Help Selling More Books – Write More, Publish More, Sell More

Help Selling More Books – Write More, Publish More, Sell More

That’s the trick, isn’t it? If we write more, we can publish more, and then we can sell more. I publish roughly 2-3 novels per year, plus a couple of short stories, plus anywhere from 9-14 novellas. This year, I will finish up with eight novellas, a couple of short stories, and two novels. Somewhere between 375,000 and 400,000 words of published fiction, plus around 100,000 words of blogging. I don’t count FB posts, but I do count the stuff I write here, because it’s written with intent and forethought, and usually some level of narrative thread. So close to half a million words, or a little more if we take into account the 60K of Black Knight #7 that I trashed, and the 25K of TECH Ops that I’m still working on.

That’s a lot of words. That’s what it takes for me to make a living. I don’t make any kind of extravagant living, but I am the wage-earner for my wife and I. That word count allows me to do that. It also allows me the time to work on Falstaff Books projects, and we will probably end the year producing 20 titles, every one of which I had some level of direct hand in producing.

So the question I get from a lot of writers is “How do you write that much?” Well, here’s how, and I have to give credit where due to Dean Wesley Smith, who wrote some very good blog posts in 2010-11 on a workmanlike approach to writing, and how much you could produce in a year if you just write 1,000 words per day. I shoot for a little more than that, but I also don’t write every single day.

But here’s my basic approach.

  1. Divide and Conquer – I typically work on two projects at once, one main project and one side project. This lets me have a palette cleanser project that I can fiddle with when I need to let my lizard brain work out a plot problem.
  2. Break Down the Project – My chapters are almost always 2,000 words long, so I shoot for one chapter per day on my main project. When I’m working a novella, that means that working Monday-Friday for three weeks gets me to 30,000 words. That’s the average length of my novellas, with a couple thousand words for an epilogue. Since I usually get to the last chapter and binge right through to “THE END,” I write a novella in three weeks. That’s a pretty relaxed pace. Then I use the 1K/day on my side projects to do things outside the Bubba or Harker universes, my novels, or work-for-hire stuff. I’m currently working on some work-for-hire serialized stuff for a client, and they want 5K per part. So that’s one week per serialized chunk.
  3. Don’t Kill Myself – I mentioned that I write 3K per day, and I consider that a pretty relaxed pace. I can do 5K/day, but it’s tiring. I could train myself to write more, and faster, but I’m in this for the long haul, and I have yet to meet more than a couple of people who can do 5K/day for more than a year or two and make it consistently good. That’s pretty important to me – being able to do this for the long term. I’m seven years into my fiction writing career, and 11 years into my professional writing career, so I know what I can do consistently to make the words come out tight and requiring as little polish as possible. I want to turn in clean copy, and about 3-4K/day is my maximum sustainable pace for that. Much faster, and I spend so much time scrapping shit and rewriting that I am better off just writing slower in the first place.
  4. Let Life Happen – I mentioned above that my output this year wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be. I had some months where I didn’t write much, and it was a struggle to get 2K per day. That happens, especially for those of us with depression, anxiety, bipolar (that’s me!) or other mental health issues. Or physical health issues, if you have those. Or family issues. Shit happens, and sometimes you have to deal with that. Hopefully if it shits all over your writing productivity, you either still have a day job, or you have enough of a backlist selling through to carry you. But you can’t freak out about that shit, or you’ll just create a whirlwind of doom and never write anything.
  5. Hop Around a Little – I write four series currently, or more like 3.5, since the Harker books and the Shadow Council books are so intertwined. But that keeps my ADD appeased, with the occasional bone thrown to my distractions by doing something like Amazing Grace (which is out for preorder now). I would likely make more money if I just hammered out Harker novels as fast as I could. But I’m not in this just for the cash. Yes, this is how I make my living. Yes, I need this income to pay my bills. But as I keep saying, I am in this for the long haul. Amazing Grace could turn into a Hallmark movie series, for all I know. What I know about that book is that while writing it may mean that it takes me two years to finish the Harker plot Quest for Glory, I wrote a book I absolutely love and think is the best thing I’ve ever produced. That will pay me more dividends in the long run than jamming out another Harker novella or novel.

That’s what I do. That’s how I work, and how I make a living in this business. Am I killing it like some of the newer self-published Urban Fantasy authors? No. Am I still going to be here in five years? Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of people flame out in the past seven years, and I’ve found the method that lets me continue to produce at a reasonable pace and not burn myself out. You’ve got to find what works for you, but for me, writing for 3-4 hours each day gets the bills paid, as long as I’m doing all the other stuff that goes into being a full-time writer, more than half of which has nothing to do with actually writing.

Remember, if you find these posts helpful, feel free to buy one of my books as a “Thank You,” or you can join my Patreon and pledge your undying support!

Ladies and Gentlemen, Simon Cowell!

Not really. But I have begin referring to myself as “Simon Cowell of small press publishing.” If you’d really like to see why, you can go check out the finalists of Son of a Pitch, an online query contest that gets things read by actual publishers. My pal Samantha, she of the menopausal superhero novels asked me to participate, so I read the 20 finalist queries, and the 250-word samples they submitted. Out of the finalists, who had been winnowed down through two previous rounds of judging, I requested three submissions.

Despite the rapidly growing size of our Falstaff Books catalog, I’m not an easy sell. Let’s be honest, most stuff gets rejected before it gets to me. We have multiple acquiring editors reading submissions at Falstaff, and they have to like it before it gets referred to me. Then I have to read the book and like it enough to put it into one of our very limited novel-length publications slots. Then I have to converse with the author and come to terms with them on a contract. Then they’ve sold a book.

But I’m the bottleneck. Probably 80% of submissions that come in are rejected before they get to me. I take less than half of what comes through our acquiring editors, and only about a third of what comes to me directly.

Yes, there are way to bypass the acquiring editors (the slush pile). Here’s how – meet me face to face and pitch me. I do open pitch sessions at any convention that will let me, but the downside to getting face time to pitch a publisher at a con is that it’s in front of a room full of people and you get my critique of your pitch right there on the spot. If you can stand it, come to Atomacon in November, I’m doing a 9AM Saturday morning pitch session. So now you have to pitch me in front of people, AND I’ll be pissy because it’s early.

I won’t really. By 9AM most day’s I’ve already been working for at least an hour.

We did one of these at Congregate in July, and one of the authors there is in the queue for a contract already. So it works.

But I’m not nice. I try not to be rude, but I really do channel my inner Simon Cowell. Now I never watched him on American Idol, but I’ve seen him on America’s Got Talent, and Simon is the tough judge. Not because he’s a dick, although he puts on that front to attract viewers. No, he’s the tough judge because he’s in the business of making money. He wants to turn records into dollars, just like I want to turn books into dollars. So if you show up with a half-assed pitch, or trying to pitch an unfinished book, I’m going to bounce you off the stage as fast as Simon will. But if you show up with something that you’ve obviously put a lot of work into, and you’ve researched our press, and you’ve done all the right things before you get there, then I’ll probably ask you for a submission.

Then the book has to be ready to submit, and it has to be awesome, but those are steps 2-27 of selling a book. First you have to get past Simon. And only about a third of the 20% that actually gets to me make it to contract.

And I accept a LOT more books than most publishers. So get your shit ready before you submit!

Help Selling More Books – Write More, Publish More, Sell More

Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

I wrote a couple of posts early in this series about how to build a mailing list with Incentivized and Organic Subscribers, and all that stuff remains true. If you missed them, the first part is here, and the second one is here. This won’t be about the philosophical elements of making a newsletter, this will be about the nuts and bolts, the mechanics, and what I personally do with my mailing lists to monetize them. Some of this is stuff I’ve gleaned from the internet, some of it I’ve come up with on my own, and fair chunk of it is from notes I took in a long conversation with my friend Stuart Jaffe. If you want to read some kickass adventure or supernatural mystery stuff, check him out. And if you sign up for his email list, you’ll get some free shit! Eric Asher is another person I use for a resource on promos and mailing lists, and he’s also got a deal or two running right now.

But how do I deal with my mailing list(s)? Well, that’s been the subject of a lot of thought over the past few days, as I’ve recently relocated my mailing list from Mailchimp to Mailerlite, because for the number of subscribers that I have (currently about 3,600 across four lists) Mailerlite is $20/month, where Mailchimp was $50, and going to $75 when I reach 5K. So that’s not an insignificant savings, especially given what I have in the marketing budget most months, which is frequently dryer lint. By the way, if you click on those links and sign up for Mailerlite, you get a discount and I get a kickback, so if this is helpful, that’s one way to show the love.

As I mentioned, I have four mailing lists, three of which are active, and one I’m just getting moving (slowly) on. The lists are – my newsletter, the Falstaff Books newsletter, and the ARC team for me & Falstaff. Yes, those links are the signup forms for the linked newsletters. Yes, you can get a metric ton of free ebooks just for signing up to all of those email lists and then auto-dropping. I mean, by my rough reckoning, if you signed up for all the lists that I’ve shown you here, you would get six complete novels, two short stories, one sampler anthology, and one anthology. All for free!

But how does it work? How do I get people onto the lists, and how do I deal with the lists once I’ve got them there. Okay, here’s what I do. It’s more than most people, and scale it back to fit your productivity, but remember that I release at least one new product every month, and sometimes more, plus I have a publishing company releasing at least two new books each month, usually more. So I have a lot of shit to notify people about. But here’s the plan.

1) Consistency – I’m a flake, and anyone that has worked with me knows it. I know it, and I also know that I can’t do the things I need to do if I’m flaking out all over the place. So I have an event set up in my calendar to write a newsletter every Wednesday. It’s also when I write these posts, so it kinda just gives me a couple hours in publisher headspace to do this kind of stuff. I do a John Hartness newsletter one week, then a Falstaff newsletter the following week. If for some reason I don’t have anything new coming out that week, the week before, or the week after, I skip a week. That doesn’t happen very often, between appearances, book releases, and audiobook releases, I have something hitting the virtual streets almost every week, so there’s something to talk about. But consistency is critical. If you go too long without sending out a newsletter, people forget about you. And obscurity is our enemy. So I send out a newsletter about every two weeks for each of my major newsletters. The ARC team is a whole different story, and one that I’m still working on. I’ll keep you posted.

2) The Funnel – This is what I learned from Stuart, setting up my automation. I know he didn’t invent the idea. He’s smart, but not that smart. But he was kind enough to take the time to sit down and explain the whole thing to me. So here’s what happens when someone signs up for my email newsletter, and this is another place in which Mailerlite has Mailchimp beat, hands down. This shit was so much easier to set up on Mailerlite that it wasn’t even funny.

Step 1 – Janet signs up for the newsletter. Janet gets a confirmation email with a link in it directing her to confirm that she’s a human and really wanted to sign up for this crap. Once she does that, she is sent to an Instafreebie page. Instafreebie is a website that automates ebook giveaways and integrates them with mailing lists. It lets me do all this without actually having to sit down and send people ebooks. I use it for all my mailing list giveaways. Yes, there is a referral link buried in that link, too, so if you sign up for Instafreebie and upload a book, I get a discount. Just assume that I have put referral links in every link in here, because I probably have. It doesn’t add anything to your cost, and if I am recommending that you sign up for a service, might as well get them to pay me for it, right?

Step 2 – But anyway, Janet goes to Instafreebie and gets her free ebook. Then the automation starts rolling. In a few days, Janet will get a second email, with another Instafreebie link, this one to a different free short story. She doesn’t have to sign up for anything extra, she doesn’t have to get the story. But it’s free, and it’s a story I like, so why not give it away?

Step 3 – Seven days later, Mailerlite runs an if/then sequence. If Janet opened the email, then she gets an email inviting her to join the Falstaff Books email list. This will get her two more free ebooks, plus another set of notifications. If she didn’t open the email, it will resend, to give her a little reminder to become an active fan and read all my shit (and get more free shit!).

Step 4 – Seven days after that, another step runs. If Janet didn’t open the email a second time, she’s removed from the list. I pay per subscriber, and if people aren’t reading the things I’m sending, then I would rather not pay to keep them around. If they are actively interested and just got busy, they can sign up again and get more free shit all over again. If Janet opened the email the second time it sent, she then gets invited to the Falstaff Books email list. To get more free shit. If she opened the Falstaff Books invite, then she gets another email inviting her to join Stuart’s email list and get his shit for free. Because we all like to work together, and a rising tide lifts all boats. So the more books Stuart sells, the more books I will eventually sell, because we’re all about training people to buy indie and small press books, and love us all. So I like pimping my friends.

If Janet didn’t open the Falstaff Books email, then nothing else happens. I don’t refer only moderately active subscribers to other folks, but I don’t boot them, either. If they’ve opened 2/3 of the emails I send, then I definitely want them around.

That’s the way my funnel is currently set up, and it’s constantly evolving. But I want to draw people in as much as I can, and engage them as much as I can. Those are the initial steps to building a list, signup forms, and creating a funnel to suck them into your loving arms forever.

We’re way over the thousand word limit I try to keep these at, but just a quick note – there’s a new Quincy Harker short story coming out soon, and I’m giving away 100 copies on Instafreebie. You don’t have to sign up for shit, just click this link and you can get a free Harker story. Now, you CAN sign up for the email list while you’re there, but it’s not required. There are 80 or so available as of this writing, so go get some free shit!

Writer Services – What do I do and what am I thinking?

Writer Services – What do I do and what am I thinking?

So you might have missed it, because it isn’t something that I am promoting all that heavily, but I reinstalled the “Writer Services” tab on this site. I have a few skills that people are willing to pay for, but since the use of those skills is illegal in most states, I decided to whore myself out to help people get their books produced instead.

First off, why am I doing this?

There are two reasons. The first is the most obvious – money. I have skills, people are willing to pay for those skills, and they want to pay someone. I think it should be me. Plus, let’s face it, Dragon Con was expensive. Even splitting the room cost with three other people, it’s not cheap. And I have a bunch of other events coming up that will take me out of town, and thus put me in a hotel, in the fall. So that costs money. Book sales are okay, but it hasn’t been the best quarter, and I could use a little extra cushion coming in. So if I can pick up a couple hundred bucks helping people produce good-looking ebooks and print books, I might as well.

The second is that there are a lot of people who want to self-publish, but don’t have the technical skills. It’s not a knock on anyone, it’s just a set of skills that they haven’t learned. I haven’t learned how to wire a house or build a brick wall. They may have learned these things. If I need a house wired, I call an electrician. If they need an ebook built, they call me. So I can help some folks with their ebook creation, make a good-looking product, and get paid in the process. Sounds like a win-win-win to me.

Now – what do I do?

Ebook Formatting

I take a Word document and I turn it into an ePub or .mobi file. EPub is what the world uses for their e-readers, mobi is what the kindle uses. Even if you’re only putting your book into Kindle Unlimited, you should still get an ePub made. You might need it in the future, and you may need it to email to reviewers, Patreon patrons, or just your mom.

I dunno. Maybe your mom really loves her Nook. It could happen.

I use a piece of software called Vellum, and it makes a very nice-looking ebook. Vellum lets me do the nice section breaks and page headers, as well as making nice drop caps at the beginning of chapters and after section breaks.

It also doesn’t take me very long, so I can do this work pretty cheaply. I charge $50 for basic ebook creation. This means it comes to me in MSWord, and I put it out the door as both an ePub file and a mobi file. If you have a bunch of illustrations, need to send me the file in something other than MSWord, or have a file over 150,000 words, we will negotiate a price.

Print Formatting

I use Vellum for print, too. It has four basic sizes that are available, and it makes a nice, basic, clean print book. This isn’t anything fancy, but it’s good for fiction books. I’ve used it on several of our novellas that we produce at Falstaff Books, as well as on my novel Fireheart. If you want something fancy and awesome, go to Clicking Keys. They have a much deeper suite of services, including edits and cover design. They are who I use for any of our books that require special interior formatting. But if you just need a basic book with page numbers and chapter headers and a clean interior design, I’ll do that for $50. If you want me to do both print and ebook formatting at the same time, I’ll do that for $75.

Those are the primary things I’m offering, but if you want more, I can also do newsletter setup, ebook uploads, keyword optimization, and social media setup. Those rates are all on the Writer Services page.

 

What I Don’t Do –

Freelance Editing – I tried it, it was a debacle. I’m a good developmental/story editor, but a shite copy editor. And now that I’m working as a publisher, I’m much more interested in mentoring through that avenue that any other, so if you have the next awesome novel, submit it to Falstaff Books and we’ll take a look at it.

Cover Design – I’m no cover artist. You can tell that from the early Bubba short story covers. I know good cover artists, and I’ll happily recommend them to you. But I ain’t them.

Complex Interiors – If you want a bunch of images, I’m not your guy. If you want chapters, text, and headers, I’m there. But let’s be honest, $50 isn’t getting you eight hours of an InDesign specialist. My services are intended to lend a hand, help people make cool ebooks and print books, and maybe make a few bucks.

 

So that’s the deal. In other news, Falstaff Books has a brand new Patreon! If you love the stuff coming out of the Misfit Toys, you can support us and get previews of ebooks, signed books, stickers, and other cool stuff! Check it out!

New Book Bundle for Halloween and More!

New Book Bundle for Halloween and More!

Hey there! Here’s a badass new book bundle that I’m part of along with some awesome writers including Gail Z. Martin, Mario Acevedo, Dean Wesley Smith, Quincy Allen, Jean Rabe, Kelly Harmon, Stuart Jaffe, and Mindy Klasky. It’s on sale wherever ebooks are sold, and also is available on BundleRabbit!

It includes Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1, and eight other great books for as low as $2.99 for the whole set!

Get your bundle today!

Bump in the Night