On Ebook Pricing And Promotion
This post will really only be of interest to other people who self-publish or plan to. The rest of you can ignore it. It’s a little addendum to the post I made last week.
There is nothing more likely to get arguments raging on self-publishing discussion boards than the question of pricing one’s book (and it’s almost always ‘book’ singular. Very few of the people involved have written more than one). One group insist that the right thing to do is to publish books at 99 cents – or give them away for free – for ‘exposure’. The other group think their work is too valuable to give away at such a low price – “my book is worth more than a chocolate bar.”
Both sides are, ultimately, arguing from a lack of evidence. The first side can point to the occasional success story – writer X whose first novel sold 100,000 copies, and she sold it for only 99 cents – while the other side can say “the major publishers don’t sell anything for under $10. If I sell mine for $5 that’s still only half their price.” But basically they’re going from instinct.
My case is a little different from many of these people. I write entirely for pleasure. But I publish for business. This is why I post almost all my writing to my blog first and let people read it for free if they want to. But if they want to have a physical copy or an ebook of it, then they need to pay me for the time and effort I put in for cover design, typesetting, formatting, uploading and so on, because unlike the actual writing that stuff is hard, tedious work that I don’t enjoy and am not very good at. So I’m looking at pricing entirely from the point of view of what will maximise revenue.
The tactic most often endorsed by self-publishers is to write a book, put it out cheap, for ninety-nine cents, and promote the hell out of it on all the social networks for as long as you can, and only then start writing your next book.
Now, this tactic would be painful for me, because I find it almost impossible *not* to write. I can’t always write the thing I intend to write (I’ve got my half-finished MindlessWho post that should have been up a week ago as proof of that), but the only time I’m not writing something is when I’m physically incapable of doing so. But imagine that I could.
So you have your ninety-nine cent book and you spam everyone about it. Let’s imagine a best case scenario here, and say that you don’t get blocked by everyone on Twitter and Facebook. We’ll further imagine that pricing at ninety-nine cents is actually an effective way of getting noticed at this point (it isn’t, because literally millions of people are doing the same thing now). So let’s be optimistic and say that your book sells a thousand copies a month for the year you’re promoting it.
Many of those sales will be to people who won’t particularly enjoy it, and will give it bad reviews. The sales are mostly coming from social networking, so once you stop that to write the next book (if you ever do), sales drop to zero or close. So we can take the first year’s income from that single book as being a year’s income from writing. 12,000 ebooks at ninety-nine cents, at a 35% royalty, comes to $4200.
So write a single book a year, sell it for ninety-nine cents, spend the rest of the year promoting it, you can get $4200 a year, in an ideal world.
Now let’s look at what I do.
I wrote five full-length books last year, for which I’ve priced the ebooks at $5. I did essentially no promotion for any of these – one blog post, a tweet and a facebook post is about it. I did do a couple of guest blogs promoting my fourth book, but that’s all. I spent the time writing instead.
Now, none of them are selling anything like a thousand copies a month. But this month, between them they sold 87 books as ebooks alone (not counting for the moment either paper copies or revenues from stores like Apple which haven’t reported for this month yet). Admittedly, this is one of my better months, but also I write stuff for *incredibly* niche audiences in most part. And those books sold that much without any additional promotion on my part. I used that time to write instead.
Eighty-seven books at five dollars a pop, at a seventy percent royalty (actually some are at a higher royalty because Smashwords pays better, but let’s keep this simple and stick to Kindle royalty figures) is $304.50 . The single-book author who’s promoting rather than writing makes $350 from her single book.
I’ll actually surpass what she makes with her thousand downloads, because I’ve also got a couple of short stories up for ninety-nine cents and a longer story up for three dollars (I’m not saying never to price something at ninety-nine cents – I use the price if the ‘book’ I’m selling is under ten thousand words or so, because it would be cheating the readers to charge more), and I’m selling paper books (most of the ninety-nine centers don’t) but even if we take that figure as all I’ll make, I know I can write at least five more books this year. (In fact I’ve got at least eight that are either in the planning stage or partly written, most of which should come out this year, along with a few more short stories and novellas. I’m aiming to get *something* at least e-published every fortnight this year).
So next year, assuming the average sales stay the same and I do another five full-length ebooks, I’ll be on $609 a month from ebook sales. The year after, $913.50 . Meanwhile, the natural audience for the ninety-nine cent book by the one-book-a-year (or less) author has already been exhausted, and that author is essentially starting from scratch with the next one.
Now, not everyone can write as fast as me – I’m lucky in that I write extremely clean copy, and I’m very good at structure, so I don’t need to rewrite much, and I think very, very fast. My books are also mostly on the short side (my natural medium is the essay or the short story, rather than the novel or series, though I think my two best books are the ones where the essays build and reflect on each other in a novelistic structure). And these numbers obviously don’t apply to everyone. But I think this shows that there is certainly a *very good case* for the best strategy for self-publishers to pursue being to charge a relatively high amount, but to write a lot, and let the promotion take care of itself.
Opinions?
How To Get Your Books On Sale
I’ve been talking with a few people recently about self-publishing, and some of them are vaguely confused about what you need to do in order to get a book out if you’ve written it and want to publish yourself, so I thought I’d do a semi-comprehensive guide. This is for full-length books of 40,000 words or more – short stories are a slightly different beast.
First, you need a word processor that will output in both .doc and .pdf format. Microsoft Word will do both these, I think, and I know that LibreOffice, AbiWord and OpenOffice.org will. I actually use LyX, because it produces beautifully typeset work and you don’t have to fight it the way you do MS Word. If you use LyX, the book Self-Publishing With LyX (free PDF version) is a godsend.
First, we’ll look at print publishing. Export your book as a PDF, with all fonts included in your file – if you don’t do this, there may be typesetting errors with your finished book. Most typesetting advice will tell you to use a ten-to-twelve point serif font, but I use a fourteen point sans serif. This is because my wife is visually impaired, and she finds this much easier to read. I suspect this will be the case for other visually impaired people, and I don’t want to exclude anyone from reading my books. So long as you use a simple, plain font for this, not Comic Sans or anything equally horrific, your book will look professional enough.
You will want to set fairly generous margins on your pages in the PDF, to allow for the pages to be trimmed. I use the margins suggested in Self-Publishing With LyX – Top: 2.5cm, Bottom 2.5cm, Inner: 2.5cm, Outer: 2.0cm . If you’re using Microsoft Word or one of the Wordalike Free Software word processors, lulu.com have a template you can use that will make your pages the right size, but when I used this (on my first two books, before I discovered LyX) I found it extraordinarily fiddly to use with LibreOffice, and next to impossible in AbiWord. I don’t have a copy of Microsoft Word, so I have no experience with that.
Once you have your PDF, you next need your cover. If you can’t draw yourself, you have a couple of options. One that some writers take is to browse stock photo libraries, and pay a small amount (usually in the tens of pounds) for rights to use a picture. You can, however, also search Google Images for images that have been freely licensed for commercial reuse.
One thing to remember, as well, is that all images created by branches of the US government are automatically in the public domain, so lots of military, scientific or space photographs, as well as photos of various politicians and so on, are completely free to use.
Now create an account with a print-on-demand publisher. I have heard very, very good things about CreateSpace, but I use lulu.com myself. This is partly because CreateSpace are an Amazon company, and I don’t want Amazon to have a monopoly or to put my eggs in one basket, and partly because Lulu also offer very good quality hardbacks, and I like to have nice copies of my books.
Once you have an account, click ‘start a new project’ and follow the steps it tells you. You will want your book to be available as a trade paperback (this is a normal paperback of a standard size – Lulu also do larger, coffee-table style books), as a hardback, and as a PDF (don’t add DRM to your PDF – DRM doesn’t deter so-called ‘pirates’ and does deter actual readers). Lulu have an easy-to-use cover designer that will take your image, resize it to the right dimensions, and let you add the title, author name, back-cover blurb and so on. You will get a PDF copy of this completed cover – take a screenshot of the front cover and save it as a JPG, and you can use it for your ebooks.
While Lulu do publish ebooks in non-PDF format, I’ve had nothing but horrendous experience with them in that department, so don’t put your ebooks out through them, other than PDF versions.
You can either buy an ISBN for your book or get one assigned by Lulu. There is no reason I know of not to use Lulu’s. Once you have an ISBN assigned and have bought and approved a proof copy of your book, you can choose either Lulu’s ‘ExtendedReach’ service (which is free, and gets your book on Amazon and into bibliographic databases so other stores can choose to order it) or their GlobalReach service (which is expensive but gets you onto other sites like Barnes & Noble). Interestingly, they seem to be experimenting with merging these two services and making them both free, but I don’t know if that will be going ahead.
Now you’ve got your physical book sorted, it’s time to think of your ebook. For this you’ll need your book to be in Word .doc format. (If you have a choice of which .doc versions to output as, choose Office 2003. DO NOT choose either Windows 95′s version, which doesn’t have all the features you need, or docx, which the major sites don’t yet support). There are many programs that will allow you to produce your own good-quality epub and mobi files, but if you want to get on the major sites you actually want them to convert the files for you at the moment.
Read through the Smashwords Style Guide (free ebook in various formats here) and follow its instructions precisely, paying special attention to the section on Table Of Contents. Then create an account with Smashwords and upload your correctly-formatted .doc file. Smashwords will then convert your book into every format in which you wish to sell it. Select all formats except .mobi (the Kindle format, which we’ll deal with separately) and PDF (Smashwords’ PDF copies look horrible, sell PDFs through Lulu instead).
Smashwords will assign you a free ISBN for your ebook, and will sell DRM-free copies through their own site, but their real advantage is that they will get you onto other online bookstores. They’re the only simple way to get on iBooks, Kobo, Diesel and Sony’s bookstore. They’re also the only way for people outside the US to get on Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebookstore. (People in the US can use Barnes & Noble’s PubIt). These sites between them account for something in the region of 20% of the ebook market.
Smashwords will claim that they offer distribution to Amazon, but they don’t. Disable this option just in case this changes, because you’re going to put your book out through Amazon by yourself – no reason to give Smashwords a cut.
You will want to price your book on Smashwords at between $2.99 and $9,99 – this is not because of anything to do with Smashwords itself, but because Amazon price-matches with other sites, and that’s the price range in which you get the best royalties on Amazon.
Smashwords is a great service, but has two major disadvantages. The first is that they pay quarterly in arrears – so if they receive money from a sale on Apple’s store in February (and Apple take their time to pay Smashwords), you won’t see it until June. The second is that for non-USians they require you to jump through a lot of hoops in the US’ insanely complex tax system if you don’t want to lose 30% of your money, and this takes time. The combination of these two things mean that even though I’ve had books up on Smashwords for a year, I am yet to see any money from them. But when it does finally arrive it’ll be a substantial chunk.
Finally, you’ll want your book to be available on the Kindle. This is the simplest of all these options by this point. Take your Smashwords-formatted .doc file, remove the line about ‘published on Smashwords’ that you inserted to meet Smashwords’ requirements, add page breaks at the end of each chapter (Kindle like page-breaks, Smashwords don’t). Then create an account at kdp.amazon.com and upload your files.
Amazon will try to get you to join a program called KDP Select with your books. DO NOT JOIN THIS. It is a very bad deal for actual writers (as opposed to delusional fools who want to strike it big with a single bestseller), it limits what you can do enormously, and some of its provisions (like turning the money made from lending into a zero-sum game in which you have to compete with other authors) are actively evil.
You should price your book between $2.99 and $9.99, as outside this price range you only make a 35% royalty, but you get 70% if your book’s in that price range. Some people will advise you to sell your books for 99 cents to ‘get noticed’. This was possibly good advice two years ago, but when there are literally millions of books selling at that price (and people giving books away as part of the KDP Select programme), any advantage the low price may have had is gone, so you might as well charge an amount where you’ll see some money. (99 cents is, however, a fair price for a short story if you’re publishing those).
Do not enable DRM – all DRM does is put customers off, it doesn’t deter illegal copying. Enable text-to-speech unless you hate blind people and want them to suffer.
Finally, get an Amazon Author Central account. You will, in fact, want to set up two of these, one on the US site and one on the UK site. From a reader’s point of view, an authorcentral page allows you to see everything an author’s written in one place, as well as a bio of the author (see my page for an example of how this works) – useful if you’ve written multiple books and people want to find them all. From an author’s point of view, it gives you some extra tools to manage your books.
And that’s it. Once you’ve done this, post a link on your blog or website saying your book’s out, then forget about it until the money comes in, and write the next one, and the one after that.
Nobody Is Stealing Your Book!
I’ve been unwell since finishing work yesterday, so I’ve not got anything prepared for the blog today (I still haven’t replied to most of the emails I’ve had since Tuesday for that matter). Since I’m going to be away at Thought Bubble over the weekend, I’ll just post this, about two related but opposite things I see self-publishers doing over and over again.
The first, and most bemusing, is going to ridiculous efforts to lose money. $3 to $5 is a reasonable price for a full-length ebook, most readers are agreed. Certainly Amazon are trying to encourage that price – $3-$10 is the price range they want, and you get the highest royalties at that price.
But a few people noticed that they could sell more books at 99 cents, and that by doing so they’d sell enough more that they could make the difference up. And that worked for a few people. But now everyone’s doing that, except those like myself who’ve realised it no longer works. I can sell a hundred copies of a book at $5 and make $350, or two hundred copies at 99 cents, and make $70. The maths isn’t hard.
So now people have noticed that selling their books for 99 cents doesn’t work, they’re trying to force Amazon to give them away. Amazon have a minimum price of 99 cents, but Smashwords (who distribute to Barnes & Noble, iBooks and so on) don’t, so people will put their books on both, set the price on Smashwords to free, then report a lower price on Amazon, who have a price-match policy.
The idea is supposed to be that you can gain additional publicity from this, and thus stand out from the crowd and sell copies of all your other books. That’s standing out from the crowd of other people doing this, and selling copies of all your other books to people who think even 99 cents is too much to pay for a novel. There may be a flaw in this argument. And those of us who know the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ can expect people to be paying readers to get their books within a year, for ‘exposure’.
Weirdly, some of these people are also the prime advocates for DRM. Now, I’ve already explained why Digital Restrictions Management is a horrendously bad idea. Without even getting into its immorality, or the impossibility of what it’s attempting (seriously, every DRM scheme by its nature amounts to giving someone a locked padlock, a key, and a note saying ‘do not put key in padlock on pain of prosecution’), DRM makes it more difficult for readers to pay for your work than to ‘pirate’ it.
It is impossible to compete with ‘free’ on price, so we have to compete on ease of use.
But a lot of self-publishers are absolutely terrified, beyond all reason, of ‘piracy’, of plagiarism, and of some filmmaker stealing their idea and making a billion dollars without giving them any.
Now, there is, of course, no evidence that ‘piracy’ has any negative effect on sales at all, and some anecdotal evidence that it increases sales. For example, I heard good things about the SF writer Greg Egan, so I torrented one of his books, Permutation City to try it (I would have borrowed from the library, but I have a habit of losing library books and getting massive fines). That was in April. As a result of that, I’ve bought Egan’s books Permutation City, Quarantine, Schild’s Ladder, Axiomatic, Oceanic and Luminous in paperback and Incandescence, Zendegi and The Clockwork Robot as ebooks. (I since discovered that Mr Egan has a lot of free stories available on his website. I would have tried those instead rather than torrenting had I known about them).
But assume I’m wrong. Assume ‘piracy’ matters. Assume every copy on a torrent site is a lost sale, pure and simple. Are your books going to be ‘pirated’?
I had a quick look at the top twelve Kindle bestsellers (as of 11:33 PM on the 17th November) on Amazon’s US site (where the vast majority of sales come from). I searched for each on two top torrent sites. I won’t link those sites here, but one ends in ‘bay’ while the other ends in ‘noid’.
The Journey Home by Michael Baron
Search terms – Baron The Journey Home
Results on site 1 – nothing
Results on site 2 – 28 hits, including Star Wars comics, DangerMouse cartoons and a documentary series by Jonathan Miller on atheism. The book doesn’t show up.
Rescue Me (a quirky romance novel about secrets, forgiveness and falling in love) by Sydney Allan
Search terms – Allan rescue me
Results on site 1 – nothing
Results on site 2 – 16 results, including a 1917 Douglas Fairbank silent film, a collection of albums by jazz-fusion musician Allan Holdsworth and a collection of 882 NES games. The book doesn’t show up.
Best Friends by Consuelo Saah Baehr
Search terms – Best Friends Baehr
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – One result, the jazz album Moment To Moment by Roy Hargrove
Last Breath by Michael Prescott
Search terms – Last Breath Prescott
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – One result, a collection of books by someone called Lisa Marie Price
Ghost in the Polka Dot Bikini (A Ghost of Granny Apples Mystery) by Sue Ann Jaffarian
Search terms – Jaffarian Polka
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – A hit! A palpable hit! – one result, a torrent containing this book and the other book in this series.
Double Exposure by Michael Lister
Search terms – Lister Double Exposure
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan B. Allender Ph.D. and Dan B Allender
Search terms – Allender Wounded
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan
Search terms – Mill River Darcie
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – Another hit – several copies of the same torrent, containing this and other bestsellers.
Come Back To Me by Melissa Foster
Search terms – Foster Come Back
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – one hit, a solo album by the former lead singer of Hootie And The Blowfish
Flat-Out Love by Jessica Park
Search terms – Flat-out Park
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – Another hit, a torrent of this book.
How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play by Barbara Baig
Search terms – Baig writer
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
WIRED by Douglas E. Richards
Search terms – Wired Richards
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – another hit – actially in the same torrent as Mill River Recluse
Just for fun, I also searched for myself, to see if any of my books showed up. On site one, nothing showed up, and on site two I saw the DVDs of the three Transformers films, and a copy of The Name Of The Rose in Italian.
So, of the twelve biggest selling books on Kindle, each of which must be selling hundreds of thousands of copies, only four of them are even available at all – so if you make it to the very, very top of the best-seller list, you still only have a one in three chance of having anyone bother to torrent your work.
There are currently 887,909 books in the Kindle store. If the books at the top aren’t being torrented, what do you think – really – that the chance is of your book, when it enters at 887,910, being pounced on?
As far as I can tell, the most sensible strategy is the one I follow:
Make at least some of your work available for free, like I do through this blog, so anyone who wants a taster can have it.
Make it as convenient as possible to buy your books in whatever format people want. Have them available as paperback, ePub, Kindle, PDF… as smoke signals if someone wants that.
Don’t give anyone a reason *not* to buy. DRM is a reason not to buy.
Sell for a reasonable price. Ideally you want to sell for a price where every sale will net you a noticeable amount of money, but not enough to put anyone off. I go for $5 for electronic copies (except short stories, which are 99 cents). The paper copies have to be more expensive because they cost much more to produce, but I get the same money (or less) from them.
Put the book out and tell people about it. And by ‘tell people’ I mean ‘tell people who are interested in your writing and/or the subject matter’, not ‘spam forums whose only readers are other self-publishers and then complain that you’ve got no sales’.
Then write the next one, and don’t worry about who’s doing what with the last one. If it’s good, people will pay for it if you charge fairly. If it’s not, people won’t even take it if you give it away.
Caveat – I’m not a full-time writer, so I’m obviously not *that* successful. But I *am* doing well enough that my income from writing makes up a significant percentage of my income.
I’d be interested, therefore, if anyone had any better strategies, or any refinements on the above.
Pissing In The Pool (Or Why Readers Hate Indie Writers)
I recently took a minor part in a discussion on Amazon’s Kindle forums. This started because some of the people on there were looking for a way to filter out self-published authors (like me) and only see ‘proper’ authors. This would obviously not be something I’d be keen on.
But the thread I was drawn into was started by someone – another indie writer – complaining about this. And these were some of his complaints:
I’ve also read thousands of pieces of literature, mainly trad. published, and I’ve seen all types of mistakes in the writing — spelling errors, bad sentences, bad grammer, plots that didn’t add up . . . all and all, for me personally, I’m not a nazi, it’s no big deal, it’s just a story . . . when you see a play or a concert or some type of live show and the performer is a little out of key or makes a mistake, is it that big of a deal? So why are people so hard on indie writers?
This is an attitude I see all the time. There are two parallel lines of thought among self-published authors, both of which are pernicious but which when combined come close to being actively evil.
The first is “Those evil traditional publishers are just trying to keep us indie authors down, with their pesky rules about ‘writing good English’ and ‘not plagiarising’ and ‘bothering to be vaguely coherent’. Real talent like mine doesn’t need those things.”
That is then coupled with an attitude that can be found on the Kindle author boards, which says that anyone giving a self-published author a bad review is ‘jealous’ – or in extreme cases that bad reviews are obviously the work of the evil publishers, trying to knock the competition, and that the last thing you should do is pay attention to those nit-pickers who point out problems with your work.
Let me put this as simply as I can:
If you are charging for your work, you have an obligation to be professional.
This is particularly true in the case of publishing. When you put your book up for sale on Amazon, you’re in direct competition with every other work of literature ever published, near enough. That means *you have to be that good*.
You don’t have to have written the single best book ever written, of course. But there has to be at least one person in the world, who doesn’t know you, for whom your book is the single best way they could spend their money and reading time.
Can you make a convincing case that there is *someone* out there who will get more out of reading your book than out of reading Hamlet, or Ulysses, or the Feynman Lectures In Physics, or Huckleberry Finn, or Catch-22, or Orwell’s collected essays, or Thank You Jeeves, or any of a million other books? Is there someone out there who, if presented with all those books, you could tell with a straight face “you’ll like mine more”?
There don’t have to be many of them. The numbers could be in single figures. But if those people don’t exist, then *YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS PUTTING YOUR WORK OUT FOR SALE*. You are, fundamentally, trying to perpetrate a fraud on your readers. You are telling them “this is the book you should read next” when you know full well that they shouldn’t read it at all.
I don’t make any great claims for my own work’s quality, but it does meet that standard. I know it does, because people I don’t know, with no reason to care either way, have said to me “I enjoyed your stories, I hope you write some more” or “I liked the Beach Boys book, when’s volume two coming out?” or “I bought the Beach Boys book and liked it, you should all buy the Monkees book” or “I loved that essay, if you collect it in a book, I’ll buy it”. I wouldn’t be ashamed of telling any of those people to buy any of my other books in the same categories.
But the reason for this is that I *make the effort*. I get several people, with different levels of knowledge and different skill-sets, to read what I’ve written and check that it makes sense. I spend many hours proof-reading. I get good covers. I do my utmost to ensure that not a single error of fact or of language slips through. Errors nonetheless occur, of course – I am human, after all – but not one person has ever emailed me with a problem, even though I include an email address for errata in the books.
That’s not me boasting. That’s the *minimum* standard which you should be reaching before you put a book out for sale.
If you put out a book that is not the absolute best work you can do at the time, you are causing harm in three ways:
You’re harming the people buying your book under false pretences. Doing this to them is a species of fraud.
You’re harming yourself. Your reputation will suffer, as will your chances of ever having a career in writing (which presumably you would want).
And you are harming those authors like me, or my uncle, or Simon Bucher-Jones or Andrew Rilstone or Lawrence Burton or Chris Browning or hundreds of others who actually *do* put the basic effort in to make our work competent. Every time someone buys something like this or this, they are going to be that much more likely to want to avoid any further self-published authors for fear it’ll be the same.
And that goes double if you get involved in ‘review swaps’, artificially inflating the review scores of terrible books. And triple if you spam readers’ forums about your books. And quadruple if, on those readers’ forums, you start talking about how “we self-publishers aren’t bound by your Nazi rules of grammar, it’s all about free expression.”
Every time you do this, you’re not only sabotaging yourself, but you’re hurting everyone else, too.
There are a lot of very, very good self-published authors out there, with good reasons for publishing their own work rather than going through publication houses. But as long as we tolerate – and even encourage – incompetence, illiteracy and unprofessionalism in the name of solidarity, or sticking it to ‘the man’, or even just being kind to someone who means well and tries hard, sensible readers are going to lump everyone in together and avoid all of us.
If you read self-published books, please leave honest and accurate reviews, both good and bad, on the books you’ve read, so people know what they’re getting. The good reviews help books with no marketing budget, and the bad reviews help sink the rubbish more quickly.
If you *write* self-published books, please take the same care you’d take in your day job (or greater), and treat readers as potential customers rather than antagonists.
If you hang around on self-publishing forums, please don’t encourage obvious incompetence and laziness. Please do provide constructive – but thorough – criticism for those who need it.
If we all do this, then with a little luck the people writing drivel will realise that Amazon isn’t an infinite money-tree, and readers can get back to reading books they want to read, and writers to writing them, without having to worry about who’s self-published and who isn’t.
One Week’s Notice – Withdrawing My Books From Smashwords
Just to give people a head’s up – a week from today I’ll be withdrawing my ebooks from smashwords.com , so anyone who has bought them but not yet downloaded a copy should make sure they have one.
The reason for this is that Lulu, who I do my print books with, have announced that they now have an automatic epub conversion facility similar to Smashwords’, so there should be no problems with formatting (the main reason I didn’t use Lulu previously) as well as getting ebooks onto the same sites (iBooks, Nook etc) that Smashwords does.
And Smashwords has a truly Byzantine payment system which means they can pay you anything up to six months in arrears (I’ve still never received a penny from them) and they make non-US authors jump through all sorts of hoops or withold 30% of their earnings for US tax (I was going to jump through the hoops, now I’ll take the hit since the amount of money involved is going to be tiny) while Lulu pay monthly and consider one’s tax situation one’s own business (I must get an accountant early next year, because I’m now selling enough books to justify it).
So my books will still be available in DRM-free ePub form, and after a relatively short break they should be up on Nook, iBookstore etc as before, but they won’t be on Smashwords after this week.
Some Tips For Self-Publishers
Having self-published four ‘real’ books, plus a small ebook of short stories, I’ve figured out quite a few things that I think would be very helpful to any aspiring writers, so thought I’d share them with you all.
Use LyX to write your book in. It has the least user-unfriendly interface of any word processor I know of, and produces beautiful typesetting in a variety of formats. The book Self-Publishing With LyX will give you a few tips. Output your book as a PDF – this can be used directly to typeset the printed version – and as an RTF file, which can be edited in LibreOffice, OpenOffice or similar to produce the text for your ebook versions.
If you have an index, don’t do it until *after* you have produced an RTF or .doc version for ebooks. LyX has a wonderful indexing system, but it leaves formatting marks in your RTF output, which will cause problems for ebook versions.
Serialise your book on your blog. This will build a readership – and you can later link every post to the released book. Don’t worry about people reading it for free who would otherwise pay – blogs and books are such different media that people *will* pay for a book version of blog posts they’re interested in. What I tend to do is add an introduction, extra footnotes, an index and so on to the book, so it still gives purchasers a reason to buy. I also revise everything before publication – and here the eyes you’ve got from your blog posts are invaluable, because people will have noticed the most obvious mistakes before you put them in print.
That said, before you publish your book, get at least four other people to read it over – ideally have two or three of them be people who know something about the subject/genre in question, but also have one or two be people who know as little as possible about the subject, but who are proficient in some other area (especially important is to get at least one person who is able to spot your spelling and grammatical errors – which you *will* have). I learned this after my first book, when two separate people (Plok and Mike Taylor) said “It’s a good book, but…” then made the same suggestion, which would have improved it.
Use Lulu for print versions. Yes, I know not many people buy print versions of books online, but some do, and you want every sale you can get. Make your book available as paperback and hardback, as well as PDF. Hardbacks won’t sell very much, but there will be *some* people who want them – some will even buy both versions of the book, to have one as a reading copy and one for their collection.
Do not, however, make your books available as ePubs from lulu. Lulu use an insanely complex auto-checking system that falsely marks many valid ePubs as being badly formatted – I suspect so they can sell you their ePub formatting service. Don’t fall for it.
For ebook publishing, the single most important thing you can do is to get on the Kindle. You can upload an RTF document at kdp.amazon.com. Don’t put DRM on your book. All it does is annoy customers – anyone who wants to ‘pirate’ your book will do so anyway. Learn from the mistakes of the music business, don’t repeat them.
Make sure you price your book above $2.99 in the Kindle version, as that’s the point at which Amazon will let you take 70% of the revenue, rather than 30%. My own experience has been that about $5 is a reasonable price for a ‘proper’ ebook (i.e. not one like my book of short stories, which is only 20 pages long). You’ll get slightly more sales at a lower price than that, but not (in my experience) enough to make up for the lost revenue. On the other hand, pricing the book at any more than that just makes you look greedy.
The pricing advice, however, will vary depending on how fungible a good your books are. Amanda Hocking, who writes stories about teen vampires in love (or something like that – ‘dark fantasy’ anyway) prices her books (or at least the first in each series) at 99 cents, because that’s a market with a lot of competition (and she’s managed to sell over a million books, so she’s doing something right in that market). Joe Konrath, who writes thrillers, publishes at $2.99, and again sells more than me. But I think in the case of Hocking or Konrath, their customers want ‘a dark fantasy’ or ‘a thriller’, and have thousands of choices. If your book’s in a more niche market, as all mine so far have been, you can afford to price it higher.
Also get your book onto smashwords.com – they will get your book into all other major ebook channels (Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Nook etc), and will convert your RTF into the appropriate, DRM-free, formats. Make sure you follow the Smashwords Style Guide though (you can use your smashwords-formatted RTF to upload to KDP too).
Don’t let Smashwords put your book on Kindle, though – make sure you do that separately, yourself. Smashwords only pay quarterly, *and* take a percentage of what you make, *AND* it takes time for them to get paid by third parties, *AND* if you’re outside the US you have to jump through tax hoops which can take five months or more unless you want to lose another 30% of your money. If someone wants your book, direct them to Lulu or Amazon – Smashwords is only there for the less than 15% of the market who want ePub books. Put your book there and look at any money you make from it as a pleasant surprise.
Get a decent cover. People *do* judge books by their covers, and even if you can’t design things very well yourself (and don’t have a friend who offers, as my friend did for the cover of my Beach Boys book), there are enough public domain images available that you can get something quite striking.
Get somebody to read your blurb over. This is even more important than getting your book proof-read. I’ve seen some truly horrendous blurbs on Amazon from self-published writers – some actually illiterate.
DON’T join in any self-publishing author fora. There may be some useful advice there, but it’s lost in the noise of pyramid-scheme “I’ll buy yours if you buy mine” and people ‘reviewing’ others’ books (just giving them encouragement, rather than advice on how to get better). If you want to see what self-published authors are doing, look at some of the links in Joe Konrath’s blogroll, and just read the blogs that seem useful to you.
Write a *lot*. You won’t make much from any one book, but each of my books makes me between £25 and £50 per month. That’s not enough to live on, but that’s because I only have four books out – the more books I put out, the more money I’ll make. That said, it’s important not to churn out crap. Every book you publish *must* have a reason for existing. There’s nothing in any of my books that I haven’t felt compelled to write.
And finally, if you don’t have time to go through that whole list of advice, just look at this, do the opposite of what she did, and you should be OK.
HOWTO: Create a usable ePub file for Lulu.com
I’ve been having a lot of problems with getting my latest ebook uploaded to Lulu, and I know other people have had similar problems, so here’s what I’ve learned so far. (Currently I’ve *finally* got to the point where they’ve accepted my ePub file, but then the next screen gets me an ‘unrecoverable error’).
I’m assuming, first of all, that like me you’ve created your book in a WYSIWYG word processor (like Microsoft Office or AbiWord or LibreOffice) rather than having it already in some suitable XML-like format or creating it in LaTeX or something. If you know enough to do those things, you know enough to hand-hack an ePub file anyway.
But if you have your book as an .odt , .pdf , .rtf or .doc file, you’ll want to convert it and preserve most of your formatting. The best software to do this is a Free Software package called Calibre, available for download for Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux here (though if you have GNU/Linux on your machine it’s almost certainly in the repos of your distro, and you should get it from there).
However, Calibre has what seems to me a rather unintuitive interface full of giant blobby teletubby icons. If you have any difficulty using it, you might want to use this site, which is just a web front-end to Calibre. I have no idea what, if anything, they do with your file once it’s uploaded, so the usual caveats about ‘cloud’ services apply, but I can confirm that the ePub files they generate are valid ones, and generated with a recent version of Calibre (0.7.40 – for comparison the version in Debian Squeeze is 0.7.38 while in Sid it’s 0.7.42).
When you have your ePub, you can check that it’s basically valid using this online validator. However, you can still run into several problems.
The first one I found was a Permissions problem. An ePub is just a renamed .zip file, containing lots of other files which make up your book, and Calibre appears not to give anyone else the permission to do stuff with those files.
The second one – and one that a lot of people have complained about – is unmanifested files. This problem, which is not explained properly by Lulu, is a simple one – in the .zip file, there’s a list of all the files that should be there ( this list is called content.opf ). Sometimes there are extra files in there that shouldn’t be – in my case Calibre generated a directory called META-INF but didn’t list it in content.opf .
So here’s what you need to do. Take the ePub file, and extract it (Windows users can do this by renaming yourbook.epub to yourbook.zip and using an app like Winzip. GNU/Linux users and users of other unixalikes can use the unzip command).
Next, change the permissions of all the resulting files so that everyone can access them. Here’s how to do that in Windows. In GNU/Linux you just run the command chmod -R 777 * (making sure, of course, that the directory you’re in contains only those files that you wish to alter).
Now, open the file content.opt in a text editor (like Notepad, Gedit or Vim). You should see in there a section like:
<manifest>
<item href=”Pictures/10000000000000CC000000A83F7DB793.jpg” id=”id3″ media-type=”image/jpeg”/>
<item href=”Pictures/100000000000012C000001C881668E50.jpg” id=”id5″ media-type=”image/jpeg”/>
<item href=”Pictures/1000000000000177000001781C2F2F04.jpg” id=”id8″ media-type=”image/jpeg”/>
<item href=”Pictures/10000000000001A2000001837F27C3DA.jpg” id=”id4″ media-type=”image/jpeg”/>
<item href=”Pictures/10000000000002BC000000E20000658C.jpg” id=”id2″ media-type=”image/jpeg”/>
<item href=”Pictures/10000000000003CF000002FA25F145A0.jpg” id=”id7″ media-type=”image/jpeg”/>
<item href=”Pictures/10000000000003F9000001D7FD934D20.jpg” id=”id6″ media-type=”image/jpeg”/>
<item href=”index_split_000.xhtml” id=”id129″ media-type=”application/xhtml+xml”/>
<item href=”index_split_001.xhtml” id=”id128″ media-type=”application/xhtml+xml”/>
This is the list of files that should be in there. Look through that list and compare it to the files you’ve got, and delete any files that aren’t in the list. If you have anything that isn’t in this list, Lulu will (quite rightly) reject it – you could have put anything in there along with your book, after all.
Now, you’ve got your list of files sorted out, and they all have the correct permissions. What you need to do now is create a new zip file with all of these in. But it’s not *quite* that simple – you have to make sure the file called ‘mimetype’ is the *first* file in the zip file, and normally when you create a zip file the files in it are listed either alphabetically or by time added.
So what you need to do is create a new file and *only* add the file ‘mimetype’ to it. In Windows you can create a zip file called mybook.zip using Winzip and add this file. In GNU/Linux, use the command zip -X0 mybook.epub mimetype .
Now, once you have this file, you can add the rest of your files. In Windows, you can use Winzip for this. In GNU/Linux, use the command zip -X9Dr mybook.epub [list of files and directories] .
If you’ve done this in Windows, you must now rename your file from mybook.zip to mybook.epub . Check your file in your favourite ebook reader (if you don’t have one, you can read files in Calibre as well as write them) and make sure it looks more-or-less like you want it to. Then check you’ve got everything right with this online validator and you can upload it to Lulu. If everything’s gone right, then this should be everything you need to do to get your book uploaded – assuming you don’t, like me, then get a server problem on Lulu’s end.
7 comments