Surfing the Amazon: Part One

April 12th, 2012

 

I am now about to say something writers rarely say.   Ready? Brace yourself.

I’m happy.

In fact, I’m having fun.

The nature of my admittedly-probably-temporary fun is my self-publishing project, a historical mystery series collectively called City of Mystery.   The first book, City of Darkness, launched on Amazon last week.  The debut was a success, I think – at least as much as you can ever think anything definitive about anything in publishing.  So here’s my story.

After talking to other people who self-publish and studying the matter a bit on my own, I followed these steps.

1)    I made the decision to do this in stages, putting the ebook up first and releasing the paperback a month later. I also made the decision to go exclusively with Amazon and I’ll talk more about this later.  I figured these two decisions would allow me to focus now on Kindle related programs and I could do other things, like a launch party, when the paperback was printed.

2)    I put the book up “soft” about five days in advance of the official launch.

3)    During this time I browbeat members of my writing group and everyone else who had read it- or who owed me a favor in any category at all- to put up a review.

4)    I contacted bloggers, the same people who had helped me two years ago when Grand Central published my novel Love in Mid Air.   A goodly number of them were willing to publicize my latest bastard child as well,  so I gifted them ebook copies.   My hope is that they will ultimately review the book online and/or feature it on their blogs with links to buy.  A couple of them are fast readers, bless their hearts, and had their reviews up before the official launch.

5)    My goal was to accumulate twenty reviews before the official launch.  I’ve heard, rightly or wrongly, that having a solid number of reviews upon launch helps to draw Amazon’s eye. And successful ebook publication is ALL about attracting the attention of Amazon adequately enough to get your book factored into certain algorithms.   The Amazon algorithms are like God.  No one has seen them or claims to know exactly how they work but evidence of their existence and their power is all around us – yea, dead books are being resurrected online nearly every day.     

6)    Got twenty reviews instead of eighteen but launched anyway.  I priced the book at$2.99, a price point at which Amazon grants the author a whopping 70% payout and left it there for two days.   This was pretty much my chance to give my friends and relatives the opportunity to donate $2 per download to the Kim Wright Wiley Semi-annual Health Insurance Payment fund.

7)    I categorized my books, which sounds straightforward but which is actually a pretty tricky part of the process.  Amazon allows authors to designate seven terms in relation to their books – for example, I chose “mystery,” “history,” “British detectives,” etc.   This matters because your sales record will be compared to other books in your category in order to determine best seller status and top 100 rankings within that category.   Being ranked in the top 100 of your category is also a boon for getting your book into lots of recommendation queues  - you know, the “if you liked that, you’ll also like this” sort of thing Amazon routinely does when people buy books – so there’s an art form to choosing your category.   If you say something huge like “mystery” then a top 100 ranking there counts for a lot – but with so many mysteries on the market it can be hard to break into the top 100.   It’s easier to rank high if you also indicate subcategories within mystery such as “hard-boiled,” “women sleuths,” or my own “British detectives.”  Even a moderate seller can get ranked top 100 in a sleepy category.

8)    After the two days on sale at $2.99, I started my first promotion, making the book free on Amazon for two days.   If you’re a member of the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) program you’ve agreed to several things by the mere act of joining.  You’ve made your book available for Prime members to borrow.  The author payoff is approximately $1.60 per borrow which stacks up reasonably well in comparison to the $2 per download I would have gotten if the customer had actually bought the book.  And, somewhat more controversially, you’ve agreed to publish your book exclusively with Amazon, saying a nice loud buh-bye to Nook and the others.  Considering how much Amazon dominates the ebook market anyway, I didn’t have a problem with this but some more politically-minded writers resent the monopoly Amazon is gaining and chafe under this restriction.   Every writer has to make his own call.

9)    The choosing of two days was fairly random.   Books in the KDP program have the option to go free for five days during each 90-day cycle they’re in the program.   (If you opt to re-up after the first three months you get another five free days.)  With five days to play with I figured two now, two later, and then one.  That gives me three shots at getting the famed KDP free “bounce.”  The theory is that if you put your ebook up for free lots of people will download it and this will drive you into the algorithms as a hot-selling item.   Amazon is the perfect example of “and the rich get richer,” since they like to promote books which are already selling well.   The idea is that if you do well in the Kindle free category, bumping your book up in both the general rankings and within your genres (such as mystery) and subgenres (in my case, historical mystery) this can help you get figured more prominently into the algorithms and mentioned more frequently to buyers browsing the site. Of course at first it’s just about how many books you can give away for free, but  – at least in theory – when you rotate off the free list you get a bounce in the paid category.   In other words, by drawing attention to your book through the giveaway, you increase the chances more people will see it and buy it when it goes back to its regular price point.

So….book loaded, check.   Nice bright cover, check.  Eighteen reviews, check.    Categorized in a couple of big competitive categories a couple of smaller easier ones, check.  Twitter account and Facebook page established for the book, check.  Ten books gifted to bloggers with fingers crossed, check.  Now there was nothing to do but sit and wait.  Or, more accurately, nothing to do but to stare wide-eyed at my computer screen waiting for the Gods of Amazon to anoint my book with oil.

PART TWO OF MY THREE PART ADVENTURE WILL GO UP ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK

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My Interview with Ellis Shuman

April 9th, 2012

Last week I was interviewed by Israeli writer Ellis Shuman.  When I see it all together like this, it’s strange to consider the arc of my career  Anyway, thanks Ellis!

ES: You’ve been writing non-fiction articles and books about travel, food, and wine, for more than 25 years. When did you begin to write fiction?

KW: I’ve always written fiction “on the side,” like I think a lot of nonfiction writers do. I love them both in totally different ways.

ES: How long did it take you to write your debut novel, Love in Mid Air?

KW: That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. I worked on it for two years part time then set it aside. I was in the middle of getting divorced myself and my own story kept bleeding into the fiction. Sometimes you can be too close to a situation to write about it objectively. So I took a two year break from the book and then went back to it and finished it in about a year. So I never know if I should say five years or three years. Does the break count?

ES: Describe your path to publication for Love in Mid Air: Did you query for an agent and/or publisher? How difficult and long was this journey?

KW: It was very hard for me to get an agent. In fact, I queried for two years with no success. Finally a writing friend introduced me to her agent and we clicked immediately. This isn’t uncommon – most writers find their agents through referrals. Once I had an agent, he sold the book pretty quickly. I think it took about two months.

ES: When Love in Mid Air was published, did you realize how much its success depended on your marketing efforts?

KW: No, not at first. This is a part of the publishing industry that is changing fast. Writers are expected to do much of their own publicity work now, even if they publish with a large, “Big Six” house like I did for Love in Mid Air. Two years ago when that book came out I did have a couple of great publicists helping me and one of them, the online specialist, taught me a lot about blog tours. Now, two years later, writers are expected to do even more of it on their own. I consider myself lucky that I had her to mentor me through it at all because I’ve used what she taught me to publicize subsequent books.

ES: How big is the chick-lit market? Is a sequel to Love in Mid Air in the works?

KW: Chick lit is declared dead every year or two but it keeps on plugging along. Most female writers don’t really like the term, which can be pretty dismissive, especially when male publishers use it. But if you mean women’s fiction, that’s a huge part of the market. Women buy the vast majority of novels. I have the rough draft to a sequel of Love in Mid Air, this time told by the point of view of Kelly, who is the sidekick/best friend to the hero in the first book. But, following the same pattern of Love in Mid Air, I wrote a draft and I’ve now put it aside. I’ll pick it back up and polish it later.

The real world of publishing
ES: What were your goals in writing Your Path to Publication? How easy was it to get this book published? Does the book also deal with self-publishing options?

KW: My goal with Your Path to Publication is to tell readers exactly what I wish I’d known when I started this whole journey to publication years ago. And that includes a chapter on self-publishing which is growing part of the publishing world and much more viable option than it used to be. This time it was easy to get the book published, partly because I went with a small press. I met the publisher at an MFA graduation party and we started chatting about how even MFA graduates don’t know much about the real world of publishing – the nuts and bolts like agents, contracts, foreign rights, etc. So the idea for the book was born.

ES: Tell us about the Wish Granters books: Who writes them and who published them?

KW: I’m co-writing the Wish Granters series with a friend. She’s a self-publishing maven and she convinced me to give it a try. The books are about two people who are trapped between life and death – sort of like angels except that they have the option of earning their way back to earth by helping people. So they’re assigned a series of women who have wishes, and of course it all gets very complicated because sometimes what people wish for isn’t what they really want. Or they get the wish and unseen complications come along with it.

ES: Is there a significant advantage to self-publishing and marketing a number of books in a series?

KW: The biggest advantages of self-publishing is that no one can tell you “no” and that, as a writer, you keep a bigger percentage of the profit on each copy you sell. The biggest disadvantage is that you do ALL the marketing yourself and it can be hard to find an audience. The writers who are most successful almost always have a series. That way they’re just reaching out for that reader once and selling multiple books, since most people who like a series will read all the way through it, and thus buy multiple copies.

The first forensics unit at Scotland Yard
ES: Your latest book is City of Darkness. What’s that about, and what brought you to write in a completely different genre?

KW: It’s not really much of a departure because I’ve always loved both mysteries and history. The book is about the famously unsolved case of Jack the Ripper and the founding of the first forensics unit at Scotland Yard. It’s a nice juicy, bloody, action-filled story!

ES: Did you try to traditionally publish City of Darkness? Has something changed in the publishing industry?

KW: Yes, my agent did show it to four editors, which isn’t very many. He came back to me and said it was just a hard time to be selling anything, which it is. It’s no secret the whole global economy is a mess and, as an industry, publishing is being especially hard-hit. So I had a decision to make – sit on the book and wait for conditions to improve in the market, or self-publish. I went with the latter.

ES: There is already mention of a sequel to City of Darkness. What other future writing plans do you have?

KW: I’m almost finished with the sequel, City of Light, which is set in Paris and am researching City of Silence, which will be in St. Petersburg. Now that I have my team of forensic specialists assembled I plan to send them all over the world, investigating high-profile cases.

Advice for aspiring writers
ES: What advice can you give to an aspiring writer today? Should he/she pursue traditional publishing options, or has the industry changed so much that self-publishing is the way to go?

KW: I’d say try both options….there’s really no reason not to and nobody knows what direction the industry will ultimately take. For example, you could self publish genre fiction while pursuing an agent for your more literary work, or self publish short stories or novelettes and try to traditionally publish your full novels. People are doing it all sorts of ways and I know a lot of writers who are saying it’s not a matter of either/or, it’s more a matter of both/and.

ES: One last question. I understand that there’s another published writer in your family?

KW: Absolutely! My daughter Leigh is the author of a self-published alternative history series called The Six Lives of Henry VIII and it imagines how history would have been changed if just one event had gone differently in each of Henry’s six marriages. Catherine the Inquisitor and Anne the Saint are already available on Amazon and she has the third book, Jane the Spy, almost ready to go.

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Hacked by Jack

April 4th, 2012

I suppose I can appreciate the irony….the first day my new book City of Darkness is available on Amazon I get mondo hacked.  An email claiming I’m in London and have been mugged and need funds goes out to everyone on my email list – and that’s over 300 people.  I was in the Matthews library, a small, quiet calm place researching the unfortunate Nicholas and Alexandria for book three when I glanced at my I phone and saw I had over 30 calls and messages.

Yikes.  Most people saw it as a scam immediately and were just writing to make sure I knew I’d been hacked.    But a few – mostly men, God bless them – were contacting me to offer money so I could get home.  It’s gratifying to know there are so many people out there in the world who would come to my aid had it been a true crisis but it also left me with hours of work trying to change all my passwords and debug my computer.   So the day I thought I’d spend lining up reviews for City of Darkness was actually spent responding to the hack.

Monday night I was a wreck.   Exhausted and irritable.   Upset out of proportion to the event, actually.

I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned in all this but right now I’m not sure what it is.   In my more paranoid moments, I could believe the universe conspired to complicate the task of bringing this book to market.   In my most grateful moments, I appreciate the chance to literally count all my friends.  And it’s interesting to mull how the internet giveth and the internet taketh away.   The very technology which allows me to reach out to readers all over the world with one click is the same system that leaves me vulnerable to some creepy scam artist.

In my book my detective Trevor Welles thinks that sometimes he hates being a modern man.  It’s a very autobiographical moment in a relatively nonautobiographical book.  If you had told me ten years ago I’d be betting my writing future on a digital format I wouldn’t have understood what you meant – and I wouldn’t have liked it if I had.  But here I am, the modern woman, faceless and yet easily accessed.   And like Trevor, sometimes I hate it.

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British beer, girls in pantaloons, and other ways to sell books

March 30th, 2012

As the debut date for City of Darkness draws near I’ve been thinking of innovative ways to announce this fact to the world.   

When my novel Love in Mid Air came out two years ago,  I had a publicist with a Big Six house and while I was loosely consulted on publicity plans, the bigger issues were handled by her.   There are good and bad aspects to giving up this power.   The good news is that my publicist was smart and hardworking and that Grand Central paid for her efforts, including the not-inconsiderable expense of mailing out advance reader copies to potential reviewers.  The bad news is that Big Six houses rarely think outside of the box on publicity.   They keep cycling through the same ideas – book tours, certain high-profile blogs, ads, product placement in chain bookstores.   None of these things are problematic in and of themselves.  In fact, it’s great if you can get someone to pay for any of them.   But they do tend to be expensive and old-fashioned ways to find readers.

Two years later I’m wondering at the wisdom of doing any of them.

I’ve decided to self-publish City of Darkness and the subsequent titles I have planned for the City of Mystery series.    As I was discussing it with my friend and fellow novelist Dawn she said “It’s so exciting to think you don’t have to ask permission.”   And that’s one of the little-explored beauties of self-publishing.   People talk a lot about writers getting to publish whatever they want and keeping a bigger percentage of the profits and yeah, those are advantages.  Being able to choose your cover and title and have the final say on edits?  All good things too.  But the less-discussed perk of self-publishing is that you get to think of innovative and downright wacky ways to introduce your book.

The City of Mystery series is about Scotland Yard’s first forensics unit, founded under the protection of Queen Victoria following the unsatisfactory conclusion of the Jack the Ripper case.   Throughout the books, my characters will travel to the major cities of the world working on high-profile crimes.   This means each book will be set in a different city and it seems to open up to me a wealth of possibilities.   I’ve thought about:

A launch party for each edition held in a local restaurant that matches the locale of the book.   A British pub for the first, City of Darkness, followed by a French bistro for the second, City of Light.

Shanghei-ing my friends into dressing as characters from the book to serve the food.  Who could resist canapes served by the collective victims of Jack the Ripper?  Okay, okay, maybe I need to rethink that one….

Offering city-appropriate snack suggestions for book clubs.   My old book club used to try and theme the drinks and snacks to the book,  something that was fun but often a pain in the rump for the hostess.   I’m thinking of putting suggestions of food and wine on the webpage for book clubs.  Maybe suggestions for a background soundtrack as well?

This is a stretch, but….I used to love those mystery parties where people assumed identities and everyone tried to help solve a fictional crime.   Remember?   They came in a box and were built around like a concept like a high school reunion or a weekend at a country manor?  Maybe I could come up with forensics games for the launch party and challenge my guests to solve fictional crimes based on the limited forensics tests available in the Victorian era.  Winner gets a free autographed copy?

What I’m definitely doing is providing a drink themed to each  book on the website.   My friend Felicia is a mixologist and she’s at work on a British-themed drink for me to serve at the launch….and a French-themed one for City of Light and then a Russian-themed one for City of Silence.    The other ideas might be overly ambitious for a self-employed writer ona  tight budget but a special drink?   That’s doable.

I guess the idea is that I feel free to play around with it.   To not be so serious and think “This. Is. Literature.”   When I back off and think that launches and signings are supposed to be entertaining and that book clubs are about more than reading, a lot of ideas flood to the surface. 

People want to have fun.   Shouldn’t books help take them there?

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Fear and Self-Loathing on the Publishing Trail

March 23rd, 2012

Writing, like politics, can make for some strange bedfellows.   This week I met with my writing buddy Marybeth and her buddy Erika who also became my buddy during the lunch.   The subject, of course, was writing.  It always is.

In many ways Marybeth and I are an odd pair.  She is a designated Christian writer, a member of an evangelical church, politically conservative, the mother of six children and I am….none of those things.  But the Sisterhood of the Recently Published is a club that seems to sweep away surface differences and divide the human race down to two categories:  people who have walked the bewildering and thorny path known as publication and those who have not.

So Marybeth and I have been getting together for two years on a regular basis and helping each other stay sane through the ups and downs of the experience.

I’m self-publishing my next book.   It’s a complex decision on one level but on another level it’s simplified greatly by the fact my agent couldn’t sell it in the conventional way.  I literally have nothing to lose.

Two years ago this would have felt like an utter failure – a sign something was wrong with the book.  Now it just feels like the way things are and I honestly am not sure I would have been all that happy if a conventional publisher had bought the book.  Maybe I know too much now. The shrinking advances, glacier-slow production,  tightening publicity budgets,  three-month window of opportunity…it all adds up to an experience that is rarely as glamorous as you imagined it would be.  In fact it’s often painful.

So if conventional publishing is a mixed-bag of experiences, self-publishing begins to look better.   It is, after all, also a mixed-bag of experiences but this time the events are significantly more under your own control.

As I was explaining my feelings to Erika over lunch,  Marybeth – who has known me since my bright-eyed dewy-cheeked pre-publication days – looked at me and said “It’s been interesting to watch the whole evolution you’ve been through.”

Hmmm.

I wrote a while back that a friend described me as “cynical” and how much I hate that word.   I still don’t think it fits.  If the situation was right I would certainly happily sell another book to a Big Six publisher.   I haven’t turned my back on that possibility.   But yeah,  I’ve become wary and not as willing to accept any deal that’s offered.  

A large part of the process has been realizing where the writer is on the food chain of conventional publication.  Because there are so many of us and we are all so eager/desperate to be published,  the editors and agents of the world quite logically take us for granted.  We are a rapidly replenishing resource:  When one falls,  three more erupt from the soil to take her place.   Readers are likewise marginalized in the process.   Recently at the AWP in Chicago I sat through a 75-minute panel which devolved into a discussion of how everyone is suffering.   Publishers.  Agents,   Editors.  Big chains.  Small independents. What will they do?   How will they make it?   The two cateogories of people that weren’t mentioned at all, EVER, in 75 minutes were writers and readers.   Perhaps the panelists knew that all the other categories are in danger of becoming extinct but there will always be plenty of us.

The finances are changing the game.  Thanks largely to ebooks and the rise of self-publishing,  readers are beginning to demand a lower and lower pricetag for their reading material.   In a world awash with 99 cent options, an ebook at $2.99 might be considered pricey.   Might be in danger of pricing itself out of the market.   Twenty-four dollars for a hardback from an unknown author?  Whoa.   Given what’s happened in the marketplace it’s a miracle they manage to sell any at all.

So prices are drifting down but there are still umpteen middle men to be paid in the process.   The agent, the publisher, the distributor, and the bookseller at least.   Maybe more.   Fewer sales, a shrinking pricepoint and plenty of people taking a percentage out of that smaller amount and it all adds up to hardly any money for the writer.   Is there any wonder writers would be tempted by a model that connects them directly, or almost directly, to the reader?   With only Amazon standing between the two most vital players in the game the reader can get a cheaper book and the writer can still be paid fairly.  

I call it the two-three question.    Once the agent’s fees were taken out, if someone bought a hardback copy of Love in Mid Air at $24,  I cleared approximately $3.  If someone downloads an ebook of City of Darkness at $2.99 from Amazon I will clear $2.   Even taking into account that $3 is unmistakeably more than $2, it’s a lot easier to sell an ebook for $2.99 than it is to sell a hardback  for $24.   Ergo volume alone will more than make up the difference.

Of course it’s not quite that simple.   I won’t get an advance and I’m forfeiting the chance to be in bookstores which still does matter, ebooks or not.   But the gap between the advantages of conventional publishing and self-publishing has narrowed and in the two years she’s known me, Marybeth has watched me begin to question which one I truly find to be a better fit.  

This business can break your heart.   But a little heartbreak is the price of admission for many of  life’s most valuable experiences and I’m okay with that.  The problem is that, if you’re not careful, it can break you in other ways,  ways which cause more permanent damage.   I’ve known quite a few writers who have stopped writing, who have found the process too punishing to continue.   I suppose I could take the fact my agent couldn’t selll the City of Darkness series as proof I’ve missed the boat,  that I should go back once again into revision or perhaps scrap the idea all together.   But I don’t really see it that way.  

I’m ready to try something new.

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