Creating Your Personal and Business Road Map to Success as an Author!

By Pamela Ebel

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One of the most daunting tasks I faced starting my fifth career, with the intention of becoming a published fiction author, was two-fold:

First, I had to decide on my long term goals. 

Six years later I laugh every time I look at the list -  a) finish my novel and find a traditional publisher and b) arrange book tours while writing book two.

Everyone who has been writing and publishing for any amount of time recognizes the problem immediately – a complete lack of understanding that to be a successful fiction writer it is not enough to create a physical space to write in and carve out the time to use that space to write something publishable.

Like most fiction writers, I had written stories for many years. When I decided to turn to writing as my fifth career, I failed to do a deep dive into the skills and tools needed to create a road map for success. 

Writer groups that I joined spent little time on craft specific discussions and practically no time on the one issue every professional needs to understand. I felt the need to help correct the omission.

I developed an approach to the writing journey that informs my work. I hope this series of articles will be helpful to those who are starting to or currently are making decisions about career goals that will lead to success. 

My journey started at the beginning of the Pandemic. During lockdown I examined writing processes by tuning in to a number of ZOOM presentations offered by writers with different years of experience, writing in different genres, and offering widely divergent suggestions and opinions about what ‘you must do to be successful.’

Watching videos and reading online articles, I realized there was little advice about what we should do before starting a writing career. What was missing from many of those presentations was ‘the notorious backstory.’ ‘Why’ and ‘How’ the presenters got started was glossed over, if covered at all. This led to my second task:

As I worked on understanding the ins and outs of the publishing world it hit me that missing was a clear statement that writing and publishing is a Business! 

Working to learn and hone’s one craft is a part of the Business. Finding groups, conferences, and other resources to assist us in honing the craft is a part of the Business. Learning how traditional publisher operations differ from smaller publishing houses, how those both differ from hybrid publishers, and how being Indie or self-published differs from all the rest is a part of the Business.  

Determining if and what type of legal entities we might need to create is a part of the Business. Understanding contractual obligations and how to relate to agents, editors and other professionals in the publishing world is a part of the Business. Understanding what type of costs and expenses will be incurred is a part of the Business.  We can’t make goal decisions without this information.

Before creating the perfect model, we need to understand that all businesses have one thing in common: a concrete list of the goals to be achieved and the planning skills to make those goals happen.

Those skills involve: a) avoiding ‘The One Right Answer’ when outlining career goals; b) creating a structure to keep on track to achieve those goals; c) developing ‘situational awareness’ to respond to the impact that time and events, both professional and personal, will have on the original career goals and d) being able to answer five questions to understand the business of writing and how to respond to each. 

In this article we consider the first skill: Avoiding  “The One Right Answer” 

Most of our educational experiences teach us to look for the “one right answer.”  It is a “teach to the test” approach that unfortunately does not account for the fact that life is ambiguous and frequently awash with many “right answers” and often “no right answers”. 

So, it is with goal setting. Assuming that the first goal or list of goals is the “one right answer” is a mistake. Most of our personal and professional journeys are not linear. Thinking that the first career goals are set in stone and if not met, or not met exactly as planned, leads us to believe we have failed. 

Learning to recalibrate based on changes in our personal and professional lives will prevent a sense of failure based on “the one right answer.” We will be able to remove stumbling blocks in the original path or create new paths to continue our journeys.  

Taking time to assess the current demands on our personal lives allows us to understand that any goals that create a change in the status quo will have a direct impact on our family and friends.                                       

Ask three questions: What do I want on my tombstone? What do I want to leave to those I love, to those whom I respect and to the world I will leave behind? How will I explain this new career to my family, friends, and acquaintances ?

The answers to these questions will define our personal goals and start us on our journey.  Next, consider the impact the move to professional writer will have on our current monetary and employment obligations. This step is where many writers fail because they have yet to understand that writing is a BUSNESS!

Calculating what is needed to keep up the current standard of living, while adding the expenses required to function professionally allows us to create a budget that responds to these changes.

It may well be that the current standard of living, the time spent with family and friends and on personal activities will all have to be adjusted to accommodate new demands on income and time. 

Learning how to make those adjustments and explain them to those directly impacted is crucial to successful career changes. Securing approval for life altering actions requires us to show that the decisions are based on improving the quality of life for all. Finding ways to garner acceptance and support of the decisions will be explained in the second article -  Creating a Structure to Gain Acceptance of New Goals and learning when to recalibrate those goals based on Changing Circumstances.

This Crazy Writing Life: Amazon Ads Part Three–Don't Forget to Press the Clutch...

By Steven Womack

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So you’re the type that wants to be in charge, right? The thought of targeting your Amazon Ads to a bunch of folks you may or not want the ad to go to is a real problem. Maybe you don’t trust the Amazon algorithm. Maybe you’re the kind of person who would rather drive a manual transmission than an automatic.

Okay, there’s room for all types. So how do you get started?

In last month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life, we pondered Amazon’s automatic targeting and how the Amazon algorithm based its decisions on your metadata. Metadata is a term you see tossed around a lot these days. I kinda sorta think I understand what metadata is and how it works, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actual definition of the word.

So I did what people do these days: I Googled it.

Metadata, according to that internet bastion of absolute truth (Wikipedia), means “data that provides information about other data, but not the content of the data itself.”

Say what? Data about data?

Continuing on with Wikipedia, metadata is data that gives you insights into other data. There are numerous kinds of metadata: descriptive, structural, administrative, reference, statistical, legal… A lot to take in, more than we actually need.

Before we get too deep into the weeds on this, let’s narrow our focus to the question of what is metadata for indie publishers and what does it do?

Now we’ve bitten off a bite-sized chunk. Metadata for indie publishers is the information (data) that will help lead a customer to your book. This information primarily falls under two main classifications: keywords and categories. If you’re going to attempt to manually target your promotions efforts on Amazon (or anywhere else), you’re going to have to get your head around these two dynamics.

Keywords are words or phrases that, when a potential customer types them into the search bar, takes them—hopefully—to your book. If you’ve written a book called Pole Vaulting for Dummies, then when someone types “pole vaulting” into the search bar, your book is going to be in the pool of books that Amazon pulls up.

But there’s more to it. Not only do good keywords make your book show up in search results, but if you’re running a Sponsored Products campaign (see the last two month’s columns on Amazon advertising), then your ad gets featured in pages for other books that pop up as a result of the search. If you include the keyword phrase “Mark Twain” in your metadata, then your book will not only show up in search results for Mark Twain, but as a Sponsored Product ad on every other book page that’s pulled up.

So you’re beginning to see how important this is, right? The right keywords will make your book pop up all over the Amazon place. But the wrong, or ineffective, keywords will consign you to obscurity.

It’s not just the keywords, though. You can also control how closely the customer’s search results match your keywords. There are three broad match types in the Amazon ad platform.

Exact matches are just what the name implies. You know exactly what search query you want to target. Exact matches include close variations like plural or singular versions of the phrase, but you need to be as specific as possible and you need to enter the words in the exact order you want them to appear in the search. If your keyword phrase is “private eye noir novels,” then “noir private eye books” isn’t going to give you a hit.

If you choose the phrase match option, that means you have a precise idea of what you’re trying to target, but you’re willing to be a little looser on the interpretation, like if your keyword phrase is part of a longer phrase. In other words, if your keyword phrase is “private eye noir novels” and someone types in “private eye noir novels set in New Orleans,” you’ll get a hit.

The third option is the broad match. This is the match type that will give you the largest number of hits, but you run a real risk that the some of the hits may be so far off base that they won’t give you any results. Ricardo Fayet in Amazon Ads For Authors goes so far as to recommend that you not choose broad match as an option in Sponsored Product ads.

So let’s look at Category targeting. What are categories on the Amazon platform?

Imagine that Amazon.com was a brick-and-mortar bookstore. If you were looking for a romance novel, you’d either go to the store directory and see which shelves housed romances or you’d just wander around until you found the right shelf. Same with mysteries, suspense/thrillers, or books on car repair or stock trading…

It’s vital that your book be assigned to the right categories. In a brick-and-mortar bookstore, when a book’s put in the wrong category, it’s misshelved. If someone looks long enough and hard enough, they may find it. In the vast online bookstore known as Amazon, though, when your book’s in the wrong category, it’s lost.

But it’s not just a matter of readers being able to find your book. Each category within Amazon (with the exception of some categories that we’ll touch on in a second) has its own best-seller list. The competition within each category varies tremendously. In some niche categories, you might need to sell only a dozen books to be an Amazon number one best-seller.

So what are the exceptions I mentioned? In a recent article on Amazon categories, Kindlepreneur guru Dave Chesson writes that 27% of the categories you can pick on the KDP dashboard are what he calls “ghost categories.” These are categories that don’t have a name, don’t have a category path on the Best Sellers page, and if you select it, your sales don’t count toward a bestseller tag. You almost always want to avoid putting your book in one of these.

It’s also important to understand that over half the categories on Amazon are duplicate categories. Which means if you select three of these categories (and three is all you’re allowed), then you’re really only picking one.

Here’s the other challenge when you’re determining which categories to place your book in: there are over 19,000 categories!

Yep, Amazon’s a dang big bookstore.

And Amazon’s constantly changing the rules. As I mentioned a few lines earlier, you can request that your book be placed in three categories. You used to be allowed ten, but the rules changed. Even then, there’s no guarantee your book will wind up in the categories you want. Amazon can deny you the ones you want or stick your book in other categories without even telling you. It’s important to understand how this complicated system works to get the best results. Embed keywords for a specific category in your book description, your book’s content, or even the title. That’ll help.

Do you have a sense now of how big a task this is? As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, if you’re going to embark on an indie pubbing journey, you’ve got to constantly be studying, learning, observing. This is bidness, folks, and ya’ gotta take it seriously.

How do we manage to get our heads around all this without spending forty hours a week studying how all this works. After all, most of us have lives of some kind and other demands on our time.

The best tool I’ve found, by far, is another offering from our friends at Kindlepreneur. Dave Chesson’s made a career out of mastering the indie publishing space and Kindlepreneur’s PublisherRocket is one of their best tools for mastering the keyword and category challenge (let me just jump in here, as I have before, and say with complete transparency that I’m not an affiliate with Kindlepreneur or anyone else; I’m not making a buck off this if you buy it; I’m just happy to share something that really works).

PublisherRocket enables you to discover categories and keywords, analyze your competition, and develop Amazon Ads—all in the same place. Let’s do a quick case study here, based on my earlier reference to the author who writes a book called Pole Vaulting For Dummies. You’re the author and you’ve written the book, copy-edited it, put together a great cover, and you’re ready to pull the trigger on KDP.

Fire up PublisherRocket and type in the “keyword search” bar the words pole vaulting.

Turns out there are a slew of books published on Amazon about pole vaulting (didn’t know it was such a hot area). Let’s click on the first one, Alexis Monroe Kiefer’s The Pole Vault Coaching Handbook.

PublisherRocket tells us that Ms. Kiefer’s book on pole vaulting was published 1647 days ago, its Amazon Best Seller Rank is 975,271—not great but I’ve seen worse—and it’s 78 pages long. This book does not have targeted keywords in its title, and it costs $20.00. PublisherRocket estimates its daily sales as $3.00 and its monthly sales at $20.00.

Okay, it’s not likely the author’s making a living off this book but, hey, she’s slinging a few copies here and there.

Then you hit the “See The Categories” button and the good stuff happens.

This book is only listed in two categories:

Books>Reference

Books>Sports & Outdoors>Other Team Sports>Track & Field

For each category, there’s a button to get Insights on that category (Sales to #1, Sales to #10, Average Publishers Price, and the Monthly Sales of Category’s Top 30 Bestsellers). Then there’s another button that gives you all the Keywords for that category.

Are you beginning to get a sense of how valuable that data is? I read an article about how date is the new oil—those that have got it control the market and a lot more. I believe that’s true.

Let’s wrap this one up. The last three installments of This Crazy Writing Life have been designed to just barely break the ice on Amazon advertising. I just wanted to give you a start, but if you really want to do a deep dive into making this all work, then you’re going to have to spend more time than we’ve had here. Ricardo Fayet’s Amazon Ads For Authors is the best and most complete resource out there. I recommend starting with that.

Once again, thanks for playing along.

This Crazy Writing Life: Dipping Our Toes In The Amazon Part Two — On Swimming Upstream...

By Steven Womack

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It’s hard to believe that this is installment number twelve of This Crazy Writing Life. How did a whole year go by so fast?

Maybe it’s just me. Time does seem to go by in a blur these days. Add to that the information overload and analysis paralysis we all seem to be afflicted with these days and it’s easy to see how time and life can both just go streaming by like another dreary Netflix movie.

If you’re a newcomer to this little adventure, thanks for joining us. If you’re a regular, thanks for hanging with me. I hope you’re getting something out of it.

So let’s get to work…

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We left off last month with the basics of Amazon ads and, by extension, some fundamentals of digital advertising in general. CPC versus CPM ads, Sponsored Product ads, Sponsored Brands, and Lockscreen ads were all explored. If you need to catch up on some of this stuff, then pull up last month’s column. It’s all there.

Now let’s go a bit deeper, into the underlying architecture of a digital ad campaign. By architecture, I mean how ads are built on Amazon. There’s a hierarchical system at work here that looks something like a pyramid. It’s important to have a basic understanding of how the system works because this is how you organize your advertising efforts. If you’re only advertising one book with one ad at a time, there’s not much to keep track of. But if you’ve got a dozen books out there (or as some indie authors have, dozens or even hundreds of books), then keeping all this stuff straight is a completely different challenge. And as Ricardo Fayet observed in the best book I’ve ever found on learning this platform—Amazon Ads For Authors—the best performing ad campaigns are almost always the best organized.

At the top of the pyramid is the Campaign. Amazon gives you two options here: Custom text campaigns and Standard ad campaigns. There are a couple of key differences between the two.

As the name implies, Custom text campaigns allow you to write your own distinctive ad copy (up to 150 characters) that you can use to try and convince a potential reader to buy your book. The downside here is that you can only advertise one book at a time.

An Amazon Standard ad campaign, though, will allow you to advertise as many books as you want within the same campaign. Say you’ve got ten books in a cozy mystery series. With a Standard ad campaign, you can get all ten books into an “ad group” and Amazon’s algorithm will decide with books will pop up in an ad. The downside here is that the only information the prospective customer will get is the title, the series title, the author’s name and a few other elements of metadata. No creativity allowed…

So the real issue here is twofold: 1) how many books are you trying to wedge into your campaign; and 2) how important is it to be able to write some custom ad copy. If you’re promoting a single, standalone suspense/thriller, then maybe those 150 characters of sparkling creative ad copy are important to you. On the other hand, if you’re campaign is plugging a private eye series with 25 installments, then the Standard ad campaign may give you the most bang per buck.

One big, albeit fairly advanced, component of Custom Ad campaigns is that you can run what’s called A/B testing. You write one set of copy for Ad #1, then a second set for Ad #2. You launch both campaigns at the same time with the same parameters, then measure the success of each one, which is usually done by comparing click-through-rates (CTR) and actual sales. But again, as always with Amazon, this can be a bit complicated. For one thing, you have to create two separate campaigns. You can’t run two ads with different copy in one Custom ad campaign. And you have to launch both campaigns at the same time, with the same product, same budgets, and same targeting.

Lastly, you have to let each campaign run long enough to get a true assessment of how each one’s doing. The longer, the better.

Patience: that one thing we all have so much of…

In last month’s column, we examined the three basic kinds of Amazon ads and examined how the Sponsored Products ad was the one most commonly deployed by indie authors. One of the many things you have to consider when you’re creating a campaign is the bidding strategy you’re going to deploy. As we explored last month, Amazon ads are based on a bidding system. You don’t just buy an ad on Amazon and it suddenly appears; you bid for space on the platform.

Amazon ads, as we also explored last month, are CPC—or Cost Per Click—only. You don’t get a choice on the type of bid, but you can choose the strategy to take when you create the campaign.

You can choose to go with dynamic bids. Dynamic bids change depending on certain parameters—the search terms the customer used, for example. Dynamic bids can be down only, which means Amazon, in its great wisdom, will lower your bid for clicks that are less likely to convert to a sale. This can help preserve your ad spend budget.

The other alternative dynamic bid strategy is called up and down. With this strategy, they’ll raise your bid by as much as 100% for placements, for example, at the top of the first page of search results—prime real estate on Amazon—or when a search query is especially well-matched to your book. Since they raise your bid in these cases, you are more likely to see a better conversion rate and higher sales.

Conversely, in cases where the search query is not such a good match or your ad’s going to be relegated to a less juicy spot, then the algorithm can lower your bid by as much as 50%.

If you don’t want to employ dynamic bidding and want more control, then you can check the box that triggers the Fixed Bid strategy. In this case, Amazon will only bid the amount you choose, but like everything Amazon, there’s a trade-off here. With the Fixed Bid strategy, you may get more impressions, but fewer conversions. Depending on the goal of your campaign, that may be okay.

Finally, you can use a kind of hybrid strategy, where you don’t give up total control to Amazon but you create a set of rules that will take the guesswork out of moving your bids up or down to achieve a goal. This gets into concepts like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), which leads us into some pretty advanced stuff in the world of digital advertising.

So we’ve tackled two important first considerations: the type of ad campaign and the bidding strategy we’re going to employ. Now we tackle the issue of targeting. The beauty and genius of digital advertising is it’s not like broadcasting a commercial on TV, where your target audience is every bozo who owns a television and happens to have it on when your ad runs. Digital platforms—especially Amazon—devote an enormous amount of time and energy to tracking and analyzing what their customers search for and buy. With decades of experience and billions of dollars expended, Amazon’s pretty good at it.

For many authors, your best bet is to choose Automatic Targeting. This is the easiest to set up and you’re basically, to coin a phrase from the old Greyhound Bus commercials of my youth, leaving the driving to them.

But how does Amazon do this? As Ricardo points out so eloquently in his book, like many things Amazon, that’s a bit of a mystery. Amazon guards its algorithms and proprietary information very closely. But they look for matches in their automatic targeting: close matches to search queries, loose matches, substitutes, and things that complement the search query. Amazon decides in each case if the search query is anywhere near relevant to your product and to what degree. How does it do this?

Through your metadata…

This might mean the title, subtitle or series title of your book. The categories you chose when you uploaded the book (and, oh boy, that’s a whole ball of wax) and your keywords and product description. All of this data goes into the Amazon machine, goes ‘round and ‘round, and then comes out here.

One caveat here is that for novelists or mystery writers like most of us, this is a much more inexact science. Novels, in general, are much harder to fit into a niche or category than nonfiction books. A nonfiction book on organic farming is pretty easy to target; a dystopic LGBTQ, YA, coming-of-age standalone is a bit more of a challenge.

One of the great benefits of Automatic Targeting is that Amazon will tell you what keywords and products your ad targeted. It’s a bit of a process with a couple of ways to get there, but that’s valuable information. Once you know the most successful search terms and keywords, you can go in and adjust your ads to increase their performance.

You can also use this data to find out which keywords are misleading or inaccurate and plug those into your campaign as negative keywords. What are negative keywords? These are search terms that if a prospective buyer types those into the search bar, your book will deliberately not show up in the results. How is this useful?

You write cozy mysteries. So you enter gore, erotica, horror as negative keywords and it guarantees someone searching for those terms will never see your book. That can be mighty useful.

Next month, we’ll move onto Manual Targeting and keep going. As you might have guessed, tackling Amazon ads is a multi-installment rodeo on This Crazy Writing Life. And even then, this is all designed as a beginner’s primer on Amazon and other forms of digital advertising. What you’re willing to learn and take on is up to you. If you’re really into this, you can go back to college and get a graduate degree in this stuff.

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One of the reasons the last couple of columns for Killer Nashville Magazine have run a little late is that I’m up to my nether regions in indie pubbing a book right now. This was a novel I published first in hardcover a long time ago with Severn House in England and later with Harper Collins in mass-market paperback. The novel, By Blood Written, was a standalone serial killer novel and it was by far the most graphically violent and cutting-edge book I’ve written. I had great hopes for this as a breakout book, but in both cases, it was so badly published it went nowhere. Even the Harper Collins paperback sank without a trace when the editor, who was really pumped about the book, took another job a few months before pub date (which is called being orphaned in the book biz).

For years I tried to get the rights reverted to me. Harper Collins is notorious for not reverting rights to authors, but after several years and many attempts, I finally got a rights reversion letter. I’ve retitled the book, which will now be called Blood Plot, and commissioned what I think is a fabulous cover that serves as an homage to the great pulp fiction paperbacks of the Forties and Fifties. Here’s a look:

I’m just completed formatting the eBook with Atticus (which I’ve written about before) and am going to tackle the learning curve to use Atticus for typesetting the hardcover and trade paperback editions.

I only mention this because the column is all about the freedom and options of indie pubbing (as well as the enormous amount of sweat equity that’s involved). This can be a case study for what we’re all talking about.

Thanks again for playing along. I’d love to hear what you think of the cover or anything else that I bring up in This Crazy Writing Life. Feel free to drop me a line any time at: WomackWriter@yahoo.com.

This Crazy Writing Life: Okay, Let’s Talk About The 800-Pound Gorilla: Marketing

By Steven Womack

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Bold statement time. Ready? Here it comes…

I’d rather write five novels than market one.

I think that probably goes against the grain for most people. After all, writing’s hard. A novel is long, a grinding marathon of page after empty page that goes on months, sometimes years, before you reach the finish line.

And yet I’d rather run five of those marathons than try and sell one.

When I say that, I think there must be something wrong with me. For some reason or other, I’m uncomfortable blowing my own horn, hawking my own work. For some people, it comes easily, like drawing a breath. For me, it’s always seemed…

Well, unseemly.

When I was young, one of my best buddies got us both a summer job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. We got about two days of training (I still remember the spiel: The Bison, the world’s most complete home maintenance system. Guaranteed to protect your home and furniture, conserve your time and health…) and we were then turned loose on an unsuspecting neighborhood.

I think I lasted three days.

A couple of decades later, when I finally sold (there’s that word again) my first novel, I assumed the publisher would take care of all the marketing. They’d set up book signings for me, take out ads, arrange for reviews. All I had to do was cash the checks and write my next book.

Ah, what a naïve little grasshoppah I was.

Truth is, long before the genteel gentlemanly world of 19th century publishing morphed into the Darwinian dog-eat-dog cutthroat business it’s become in the 21st century, writers had to bite the bullet and learn to sell their own stuff. Now, in the age where the number of indie-pubbed writers has long surpassed the number of traditionally published authors, it’s more important than ever that writers grasp the fundamentals of marketing. When every writer is essentially a small shopkeeper slinging pages out of a tiny storefront, unless you’re willing to promote your own work, you’re never even going to get noticed, let alone make a living.

Last September, I found myself in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida at the annual Novelists Inc. conference. I’ve written about Novelists Inc. before in This Crazy Writing Life. The beauty of the Novelists Inc. conference is it’s all business. You don’t get many seminars on developing character or finding your voice with these folks. But you will get in-depth seminars on indie audiobook production and negotiating foreign translation rights contracts.

At this conference, one of the best marketing seminars I ever attended was put on by Ricardo Fayet, who’s one of the four founders of Reedsy, a company that provides support and guidance for indie-pubbed authors, as well as being a gateway connecting freelancers with writers. If you don’t know these guys, just Google them and go to their website. It’s worth the trip.

Ricardo’s written two books on marketing for indie authors: How To Market A Book and Amazon Ads For Authors. I’ve got them both and they’re well worth the price.

Ricardo’s seminar at the conference did a deep dive into the underlying psychology of marketing and a few basic principles that indie authors need to learn and deploy. It’ll make the hell of marketing a little less hellish. Let’s take a brief look at what Ricardo described.

Principle #1: It’s cheaper to retain an existing reader than acquire a new one.

It costs five time as much to attract a new reader—in money and effort—than it does to keep an old one. That’s why series are so powerful in today’s marketplace. Whether you’re Jack Konrath writing 27 installments of his Jack Daniels series books, John D. MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels or J.T. Ellison’s nine novels in her Lt. Taylor Jackson series, a series quite literally builds a brand that attracts readers and keeps them. Fayet even cited one series that’s run to 112 books.

What if you’re not into series? Then develop a style and voice that becomes as identifiable and as reliable as a series. Dick Francis wrote mostly standalones (outside of his four-book Sid Halley series), but his style and voice was so distinctive that when you pick up a Dick Francis book, it’s instantly identifiable as a Dick Francis book.

Principle #2: Product trumps marketing every time.

This principle embodies the notion that, over the long run, no amount of brilliant marketing will sell a bad book. You’ve got to write an amazing book to even have a chance of competing in the literary marketplace. Fayet cited the statistic that only seven percent of traditionally published books sell over 10,000 copies.

“You can’t sell a book if it isn’t good,” he noted.

Principle #3: Decay is inevitable.

“What’s working now isn’t guaranteed to work forever,” Fayet said. “In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to peter out at some point.” All marketing and promotion efforts and strategies eventually begin to lose their effectiveness. This principle doesn’t apply only to books. All products, sooner or later, need a marketing refresh. Interest wanes, attention moves on to other things.

And a sidebar to this notion is the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your results will come from twenty percent of your efforts. And you must constantly look ahead. If you focus solely on today’s marketing efforts and campaigns, then you won’t be prepared for when it all stops working.

Principle #4: Steady versus Explosive Marketing.

Steady, consistent marketing efforts will get you to a certain level of sales. But you may find you’ve hit a ceiling and you’re just not breaking through to the next level.

Explosive marketing, however, requires a different approach. It requires careful planning and execution, along with good timing. If spaced out properly, explosive marketing avoids fatigue and wearing out your audience. Finally, Fayet noted, it works best for highly targeted campaigns, and for many authors, that means being enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.

Principle #5: Volume x ROI.

This is kind of a big one, folks. Start by imagining the global audience of readers: millions.

Now imagine your audience: a tiny subset of millions.

So how do you reach and then grow your tiny subset. The best strategy is to start small and cheap. Maybe that’s Amazon ASIN ads or Facebook ads. This is a highly targeted strategy, where you aim to reach the people who already read your kind of book. This may not be a huge number of readers, but your Return On Investment (ROI) is potentially going to be pretty good.

Then you aim a little higher: BookBub Featured Deals, Meta A+ ads, then maybe on to digitally targeted ads, TV, even billboards and print ads.

But remember, with each step up the marketing ladder, you’re going to reach more people. But your conversion rate’s going to go down, along with your ROI. So if you want to broaden your reach, remember that with each new and larger strategy, it becomes harder to make your money back.

Principle #6: 10% of 1000=1% of 10,000…or why you don’t need to be chasing trends.

One of the most baffling questions for many writers is the question of writing to the market or chasing trends. Of course, we all want to tap into the popular zeitgeist. If there’s a demand for something in the marketplace, we all want to meet that demand. But especially in traditional publishing, the timeline for bringing a book to market may be so far out that the trend will have passed before your book can get out there.

Just remember, Cabbage Patch dolls, Beanie Babies, and Pet Rocks were once all the rage.

On the other hand, we all want to write for a growing market. But what if you occupy a bigger place in a smaller market? Fayet noted that 10% of 1000 readers is the same number of readers as 1% of a 10,000 reader market.

This is among the most complicated and convoluted decisions a writer must make. Sometimes it’s better to stay in your lane. Should we just ignore trends?

Fayet’s answer is “Of course not!” Trends signal a growing market, but you need to weigh your decision against several factors:

Can I expect to make more money in a new genre or a new kind of book? Would I be better off just delivering what I know my current readers want?

Can I expect my existing fans to follow me?

Can I keep my sanity and have a little fun by taking a new path?

Do I know the new genre well enough to dip my toe into it? Do I have the skill set?

Can I reasonably get in on the trend in time?

This is all complicated stuff… Marketing and promotion for writers can make writing look easy. But if you keep in mind Ricardo Fayet’s six principles every writer should let guide their careers, then this mine field might not be quite so treacherous.

In next month’s episode of This Crazy Writing Life, we’ll start taking deeper dives into specific marketing strategies.

I don’t know when this installment will be published in KN Magazine. I’m writing it before Christmas, so if it comes out before the holidays, have a great one. If it’s 2025 when you’re reading this, I hope this year’s your best one ever.

And thanks for coming along for the ride.

Pricing

By Dale T Phillips

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As an Indie, you get to set your own prices for your books. Do some further research on this, as there are articles and book chapters you’ll want to refer to. There’s a lot of info on sweet spots for pricing. Just look online, for example, and see what prices are for book similar to yours. Ebooks sell the most at $3-5, printed novels between $10-16. I don’t price higher than that, because fewer people will pay more for an untried product, but at that level, they’ll give it a try. Some charts show that ebooks sell the most if they’re not over 4.99, so I’m running a sale on the pricier ones to see if there’s any movement. We Indies always get to experiment! 

Traditional publishers jack up the prices on their books, both in print and ebook, because they have to pay larger staffs. For print, I’m certainly not going to shell out $30 or more for a hardcover, and for an ebook, many readers don’t want to pay $15 for one ebook (myself included), when they can get three or more quality ones for that price. For myself, I prefer to keep prices low, so I can sell more, but still make a profit. At a live show, I can even cut a deal if they buy more than one book. The series novels are all priced the same, and at a level so I can give a bookstore their 40% or more and still make a profit. If I hand-sell one at full price, I make about $10 net, so if anyone starts to balk on purchasing, I can give them a discount. People love a bargain, especially if you drop the price right then. 

Print costs you money, but ebooks cost you little to nothing. If someone buys a print copy from me, I’ll often offer the ebook for free as an extra bonus that’s usually appreciated. 

I aim for a price appropriate to what I’m selling, as follows:

• A short story collection (five tales): print, 4.99 (net about a dollar), ebook 2.99 (net almost $2). For perspective, I tell them they can have a book for the price of a coffee. 

• Longer collections: ten tales- print 7.99, ebook 3.99, 30 tales- print 11.99, ebook 7.99

• Standalone short novels: print 9.99, ebook 3.99 

• Series novels: print 15.99, ebook 4.99. Except the first series book, at 2.99. I want to get them hooked on the series, so I offer the first at a low bargain price.

This Crazy Writing Life: On Defining a Book By Its Cover—Part Two

By Steven Womack

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Hard to believe this is already the ninth installment of This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for hanging with me on this, and I hope you’re getting something out of my <sometimes> seemingly random observations on the world of writing and publishing.

Last month, we talked about book covers—what a book cover is supposed to accomplish, how it works, and the challenges to getting the kind of cover that will serve the book the best. This month, I’m going to briefly discuss the different types of book covers. This won’t take long, so let’s dive in.

EBook covers are the simplest and quickest covers to create. They’re only one panel (no back cover or flaps), and you’ve got a little wiggle room. No need to sweat hitting the dimensions exactly (but don’t ignore them either). For Kindle eBook covers, you should shoot for a 1.6:1 aspect ratio, which is a complicated way of saying the height of your cover should be 1.6 times the width.

Kindle also specifies that the ideal dimensions for an eBook cover are 2560 pixels in height and a width of 1600 pixels. That gives you the best quality, especially if you’re reading on a high-resolution device. The cover image has to be less than 50 megabytes, and it should be either in a .tiff or .jpeg format. When you upload the image, don’t compress it.

Now if that sounds a little complicated, let’s compare this with a print book cover. Print book covers have a minimum of three different components: a front cover, a back cover, and a spine. This is it for a mass market or trade paperback edition. So how to you create this?

First, you have to know the trim size of your print book. And with modern, print-on-demand technology, you’ve got more choices than ever before. Just noodle around on the IngramSpark or KDP websites (start with the FAQ pages) and you’ll see some of your options. Or visit your local bookstore and marvel at the array of sizes books come in today.

After you get the trim size, then you have to decide on what kind of paper you want your book printed on. As I observed in an earlier installment of This Crazy Writing Life, my personal opinion for a simple novel is to stay away from white paper, which comes in 50- and 70- pound weights. But if you’re printing a book with illustrations, especially color, then you pretty much have to go with white.

Why is this critical? Different papers have different weights and take up different amounts of space. A 300-page book printed on 50-pound Crème is going to be thicker than the same number of pages printed on 38-pound Groundwood.

Oh, and did I mention you have to actually have the book typeset before you start work on the cover? Why is that?

Because the thickness of the book will determine the dimensions of the spine. And that depends on the number of pages in the book and the type of paper you choose.

There are a couple of other considerations that don’t directly affect the size of your cover. A paperback print-on-demand book from Ingram can have either a matte cover or a high gloss cover. Some specialty printers that have come into existence to serve the indie pub community (Book Vault, for instance, which I’ll talk about in a later column) can do even higher-end options like embossed covers, gold leaf lettering, and spray-on marbling. Pretty heady, exotic stuff…

If you’re going for a hardcover, the process gets even more complicated because you now have flap copy.

If this sounds a little overwhelming, just remember: once you have all this data (trim sizes, page count, etc.), then the book manufacturers can feed this into their program and spit out a template. A good cover designer is going to be able to walk you through this without too much agony.

So there’s enough to get you started. Both IngramSpark and KDP have lots and lots of information that’s easily accessible. And like every other task in modern life, you can always search YouTube...

***

I wrote last month about how essential a good, inspired, effective cover was to marketing your book. Lots of really good books get passed over because their covers aren’t eye-catching enough, or don’t accomplish what a cover is supposed to do.

Sometimes, though, it works the other way around. As I mentioned in previous columns, my inbox gets inundated several times a day with email pushes marketing books, primarily indie-pubbed books. BookBub, FreeBooksy, BargainBooksy, EReader News, Robin Reads, Hello Books… I get daily visits from them all. And I actually read the emails and scrub down through the book offerings, not because I have time to read all this stuff (who would?) but because I like to just keep an eye on what’s out there. As I’ve also mentioned, even though your crazy Aunt Agnes’s Chihuahua has more graphic design talent in his back paw then I have in my whole brain, I can still tell when a cover works and when it doesn’t.

So imagine my delight when one of these push emails landed in my inbox last week and there’s a cover that quite literally left me speechless. It was gorgeous, beautifully rendered, the colors jumping off the page. It was an homage to those great classic hardboiled paperbacks of the Fifties and Sixties. Square-jawed handsome men in the background, a teary-eyed woman in the foreground, and the front end of a Sixties-era Cadillac off to the side, against a fire-engine red color scheme with brilliant yellow type.

The cover just worked…

Needless to say, though I’m saying it anyway, I downloaded the book immediately. It was an indie-pubbed book, the author’s debut novel. I Googled him and found his website, then wrote him a nice note and told him how much I loved the cover—the blurb on the cover was equally effective—and how much I was looking forward to reading his book.

And by the way, would you be willing to share the name of your cover designer?

The author wrote me back, was happy to share his designer’s name with me. He found him on Fivrr.com and his rates start at twenty bucks for an eBook cover!

As Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, Holy Mother Pus Bucket…

Then I sat down to read the book. Now you may have already noticed I haven’t mentioned the title of the novel or the author’s name or even the broad brushstroke plot. There’s a reason for that. I’m too nice a guy to slam another writer’s work, except under the cloak of anonymity (for the unfortunate author, not me). 

But this novel was one of the worst things I’ve ever read in my life. Literally, by the second page I’m shaking my head and asking myself Did I just read that? If KDP offered a purple-ink option, this guy should’ve taken it. Purple prose so overwritten that it dripped off the page. Clearly, this writer never met an adjective or an adverb he didn’t fall in love with. Clichés that were literally on par with heaving bosoms and throbbing…

Whatevers.

I went into the kitchen and read an excerpt to my wife, who broke out laughing. This literally could have been a winning submission for the Bulwer-Lytton contest, except it was a whole damn book.

Which just goes to show, you can have the best cover in the world, the best marketing plans, the best intentions. But if your book sucks, it ain’t gonna work. Rule #1: Write—At The Very Least—A Passably Good Book.

What the hell, I found a good cover designer, though.

See you next month.

This Crazy Writing Life: On Defining a Book By Its Cover

By Steven Womack

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We left off last month’s column with an exploration of the technical aspects (and challenges) of formatting the interior of print books. This month, let’s talk about the exterior of the book—the cover.

Before we get started, though, one quick sidebar. In late September, I drove back from St. Petersburg Beach, Florida (just about 48 hours ahead of Hurricane Helene) after attending the annual conference of Novelists, Inc. Novelists, Inc. may not be as well known as some of the other major writers professional associations like the Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, or SFWA—Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America—but since it was started in late 1980s by a group of disgruntled romance writers, it’s emerged as one of the most powerful trade associations out there. It’s the only writers’ organization I know of outside of the Writers Guild of America that requires you to actually be a professional writer to join. To gain admittance to NINC, you have to have published at least two novels in popular genres like romance or mystery, and you have to have earned a minimum amount of money from those two books (the exact requirements are outlined on the website at www.ninc.com).

Readers and fans, editors and agents are not eligible to join NINC. The founders of the organization decided that NINC would never offer prizes or awards (like the MWA and RWA) because this fostered a sense of competition that was contrary to the organization’s purpose of encouraging and lifting up all writers in the struggle to survive in this crazy business. And business is the focus of the conference as well as the organization; you’ll rarely see a NINC panel on how to write sparkling dialogue. But you will see panels on understanding the intricacies of subrights licenses and contracts or the technical aspects of independent audiobook production.

Sponsors pay big bucks to have a presence at the NINC conference (in the spirit of complete transparency, I’m a former president of the organization and a current Board member). The reason I bring this up is that as a result, some of the most cutting-edge aspects of indie publishing show up at this conference. Every time I go, I learn something new. Last year, the big topic of discussion was the use of A.I. generated voices in audiobook narration. This year, there seems to be a big movement toward indie authors selling books directly from their websites. The One Big Thing I learned is that taking a simple, static author website and turning it into a true e-commerce platform is something I’m just not quite ready for.

In future columns, I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned from these conferences. As independent publishing continues to grow from an isolated few stubborn writers trying to survive into a cultural and business movement that has totally remade publishing, dozens of other companies have sprouted up as well to serve this market.

As I’ve said more than once lately, it’s a whole new world out there.

***

I was curious as to where the phrase/cliché Don’t judge a book by its cover came from, so I Googled it. Turns out George Eliot first coined that turn-of-phrase in her 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss.

Gotta confess, I missed that one.

But I’ve heard the adage all my life, which is a metaphorical phrase telling us that outward appearances can be deceiving, that we should never judge anyone or anything by its external looks.

Sounds good on the surface; only problem is it’s hogwash. 

We judge everything by its external appearance. A car may be the most dependable, rugged, efficient vehicle ever made, but if it makes you look like a complete yutz driving it, you’re not going to buy one (are you listening, Walter White, cruising along in your Pontiac Aztec?)

You may meet someone at a party who would be the kindest, most loving, passionate and dependable life partner you could ever wish for, but if their hair is greasy and dirty, they smell bad, snot’s running out of their nose, and they have huge pit stains, you’re probably gonna take a pass.

It’s the same with book covers. The indie pubbing world is full of stories of books that didn’t sell for squat, so the authors yanked the books down, changed the cover, put the book back up without changing a word and now it sells like crazy. You may have written a classic, a prize-winner, a book that will last through the ages, but if your cover turns everyone off, then the book’s going to be a loser.

I’m speaking for myself now, but I’ll bet a lot of you are in the same boat. I’m not a graphic artist, and when it comes to good cover design, I wouldn’t know it if it ran up behind me and bit me on the butt. Truth is, I’m not even qualified to write about book covers from an artist’s point-of-view. I have absolutely no talent as a graphic designer. So, I’m writing this from the perspective of an indie-pubber who has to deal with the fact that he’s not even capable of telling good design from bad.

Maybe I’m being a little hard on myself here. Truth is, I’ve been around book covers my whole life, and while I have no talent as a designer, I am a sophisticated and experienced consumer of books. I know when a book cover design doesn’t work for me. And when I run across a brilliant book cover, it moves me on a visceral level.

I’m not overstating here: your book cover is the first and one of the most important marketing tools you have.

So how do you deploy this tool to make your book as marketable as possible?

First, it’s got to convey a certain amount of information. The title of the book—and subtitle, if it’s got one—and the author’s name should be prominent, along with any other information that will help sell the book (as in “New York Times Bestselling Author”). I have actually seen book covers where the author’s name was hard to read. When that happens, someone needs an intervention.

Second, the design/artwork should stand out visually. Whether on a jam-packed bookstore shelf or a crowded Amazon web page, there should be something that grabs your eye as you scan from Point A to Point B. I realize that’s a nebulous, unfocused notion. If I could actually define in solid terms what “stand out visually” means, then I’d be a famous well-paid cover artist and not the word-shoveling literary coal miner that I am. The best I can do is echo Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who—in attempting to define obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio—famously wrote I know it when I see it.

Third, your cover design must reflect and communicate the book’s genre and tone. If you’ve written a light-hearted cozy mystery where the protagonist’s cute but feisty cat solves the murder based on a plot point that’s a recipe for cream cheese blintzes, then a dark, brooding, heavily shadowed cover with a pair of threatening, glowing eyes coming out of the mist is not going to help you. Conversely, you’re not going to sell a graphic, disturbing serial killer suspense novel with a bright, cheery cover of pinks and blues, cartoon characters and fonts with extra curlicues and other cutesy elements.

This requires you to learn and study the conventions of your genre, to research what works and what doesn’t work, and to learn the expectations of your audience.

Stuff you should already be doing anyway…

One of the best examples of dynamite book covers out there today are the books published by Hard Case Crime. Hard Case Crime publishes crime fiction that echoes back to the paperback pulp fiction era of the 1940s through the late 1060s, when writers like Mickey Spillane, Cornell Woolrich, and Robert Bloch were flourishing. They’re bringing back and revitalizing the old hard-boiled school with contemporary writers like Stephen King, Lawrence Block, and Max Allan Collins, as well as republishing long-dead writers like Donald Westlake and Woolrich. And their books all feature covers that are homages to those great mass-market paperback pulp fiction covers.

While I admittedly am not a designer myself, I do find that there are certain things I react positively to and others that turn me off. I subscribe to a lot of book promotions websites: BookBub, Free Booksy, Robinreads, etc. So I get way too many push emails every day, and most of them are for indie-pubbed books. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that more and more book covers depend on stock photos for their visuals, especially in genres like romance. I get that original art costs a fortune, but there’s something about a generic stock photo on a book cover that screams self-published, and I find that a turn-off. You can start with stock photography if you want, but with programs like Canva and Book Brush out there, in my view one should at least put a little effort into manipulating and adapting the image to make it more unique.

The bottom line for most writers—myself included—is that the best way to land that beautiful book cover is to find a cover artist you trust and whose work you admire. Only problem is, they can be hard to find and kind of expensive. It’s a challenge to find that sweet spot between “I love your stuff” and “oh, I can afford that.” I worked with a designer for several years when I repubbed the out-of-print novels in my Music City Murders series. Dawn Charles did a fabulous job for me, was great to work with, with very reasonable fees. Unfortunately, she passed away a few years ago. But go to my Amazon page and you’ll see what I’m talking about; it’s an object lesson in how to create a brand.

And I mentioned earlier, companies are popping up everywhere to help indie pubbers get the help they need. One that’s been around over a decade is Reedsy, which is a company that’s an online employment agency for publishing freelancers of all types; editors, designers, formatters, etc. They’re great to work with and a good place to start.

We’ll continue this discussion next month. Thanks again for hanging with This Crazy Writing Life.

This Crazy Writing Life: Defining Irony In The Time Of Covid

By Steven Womack

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In this month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life, my original intent was to start where I left off with last month’s column on eBook distribution and explore the options and possibilities of print.

That was the plan, but as someone once told me, we make plans; God laughs.

So before we move onto more serious stuff, a little sidebar.

The last half of August saw something we’ve never seen before—two major mystery conferences were taking place in Nashville in back-to-back weeks. Killer Nashville, of course, is now a major regional conference that draws writers and readers from all over the country, if not the world. The week after KN, Nashville hosted Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, the largest gathering of mystery writers and fans in the world.

This was, to paraphrase a conversation Joe Biden had with Barack Obama after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a big effin’ deal… This has literally never happened before. For two weeks or so, Music City became the center of the mystery world.

I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about something. I’ve been pretty transparent about my struggles in the writing career arena. When I left academia in 2020—after the college where I’d been teaching for twenty-five years quite literally closed its doors and went out of business—I’ve been trying to resurrect a writing career that was once almost promising.

So I signed up for both, with great relish.

I was thrilled when I was assigned four panels at Killer Nashville. At Bouchercon—where the competition for panels is somewhat stiffer—I was assigned one. This felt great. It was like the old days, back in the Nineties, when I was a full-time mystery writer and making a living at it.

Then, ten days before Killer Nashville opened, I woke up with a fever about five o’clock in the morning. I tried to slough it off, but after a few hours, I decided to take a Covid test.

Positive…

Everything went downhill from there. I’m an old guy, an immuno-compromised cancer survivor. When I still tested positive and still sick after a week, I cancelled Killer Nashville. A week later, same results.

So long, Bouchercon.

And want to know the irony of this? One of the panels I was scheduled to be on at Killer Nashville was “Handling Successes and Setbacks As A Writer.”

The universe has a weird sense of humor. I had to cancel my appearance on a panel about handling setbacks because I had one of the biggest setbacks in quite awhile.

Define irony…

***

So let’s talk about print books and how you indie pub them. We’ll start with a few basic assumptions.

First, most indie pub authors I’ve ever met make most of their sales (and, therefore, most of their money) from eBooks. So if you want to delve into the print arena, just be aware that it’s an awful lot of effort and cost for the least return. For many writers these days, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. On the other hand, there’s nothing like the feel, smell and heft of a real book.

Second, the technical aspects of producing print books are way more complicated and demanding than eBooks. Why? Because eBooks are marked by flowability, which means you don’t have to typeset them. The text just flows out of the ether and into the e-reader. There’s no set trim size. The user actually determines the font, point size, leading, and measure. Actually, in real life whatever device the user is reading them on determines these factors by default and the user can change them if they’re savvy enough.

(As an aside, don’t know what point size, font, leading, and measure mean? Then you’ve got an even higher technical hill to climb…)

Third, be aware that the print landscape is a little more complicated if you hope to sell print books in both brick-and-mortar bookstores and Amazon. No brick-and-mortar bookstore will order a print copy of your book from Amazon and set it on their shelves. For one thing, most bookstores hate Amazon with a fiery, searing, scorching passion. More than that, bookstores depend on wholesale discounts and returnability for survival and Amazon’s not about to help them on that front. So what this means is you’ve got to upload one set of files to Amazon and one to a wholesale book distributor. And then you hope to high heaven the same files will work for both outlets.

Fourth, unless you have a garage the size of a warehouse and deep pockets, you’re not going to go the old school route of finding a book printer to print up a few thousand of your books and then ship them to your home address. Chances are they’ll sit in your garage until the mice find them, at which point you’ll have a bunch of fat, happy mice on your hands. And if you do get lucky enough to sell a few of them, you’ll be buying cardboard shipping boxes, packing tape, and bubble wrap, then loading up the old SUV for a trip to the Post Office or UPS. If you’re not up for that, then you’re going print-on-demand, or as it’s commonly called “POD.” And that, as they say, is a whole nother ball of wax itself.

When I decided to tackle indie pubbing print books, I had a built-in advantage. Early in my career, I spent about a decade working in publishing in New York City and Nashville. I worked mainly in art departments, where I typeset books, ads, catalogues, brochures, and a ton of other stuff. But what I mostly did was interior book formatting/typesetting. I’ve probably either typeset or supervised the typesetting of a few hundred books over the years.

So those terms I threw at you earlier? What do they mean?

A font is the particular typeface you’re using. There are hundreds of typefaces and families of type, but all fonts can be broken down into basically two types: serif and sans serif. Serif typefaces have a small stroke or curlicue attached to the larger, main body of the letter. Sans serif typefaces don’t have these add-ons and the letters are just lines. If you bring up your word processor and type a few words in Arial, then type the same few words in Times Roman, you’ll see the difference. Most books are typeset in serif typefaces, except for certain types like manuals, guidebooks, nonfiction, etc. Most fiction is set in the more traditional serif typefaces, which tend to have, for lack of a better term, a classier look to them.

Point size is literally the physical size of the type. There are 72 points in an inch. Most books are typeset in around 12-point type, with some variations. Really long, thick doorstopper books might be set in point sizes less than 12. Down around 10-point type, though, they get mighty hard to read.

Leading is the distance between the lines, called that because years ago when books were typeset by hand, the typesetter inserted thin strips of lead between the lines to separate them. Most books are typeset with an extra few points on top of the point size. The point size/leading is usually expressed as a fraction, i.e. 12/15. When there’s no extra space between the lines, as in a book set in 12/12 Times Roman, that’s said to be set solid. And for anyone beyond the age of twelve, they’re really hard to read. Almost no one does it.

Measure is the width of the line, which is directly related to your trim size and margins. You want to have some kind of margin on each page; you don’t want the type to run from one edge to the next. You’ve got to design it just right to hit that visually appealing sweet spot. You don’t want too much white space or too little around your page of text. This also affects your page count, which is critical.

So there in just over 300 words is a summary of my decades in typesetting. But there’s a lot more to learn. Know the difference between a widow and an orphan and why you want to avoid both? There’s not room here to get into that, but Google it. It’s fascinating stuff. Trust me.

Once you’re ready to get into actually formatting a print book, where do you start? The easiest way is to get a dedicated app for typesetting, but truth is you can typeset a book on Microsoft Word. I’ve done it. It’s a PITA and I won’t do it again, but when I started six or seven years ago, there wasn’t much else out there. Vellum typesets books, but as I mentioned in an earlier column, Vellum only works on a Mac platform.

And for many years, the go-to software package for interior book design (and many other forms of graphic design) was Adobe InDesign. It does everything and does it well. But like all things Adobe, it’s expensive to start with and requires decades of study on a lonely mountaintop in Tibet to master it (okay, decades? Maybe I’m overstating a bit…).

Kindle Create is free, as is Reedsy’s Book Editor app. I don’t know much about them, though. There are a few other paid packages. Just Google them and get reviews.

I wrote last month about Atticus, which is produced by a company here in Franklin, Tennessee called Kindlepreneur. In the past year or so, they’ve added a print typesetting function to what has emerged as the best eBook formatting software in the business. Every review I’ve read of it is spectacular, but since I haven’t indie pubbed a book since their print functionality went online, I’ve got no personal experience. But if it’s like everything else Kindlepreneur does, it kicks butt and takes names.

We’ve barely scratched the surface on the technical challenges and considerations of print book formatting and design and I’m already out of space for this month’s edition. So I’ll stop here and next month we’ll move on to the differences between an eBook cover and a print book cover, how you make a cover work, and then onto the challenge of making book distribution outlets work for you.

As you’ve seen, This Crazy Writing Life is a grand adventure. Thanks again for playing along.

The Indie Pubbing Journey Continues—Part Four: Navigating The Distribution Maze

By Steven Womack

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So you’ve written your book, rewritten your book (any number of times), and like the good little professional you aspire to be, you’ve paid an outside copyeditor to get the book in the best shape it can possibly be. You’ve studied the market, maybe queried a few agents (most of whom never even responded), done your due diligence, and decided that in today’s publishing environment, your best bet is to go the indie route.

You’ve done a deep dive into the freelance market that’s sprung up in the last decade to serve the needs of indie pubbers, and you’ve found a cover designer you absolutely love. You’ve either chosen an app to format your book or you’ve decided to spend the bucks to outsource the technical stuff.

Little by little, piece by piece, your dream is coming together. You can see the finish line—pub date—and you get a shaky, excited feeling deep in our gut that this is finally becoming…

Real.

Hundreds of hours of work, planning, following months or even years of writing your book. You’re excited, but at the same time, exhausted emotionally and maybe even physically. But you’re nearing the end, right? The finish line’s in sight.

Hold your horses, cowpokes. The reality is, you’re just getting started.

You think writing that book was hard? Try getting the book out there, grasshoppah…

This month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life is going to—as the head of IT at the film school where I used to teach often said—start to start the process of getting your book out there. There are two main avenues by which you’re going to get your book into the hands of readers: eBooks and print books.

We’re going to start by tackling the question of eBooks, since as we established in an earlier edition of this column, that’s how you’re going to reach the largest number of readers and bring in the largest number of bucks. And in the world of eBook distribution, there is only one question to answer which will determine your eBook distribution strategy.

Are you going to go wide or are you not going to go wide?

What does that even mean, in English?

Okay, time for another [brief] history lesson. As the eBook revolution ramped up in earnest in the first decade of the 21st Century, there was a certain wild west feel to it. There was the Kindle e-reader from Amazon, then Sony came out with the Sony Reader in 2006, and Barnes & Noble came out with the Nook in 2009. So there were three different mainstream e-readers out there, each with different specs and technical requirements.

Then a whole slew of eBook distributors came online. There was Amazon (of course), and then Apple got in the game, followed by Rokuten Kobo, which is a Canadian eBook retailer owned by a Japanese company, known primarily as Kobo. Over the years, scads of other companies emerged as eBook retailers, distributors, or publishers—Tolino, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, Books-A-Million, Hoopla, etc. etc. etc.

It was a complicated landscape. The administrative load alone to distribute through all these channels was overwhelming.

So in 2008, a book marketing guru, publicist and novelist by the name of Mark Coker rolled out a company called Smashwords, which was the first eBook aggregator. Coker’s groundbreaking and innovative approach brought all these varied distribution outlets into one place. Now indie pubbers could sign up with Smashwords, pick the outlets they wanted to distribute to, and then upload one file to one place, rather than one file to fifteen places. Coker also wrote a number of reference guides on formatting eBooks to meet all the technical needs of the various distributors and did all the accounting and setup. They created tools and guides to help indie publishers navigate this complicated landscape. Smashwords uploaded to the outlets you picked, tracked incoming payments, even did tax reporting and bookkeeping, and distributed payments out to the individual authors and independent publishing companies, all for what was actually a reasonable and fair cut of the earnings.

Coker’s idea—and Smashwords—was wildly successful. Within a few years, they were distributing hundreds of thousands of eBooks.

In 2012, three young entrepreneurs—Kris Austin, Aaron Pogue, and Toby Nance—decided it was time for Smashwords to have a little competition. So they opened Draft2Digital (often shortened to D2D), headquartered in Oklahoma City. D2D took a similar approach as Smashwords, but streamlined some of the processes and offered up a competitive set of user-friendly tools to help indie author publish their books with enough time and energy left over to write more of them.

Ten years later, in 2022, Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords in a friendly deal that kept Coker on board as part of the team. Today, D2D is the 800-pound aggregating gorilla in the indie pub space.

So that, in a nutshell, is going wide. Get your book out there in as many different channels as possible and just wait for the tsunami of bucks headed your way.

What’s the alternative? And why would anyone want to consider it?

Enter Amazon, the exciting, attractive, funny, smart, creative person you’ve always wanted to date but found incredibly high-maintenance. In July 2014, Amazon rolled out Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that for $9.99 a month gave you unlimited access (with a few restrictions) to Amazon’s entire library of books and audiobooks—as long as those books were enrolled in Kindle Select (in typical Amazon fashion, nothing’s ever easy or simple; if you’re an author you have to enroll your books in Kindle Select in order to get them into Kindle Unlimited). Think of it as Netflix or Spotify, only for books.

There isn’t time or space here to go into the convoluted history of the Kindle Unlimited program. If you’d like to do a deeper dive into that, here’s a link to an excellent article:

https://www.hiddengemsbooks.com/history-kindle-unlimited/

The important thing to remember is that the way KU paid authors has evolved over time. The first payment method was rife for scamming and bad behavior. Amazon tackled that and went into a second generation of KU and now they’re in the third. But basically, in laymen’s terms, when you check out a book in KU, there’s a little widget or something inside the file that enables Amazon to count the number of pages you’ve read (well, hello there Big Brother) and authors are paid a fraction of a fraction of a cent for each page.

Five or so years ago, when I decided to dip my toes into indie pubbing, I chose what I thought was the obvious best route. I created a D2D account and listed all my books on every channel possible. Then, not knowing any better, I started buying Amazon ads and BookBub ads (more on that in future installments) and promoting them on social media and my meager newsletter subscriber lists and doing everything I thought would move books.

The result? Bupkis…

Oh, occasionally I’d sell a book here and a book there, but it’s the understatement of the day to say I was disappointed.

A couple of years or this and I was really burning out. So I reached out to an acquaintance, a fellow Edgar winner who, like me, wrote books set in New Orleans. Julie Smith and I both came into print about the same time, were publishing at about the same level, and encountering the same career struggles. Where our paths diverged was when Julie fully embraced the indie publishing movement in the early days of the eBook revolution and turned her career around.

She began publishing under her own imprint—booksBnimble—and brought back her backlist and later new work. Then she branched out and started publishing other writers. A few years later, she opened up a book marketing division to help indie pubbed authors. I reached out to Julie and after careful thought, signed on with her company.

Julie’s got a marketing plan that won’t work for everyone. Standalone books are a tough sell, as are literary books, nonfiction, and memoirs. But if you’re writing genre novels—romances, mysteries—and you have a series with at least three books, then they’ve got a plan for you.

When she takes you on as a client, you’ve got to get with their program. And the first step is to pull your books down from every distribution channel and enroll them in Kindle Select. This sounds counterintuitive, but truthfully, within a couple of months, I was grossing four figures a month.

I’m running out of space here, but the moral of the story is, don’t discount Kindle Select/Unlimited just because you don’t like Amazon or think you’ll get better results with a shotgun approach. In next month’s issue of This Crazy Writing Life, we’ll take a deeper look into how you make all this work. Thanks again for playing along.

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Decades ago, when I lived in New Orleans and was a newspaper reporter during the first term of the wonderful Edwin Edwards, I learned a great local term: lagniappe. Lagniappe means “just a little something extra; a bonus.”

So here’s your lagniappe for this month’s column. I just read a fantastic book called Love In The Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed The Rules of Writing & Success by Christine M. Larson. It’s simultaneously a history and analysis of how publishing has changed since the 1980s and how romance writers were the first ones to understand these changes, adopt them, and beat the big publishers at their own game. Dr. Larsen is a professor of Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, but don’t hold that against her. The book’s a bit academic at times, but it reads like a well-written story, one we’re all still right in the middle of. It’s well worth the time to read.

The Indie Pubbing Journey Continues—Part Three: The Learning Curve

By Steven Womack

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When I was young, I wasn’t afraid to tackle anything technical. Someone sold me an ancient Alfa Romeo sedan back in the 1970s for a few hundred dollars. The engine ran rough and coughed out blue smoke, so I decided to rebuild it. Had I ever rebuilt an engine before?

Absolutely not.

Did I have any idea what I was doing?

Nope.

I had a manual and that was it. No YouTube videos, no old Italian mechanic to mentor me… Just a box of parts, a paperback book with pictures, and a toolbox. So I went out into the driveway and went to work. Several weekends later, I added new oil to the engine and cranked it up. It actually ran a little bit better, once I got it running. Then I did the first really smart thing I’d done since I bought the old Alfa.

I sold it to someone else.

In the early days of computers—I’m talking Windows 3.1 here—if my computer had some kind of weird hiccup or wasn’t doing something I needed it to do, I opened up the Windows registry and tinkered with individual lines of code.

Would I open the hood on my computer or my car in this day and age and start digging around inside it?

Hell, no.

I don’t even change my own oil anymore. I don’t know whether cars and computers have gotten exponentially more complicated or I’ve become a technological wuss. Probably a little bit of both…

So when I decided to indie pub my Harry James Denton Music City Murders out-of-print series backlist from Ballantine Books, I confess to a little fear and trepidation about the technical challenges of making that happen. But I also knew I didn’t have the resources to pay somebody else to do everything for me, so I had to swap out my lack of cash for hours of sweat equity. Facing fears trumped lack of resources, so I started with the eBook editions and did a pretty deep dive into options for creating them.

I quickly discovered that one of the most popular apps for eBook formatters is Vellum. Every writer I surveyed who used Vellum loved it, although many folks offered it had a bit of a steep learning curve. It’s powerful, flexible, and very widely used in the indie pubbing space. At a couple hundred bucks, I thought it was a little pricey but not so much as to be a deal breaker. What was a deal breaker for me, though, was it’s only available for Macs. I’m a longtime Windows kinda guy, so that eliminated Vellum for me.

I found another software package from a British company called Jutoh. When I bought it seven or eight years ago, I think I paid like thirty-five bucks for it, so the price was right. It’s a quick and easy download and there’s lots of support for it. I ran into a few technical problems and challenges, and I found Jutoh’s support team was quick to respond, despite the seven-hour time difference. When I first started my indie pubbing adventure, there were a number of different formats out there. Most of the eBook distributors—Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.—used the .epub format, while Amazon, of course, had to make thing complicated by developing its own proprietary eBook format, the infamous .mobi file (thankfully, Amazon has let the .mobi format sunset and now uses .epub like everyone else). Jutoh was able to handle them all as well as other formats like ODT (OpenDocument) files and .pdf.

For a few years, Jutoh was it for me. Then I began to get hints of another option out there, an app called Atticus. Curious, I started digging around and the more I dug, the more intrigued I became.

Before I go any further, let me state for the record this is not an ad for any one app or the other. I’m not getting paid for any of this (God forbid, writers should get paid…) and the folks at Atticus don’t even know I’m writing this. This is all based solely on my own experience.

So after a pretty deep dive into Atticus, I decided to go for it. I haven’t looked back since.

Atticus is the eBook (and in its latest revs, print book) formatting app that’s become the gold standard for indie pubbers. It was created by a company called Kindlepreneur, which curiously is located just down the road from me in Franklin, Tennessee (also the home of Killer Nashville). The founder of Kindlepreneur is Dave Chesson, who brings many years of experience in publishing and as a book marketer to the company.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dave Chesson at the annual Novelists, Inc. conference in St. Petersburg Beach a couple years ago. Not only is he a genuinely nice guy, he’s also obsessed with creating tools designed to help indie publishers succeed. He has a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel, has created a ton of courses—some free and some at minimal cost—and with Atticus has given writers a way to easily and quickly format both eBooks and print. I won’t go into the technical aspects of Atticus because I’m already over my word count, but there are a ton of tutorials out there that will make the Atticus learning curve manageable and even enjoyable.

And once you get your books formatted, you can get—as I did—at very modest cost Kindlepreneur’s Publisher Rocket app, which will help you optimize your keyword and category listings on Amazon (and trust me, that is much harder than formatting).

Next month, we’ll take up the subject of where to sell your indie-pubbed books. The choices there are as varied and as complicated as any other decisions you’ll make. Are you starting to get a sense of what it means to independently publish your own books? You aren’t just self-publishing (again, a term I hate). You’re creating a business.

Which is one grand adventure…

That’s it for episode #5 of This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for playing along.

Covers

By Dale T. Phillips

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“You can’t judge a book by its cover.” 

—Old saying that’s misleading, because many readers do

Your cover is vital to the success of your book, because readers scan quickly, and take more time to check out books with covers they like. Your tiny thumbnail image will be up on the Internet against thousands of others, so make it eye-catching. A lousy cover usually indicates inferior inside material, and many readers won’t bother. A great cover is a promise of better content inside. Many, many authors fail in this category, and their sales suffer as a result. The cover is the first indication of whether you’re a professional or not, and may be the only chance you get of someone taking a look. To understand what good covers look like, check out the top best-sellers in a genre, and see what they have in common. Some websites show examples of bad covers, so check those out and  you’ll know what to avoid.

Traditional publishers boast of their packaging superiority because Indie books have lousy covers, and for many, that’s true— as it is with many of the traditional publishing covers. Or they’ll just use stock images over and over. One traditional writer asked a fellow writer if she liked his latest cover— and it was almost exactly the one that had been on her previous book- from the same publisher! Barry Eisler, a best-selling top-notch writer, was stuck with the most unexciting, dumb-looking, green garage door for his thriller (an absolute sales-killer), and when he protested, the publisher would do nothing to remedy the situation. He soon left that publisher, costing them millions for a bad decision. 

Trade-copy paperbacks are inexpensive to publish, but hardcovers may not be worth it for most Indie writers. They’re expensive to produce, so unless you want a special edition, have legions of fans, or have a lot of extra money to burn, you may not want to bother. Few people will pay a lot for a pricey book by someone who’s not famous or pushed by a big traditional publisher. Full color print books are also expensive, and harder to create, but if you’ve got a pet project that requires it, you’ll want to spend some time planning it out.

If you cannot learn do the cover yourself (most writers cannot, as we work with words, not images) you may have to hire someone. This can get expensive, so you’ll need to carefully spend time researching costs and quality. Yes, you can get the cheap designers, but you’ll want to make sure to get something that works. Many writers who spent far too much on their covers (some thousands of dollars), got bad covers that still could have been done at a tenth of the cost. Now there are cover templates which can be had for bargain rates, and there are sites to inexpensively pay for cover art you can license to use commercially.

Some authors run A/B testing on prospective covers to see what people prefer, via their blog, website, or social media. If a number of people are strongly in favor one cover over another, the more popular is usually the one chosen by the author as a final. 

First and foremost, the cover should reflect the genre and match your target audience, so that at a glance, people can guess what the book represents: horror book covers show darkness and spooky things, romance often shows two embracing people (usually with rumpled clothes), high fantasy shows someone in armor with a bladed weapon (and often a monster), Westerns show someone in a cowboy hat on a horse. You get the idea. So know the conventions of your genre, and do something that represents your content. If you don’t know, look at several dozen top-selling books in the genre you wrote in.  

Second, the title and the author name should be in easily readable fonts, with the proper size and color. Many get this wrong. If you look at a thumbnail (or a full-size cover from ten feet away) and cannot discern the title or author name clearly, it doesn’t work. It may be the spacing, placement, size, background color, or font that are off, or a combination of those. Some use fonts that are just wrong, either unreadable as is or wrong for the genre. Again, examine other covers that work to see how they do it, and do something similar. 

For full print covers, the spine and back cover need to be done properly. The title and author name should again be easy to read on the spine, and placed and spaced well. For the back, it takes some time to figure out the design and where things should go. You’ll want some of the following:

• Description/Tagline: a few exciting lines about the story inside that make a reader want to check it out.

• Blurb (optional): a recommendation from some other writer (or reader) that praises your work.

• Another work (optional): Sometimes you’ll have an image and short description of another one of your other books here (especially for another volume in the series).

• Short Bio (optional): Some writers put these on the cover, though I prefer them in the book interior, at the back of the book. Unless you’ve got something so spectacular, like you were a spy or astronaut, that will help sell the work on that information alone.

• Price, ISBN, and barcode: Whoever prints your book will likely request you to set aside an area to include a barcode, unless you have it set it up already. Again, compare your design with that of other successful book cover backs, and do what they do. Do you want to print your price on the cover? What about the ISBN, or will you have that just in the interior?

Once you’ve set your book up for print, you’ll want a proof copy to look over before authorizing it to be published. If you publish through a site such as Amazon, you can request a single physical copy that you should carefully go through. Verify that the cover is eye-catching and professional, and the interior is done properly. Then have another careful set of eyes look it over. 

The key is that your book should at a glance look like other quality books, because readers don’t prefer ugly or amateur. At one book signing, my friend was launching his latest novel. Another writer asked about Indie versus Traditional. I said “let’s compare,” and put one of mine next to the one that was launching via a publisher. Same size, good covers, all was as it should be (and similar), the price was identical, and the interiors looked properly done. He said he couldn’t see a difference, and that’s the secret— except my friend would make a dollar for each one he sold, and my similar book would make ten dollars profit for each one I’d sold. 

Advantage, Indie!

For a series, the branding should match on the covers. Go with a theme that makes them look like they belong together, for quick identification. Check out other author series to see what they have done.

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime. He's traveled to all 50 states, Mexico, Canada, and through Europe.

Getting Started In Indie Pubbing — Part Two – The First Few Choices

By Steven Womack

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So you’ve decided to take the leap. You’re sick of agents taking six months-to-never to get back to you. The rare legitimate publisher who is willing to read unagented submissions is so inundated with manuscripts that by the time they get around to reading your book, you’ll be deep into your dotage and will have long forgotten you wrote it.

So you’re going to self publish.

Oh, wait… If you read the first installment in this series of columns I’m calling This Crazy Writing Life, you’ll know I despise the term self-publishing. If you need a memory refresher, go back through the Killer Nashville Magazine archives and find that first column.

Then do a reset. You’re not self-publishing.

You’re independently publishing.

And the first step in independently publishing your book is to make a series of choices. The first and in many ways most important choice is what are you going to publish. You’re not only a writer, but you’re a book lover as well. So having a physical book that you can fondle and sniff and gaze at on a shelf is the most important thing to you.

Okay, that leads to some choices. What form will your book take? Every writer fantasizes seeing their book as a hardcover, a classy old-school hardcover with a dust cover and maybe even an embossed cover with gold foil. That speaks real class.

But it also speaks big bucks. Times are hard, and readers are reluctant to shell out north of thirty bucks for a hardcover, especially a hardcover by an author they may not have even heard of. Yo’ momma and Crazy Aunt Agnes may love you that much, but that ain’t exactly a target-rich environment.

So you punt and decide to go with a paperback. But that forces a series of choices. Do you want a mass market paperback to minimize costs and make it possible for your book to fit on those wire racks in stores of the grocery and drug kind? You can go that way if you want, but historically speaking, the days when mass market paperbacks ruled the retail book space were over about two decades ago. And the chances of an indie pubbed book getting picked up by a major distributor and winding up in a Kroger, Walmart or Costco are about as good as winning the Powerball.

Okay, you reason, let’s go with the trade paperback. But again, that incites a series of choices. What trim size do want for your trade paperback? What kind of paper do you want? In the early days of indie-pubbed books, your only option was the white paper that was similar to what came out of a Xerox machine. This kind of paper, combined with the early binding and production quality of a print-on-demand book screamed self-published. So you want to go with something a little classier than that. But you also want to hit that sweet spot between size and production costs, the number of pages and your word count. You also have to consider the genre. Science fiction fans and romance readers have different expectations. You might have to go to a bunch of bookstores with a measuring tape and start researching this.

Then you go on from there. Let’s consider eBooks. I realize that this may be opening up a real can o’ worms for some folks. Some people hate eBooks. I know people whose intelligence I admire and respect that absolutely cannot abide eBooks.

But let me interject a little bit of reality here.

The idea of a digital or electronic presentation of a book actually dates back to the 1930s. But it was in 2007, when Amazon launched the Kindle eBook reader, that eBooks came into their own.

And let me state this as bluntly as I can. The invention and launch of the Kindle was the most significant, game-changing, revolutionary event to hit book publishing since that fellow Gutenberg invented the first usable system of moveable type almost 500 years ago. This is not an overstatement. The eBook has made modern independent publishing both profitable and possible. It has created a whole new industry. It has enabled thousands (and on its way to being millions) of authors to bring their work to the public. And like throwing a rock into a still pond, the ripple effect keeps widening every day. There are multiple distribution channels for eBooks, up to and including you can now borrow eBooks from libraries just like physical books. And there are more being invented and created every day.

Millions of readers now gobble up eBooks by the gigabyte. For certain genres—especially popular ones like romances, mysteries, thrillers—eBooks are rapidly becoming one of the chief ways readers read.

So here’s the bottom line: if you’re going to independently publish your own work, then you’ll bypass eBooks at your own peril. There are extremely successful independently published authors out there who only publish eBook versions of their work, either that or they publish print versions solely as vanity or corollary editions.

Because eBooks are so much cheaper to produce and distribute than print books, you can price them lower and make more money (sometimes much more money) than you can with print. EBooks are also much easier and faster to produce. Next month, I’ll introduce you to an app that will have you formatting your first eBook in a matter of hours.

So that’s where we’ll go next month. We’ll explore how you format and produce eBooks and how you decide where and how to distribute eBooks. It’s a whole new world out there.

Jump in and hold on.

Getting Started In Indie Pubbing (or Good God, what have I gotten myself into?)

By Steven Womack

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Maybe you’ve written your first novel (or second or tenth, whatever) and you’ve taken three years to query every agent on the planet and haven’t gotten even a nibble.

Or maybe you’ve been in this business a couple of decades and published two dozen novels, all of them with modest midlist advances and now out-of-print and not making you a penny. And you’re getting older, and all those years writing novels were years you weren’t piling money into a 401(k) or a company pension, and now you’re scared as hell you’re going to be eating cat food in your dotage.

Or maybe you’ve had some success, made some pretty good money from time to time, but you feel like you’ve been thoroughly abused and taken advantage of by publishers (don’t laugh; it happens). And you’re tired of arguing with editors and having covers you hate shoved down your throat, not to mention the complete lack of marketing, promotion and support (unless you’re a best-seller, in which case you don’t need it).

 So you listen to a few podcasts and read a few blogs and there all these stories of writers taking control of their careers, writing what they want, with covers they love, and succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. You’ve heard of this guy Mark Dawson, who sells a huge, sprawling extensive bunch of courses under his “Self Publishing Formula” brand. And you’ve heard about that fellow in northern Wisconsin who blogged that he made a hundred grand in three weeks selling his self-pubbed titles on Kindle.

And you hit the “Yeah, I’ll take your cookies” button on a few websites you visited and now your Inbox is flooded with emails every day offering to sell you courses on how to be a successful self-publisher or even offering to do it all for you—for a price.

It’s too much. Overload, fuses blown…

Time to take a deep breath and relax.

Like everything in life that’s overwhelming (and the older you get, the more of life that encompasses), sometimes it works to stop staring slack-jawed at the big picture and just break off a little chunk of it and see if you can handle that.

So if you’re trying to build a career as a writer, what’s the best chunk to start with?

The first step goes without saying: you’ve got to write a good book. I won’t spend much time discussing that, but remember—without a story that works, characters that are compelling, writing that leaves you wanting to turn to the next page even if it’s past your bedtime, everything else in the process is for naught.

So given that you’ve done everything you can to meet that first requirement, what next?

You also have to realized that writing, editing, marketing, book design, cover design—all the components of the process—are completely separate skill sets. Just because you’ve written a book doesn’t mean you can edit it or design a good cover for it. Indie pubbing your own work means, first of all, making a series of choices as to which skill sets you’re willing to learn and which ones your going to pay someone else to do.

So one consideration becomes: how much money do I have to put into this?

If money’s not an issue (is that even possible???), then you can write your book and pay somebody else to complete the process. There are perfectly legitimate companies out there who will do a good job for you (BookBaby being one of the more prominent), but plenty of others who are just blatant rip-offs. Do your due diligence.

Say, though, you don’t have unlimited resources and your biggest asset is the sweat equity you’re willing to put into this. Each person’s professional and life experience is different. For instance, I spent a decade working in publishing art departments, mainly as a typesetter and running an in-house art department. I’ve either actually typeset or supervised the typesetting of hundreds of books, so I’m pretty comfortable with interior book design and formatting.

Would I touch a book cover, though? Not a chance. I wouldn’t know good graphic design if it ran up behind me and bit me on the keister. A good cover designer is worth every penny you pay them, and more.

Editing? In my life, I’ve written literally millions of words. Do I trust myself to edit them? Hell, no. In the last Music City Murders novel I published, my biggest single expense was paying an editor to make sure the manuscript was in the best shape possible. I’m even glad someone’s going to be looking over this column before you see it.

That’s enough for now. I hope this has given you something to think about as you ponder your own indie pubbing journey. Next month, we’ll do a deeper dive into the steps of this process. Stay tuned…

Making Your Plan

By Dale T. Phillips

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“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

Sometimes attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (though it may be someone else’s)

Since success is far more likely when you have a good plan and follow it, you’ll want to work on this critical part a bit. Realize that the plan will likely change along the way, and that’s okay, as various life events and opportunities arise, especially if you have schedules, which you should. The plan needs to be recorded in some format: I use basic office software spreadsheets. Writing down things makes them real, and sets it more firmly in your mind. Charting your progress keeps you focused and motivated. Do what works for you, and make it easily accessible, because you’ll refer to this frequently, to keep following the plan. 

The plan isn’t hopes or simply dreams, it’s achievable goals that are within your power. You can certainly write down your dreams, or incorporate them as part of a Vision Board, but your plan is doable steps to success. Winning awards, selling 100 thousand copies, being on Oprah, these are outside of your control. What is within your control is easy: what you’ll produce, by when, and how you’ll get it out to the world, and what other steps you’ll take. All while you’re learning more and creating your business. Work by work, win by win, you set each foundation stone to build that house of success.

Series

Series are a great way to get more books out quicker, as you don’t have to rebuild the novel world each time. They’re more likely to get you repeat readers and build your fan base. One writer I know is a smart cookie who has all the keywords and ad campaigns down, knows some of how to market, but all five of his novels are in different genres with no connection. A reader finds one of his books they enjoy, but nothing else like it by the same author, so sales are one-offs. That’s why the books don’t sell, but he doesn’t do anything about it, except gripe about how they’re not selling. So he’s discouraged and wants to give up. People buy my entire mystery series, because when they find a fictional world they like, they enjoy returning to it again and again. Remember, there are many series which survived past the demise of their creator, because people enjoy those worlds, even when written by others. One reason why fanfic is so popular. 

Stories

If you can add stories and collections to your output, that gets you to success quicker. Each story publication is another showcase ad for you when it comes out, as well as a chance for more promotion (and some form of payment). They can be finished and published quicker than novels, and serve as good credit-building. They get you through the long haul between books, and keep you going, a refreshing change of pace from the long grind of a novel. If you get a story into an anthology or collection with other writers, there are good connections to make. Having a book of your stories is a good resume addition, and an inexpensive way for new readers to find you. More in the store! 

Start with making a goal of writing one story a month. At that pace, you’ve got enough in a year and a half to Indie publish a couple of collections. That lets you easily get into the publishing process, and puts some product up, apart from one novel or two. It helps to get the ball rolling. Momentum is nice to have. It’s good to keep a list of ideas and titles for future works, be they novels, stories, or whatever. If I need an idea for a targeted anthology story or get stuck on what to write, I look at the ideas and titles I’ve recorded to see if anything sparks me to begin on that. I always have material to write.

For the master plan, break it down into large segments. First, what you expect to have done by a year from the start date. You can do a lot in a year, more than you think. Second, what you’ll have done three years from now. That gives you enough time to put out some quality work that will get you noticed. Then a future date, by which you’ll have done enough to be successful. Say five to seven years, by which you’ll enough good novels written and published, and a lot of stories. More than many writers. 

Then detail each time segment in your plan, making milestones and goals. First year, first book. Say fifty thousand words, a short novel, only one thousand words a week. When you get to five thousand words, that’s a major milestone— your first ten percent! Hitting these milestones makes you feel like you’re really progressing, and keeps the momentum. As studies show, setting specific intentions greatly increase your chances of success.

Then the other details— how will the book be edited: critique group, beta readers, editor? Have you started on those parts yet? If not, set a period of time to research, and put that in the schedule. If you haven’t done it, it may be difficult to estimate, but it’s good to rough out some sort of time frame, even if preliminary. Remember, you can adjust the plan later as more information becomes available. Set a reasonable time for editing, especially if this is an early novel, which may require some restructuring and story work. One of the great aspects of the Indie world is that you don’t have to publish a book until it’s ready. There have been a number of occasions where I wanted a book done by a certain date, but it needed more work, so it got delayed. Don’t publish until it’s good, but don’t spend eternity on it, either. Get work out rather than let it sit for too many years unpublished. 

Publishing

Apart from editing, do you know how to publish? Print, ebook, audiobook? Do you have a cover artist and know how to format? Do you know what platforms you’ll distribute on? Do you have all your marketing materials planned out? Do you know the other aspects of what comes after? If not, set periods for research. Ebooks can be published quickly, as soon as they’re ready. Print needs more formatting, and time to order a proof copy to verify it looks like it’s supposed to. Audiobooks need to be produced, and take the longest time. Adjust plans accordingly, and if you don’t know, just put a guesstimate or TBD (To Be Determined) in the time frame for now.

Definitely set the schedule for learning, and not just the publishing knowledge you’ll need. Can you absorb a new craft book on writing every 3-4 months? That gives you a few every year, and helps you improve much quicker. Plan on a course, online or in-person event every year, on some aspect of your writing that needs improvement. For that, I recommend at least one live writer conference a year, where you can learn a great deal in a few days. Budget for it, because they’re invaluable in advancing your writing career and making connections with other writers and fans.

And that’s just the start. See what I mean about how most people don’t get that far? It’s daunting to think about all you have to know, in addition to the writing. It took me about two years to learn enough of what I needed to publish my own books and break out as full Indie. Then I just took off and didn’t look back, though I’m still always learning. It does get easier as time goes by, because once you’ve acquired certain knowledge, you don’t have to relearn it.

Getting There

By following a good plan, in three years, you can be set on your success path quite readily. You’ve got some good books published, maybe some other material as well, you have your marketing material all prepared, you know how to contact libraries and bookstores, you’ve learned a lot. You’ve learned how to take feedback and have some trusted advance readers who will help. You’ve got some reviews and been interviewed a few places. After you get many of the preliminaries out of the way, plan to step up your production. Since you need less research time, put it into making your books awesome. 

And the next few years after that should determine how well you’ll do. If you’re always moving forward, making plans and achieving goals, producing good work, you’ll be surprised at how much you can accomplish. 

My original plan was to get a good start on success with ten good novels, ten story collections, and one hundred published stories. 

And that’s just the beginning! 

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime. 

Why Book Signings Aren’t What They Used To Be

By Steven Womack

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Buckle up, Buttercup: it’s story time!

Today, I’m putting on my Professor Peabody hat and inviting you to join me in The Wayback Machine, where we’ll journey back thirty years or so, to a time when being a working novelist was a whole different gig that it is now.

I started my first novel when I was eighteen, which was entirely too young for anyone to think they had anything to say about anything. Still, the combination of youth and arrogance knows no bounds, so I pressed on, determined to be the great writer I knew I was somewhere inside. Now if I could only convince the rest of the world…

Then life took over. And in one of the great ironies of my life (and the older I get, the more convinced I am that irony is one of life’s more primordial forces), after starting my first novel at the age of eighteen, it would take me precisely eighteen more years to sell one.

Even after the sale, it took a couple of years to get the book out. Then, as now, the wheels of traditional publishing grind very slowly.

So in 1990, I became a published novelist. Not only that, my first novel was a hardback published by one of the great publishing houses of New York, St. Martin’s Press. And like all newly published novelists, my first concern was when can I start doing book signings!

I loved going to book signings, loved meeting authors who’d written real books. Bookstores were my happy place and now my dream of getting to go to my happy place from the other side of the signing table was coming true. My hometown, Nashville, was a wonderful book town then. There were lots of independent bookstores around, as well as the big chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble.

One of the local independent chains was Mills Bookstores (chain? well, there were three of them), so I reached out to them, and they very kindly offered me a signing at their flagship store in Hillsboro Village. I met a fellow there—Michael Sims—who had moved to Nashville a few years earlier and would later go on to a spectacular writing career himself. He and I have been friends ever since.

Even then, publishers didn’t put a whole lot of marketing or promotion into most debut novels. So I took it upon myself to publicize and promote my first book signing. I worked up a database of a couple hundred of my closest friends and family, then merged the database with a Word document and sent out personalized letters inviting them to my very first book signing, which took place on a warm Sunday afternoon.

And it was astonishingly successful. In an incredible leap of faith, Mills had ordered around 130 copies of a book no one had ever heard of, by a writer no one had ever heard of. The store was packed, the event went on for—if memory serves me—at least three hours. I spoke for a bit, read an excerpt from the book, then signed literally every copy in the store. By the end of the afternoon, Michael was pulling display copies out of the front window to sell.

At the end of the day, I thought I got this…

Now, over thirty years later, I still haven’t had a book signing that successful. Most of my book signings have been like one I did with Sharyn McCrumb at a Little Professor Bookstore in Birmingham, where someone walked up to our signing table (and right up to it, since there was no line) and asked if I knew what the lunch special was today.

Book signings were events back then. They still are for some writers, if you’re a star. Stephen King can draw a crowd wherever he goes. If you’re a genre writer and have developed a huge following in your field, then you’re good to go. Celebrity book signings still work, and locally famous true crime books or other spectacle-type gigs still work.

But if you’re just a working stiff writer, on a self-financed book tour in a town where nobody knows you (yep, I’ve done plenty of those), book signings aren’t worth what they used to be. There aren’t as many bookstores today, so your options are more limited. The two great independent chains that were in Nashville back in the day—Mills Bookstores and Davis-Kidd Booksellers—are long gone. As a result, writers sometimes have to compete for limited signing slots at the few bookstores left. One bookstore I know has an application on their website you fill out if you want to sign at their store, and I know a number of writers they’ve turned down. And some independent bookstores, when they schedule a signing for a well-known author, actually charge admission to people who want to go hear their favorite writer drone on.

If you’re an indie-pubbed writer, then it’s even more disheartening. Bookstores, like everyone else, still have some old-school, ingrained prejudices against “self-published” writers (see last months column).

Even David Gaughran, an Irish writer who’s been a pioneer and an expert in the indie pubbing movement, wrote in his latest blog that getting out there to press the flesh—book readings and book fairs—are “F Tier” marketing strategies for authors today.

“F Tier” means a waste of money and time.

The days when books were primarily hand-sold, person-to-person in brick-and-mortar bookstores are long gone. You might sell a few books here and there, but it’s not going to move the needle on your actual numbers or your Amazon Sales Rank—and sad to say, that’s what counts these days.

So if you want to do a book signing, then do it for the right reasons: you want to hang with friends, family, fans and fellow book lovers for a pleasant afternoon or evening. Have a good time, boost your ego, have a glass of wine.

Then get up the next morning and go back to work. That paper’s not gonna sling itself.

Editors- You DO Need Them

By Dale T. Phillips

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Editors are essential to improving your work and aiding your success. Most writers are blind to the faults in their own writing, despite being sharp about discovering them in every other printed work. I’m no exception, and though I’m paid to evaluate and edit other manuscripts, I still pay another good editor to help make my manuscripts better. However, when I send my manuscript to my editor, I’ve done a great deal of cleanup beforehand, to give her less work to do. Note that some editors charge by the page, which is a crap system. Something that needs a lot of cleanup takes far more time than a very clean page, so go for editors who work hourly, to save yourself money. And get honest ones- my editor thought the latter half of a novel needed rewriting, so sent it back for revisions before spending hours editing something that would be significantly changed. 

There are different types of editors and editing, and disagreement about which is which, as some of these terms are variable. Some combine more than one of these in their inclusive editing. Know up front what you’re getting and paying for.

• Manuscript evaluation/appraisal— This high-level check is for the essential quality of your manuscript. Does it work as a book? Does it have commercial viability? Does it have the elements it needs for publication, or are there major problems which must be corrected first?

• Developmental or Story editing— This is a check that the structural story works as it is, or may need chapters/characters moved around, added/deleted, or simply further detail in certain areas. Completed story arcs?

• Line editing— This check is for content and flow, things like consistency of voice, point-of-view, tone, and clarity, and slack writing which may sag or need some punching up.

• Copy editing— This type drills down to the precision bits on a word-for-word basis, usually working to a style type or sheet. Different copyeditors work using different standards, though, so make sure you agree with yours. 

• Proofreading— Checking for any and every error, in text, layout, numbering, placement, etc.

• Fact checking— If you have a manuscript with a lot of facts in it, you may need one of these editors for verification of the information you’ve included.

Because most Indie writers don’t have a lot of surplus income, they blanch when told they MUST have a good editor for their work, before it goes out to the buying public. Since good editing runs $50 or more per hour, they despair at not having hundreds of dollars to make their work better. Especially when they hear that there are different levels of editing, and the work might need more than one editing pass. Ouch! When you’re talking about a thousand dollars or more for each book, that’s real money to most writers.

And if the writer is expecting an editor to wear all those hats and correct all the errors in a manuscript in one pass, and to do it cheaply, well, that’s like looking for unicorns. So the money-impaired writer is tempted to skip the process altogether, or to assume a publisher (if they go that route) will take care of that. Skipping (or even skimping) on editing is a bad business decision that will adversely affect a writing career. As a reader, when I encounter a poorly-edited book, I seldom read that author again. If their story wasn’t even worth an editing pass, then it’s not worth wasting my time to read it, or anything else by them. So what’s a poor writer to do?

It’s never too early to start your search for a good editor, to get them lined up for when you’ve got a work ready for their red pen. Know what type of editing you’ll be getting for the money and get some samples up front. Many writers got burned paying for poor levels of edits they didn’t want or need. You’ll need to do some careful research for this one, to find someone you’re comfortable working with, who can be trusted to work in a timely fashion, and who provides quality for the price. You can start an editing fund right away, even if it’s a few bucks a week. Forego the pricey coffee, young hipster, and bank those four dollars so your work will be better. Your stories are worth it, aren’t they?

Here are some ways to get your manuscript in shape BEFORE you send it to the editor. The less work the well-paid editor does, the less you pay. You’ll see that each method described here will do some of the work of different editors. It’ll catch a lot of simple stuff, but it’s extra work that takes an editor more time to point out and mark up.

• Study about feedback, using beta readers, writing groups, and workshops. Get advance feedback for your work through the methods described there. Story edits for flaws can cause massive rewrites, driving up the cost of your editing, and taking a lot of extra time. When your story passes muster with all your free feedback sources, then send it on to a pro.

• Our brains play tricks when scanning text, gliding over mistakes, so copy the text into a different type of file, and change the font, and the size, and print it out. You’ll catch a lot of things you didn’t see before.

• Get a helper, someone to listen, and read through your work- slowly. Do this in stages, so you don’t overdo it. Mistakes will sound like dull clunks in many cases. You’ll wince when hearing some of the stuff you wrote that looked okay on paper. Mark it all and fix that stuff!

• Some people recommend reading it backwards. If that floats your boat, go for it. Haven’t tried that one yet.

Check with the editor in advance when you know you’ll soon have a manuscript for them. They might be busy for weeks with the work of someone else, and you don’t want to have your manuscript sitting around. Once you’ve put in all the free feedback, and had other eyes on the text, NOW you’re ready for a proven, paid set of eyes for your work. You’ll swear up and down your manuscript is perfect, but you’ll be shocked to discover what you missed when you get it back. 

On the path to success, quality is necessary to establish a trusted “brand”- with clean, well-told stories, your audience will grow. Having a lot of mistakes in your manuscript will get you dinged in reviews, and may convince some to not buy or read it. Lay the groundwork for a long-term writing career you can be proud of.

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime. 

www.daletphillips.com

Why I Hate Self-Publishing

By Steven Womack

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Some time ago, I gave a talk at the monthly meeting of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of Sisters-In-Crime. A week or so before that, I’d read an installment of Clay Stafford’s writing blog that put forth the proposition that writers should not give their work away. A writer’s work has meaning, Clay wrote. It has value and to give it away for free sends the wrong message to readers and to the world in general.

I’ve known Clay Stafford a good couple of decades now and have always regarded him as a wise and successful friend. When he speaks, I listen—and usually take notes.

This time, however, I had to disagree.

It’s not that I disagree with his notion that a writer’s work has value. It does, even if sometimes it’s only to the writer him/herself. All writers put an enormous amount of work and heart in to getting those words onto a page. But that doesn’t always automatically translate into value, especially value measured in sales/dollars. When there are roughly 2.2 million new books published every year (according to UNESCO), the competition is pretty rough out there and it’s hard to convince an audience that your book has value; in other words, it’s worth reading.

So I put forth the notion—based on my own experience—that the best way to get attention for your book was to give it away. In February, I had my first BookBub Featured Deal and in a four-day period gave away 24,897 eBook copies of the latest installment in my Music City Murders Harry James Denton series, Fade Up From Black. Through the rest of the month, that resulted in over 200,000 page reads. And since Amazon’s policy is to pay page reads on book giveaways if the book’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, I made money giving stuff away.

Enough to pay for the BookBub Featured Deal, anyway.

While I’ve given up predicting the future, I feel confident that at least a few of the people who downloaded those nearly 25,000 copies will like the book well enough to actually go out and buy the other installments.

It’s a whole new world out there, marketing-wise. Marketing in the internet age has a  very long tail, and to riff on my old pal Larry Beinhart, sometimes the tail wags the dog.

***

After my talk, Clay wrote me a very complimentary note and asked if I’d be interested in writing a monthly column for Killer Nashville Magazine on self-publishing. I was very flattered, but the first obstacle to overcome was my loathing of the term self-publishing. Loathing? Seems kind of harsh. Why would anyone loathe a term like self-publishing, especially since some of the greatest writers in history published their own work? 

Disgusted with his usual publisher, Mark Twain formed a publishing company to publish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles Dickens’s regular publisher showed little interest in A Christmas Carol, so Dickens hired artists and editors and paid for the printing himself. Beatrix Potter literally couldn’t interest anyone in publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, so she borrowed the money to print 250 copies. At latest count, there are some 45 million copies of THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT in print. Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. The rest, as they say, is history.

In our lifetimes, the stories of self-published books that sold gazillions are apocryphal. Amanda Hocking, Andy Weir, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Scott Adams… all have, at some point in their careers, published their own work. And let’s not forget that whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing.

So why such distaste for the term?

I confess here that I’m an old guy. I began seriously writing in 1970, fresh out of boarding school and working on my first novel. There was no Internet then, no such thing as an eBook, and everything was old school; no respectable publisher would consider an unrepresented book, so you queried one agent at a time and if they took six months or a year to get back to you, tough noogies. They were the gatekeepers and they made the rules.

Then, like now, it seemed that every sumbitch who knew how to type thought they could be an arthur (a term coined by the wonderful Molly Ivins, when someone introduced me to her as a mystery writer—Great to meet you, we arthurs gotta stick together…)

Then, as now, there were dozens of predators out there preying on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers. Self-publishing then was a synonym for vanity publishing, and the vanity presses were raking it in from the naïve rubes. Vantage Press, Pageant Press, and Exposition were three leading vanity presses that were, by the 1950s, “publishing” over 100 titles a year each. 

Even I got roped in myself when I paid $400 to have the legendary Scott Meredith Agency read a novel of mine. Meredith, being one smart cookie, had created a whole separate company to sucker in aspiring writers like moi. I got notes back from some office drone, supposedly signed by Meredith, who needless to say, didn’t take me on as a client.

Not one of those books published by a vanity press had a chance of being reviewed by anybody, let alone a respectable press like the New York Times. No bookstore would carry them.

Writers have always been easy pickings for predators. The most egregious case in history was The Famous Writer’s School, founded in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, a Random House editor and regular panelist on the TV show What’s My Line? There isn’t enough space here to go into that con job, but it made millions by paying writers as diverse as Mignon Eberhart, Rod Serling, Bruce Catton, and Faith Baldwin to join their “faculty.” The suckers thought their stuff was being read and critiqued by Rod Serling, when in reality the work was being done by unknown copy editors. There’s not room enough here to really relate the history of this scam, but Google it. It’s an object lesson for us all.

If not self-publishing, then what?

The world of publishing today bears no resemblance to the publishing world I came of age in, and that’s a good thing. I’m already over my word allotment that Clay gave me for this column, so over the next few months (or however long this little adventure goes on), I’m going to talk about these changes and how my own experience in This Crazy Writing Life have shaped me and my career. To me, it’s not self-publishing. Self-publishing means your stuff’s so bad, you’re the only who’ll touch it.

I prefer the term independent publishing. Going forward, I’m going to talk about how we, as writers, can take control of our work and careers, take back the power from the gatekeepers, and become the kinds of writers we want to be, with the kinds of careers and lives we want to have.

This’ll be a journey we’ll share. After all, as Molly Ivins once said: We arthurs gotta stick together…

A writer's hardest work begins when the presses stop!

By John MaGuirk

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Is the world ready for us?

I’ve watched Doris Kerns Goodwin sit in a drafty hall, sign books, and make small talk with strangers. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes.

This is the blog you have been waiting for: Number 3 in the series producing your audiobook.

We’ve bought the equipment, learned how to use and edited our effort. What happens next?

Journaling, Blogging & Podcasting are three sides of a single coin. If you think of a Podcast as a spoken blog, you’re almost home.

Every Podcast is three things: creation/writing, performing/producing & distributing.

I hope what you may have been doing is bombarding your friends, family & mailing list with promotional material. If our friends won’t buy our book, maybe it’s time for new friends. You’re stuck with your family.

I used my first novella as Christmas presents for some family & close friends and sent a review copy to a media friend. I also mailed PDF copies to friends who were confined to home by illness.

I posted installments on my website, but not the concluding chapter. Your first chapter should contain a further special offer. Every episode should invite feedback. For your website, get professional help to build a subscription offer and/or a sales funnel.

It’s possible to distribute any file through your website. The trick is to build a proper sales funnel to channel subscribers to your premium content. That’s a task for your webmaster; websites are always collaborative efforts. It takes two to tango, as they say.

A webmaster creates the site, and a content provider (writer) gives the site substance ie. Make a post! The webmaster should assist you by building the sales funnel or channel which directs visitors/users toward your premium content. 

You may invite readers to subscribe via your website or through Facebook, for content to be delivered direct to their inbox by subscription. 

An audiobook is just one more arrow in your quiver and if you have built your sales funnel properly you don’t have to share with anyone else, not even Amazon. But you have to do your share by creating the best content you can manage and demand equal performance from your webmaster. 

FYI/iBooks author by Apple permits the inclusion of video, and audio along with the text. 

Another promotional tool is to create a CD for mailing to friends and associates as a sample, be sure to include a “special offer” or mini sales funnel on the CD. 

At the end of each production be sure to encourage feedback. It’s the audio equivalent of a “sales funnel.”

Yes, any MP-3 is indeed a large file, especially if it has a run time longer than 30 minutes. Exporting content to a Cloud server aids in compression. 

Although we are unaware of it, radio personalities or newsreaders speak just a little faster than our normal speech pattern.

That makes it necessary to plan your work into as short segments as you can manage. Try to stay under a maximum of 45 minutes of reading time. 

The message I write for is: “that was great send me more….”

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John MaGuirk creates, writes & produces digital content by PodCast. Since his debut in 2011(December) he has produced over 1100 unique episodes.

Productivity

By Dale T Phillips

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“Writing a novel is like driving at night with your headlights on- you can only see a little of the road ahead, but you can make the whole journey that way.”

—E.L. Doctorow

You write a novel the way you’d eat an elephant—one small bite at a time.

Writing even one novel is a lot of damned hard work. Continuing to write them is little short of obsessive. But to be successful, you’ll have to keep doing it over and over. Unlike singers, however, you get to do different ones each time, not the same thing over and over. 

Every writer has a different way of doing the work. Two major types of writers are (with many of us doing one or the other, or both):

• Plotters, who carefully detail everything before writing, doing the outline, and setting the scene first.

• Pantsers, who write “by the seat of their pants,” just jumping in without a complete structure in advance. Dean Wesley Smith uses this method, which he calls “Writing into the Dark.” He has an advantage, though, in having done it several hundred times!

It’s good to keep files of ideas, titles, character sketches, and turn of phrases. When you need a new idea, scan these files for things that spark your imagination. I’ve got hundreds of potential titles in one file and ideas for new stories in another. I’ll never run out of things to write.

The best way to be productive is to write every day if you can. It builds the habit. Don’t wait for inspiration. If you can do that, it’s a wonderful way to be productive. On the other hand, I do it the “wrong” way (even though fellow writers compliment me on my productivity, which I find amusing). I have to be inspired by the ancient Greek concept of “The Muse,” which many say is not effective, because you won’t write as much. Lucky for me, I take The Muse seriously, and She often drops by to tell me what to write next. It sometimes messes me up because I shift projects at a moment’s notice. 

For too long, I was working on three different novels and not completing any of them. One was 75 percent done, another was 50 percent done, and the third was 25 percent done. Which all adds up to zero percent finished. There were some publishing strategy changes and various issues in the narratives which bogged me down. 

Then I finished one novel, but before I got to the other two, another novel sprang into being. I wrote most of that, and got stuck again when illness, depression, and Covid-19 hit in rapid succession. I was down and out for too long before I decided that writing would give me back my life. Indeed, it did, and I burst forth with a completed and published novel, a new story, and a finished draft of another novel. 

Write whenever you want or can: early morning, late at night, on lunch breaks, whenever. Find the time that works best for you. Short stretches or long marathon sessions, it doesn’t matter. Keep a notebook handy for ideas that come to you when you’re doing other things like driving, showering, or taking a walk (when many ideas turn up). 

If you have trouble, try the “Pomodoro Method” of sprints and movement. http://graemeshimmin.com/the-pomodoro-technique-for-writers/

NaNoWriMo is a fun method to put out a lot of work in just a few weeks. If you’re having trouble getting words down, think about giving it a try to kickstart your brain into fevered word production.

One good habit is to set aside your writing time as the primary task for the day. Writers procrastinate better than anyone else, and it’s so easy to get sidetracked that writing time can easily slip away. Write first, do all else later. Don’t do research in your writing time because it’s easy (and lots of fun) to fall down the rabbit hole. If you come to a passage that needs to be researched, just mark it as such and move on.

Doing the Math 

If you’re just starting out, you may produce at a slower rate. That’s okay, it will just take you longer. If you’re going to be a successful indie writer, you’ll need a fair amount of good work. Do you know how long on average it takes you do finish, edit, and publish each book? If not, start with an estimation of writing one book a year, 50-100,000 words. When you get more experienced, you’ll definitely want to increase this output, but it’s a good place to begin. At that pace, it will take you roughly five years to write five good books, which will (simply by that output) put you in the top 20% of all published writers. 

Have you got at least five good books in you, just as a start?

So, your first novel. Say 75,000 words, and you want it done in a year. That’s only 1500 words a week (a few hundred a day) and around 5 pages. Fifty weeks later, you’ve got 250-plus pages, and those 75,000 words. Congratulations! You’ve done more than many who set out to do this. It may not be the best yet, but you got it done.

Celebrate!

Then get to work on the second novel. You’ve practiced for a year, so maybe this one will go faster. Up your word count to 2500 words a week. Still quite doable. This means you’ll get this one done in just over six months. How about that? Almost half the time. You learned a lot more, and it’s probably better than book one.

Celebrate! 

Write the third book, slightly better pace. Finish. 

Celebrate! 

Two years total, three books under your belt.

Starting to get the hang of it? Hopefully. Rinse and repeat. 

If you need a million words to get really good, how many can you write in a year? A book a year is a decent pace, better than most, but for more success, you might want to step it up some. If you can put out 5,000 words a week, you can have 250,000 in a year, and a million words in only four years. 

One book a year might net you a few hundred dollars in income (or a few thousand), but you want more, you want volume. The more you write and publish, the more you’ll make. If you want to make 48,000 dollars a year, you’ll need 4,000 dollars a month, or roughly two thousand total sales at two dollars profit each, or 500 sales a week. One book will sell x number of copies, ten books will sell much more. So you want to get to ten good books published, as quickly as possible. That takes discipline and dedication. 

Figure out how much you make per hour, and scale up. If you make a penny per word, an hour of good writing at one thousand words nets you roughly ten dollars. That’s your scale. If you want to make $48,000 a year, you have to either write faster or get paid more. Daunting, yes. 

After six to ten books, you should be selling more of everything. Each new book adds to the total. The “Halo effect” means that other books of yours are bought because people discovered a first book, then went on to others. Especially if you have a series or connected books. 

In the old way of publishing, some authors could get by with one book a year. Today, you’ll likely have to be far more productive to make a decent income. It’s up to you to determine your level of success.

Dean Wesley Smith calls his copyright and production output The Magic Bakery.

Imagine that you have a storefront with all your items for sale within. If you have one book in one format, you have one product. Have you ever walked into a store and bought a single product? You likely won’t stay long. As a successful author, you want variety and choice, different price points, and for shoppers to come back again and again to buy more. A series can bring them back for more. Put your work out as an e-book, in print, as audio, and other formats, such as graphic novels. The other aspect of The Magic Bakery is that as an indie author, you can keep licensing pieces of each product, while keeping the original. Traditional publishers buy the whole product, which you cannot resell. Dean made thousands of dollars from one story, by licensing different pieces of it. Make your work into a virtual storefront, and fill it with tempting merchandise. 

It’s amusing to me that when I set up my display at book events (24 books currently, plus anthologies with others), people look at the output, and think I’m prolific, when I feel like a slacker who doesn’t do enough. I smile and say, “If you want it badly enough, you’ll work for it.” I sell more than most writers at these events, because of my sheer variety, and the different price points (with prices shown for each book, so browsers don’t have to ask). A few secrets of my success. I point out that someone can grab a book of short stories for little more than a cup of coffee or get a good novel for half the price of a hardcover in a bookstore. And because people love a bargain, I’ll give them a price break if they want to buy more than one book. By having so much available, with ebooks and audio of everything, I’ll offer them other free versions of the work when they purchase print (which costs me nothing). People will remember and come back in subsequent years to buy more. And every year they come back, there’s more to sell. 

Advantage, productivity.

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime. 

Punctuation is Power - Part 5: Are you in business or in hobby?

By Angela K Durden

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Across the board in creative endeavors something interesting is happening. Folks are getting to be about 55 or so, thinking of or are retiring, and getting back into the thing they loved before the kids came along and the bills piled up and their time was not their own in that thing we call Life. 

Whether it is music, writing, sculpture, painting, pottery, dance, and more, you will find many “of an age” mingling with young folks just getting into that creative endeavor. For some, writing a book or two is just a hobby. They don’t really intend to make it a business. Thinking about the bygone golden years of publishing when authors became stars. They dream of their book being:

• rep’d by an agent, 

• sold to one of the Big 4, 

• making the best seller lists, 

• selling like crazy domestically, 

• translated into multiple languages and selling internationally to wild acclaim, 

• made into a movie or two or three. 

Bring on the mailbox money! From your mouth to God’s ears, right?

Well, firstly, the business was never exactly like that. As we learned from the recent Hemingway documentary, his lavish lifestyle was mostly due to having a series of rich wives. Secondly, the old saying “make hay while the sun is shining” applies in this business. Much marketing of personalities went into the making of the myths. Hemingway used his marketing myth to get money for product endorsements. Nothing much has changed there.  

Still, much hard work by many people went into the writing, editing, printing, marketing, distribution, tracking of inventory, and sales of most books. Starting in the late 1980s, though, the book business began to change. Tired of being shut out and stolen from, the age of the Indie Author and Indie Publisher began and has not abated. Technology has made the publishing of a work easy; distribution via print-on-demand methods has made it within the affordable reach of millions. (Marketing of a book is a whole other subject. It is a bugaboo, a thorn in our paws, a never-ending challenge.)

Unfortunately, too many authors, having written a work, tire out and don’t do the necessary boring work of thorough and multiple edits and rewrites. Not only that, they are also unwilling to pay for it, too. Many will not take any advice when it comes to punctuation, sentence structure, flow of the material, etcetera. They see any question as an assault on their baby. 

I want to scream when I hear “Well, I [or my spouse, significant other, best friend, or sibling] have a degree in English and have already edited the book.” Or “My wife edited my book. She has a degree in English. She’ll get her feelings hurt if I let anybody else edit it.” 

Then these authors are not in business. They are in hobby. True, there are some creative outputs that are simply for making the creator happy. Enjoy the process! It is wonderful to have a hobby one enjoys. 

The business of book publishing, though, requires another mindset. Sorry to say, but one may still not see a profit from all that hard work. All business endeavors are a crapshoot. 

I have always had an allegiance to words in whatever form they take. I hate advertising language that reeks of the weasel. Since it has always been a moving target, I detest rigid rules of punctuation for rules’ sake. [See Part 1 of this series]. 

As a writer in many categories (business, children, non-fiction, memoir, humor, and fiction), my goal is to teach and/or entertain but always challenge the reader and tell it well.

As an editor my goal is to make a book the best it can be. One that, when a grandchild finds it on a shelf and reads Grandma’s or Grandpa’s book they will be proud of how good it is, not embarrassed about it. 

As a small publisher it is to bring to life high-quality books the Big 4 will not touch. Blue Room Books has published history, music business memoir, fiction, and more, some not easily categorized. We may or may not make a profit on these, but damn it all, when they go into the world they will be equal to or better than offerings from the big houses. 

So, as asked in Part 4, I ask again: 

Why do you write? 

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Author, editor, publisher, and more: learn about Angela K. Durden here and here and here.