language! It was especially awful because people on other planets would never use bad language--wow, that is something I did not know.

Anyway, I did something I normally would not do and reported the review. Opinion or not liking the book is one thing; ignoring a warning clearly stated in the book description is something else.

For no particular reason, I'm also going to throw in a link to my favorite recent review. And my guest post on cussing.