by john | Jul 25, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books
This is a screen shot of my Hootsuite for a week.
So I’ve mentioned before that I hold an unpopular opinion about social media; that it’s okay to use certain forms of social media as a billboard, just blasting “Buy my shit” tweets out there. For me, that medium is Twitter. I don’t really look at Twitter. I don’t really have time to dig through the hundreds of people I follow to see if there’s anything interesting, and usually they’ve got their Twitter set up to cross-post to Facebook anyway, and I can be snarky in long form there. So I engage with people on Facebook, either on my personal page, my author page, the Falstaff Books page, or in my Facebook Author Group.
Yes, it was a pain in the ass to go back and turn all those into links. And yes, I totally stole the idea of having a Facebook group from Rick Gualtieri. If you haven’t read his Tome of Bill series, you should go buy the omnibus right now (yes, there is an affiliate link buried in this sentence).
But I mainly use Twitter as a billboard, and I use Hootsuite to make that happen. Some folks have asked how exactly I do that, and since I scheduled all my social media for the week today (I’m writing this on Sunday for a Tuesday pub date) I figured I’d just walk y’all through the process.
First I log into Hootsuite. I got the Hootsuite Pro account a long time ago, when it cost $5.99/month. It’s probably more than that now. It’s also worth it to me. The Pro account is what lets me schedule all these posts I’m going to talk to you about. So yeah, it’ll cost you a little money. And no, there is not an affiliate link in that sentence. I don’t have a code for HS.
Then I open my Word document with my pre-written tweets. I have 2-3 tweets written for each book I have out, and whenever I release something new, I write a new one. That way it’s not too much of a pain in the ass to keep on top of it. For example, I just set up the pre-order for Fireheart, so when I scheduled this week’s social media, I wrote a couple of tweets about teens, romance, and dragons. Mostly dragons. But I have a LOT of titles, so I have to prioritize what gets the social media love each week. I’ve guessed that most people spend the most time on Twitter and Facebook (and I have set up Hootsuite so it posts to 5 accounts all at once – my personal Twitter, the Falstaff Twitter, my personal FB, my author page, and the Falstaff FB page) during lunchtime, so the things that I want to push the most heavily I set to tweet from 11AM-2PM Eastern.
I have no metrics to back that up, it’s just when I remember fucking off the most back when I had a day job. But it makes sense. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person eating at my desk most days, so that’s when you feel less bad about trawling social media for interesting shit.
So this week I set up Fireheart posts for noon. That also means that I catch West Coast folks when they’re sitting down with their morning coffee and firing up the fuckoffery. So my newest releases go from 11-2, then I plop in tweets every hour on the hour from 9AM-6PM Eastern, Monday-Saturday. I don’t tweet on Sunday, because that’s the Lord’s day. Nah, I just figure fewer people will see it. I could probably cut Saturday without any ill effects, but I’d have to remember, and by now it’s habit. So I tweet about a John Hartness release ten times every day for six days.
Not all of these are book tweets. I also tweet for people to join my Patreon, sign up for my email list, sign up for my ARC team, and read this site or listen to my podcast. I also have started trying to do at least one tweet per day pimping other writers. I just have a list, and a bunch of people who I know are active on social media get some pimping every day. I rotate through people, and I try not to leave too many people out. But if I haven’t tweeted your name, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it just means I did a lot of drugs in the 90s and I can’t remember shit now.
But that’s what I do. I send out ten tweets per day. On average that’s 7-8 tweets about my books, and 2-3 tweets about other things (mailing lists or promoting other authors). That’s just my personal self-promo.
Then I move on to promoting the Falstaff stuff that we’ve published, and that list is getting looooooong. Every book we’ve published gets one tweet per day. The only exception is that if I’m tweeting about Book 2 of a series, I won’t also tweet Books 1&2. I may rotate through different books in the series, or I may just promote the most recent book, or the first one. It all depends on where we are in publishing/promotion cycle. Same deal there – new releases get the mid-day slots, then I plug in around them. This week, that was 16 tweets per day. So 26 messages per day, six days per week, smells like 162 social media messages going out to promote my stuff and the Falstaff stuff every week. All broadcast to five different social media networks, with a reach of around 6,000 people.
It takes me about 90 minutes per week to do this. By now, I know what I’m doing (kinda, I never have figured out their bulk message thingy, and I like to see it in the grid on the Scheduler tab anyway), and I have almost all my messages pre-written. When I think things are getting stale, I’ll add something new into the mix, and when I release a collection, I stop tweeting about the individual novellas. But otherwise, these messages stay evergreen.
Yeah, it’s completely in opposition to what everyone tells you to do on social media. It’s exactly what people say is the most annoying thing in the world (it’s not – that’s someone else’s child). But it also is responsible for 20-30 book sales per week for me. Because I see a decrease of about 10% in gross sales when I take a couple weeks off from social media broadcasting. And like I’ve said before, if junk mail didn’t work, no one would still send it out.
So that’s what I do, and how. if I missed anything, let me know in comments and I’ll try to address it. If there’s any other topic on selling books you’d like me to address, let me know and I’ll put it in the queue.
by john | Jul 12, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books
You’ve heard me say it – write more shit.
You’ve heard a lot of people say it – write more shit.
You’ve heard people more famous and touchy than me say it – write more shit.
But sometimes you might need to hear somebody say this, too – Slow the FUCK down!
Last week I saw a guy post something to a FB group that I’m a member of about his new book being basically dead after 30 days, because it’s no longer “new” in Amazon’s algorithms, and should he make it permafree to bring in readers, or just ignore it and keep trying to write the next book in the series to get that out there in the next few weeks.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Y’all, stop the goddamned presses. A book doesn’t die at a month old. Shit, some books don’t even find any kind of audience traction until several months into their life, or maybe a year or more. Let’s think about this for a second – if you like a band or musician, and you happen to not notice that they have a new album out the first couple of weeks that it’s out, does that mean you’re never going to buy that album? No. It means that you’ll grab it when you notice it.
Books are like that. Ebooks are especially like that. Y’all, indie writers have been bitching for years about trad pub working on a produce model and only giving a book 90 days to succeed before they pull all promotion of it, because that’s how long a bookstore can shelve a book before they have to pay for it. NOW you want to stop promoting a book after 30?
Look, I get it. You want to jam a bunch of work out there so your name stays fresh. Listen, I’ve been a proponent of publishing a bunch of stuff fast for a long time. That’s probably why I have so many damn titles out there. But that doesn’t mean that I give up on my babies after the initial rush of sales is over. I still promote (albeit less strenuously) The Chosen, which is the first book I ever wrote and self-published! That book is seven years old, and still makes me money.
Not much, don’t get me wrong, but for the five minutes I spend promoting it, the $50/month that book makes me is pretty good for a seven-year-old book.
No, it’s not much, but how much money did you earn off your second-grader last month? Right. I win.
For a less extreme example, let’s look at Calling All Angels, the Shadow Council novella I released in January. That book has been out for six months now, and the gild is definitely off the lily as far as any newness goes. I send out a tweet each day about the book, which cross-posts to Facebook. I do that with most of my recent releases, and I spent about an hour each weekend setting that up. So we’ll say I’ve spent an hour on that book specifically in the last three months, being generous.
It has earned me well over $600 in the past three months. That’s a pretty good rate for an hour. it’s not terribly specific, because I just don’t feel like digging through all the KDP reports to get the Kindle Unlimited earnings for the book, but in the last 90 days, it’s earned $450 in sales, so I feel safe assuming it’s earned at least another $150 in page reads, just eyeballing the chart.
Do I spend a lot of time flogging that book? No. Do I spend any money promoting it? No. But I don’t spend any appreciable money promoting any of my books. I probably spend less than $200 per month on promotion, and most of that is on Mailchimp, Hootsuite, and Instafreebie subscriptions.
So I guess my point is, and let me be very clear in case anybody misses it, because I don’t want to spend my afternoon explaining myself – THIS IS NOT A MOTHERFUCKING RACE. There aren’t prizes for flinging the most poo against the wall. There’s no blue ribbon for releasing the most shitty books and finally selling a fuckton of one of them in the first week it’s out. You’re building a goddamn career, not pulling a jewelry store smash-and-grab.
Don’t get me wrong – you still need to write fast. You still need to publish more than one book every three years. You almost certainly need to publish more than one or two books every year to build a career. But you do not have to throw a book out there, then immediately abandon it a month after it’s published just because the shiny wore off and Amazon’s computer doesn’t help you anymore.
For fuck’s sake, these tips are things to help you promote your awesome books, not ways to game the fucking system to force you into this rapid-fire shit-slinging like meth-addled monkeys at the zoo. Yes, you get a boost from the search algorithms when your book is new. That doesn’t mean give up when that help goes away, that just means work harder. It means be smart about how you spend your money. If you’re going to spend money on promotion, time it to coincide with when the system is working for you, don’t just give up when it starts to work against you. And shit, it’s not even that it works against you, it just ignores you. Okay, so you don’t get to exploit the search box anymore. Maybe you should, I don’t know, WRITE AWESOME BOOKS AND GROW A GODDAMN FAN BASE instead of trying to game the fucking system in some ludicrous get-rich-quick scheme.
So yeah, if you want to jump on a bandwagon, then go for it. Hop right on, write a book and forget about it after a month. But if you want to build a career, you don’t abandon your shit right after you make it. It takes time to grow a readership. Years, even. So write faster, but slow down.
by john | Jul 4, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Travel
Hey there! If you’re one of the new people who found me through Chris Fox linking to me, welcome. If you’re looking for more contentious debate, I think this week may disappoint. But if you’re looking to sell more books, particularly by hand at conventions, then hopefully this will help out.
If you’ve been around here any length of time, you’ve probably seen me say that you usually won’t make your money back in the short term doing conventions. They’re part of the long game, rather than a quick ROI project. Conventions are about marketing, brand-building, and networking. Selling books is a side part of the gig. Most of the time. Some cons, like comic cons and the big media cons, are way more about selling stuff, because in a crowd of a couple hundred vendors and 50,000 people, it’s going to be hard to get noticed enough to be “sticky” in someone’s head unless they buy your shit and love it.
So for the purposes of this article, let’s use the term “con” to refer to the small to mid-sized Sci-Fi and Fantasy cons like the one I did last weekend (LibertyCon in Chattanooga, TN) and the one I’m doing next weekend (ConGregate in High Point, NC). These events can have anywhere from a couple hundred people to several thousand, and running a table at one of these cons takes a few more things than you would initially expect. So here are a few tips and “con hacks” that I’ve come up with through the past seven years of doing this.
1) Have some flat swag – Have something to put into people’s hands. Bookmarks, postcards, even a xeroxed one-sheet about your book if you don’t have the money or wherewithal to make anything better. But a lot of people are not going to buy your book at the con, realistically you’ll talk to far more people who won’t buy the book than people who will. So you need to have something to put in their hand so they can remember you when they leave.
2) Have a Sharpie – Especially at bigger cons, you’ll have folks who say “I’ll come back.” If you give them a piece of flat swag, they still might not be able to find you amidst all the chaos. Write your booth number on the back of the bookmark. Look, I didn’t say these tips were rocket science. I just said they were helpful.
3) Carry plastic bags to the con – You intend to sell shit to people. People need a way to carry shit. Plastic bags are cheap if you buy the crappy ones you get at all the dollar stores, or free if you just recycle plastic grocery bags. But I have made more than one sale by beckoning over some poor soul who is barely able to carry the stack of books and crap they’ve bought, and they’re so grateful to have a bag that they listen to my pitch. Admittedly, I’m way more likely to help out somebody with an armload of books than an armload of Funko Pops, but I don’t sell Pops. I sell books, and someone who has already shown a predisposition to buy books that day is my target audience.
4) Flat stock is the devil – Don’t lay your books down so that the shopper has to stand completely over them to see the cover. Invest in some cheap wire folding book stands (sometimes also called plate racks) and stand your shit up! You spent money on the cover to that books, or someone did, so show it off. Standing up your books helps draw in the long-distance browsers, the folks that don’t want to get too close to the table, lest they buy something. Until they see something awesome, and can’t help themselves. if they can’t see your book, you aren’t giving yourself the option to be that something awesome.
5) Witty bookmarks are the absolute jam – I have one piece of marketing material that i can trace to direct sales. For The Black Knight Chronicles, I made a run of bookmarks that say “Suck It, Edward” in big letters at the top. So when I put those in my vampire books, and stand them up, people from across the aisle can see me making fun of Twilight. Frequently they’ll chuckle, then walk all the way over and either pick up the book or ask me what it’s about. Worst case, they want the bookmark. But more than once I’ve had people buy either the Omnibus ($23) or the entire set of Black Knight books ($50) just off seeing the bookmark. H.P. Holo makes bookmarks with a big circle at the top that says stuff like “SPACE PIRATES” or “WIZARDS & MONKEYS” (it doesn’t really say wizards & monkeys) on them. This lets people see what the book is about from a distance, and draw them in. That kind of dual-purpose swag is awesome for drawing people in.
6) Take Credit Cards – I did a comic con this year, in 2017, with a comic artist who didn’t take credit cards. He proclaimed his disdain for a smartphone, why he wouldn’t need one, why he does fine without a Square reader, and why all this newfangled technology was silly and useless. At the end of the one-day con, after he watched me ring up over $200 in credit card sales, compared with his $20 in cash sales, he said to me, “Maybe I need to look into getting one of those.” I understand that it used to be hard to accept credit cards. There was expensive equipment, monthly fees, and all that BS. Square is free. Paypal is free. Yes, they take about 3% of the sale. Last weekend I processed almost $300 in credit card sales, and I only had a sales table for Saturday. Square can have their $9, because I guarantee you that I picked up at least $100 in additional sales by being able to process cards. Added Bonus – money that is spent with you on credit cards usually doesn’t hit your bank until after the con, so it’s not burning a hole in your pocket whenever you walk through the deal room!
7) Make friends with your neighbors – I try really hard to help out the people next to me at cons, whether I know them or not. Selling books is not a competition, and a rising tide really does lift all boats. Getting a book in someone’s hands is awesome, no matter if it’s your book or the book from the guy next to you. Because once people are predisposed to buy books, they will buy a variety of books. So it’s good for everyone when everyone is selling. Being nice to your neighbors also means that you’ll have someone to keep an eye on your shit when you have to go pee. So don’t erect huge displays that fuck the sightlines of people getting to your neighbor. Don’t blare sound music all day through the con (no matter how cool it is), unless of course you’re a band or a musician, then at least try to mix it up so your neighbors don’t have to hear the same song for three days. Bring extra bottled water and share it with your neighbor. Be happy to break a twenty for them if you have more change. Just be nice and friendly, and it’ll work out well for you in the long run.
8) Get a bigger hand truck than you think you need – I had a decent little $50 hand truck from Lowe’s that I used for a couple years. Before that I had a nice little fold-flat hand truck that did me well until I had too many title to carry on that in one trip. At RavenCon, I had the Lowe’s hand truck, which theoretically had a flatbed load rating of 400 lbs, loaded down pretty damn heavily. We hit a pothole in the hotel parking lot, and one of the wheels shattered. A few feet further along, and the overburdened other wheel gave up the ghost. We struggled that shit into the room, set things up, and did the show, but that hand truck was toast. For the next con, Suzy bought me one like this. Mine is a little different, but it can do vertical or horizontal, has 1,000 pounds capacity, and is big enough to carry everything for two authors (at least) in one trip. It’s friggin’ awesome and I wish I’d just spent the $150 on that one the first time.
There’s a million other things, but I’ll leave with just a quick inventory of my “con box,” the big blue tub that I carry around that has no books in it, just the stuff that I feel like I should have with me to do a booth or a table.
- (2) 8′ Black Tablecloths – I use them either to cover the table if one is not provided, or to cover up my crap at the end of the night.
- Falstaff Books Table Runner – this is new, but it’s just a nice little banner that drapes over the table with our logo on it.
- (12) folding wire book stands – I almost always need less than this, but it leaves me one or two to loan out. See point #7
- Package of big zip ties – I have a sign that ties to the back of my book rack. Also useful for hanging my bags and a trash bag.
- plastic bags – I got a box of “t-shirt bags” years ago and they haven’t run out yet.
- Bookmarks – I have a Falstaff Books bookmark, plus one for Bubba, Harker, and Black Knight. On the back of the Falstaff Books bookmark is a link to a free ebook download of a sampler that gives people a taste of everything we publish.
- Stickers – I have stickers for each property that I have bookmarks for. Buy a book, get a sticker.
- deodorant – I forgot it once on a trip. Never again.
- Drugs – I keep a stash of ibuprofen, immodium, and claritin-d in my con box. These treat the three main things that can ruin a con for me, so I try to stay prepared.
- post-it notes & a small legal pad
- pens and a sharpie
- SC Business License – not all states require a state business license to vend at a con. SC does. I just never take the license out of the box, so I always know where it is.
- Business cards and holder
- spare phone battery – it’s one of those little things by Anker that can recharge a phone, iPad, or more importantly, a Square chip reader.
- Square reader, iPhone 7 adaptor, and Chip reader – I know the chip reader is more secure, but more importantly to me, it’s more efficient. The swipe reader takes multiple swipes at least 50% of the time, but the chip reader almost never takes additional time and effort. I hate the fact that the iPhone no longer has a headphone jack, but I didn’t get to design it, so I bought an extra adaptor and put it in the con box.
- (2) Snap light stick – shit happens. Some con spaces have very few windows, or are even underground, like the Charlotte Convention Center. I don’t ever expect to need to have a small chemical light source, but the day I want it will be the day I REALLY want it.
- pocketknife – I don’t leave home without it.
- Leatherman – some jobs are too much for even a pocketknife
That’s what’s in my con box. It goes to every con, and is the most important thing that goes into the truck.
by john | Jun 28, 2017 | How to Sell Books, Writing
So yeah, that’s a total clickbait headline. It’s also not true. But it kinda is. Like so many things, the concept of Write to Market has diverged from its original core values into a set of weird “truths” and market and career advice ideas that it has turned into a whole messianic movement.
Let’s start with a basic question – What is “Write to Market?” Chris Fox, a successful midlist genre fiction author, wrote a series of books about how to be a successful author, focusing on many of the things that I tell new and aspiring writers to focus on – writing speed, production speed, don’t get caught up in revising forever, produce the work, you’ll sell more in a popular genre than in a niche genre – all very level-headed, common sense advice. These books caught on, and some people managed to take the tips and tricks that Chris write in these books and turn them into some very successful series, almost overnight.
EDIT – So Chris came on to comment and clear up some of my inaccuracies. According to Chris, and I have no reason to doubt him, he sold enough copies of his book written with the Write to Market theory to hit the NY Times list. I believe him, and congratulate him on that success. I think it’s awesome. My guess that his non-fiction stuff outsold his fiction stuff came from five minute of looking over his ranks on one series. I apparently missed the stuff that sold the best. My bad. He says he outsells me, which puts him in good company. Rock on. I am sincerely happy whenever anyone sells books. Chris obviously sells a lot of fiction, which does lend more credence to the words that he preaches. It does not, however, change the fact that most of the people advocating write to market are not saying the same things he’s saying, and are saying that you can write crap and make money. I still think that’s a load of shit.
Good for them. That’s awesome.
Then a lot of other people looked at it, decided that it was a great way to make a lot of money in the easy life of a writer, and it all went to shit.
Let me clarify something before I go much further. One, when I call Chris Fox a successful midlist genre fiction author, please don’t consider that any type of insult. I briefly looked at the rankings of his fiction books on Amazon, and it looks like he sells some books. Probably a decent number. Rock on. To me, that puts him in the same category as me and most of my peers who haven’t made it onto a major bestseller list.
But just like a couple years ago people were holding Hugh Howey up as the messiah of all things self-pub, nowadays Write to Market is the Hot New Thing. It’s the Guaranteed Way to Quit Your Day Job and Live the Easy Life of a Novelist! But here’s the thing – that’s a load of shit.
No, I don’t work a day job. No, I am not wearing pants write now, at 3PM. No, I didn’t have to call in to anyone all week the I felt like refried ass and didn’t want to work because I had a stomach bug.
I also don’t know how much money I’m going to make from month to month, I work as many weekends as I do weekdays, and I put in as many hours at work now as I did when I was a middle manager with a dozen people reporting to me. So I don’t have a day job, but unlike some folks, I’m not cruising around on my boat butt-nekkid waiting for my movie to come out.
Don’t visualize. There is no Visine for the mind’s eye.
Please understand – a lot of Chris Fox’s principles are things I agree with. Yes, you need to write fast. Yes, you should probably start your career working in a genre that people will actually read. Yes, you should do some market research before you launch a book. I’ve said many times, in many places, that the idea of writing a book and just letting it float out there on its own is one that should have died when Salinger did. But really, it should have died with Dickinson.
The problem is, nowadays you have a lot of people jumping in the “write to market” pool, looking to make a quick buck. So there’s a lot of folks on lots of internet sites focusing on analyzing market trends, looking for hot genres to capitalize on, talking about forgoing editing in favor of computerized proofreading tools (It’s a TRAP!), and how a good cover and solid story will make up for all the weaknesses in your craft.
Those people are full of shit and will either change their tune or will be out of this industry in a very short time.
While it’s possible to look at a popular genre without a ton of competition in it, dissect the tropes of the successful books in the genre and write a formulaic book to hit all the buttons and sell a bunch of copies, is that really any way to build a career?
Let’s say I want to make a pile of money selling books. I hear that shifter romance is hot, so I decide to write a shifter romance. I buy twenty or so of the bestselling books in that genre, read them, understand the story beats, figure out how they’re put together, and plot out a six-book shifter romance of my own. I write them as fast as I can, pay nominal attention to the editing and the craft, get a decent cover, put the books up on Amazon, and watch the money roll in.
I can probably make a decent chunk of change over the next six months doing that. Then the winds change, the genre cools, and I have to chase the next trend. Again and again and again. How often can you stand to do that? At what point are you no longer doing the thing that made it fun to write in the first place – creating? How long can you stand to follow that mechanical process before it becomes as mind-numbing as the day job you were dying to leave in the first place?
That’s kinda my point, and why I say that despite the fact that Chris’s original principles are things that I think people can apply to successful career creation, the bandwagon-jumpers who are looking to make a quick buck are missing the whole point of writing to market – writing.
You can go online and find a lot of people telling you that editing doesn’t matter, that a good story is all that matters. They’ll point you to a dozen big-selling indie authors whose books are really mediocre as far as the craft, and those folks are moving huge numbers.
Today.
Come back to me in ten years and let me know how those folks are doing. Because I’m seven years into this journey, and I’ve figured a few things out. One of them is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and most of the “overnight successes” that I’ve known haven’t been that overnight at all. So if I’d rather listen to advice from folks like Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch and Kevin J. Anderson and Faith Hunter and Chuck Gannon and Ed Schubert, who have been in the business for decades by now, then maybe I’ll just stick with those folks.
The thing is – you can jump on a bandwagon and make a pile of money. But you won’t make millions. You won’t make the kind of money that lets you jump on a boat and sail naked around the world (unless you catch lightning in a bottle). You can make enough money to make a living by dissecting a trend and writing to a trend, then jumping to the next trend and doing it all over again, ad nauseum.
But you can also make a living by writing the books you want to write, as well as you can possibly write them, about whatever the hell you want to write about. I wrote a book about Sasquatch’s dick. Robert Bevan has a whole series about poop jokes and killing horses. Rick Gualtieri, Drew Hayes, and I have ALL written very different books about nerdy vampires. Joe Brassey has a book coming out about sky pirates. These are all successful authors. These are all people writing whatever the fuck they want to write, working hard on their craft, putting out the best product they know how to produce, and putting food on the table while they do it. And I would lay a lot more money on these guy being around in five years than on any of the latest get rich quick schemers that want to write shifter porn just because it’s the hot thing right now.
So to close – Chris Fox had some good ideas, and did a great job of branding himself as an expert on selling books. So much so that his books on how to sell books outsell all of his fiction, so good job. But then a bunch of people who want to shortcut the learning of craft have taken his ideas and turned them into bullet points and now are waving flags for WRITE TO MARKET IS THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE TEH MONEYZ OMG U CAN MAKE TEH MILLIONZ 2MORROW!. So read Chris’s books. There are some good ideas there. You probably do need to write faster, and you probably do need to focus your efforts on a more popular genre rather than writing that antebellum retelling of the Mahabharata set in a far-future Venutian colony.
But you don’t need to cut out your editing. You don’t need to not learn the craft. And you sure as balls don’t need to turn your dream of being a writer into another soulless day job where all you do is dissect someone else’s creativity and regurgitate it for money. That kind of assembly-line shit will get old real fast.
And if you’re looking for advice on how to sell books – make sure the person giving the advice sells more books of fiction than books on HOW TO SELL fiction. Because the folks that have walked the walk, can talk the talk.
by john | Jun 20, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Writing
Sorry for the clickbaity headline, but I’d like to get some more traffic. 🙂 So yeah, really not a bit sorry.
When I talk to writers nowadays, sometimes I’ll have the conversation with people about audiobooks that goes something like this –
Writer – “Do you really make any money off audiobooks?”
John – “It’s almost 20% of my annual income, so yeah, I make some money off audio.”
Writer – “I don’t know anything about how to do it.”
John – “I have the technical skills of a tree frog and the patience of a hummingbird on meth. You think I edit any of that stuff? I hire people to do it.”
Writer – “But it’s expensive!”
John – “I usually work with my narrators on a royalty share. That way I don’t lay out anything up front. It’s not as lucrative for me in the long run, but I don’t have to pay a couple grand to get a novel narrated, and I don’t have to do it.”
Writer – “It sounds hard!”
John – “Now you’re just being lazy. I tell you that you can make a grand a month with no upfront cost, and all you have to be able to do is the equivalent of listing something for sale on eBay, and you still don’t want to do it? What the hell? You’re totally paying for lunch, just for being a buttmonkey.”
Disclaimer – I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone a buttmonkey, but I will almost certainly start.
That’s a brief example of the way I feed my family – I have multiple buckets out to catch the rain. If you have one bucket out in your yard, and you need ten gallons of water, then it needs to rain for a long time for you to get all that water. But if you put twenty buckets out in the yard, then you can get ten gallons pretty quickly.
In case you missed it, the rain is money, and the buckets are revenue streams. Just in case you missed it.
It’s increasingly important to have as many revenue streams as possible, especially for someone trying to make a living as a writer. You can’t just depend on one check twice a year from a major New York publisher. That’s crazy, unless the check is ginormous!
Here are the ways I get paid –
Monthly –
Amazon – This is the biggest bucket. I have books for sale on amazon in print and ebook. This makes up about 2/3 of my income. Amazon pays monthly. That’s kinda what I budget my life around. Most of my monthly living expenses are covered through Amazon.
Other sites – While I have a lot of titles listed in Kindle Unlimited, I do still have a few things floating around out there across other sites. I use Draft2Digital as the aggregator for those sites, and they also pay monthly.
Patreon – My patrons are wonderful, and they provide about enough money each month to cover the cost of the conventions I attend. This is quite helpful, especially when I have four cons in eight weeks, like I do right now.
Audible – Audible also pays monthly, which is very helpful. Most of this money goes into a savings account for emergencies or taxes, but if there are lean ebook months, I’ll dip into this.
Autographed books – negligible, although I do hope that since I’ve redone that page on the website, that will start to be a reasonable little dribble of money.
Convention sales – let’s face it, if I break even at a convention after I’ve paid all my expenses, it’s a really good con. I’ve been very fortunate this year that sales are going better than normal, but I still mostly pour all the money back into inventory, so on a good month, it’s a wash.
Quarterly –
Other publishers – I still have a little work out there with other small presses that pay me quarterly. It’s not a lot, but about enough to buy dinner for me and Suzy, or maybe a trip to the movies.
Semi-Annually –
Bell Bridge, the folks that publish The Black Knight Chronicles, pay me twice a year. This is like clockwork, and it also mostly goes into savings for taxes, but also helps defray the costs of cons like Dragon Con, which are way more expensive than normal conventions, and I don’t sell there.
Intermittent Income –
Sometimes I’ll do a story for an anthology that has a one-time payment associated with it, or have a small royalty check from some random work I did a while back, or pick up work that has an advance tied to it. Those are pretty much gravy, and they either go towards erasing credit card debt, or go into savings for taxes.
So I have a bunch of buckets out there trying to catch the rain. Not as many as some people, but a good half dozen revenue streams working. That’s how I can afford to make a living writing, and maybe not write much of anything in June, because I can count on another strong month out of the last Harker novella, and the latest two Harker audiobooks to carry me through any lulls in productivity or sales.
The point of this is not to say “Look at how awesome I am for having a bunch of diverse ways to make money!” I mean, let’s face it, you’re here reading this – you already know I’m awesome. 🙂 It’s more to say that you need to explore all the different ways that you can monetize your work. If you are with a small press that doesn’t do audio – do it yourself. If you are self-published, and haven’t done audio – get on it! It’s a huge market, a growing market, and one that needs to be tapped.
I don’t know what the next thing will be that’s like audio, but you’d better believe that I’m looking for it. So get out there and make some more buckets!
by john | Jun 13, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books
I’m going to do something a little different on this week’s blog about selling books, and give y’all a cautionary tale (and maybe some links to more) and some tips on how to avoid getting ripped off by a crooked publisher, or some signs on how to tell that your publisher is in over their head and you might be in for some problems.
This is spawned by the current arrest and charges filed against the owner of JK Publishing in Colorado. According to this article and others I’ve seen, she is accused of defrauding authors of over $125,000 over two years. She ran a small erotica and romance press, and apparently fudged royalty reports to pocket a greater share of the money, leaving her authors screwed. She’s also accused of lying on her taxes to a degree significantly greater than just the garden-variety lying on taxes.
This gives all of us, authors and publishers, a black eye. It makes the whole business look shady. Just like when an NBA ref got caught shaving points it made all referees for all sports look bad. Anything that touches a situation like this comes away dirty. I hope there is a way that the authors can get what was rightfully theirs, but let’s face it, they’re probably screwed.
So what can you do to keep from getting screwed? After all, it’s not like there’s any licensure required to open a small press. All I had to do was file the LLC paperwork, pay the state a couple hundred bucks to incorporate, and away we went.I didn’t take a class. I didn’t get certified as anyone who was qualified to publish books. I just decided to expand my personal publishing efforts to help other people get published, and hopefully make enough to cover costs along the way.
So you can’t examine someone’s license, but you can examine the person. You can examine the contract they are offering. You can examine their website (which you didn’t want to do for the first several months that Falstaff Books existed, because it was hot garbage. Pure 100% dumpster fire. But now we have a wonderful web guru Erin, and she makes us look good.). You can examine the covers on the books they produce. You can look at their sales ranking on Amazon and see if they’re moving any books. You can read reviews of books they publish to see if they are full of typos.
You can also check places like Preditors & Editors and Absolute Write. These are peer-review sites of the most grass-roots. They’re message boards, and places for people to air grievances, but in the case of a very small press, they might not be very useful. So you need to contact a human.
Here’s a case in point. When I signed Michael G. Williams to a couple of contracts, he sent them out to be reviewed by third parties. Michael and I are friends, and have been for several years, and that has nothing to do with the fact that he was 100% right to get the contracts looked at. Darin Kennedy is one of my best friends, and we revised his contract several times before we were both happy with it. It’s not personal, it’s business.
That doesn’t mean be an asshole to your friends because you don’t like the contract, but it also doesn’t mean you should sign a bad contract just because your friend is offering it to you. Or because it’s a friend of a friend. Or whatever. Every contract is a negotiation. Both parties want different things, and the whole point of the contract is to outline everyone’s expectations and get them down on paper, so you can still be friends after you’re finished doing business. So be pleasant, but be firm.
What are some warning signs in contracts?
Well – the contract needs to be very specific about what rights it is asking for. Our contract at Falstaff is for ebook, print, and audio rights. We don’t ask for graphic novel rights, because I don’t have a way to sell them. We only ask for English language rights, but we do ask for worldwide English language rights. I can’t get stuff translated, but we can sell all over the world through the distribution channels we use. We don’t do film or TV rights, because I can’t sell them. If an author sells them, good on them. Hopefully it will sell a lot more books, and we’ll both get paid that way. Other publishers may have better ways to sell those things, so they may ask for those rights. If you don’t want to give them up, negotiate. But it needs to be clear.
When you get paid needs to be very clear. And the first time a publisher is late with a payment, you need to be concerned. We pay quarterly, but I give myself 60 days after the end of the quarter to pay. That means that I’ve paid First Quarter royalties, and we’ll pay Second Quarter royalties sometime in August. I definitely want to get those sent out before Dragon Con, so they money will likely go out mid-month instead of taking the full 60 days to pay people. That also gives me a buffer in case anything gets goofy with the mail or PayPal.
Rights reversion is a big thing, and you want a contract to define what is “out of print.” Technically, ebooks don’t ever go out of print, so you want a rights reversion clause based on sales built into the contract. We didn’t have this in the first Falstaff contract, but our newest version does. We’re learning. As more authors negotiated with us, we realized that it should just go in the contract.
But vetting a small press can be tough, A lot of it eventually is going to come down to trust. Meet people. Talk to people. I prefer to do business with people I know, because I’m old-fashioned and would rather operate on a handshake. I won’t, because I don’t live in that world, but I still like to know the people I work with. You should too. If you want to publish with someone, ask around about them. Dig a little. Somebody knows these people. And it’s entirely possible that the publisher has been great, but shit fell apart and they stole from the business to get themselves by. When that happens, you can’t predict it. But you can be vigilant about it. If you have two years of royalties at one level, then there’s a significant dip the next, ask why. If you’ve released a book that appears to be doing well, but your royalties haven’t increased, ask why.
And if your publisher doesn’t respond, that’s when it’s time to get pushy. I don’t mean respond within an hour, because people do have lives, and there are times you just don’t have reception (like most of last Sunday for me). But within a couple days, certainly. If you ask a money question, and haven’t gotten an answer in a timely fashion, there might be something wrong. People don’t like to talk about money, and they certainly don’t want to talk about bad things having to do with money, but you must keep a handle on your money, because it is your livelihood.
So get your work out there, but don’t get screwed. And it’s a lot harder to screw over somebody once you’ve looked them in the eye than it is someone that you’ve never met or even spoken with before. So meet people, Skype with people, talk to them on the phone. Humanize them, and become a human to them. It’s a strong negotiating method.
Good luck!
