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Here's a podcast interview with DWS from a month ago. I think he addresses that, but I don't remember for sure. http://rockingselfpublishing.com/episode-70-writing-public-dean-wesley-smith/
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Dec 4, 2014 17:06
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Unless KU can give me a 300% increase I'm going to make more money diversifying. I've started to get some push from other marketplaces, too.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:04
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moana posted:What genre are you writing that Amazon isn't the majority of your income? I'm curious. Also what kind of sample size are we talking about? SF, Fantasy, horror, mysteries, thrillers scattered across multiple pen-names, and that's what's fatiguing. Multiple marketing platforms. You either have social media multiple personality, or you neglect audience building. 2015 I'm going to start consolidating everything, because man, I'm tired of juggling. Now it's more a matter of realizing that my fanbase has a significant non-Amazon component, and I don't want to cut them off by going exclusive. Compounded with the fact that I'm getting more traction from other retailers' promotional departments, and I'm reluctant to go exclusive.
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Dec 16, 2014 03:14
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The only really problem with exclusivity is that it takes forever to build any kind of traction on Apple or Kobo, so delaying that just makes it harder whenever you eventually get around to it. What about Smashwords or BN? Don't worry about them. You won't make any traction on Smashwords or BN. Apple and Kobo are more "long term slow build" success. If you only want to sell on Amazon, there's no reason not to go exclusive.
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Dec 18, 2014 04:47
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Oh, I agree... you should have a developed business plan. And if that business plans indicates that your time is best spent focused on Amazon, there's no reason not to go exclusive.
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Dec 18, 2014 21:01
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I've got a spreadsheet. It's a mess, but it makes sense to me. I make a new one each January. Page 1: I track sales monthly, by title and retailer (Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Other, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iBooks (by way of D2D), Kobo, ACX, Google Play). I record # of sales and income per title, which I record as both a total and an average. Page 2: I track each title's monthly sales in $ across all retailers for the year, and have a column where I calculate the cost to produce (covers, editors, hours invested x $30 per hour) so I can calculate net profit per title. I have a column that converts gross into profit averaged by month since publication. Figures grabbed from page 1. Page 3: Totals per retailer per month for the year, data grabbed from page 1.
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Jan 8, 2015 19:37
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Latest release is doing well. Apple picked up the first in its series for a promotion last month, leading to ~6k free downloads, and that has had a good iBooks conversion rate to the next. Not great, but good. Kobo is going to be doing something to promote the latest book this Friday. They contacted me in both cases, so I don't have any really special advice on how to get support from either. Kobo is more prone to promoting higher price points, according to this article. It's been a good start to the year, though I sent out an email newsletter with a big stupid typo right in the headline, so I'm sort of kicking myself for missing that.
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Jan 20, 2015 21:34
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I ask my mailing list.
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Jan 22, 2015 04:58
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ExtraNoise posted:Do you just say "Hey who wants a free copy if you give me a review?" or what? Yeah, I just tell them that the book will be out in a month, and ask if anyone wants a super secret sneak peak in exchange for a fair review that ideally goes live on release day.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:14
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Just sell your shorts to magazines. After they're published and the rights come back to you, you can bundle them into a collection and market using their appearances as a selling point.
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Jan 31, 2015 07:51
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Yeah, make more things happen. More plot, more scenes, more conflict.
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Feb 2, 2015 06:18
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SFWA votes 6-1 that self-published authors are good enough for membership.quote:In a referendum with a third of voting members participating and over 6 to 1 in favor, the membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has approved bylaw changes that enable SFWA to accept self-publication and small-press credits for Active and Associate memberships in the organization. We are using existing levels of income but are now allowing a combination of advances and income earned in a 12 month period to rise to the qualifying amounts.
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Feb 4, 2015 04:49
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Canstock. Fotolia.
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Feb 8, 2015 03:31
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"Write what you know" isn't about technical detail, it's about emotional resonance. Can't write convincingly about love unless you've been in love. Doesn't matter if you're a space pirate or a dragon rancher, the human experience is the human experience, and if you ain't lived it, you're not going to be able to fake people into thinking you know what you're talking about.
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Feb 12, 2015 21:47
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Oddly I also had 10x as many sales last month, though that was because I got into an Apple "first in series free" promo.
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Feb 13, 2015 18:23
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laxbro posted:I have a short story blog that gets about 100-200 unique visits a day. I want to monetize it. Obviously I should just write my own ebook and pimp it through my site. I've started outlining a young adult horror story, but the going is slow. In the mean time, is there a way that I can join a book blog network or sell adspace directly to authors/publishers in the same genre as me? Or is that a waste of time and I should just focus on writing my book? Okay, if you want to make money writing short stories: 1. Sell them to paying fiction markets. New ones. If they're on your publicly available blog you've killed your first electronic rights, and that's what editors buy. 2. Put them on your blog after they've been purchased, or at least after you've given up trying to market them. 3. Post new stories on a regular consistent basis. Weekly is best. Bi-weekly is okay. You can probably get away with monthly. Set up a mailing list to alert people when you've put out a new story. 4. Set up a Patreon and push this at the end of every story. People pledge to donate $1 or more every time you publish a new story. Offer cool enough rewards and you'll get people to donate more. Say for $2 they get to read the stories before everyone else (stories sent to your patrons don't eat the rights paying magazines want to buy), or you could send them ebook collections of your shorts for free, or do hangouts, or whatever else you think would incentivize people to throw money at you.
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Feb 19, 2015 17:30
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I've played with the idea of writing interactive fiction set in my books' fictional universes, but I honestly don't have the time for what would amount to a hobby with questionable marketing value. Which is too bad because I used to love writing IF when I was younger. I just can't justify the time and energy when I could be writing my next book instead.
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Mar 6, 2015 23:08
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I can't speak for fantasy precisely; I write steampunk thrillers and mysteries. I do okay. It's really picked up since the last release in January. Nowhere near top shelf income, but I make enough to write full time, and that's really all I want.
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Mar 18, 2015 17:55
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A good editor can easily cost thousands. Proofreading, marketing, layout, cover design, interior illustrations... it adds up.
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Mar 26, 2015 16:08
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"Oh god taxes oh god" - me every year
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Mar 28, 2015 21:32
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The Gilded Age posted:hello! i was wondering how many hours a day do you all write? 6-8 hours a day, five days a week.
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Apr 16, 2015 15:09
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Yeah, I set up an S-Corp and it's hugely complicated. Talk to a lawyer, possibly one that specializes in entertainment. And also an accountant.
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Apr 26, 2015 01:36
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I recently took the plunge to learn InDesign my paperback layouts instead of just relying on open office. I am pleased with the results.
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May 4, 2015 21:22
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I started writing in the 10k to 20k range. Last year my books were 30-45k words long. This year I'm aiming for 60-90k.
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May 7, 2015 18:09
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Scrivener. Exports to .epub, .mobi, .doc, .pdf, etc. Scrivener is well worth the price, even if you don't buy it on sale. Best investment in my writing I ever made.
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May 13, 2015 15:19
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Yeah, seeing that my efforts actually impacted my bottom line turned me into a workaholic.
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May 20, 2015 15:29
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In order of importance: Luck. Persistence. Talent a far far distant third. Really, what this takes is the ability to juggle the attitude of a professional creative. Produce top quality work in sufficient quality without burning out. And get lucky that the right audience will find you, and have the foresight to leverage opportunities when they come your way. Random (non-romance) genre fiction tips: 1. Write series of novels. 2. Publish regularly. Every three months, every other if you can swing it. 3. You cannot really judge if a series is successful until the 3rd (sometimes 5th) or so is out. 4. First book free as soon as the second is released, but aim for 1-5 ASAP. 5. If a series isn't working, end it, try something else. 6. Start a mailing list as soon as you can. This is your primary marketing tool. Post regularly, 2-3 times a month, or you will be forgotten. 7. Your covers should "fit in" with the other covers in your genre. But be better. Following these tips has garnered me a liveable (hah) income with no day job. psychopomp fucked around with this message at 22:08 on May 25, 2015 |
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May 25, 2015 22:01
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I really wish that I had the mentality where I could fake interest in Romance well enough to convincingly write it, but I can't. I tried, briefly, never published any, and it's pretty laughable. But then again, I'm not making so much money that if I really wanted to be making a good money steady income I wouldn't do better with a 9-5 cube warrior job. I write speculative fiction because that's what I want to do for a living. Like, physically do 40-60 hours a week. I don't want that desk job, and I don't want to write something I'm not enjoying. The writing is the quality of life I'm after. I might be scraping by in an oversaturated niche (steampunk mysteries), but my life is sitting around, researching Victorian pseudoscience, and telling stories about it. But hey, I have a few hundred fans on my mailing list and more signing up every day. Some of them might even follow me when I finish this series up and move on to whatever comes next. As long as I can pay the rent and save a little bit each month, I'll be happy. (What I did starting out was make up like a half-dozen pen names in different niche genres and start publishing short works to see which sold best and what I could see myself doing. I would not recommend this method. Just write whatever you can live with devoting great chunks of your life to.) psychopomp fucked around with this message at 00:37 on May 26, 2015 |
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May 26, 2015 00:35
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I use Mailchimp. I promote it on my website and the back of my books. There's an incentive to join in the form of a free novella segment from the second book in the series; I've got about a 50% open rate, which is fairly good for author mailing lists.
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May 26, 2015 00:53
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Mr. Belding posted:
I don't get it either. I can write speculative fiction, thrillers, mysteries, historical fiction, horror, but I can't wrap my head around the romance genre. I can write books with strong relationship subplots (including romantic relationships), but as a primary through-line? Just doesn't work for me. At least not in a marketable way, and that'd be the point. psychopomp fucked around with this message at 04:20 on May 26, 2015 |
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May 26, 2015 04:04
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Basically everything Yooper said. Publish your top quality work as often as you can manage. Chances are you won't make as much money as you would if you were writing romance, but you can still manage a liveable income. Workaholism helps. 
psychopomp fucked around with this message at 14:53 on May 26, 2015 |
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May 26, 2015 14:51
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I vaguely remember people talking about 3-5k as the absolute minimum, but that was like 2 years ago so the market has probably moved on.
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Jun 1, 2015 14:33
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quote:What is the difference in sales potential for a beginning author who doesn't totally suck in those genres? I'm talking short-term here, six months in, writing 3k words a day (but needing more time to edit. Probably the same amount of time to edit for romance and double that for fantasy/sci fi.) Would I be better off money-wise with one really good professional fantasy novel (just humour me in assuming I can do this), or the equivalent in ~20k length serials (probably five or six), or would I be much better off with like 10 romance serials that are not heartrendingly poignant but competently written and have some thought put into them? If you want to write serials it's tough. Romance readers are more accepting of the format because they're used to it. SF/F readers are just getting to the point where they'll read them to. If you want to succeed with serials you are going to have to release VERY frequently and VERY consistently. Like, one 20k episode every three weeks to a month. Each episode must be more or less self-contained, but tie into the larger narrative. Think about it like an episode of a story-driven TV show like Supernatural or X-Files; there are "monster of the week" eps and "metapolit" eps, but there's a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. So if you have the time and focus to plot out a story, write it, edit it, polish it, and publish it every month, serials might work almost as well as novels. Maybe. If you get lucky and stumble on a really marketable premise at just the right time that gets in front of the right eyes.
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Jun 2, 2015 15:32
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Gotta tell you, I'm feeling tempted to make some of my longer works exclusive.
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Jun 16, 2015 05:24
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Canadian Surf Club posted:what are people's opinions on publishing sites like wattpad, inkitt, or kindle's write on? Is working on something and putting it up chapter by chapter on there worth it for the exposure, or is it better to just wait, complete a whole thing, then get it up on amazon? Anecdote: I had a wattpad story featured. It had a ton of reads, a lot of super positive comments, and generally exploded. It was the freebie I was offering as a series starter/loss leader. Literally the best possible outcome with Wattpad. Almost zero conversion to paid sales.
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Jul 1, 2015 06:04
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You can include links in the back or frontmatter of your books. I use it to direct people to sign up for my mailing list. Some retailers (okay Apple) have a problem with you linking to their competitors, but Amazon gives no fucks. Yet.
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Jul 3, 2015 18:58
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Compile it, give it a fresh edit, a snazzy cover, maybe some EXCLUSIVE EXTRA CONTENT that wasn't serialized, upload it, and market it to the fans of the serial.
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Jul 4, 2015 02:22
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By The Horns posted:Selena Kitt currently has many titles performing very well at 99c. As do several of the heavy hitters in this thread. Once you have sales momentum and a legion of fans eagerly awaiting your next release, many of the rules no longer apply to you.
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Jul 6, 2015 14:40
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Hugh's also a pretty cool dude. I sat next to him on a Worldcon panel and had no idea who he was, but I'd at least seen Wool and recognized the cover, and he had good answers for the questions people were posing to us. Later in the same day I was sitting on a panel next to Brad Torgersen and didn't know who he was either. It really drove home for me that I needed to be reading more "contemporary" science fiction, and in the years since I think my writing has grown all the stronger for it.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:40
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 11:49 |
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Yeah, I've been sort of rolling my eyes at his recent pro KU posts, and as chill as he is in person, I find myself disagreeing with him on issues of exclusivity. I'm not really one to ever wring my hands at the idea that the sky is falling (it's always falling), but to deny that people are going to have to rethink some of their business plans is a bit naive. But being an indie author has always taken adaptability. You need to react fast to capitalize on the good changes, and fast to mitigate disaster from the bad. Hugh still acts, in some ways, like he's "one of us", but he's really not; his success has him off in a world where his concerns are less "will I make rent this month" and more "do I want to sail around the world clockwise or counterclockwise this year."
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Jul 7, 2015 19:46
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