Stuff I’ve read or helped to write
Chuck Wendig wrote this post for writers, but I think it’s relevant to any kind of creative activity:
Suddenly Old Mister Doubt is jabbering in your ear.
You’re not good enough.
You’ll never make it, you know.
Everyone’s disappointed in you.
Where are your pants? Normal people wear pants.
…self-doubt is the enemy of the writer. It is one of many: laziness, fear, ego, porn, Doritos. But it is most certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, in the writer’s rogue gallery of nemeses.
I was at a book reading by Christopher Brookmyre and Mark Billingham a few weeks ago, and Billingham described some of the angry letters he gets from readers outraged that he uses the odd swear word – but not, it seems, outraged by some of the absolutely appalling things his villains do. It seems to be quite common in crime fiction: just last night, Allan Guthrie got a one-star review from somebody so outraged by the (minor) swearing in one of his books that they couldn’t continue.
I’ve said elsewhere that writers should consider whether swearing is necessary if it isn’t relevant or appropriate – if Mr Guthrie wrote gentle Victorian-era whodunnits and used language such as “it was Professor fucking Plum, with a fucking lead pipe, in the fucking study, the fucking sneaky fucking fucker” then that might be considered somewhat gratuitous – but he writes contemporary crime fiction and police procedurals.
You may not be aware of this, but policemen and women sometimes swear. Criminals too.
Ray Banks, aka The Saturday Boy, has an opinion about all of this.
Swearing is a vital part of human life, regardless of culture, and to indulge in vicarious murder as entertainment whilst eschewing the saltier language is nothing short of hypocrisy.
I read a lot of crime fiction, and I’ve lost track of the various horrible things crime writers describe – and by crime writers I mean mainstream, your-mum-reads-them crime writers, many of whom revel in detailed descriptions of the most terrible acts. If you can stomach that but not the word “fuck” then there’s something seriously fucking wrong with you.
I thought it might be an idea to do a huge ebook-advice post based on the various discussions we’ve had here and on other sites, so that’s what I’ve done: an enormous A to Z of ebook publishing aimed at would-be ebook publishers. If there’s anything I’ve missed or got hopelessly wrong, I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments.
No, not Lulu the loud Lennoxtown song-shouter – I mean Lulu.com the print-on-demand publisher. The service’s new ebook wing offers “a best-in-class Word to ePub converter”, a 90/10 royalty split and distribution to other platforms such as the iPad and the Nook.
It sounds very like Smashwords: it’ll provide you with an ISBN, act as a distributor and so on, and if you’re publishing to any site that uses ePub the free converter and eBook creator’s guide are worth having.
New Scots man-blog A Man’s A Man has written a very nice – and very nuts – thing about Coffin Dodgers. I get the impression Owen the editor liked it.
Just a wee update: my month of cut-price ebook selling has been and gone, and I thought I’d share the figures (if you’re new here, I’ve been selling my debut novel online for £1.99 and decided to halve the price to see what would happen).
Sales hit a brick wall in mid-July, so I halved the price.
A couple of conclusions, then: first of all, price doesn’t matter if you don’t have profile. Changing the price has had little or no effect on my US Kindle sales or on my Smashwords sales. I suspect that part of the difference is that Amazon US doesn’t have as many ratings as Amazon UK, because something seems to happen when you reach ten reviews. My UK sales certainly began to climb when that happened.
Secondly, more sales doesn’t necessarily mean more money. At normal prices I get a 70% royalty, but if you go below £1.49 (before VAT – the total’s around £1.71) the royalty rate drops to 30%. At full price I get about £1 per book; at cut price I get 30p. So how do my figures look if I concentrate on cash, not just sales numbers?
I’ve deliberately skipped July because I sold books at full and half price that month, and sums are hard. Comparing June and August, it’s clear that cutting the price of Coffin Dodgers didn’t massively boost my sales, but it massively cut my income.
I know price isn’t the only factor in selling ebooks, but it’s the only one that’s easy to analyse with a calculator.
Time for a new experiment, I think. I’ve put the price back up (to £1.71, the lowest Amazon will let me charge while earning 70% royalties) to see what happens. What I think will happen is that sales will slide dramatically; what I hope will happen is that they don’t slide so dramatically that I’m getting 70% of sod-all.
I’ll keep you posted.
I sold my 251st copy of Coffin Dodgers this morning, and I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve discovered so far.
The first and most obvious thing is how important price appears to be: after the initial momentum wears off, sales plummet if you’re pricing at £1.99 (there are other factors – Amazon did a big money-off thing on mainstream Kindle books, which killed sales; this time of year a lot of UK people are away – but I think price was the main thing).
It looks like 99p is the rate the market expects for an ebook by an unknown author, which is unfortunate: cutting your price to meet that means you drop down to a lower royalty rate (35% instead of 70%). Sell at 99p and your royalty is £0.30 per book; at £1.99 you get £1.19.
If you’re self-publishing, then, there’s an interesting bet you have to make. At 99p per book, I’d need to sell 3,333 books to make £1,000. At £1.99, I’d only need to sell 840. So do you bet on volume, or margin?
What happens if you price between the two points? If £1.99 is insanely, ridiculously expensive for an ebook, what about £1.49?
This is particularly important if, like me, you aren’t flogging a whole bunch of titles simultaneously: I can’t give away Coffin Dodgers in the hope it’ll sell extra copies of Coffin Dodgers 2, because I haven’t written that yet (and might not for a while. I’m working on something else). Pricing at £0.99 has worked in terms of numbers, but would I make slightly more cash from slightly fewer sales if I went for £1.49, which is the lowest price you can set and still get a 70% royalty (about 90p per book)? By pricing at 99p, am I falling into the trap of saying “buy it because it’s cheap” instead of “buy it because it’s good”?
I’ve no idea. I think I’ll try £1.49 and see what happens.
A few other observations: Saturday is the worst day for selling ebooks – it’s a real-world shopping day, not an online one – and reviews, recommendations and Facebook links make a huge difference.
Getting Amazon user reviews is a big help too: something appears to happen when you hit ten reviews, which I suspect is when your book starts appearing in the various “you might also be interested in…” cross-selling things Amazon offers. It’s very annoying that UK reviews don’t automatically appear in the US site – I suspect that’s partly why I’ve sold bugger-all books in the US, although it’s possible that the lack of localisation (using Z instead of S, Center instead of Centre etc) is a factor too.
As you probably guessed, Kindle is where it’s at. Smashwords is fine as a distributor but (IMO) useless as a retailer, and the sites it does publish to take an eternity to list your titles too. Of my various sales, only ten have come via Smashwords and the services it works with (eight via Smashwords itself and two via Apple’s iBooks). I don’t think I’ve quite scratched the surface of Kindle promotion either: the people who’ve done serious numbers tend to spend serious amounts of time hanging around Kindle boards and similar forums. I’d love to know how they find the time.
Anything I’ve not covered that you’d like to know? Ask away…
This is interesting: a cloud-based version of the Kindle app. I’ve had a quick play with it and it works really well – it’s very fast and good-looking. The help pages say “Kindle Cloud Reader is compatible with PC Windows, or Mac, or Linux computers using the Google Chrome or Safari web browsers, on Linux computers using Google Chrome, and on an iPad using the Safari web browser.”
That’s one way around Apple’s ban on in-app purchases.
There’s an interesting post on The Guardian books blog today: The true price of publishing.
Most people instinctively feel that ebooks should be substantially cheaper than paper books, because an ebook is not physically “made”: there are no printing costs. But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the “text itself”, then the delivery method shouldn’t much matter. The fixed costs – acquiring, editing, marketing – remain unchanged.
That’s a tough argument to get across, I think, because Amazon in particular has been very aggressive with ebook pricing. Because ebooks are cheap, Joe and Jane Public expect future ebooks to be cheap too. They neither know nor care that VAT wipes out most of the production cost difference (VAT is levied on ebooks but not printed ones).
Aggressive pricing isn’t new, of course. Amazon has been doing it with print for ages – when did you last pay the RRP for *anything* on Amazon? – and supermarkets often use books as loss-leaders. In most cases the winners aren’t the publishers or the authors; they’re Amazon, and the supermarkets. You don’t really have a business without them, but their demands for discounts mean that it’s not much of a business with them.
This is something I want to come back to when I have a bit of time to do the subject justice: I think the aggressive pricing of ebooks by name authors with backlists to shift, and the rush to undercut their prices by almost every new ebook author out there, could be a form of collective career suicide. Once something’s devalued, it’s hard to change people’s perspectives of what constitutes fair pricing. Just ask the developers getting slagged on iTunes for daring to charge more than 79p for their apps.
According to The Times, most books don’t sell:
Last month [in 2008] Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks book sales nationwide, showing that, of 200,000 books on sale last year, 190,000 titles sold fewer than 3,500 copies. More devastating still, of 85,933 new books, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies. And things aren’t much better over the pond: I read recently that, of the 1.2million titles sold in the United States in 2004, only 2 per cent sold more than 5,000 copies.
If the public comes to expect professional cover design, production and editing at amateur-hour prices, I suspect there’s going to be precious little profit for the overwhelming majority of ebook authors. Even if you do 3,500 copies, if you’re doing them on the Kindle store at 99p a pop then your entire take is £1,050 before tax.
Most writers will be lucky to do one tenth of those sales: in 2007, the Guardian reported that “the average sale of a hardback book by a first-time writer is 400 copies”. That’s £120 in Kindle money. If you’re doing things the DIY way and paying for a cover designer and an editor, you’re going to make a significant loss.
I’m not arguing that nobody can make money from ebooks. Of course they can. Some are shifting tens of thousands of books, and making tidy sums out of it. But it’s important to remember that they’re the exceptions.
I’ll come back to this soon, I’m sure.
I feel a little bit bad about the slagging I gave John Locke’s how-to manual, so I thought I’d redress the balance a little bit by mentioning Let’s Get Digital. If you’re looking for a manual on e-publishing, spend your money on Gaughran’s book, not Locke’s: Gaughran makes it abundantly clear that the work starts when you finish the book, and the book is stuffed with useful links and practical advice. Some of the case studies are interesting too.
If you’re too skint or too tight to pay the £1.71 Gaughran is asking on Amazon, he’s giving a PDF version away for free. Which is awfully nice of him.