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Your protag blurb ends really abruptly. There's no hook at the end, so it feels as if there's a line that got cut off. It's making my teeth itch. The antag blurb is much stronger in that sense. But no, I don't think you need the crazy/ghost thing overt in the blurb. The concept is strong enough without it.
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Aug 30, 2015 19:35
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moana posted:Agreed on all counts, and get rid of the Mary characterization. It doesn't add anything. I love love love that tagline. Rewritten: Perfect!
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Aug 30, 2015 21:29
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Your blurb sounds apologetic. That's a horrible mistake. Look, whatever the content, you've written a book, dammit. That makes you a writer by definition. And everybody is just some ordinary person, when you get down to it. So drop the hair shirt. Your blurb needs to persuade people why they need to read your book. Saying "I'm not worthy and this is nothing special" won't cut it. Your reader's time is precious. The cover is not objectionable, but it's not going to grab people. Look at well-performing books that you want to compete against, and think about their covers. Writing a book takes ages. Invest some time in getting the rest of it right.
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Sep 2, 2015 14:52
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Agent355 posted:How can I possibly recoup the 150 hours it would take to write a 100k word piece? Last time I checked the figures -- which was _before_ Amazogeddon -- less than 1 professional author in 13 was able to make a liveable wage off their writing, and either worked a second job, or was supported by a tolerant spouse/parent. I'm mainly non-fic, and primarily trad-pub. Have been for 20+ years, and I have over 100 trad-pub books under my belt. Last year, I made about $15k between writing and editing (and couldn't scrounge up any work for three months or so). That was a pretty good year. If you want to make a living wage from your writing, forget your inclinations, accept that this is a business, and write romance. Yes, Really. If you desperately want to write adult fantasy, for God's sake don't do shorts or serials, and accept that you probably won't get to make a living wage off it. To see what it usually takes to make a living in SFF/genre, go look at Chuck Wendig. Dude is tireless, with a strong, unique website updated daily, very active twitter and facebook, and four or file novels out a year. I don't know for sure, but I believe he's up somewhere around $40k/$50k a year income -- in return for working every hour God sends, most of it being entertaining and sociable rather than mining words. It primarily took him several years of building his website to get to the point where he was moving above "hobby money".
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Sep 4, 2015 12:10
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Presentation is all nicely strong. The cover is awesome, the blurb is decent, the title is great. I'm pushed for time, so only had a quick glance inside, but was glad to see that you didn't weigh things down with an obvious prologue, and that you dumped us straight in media res. There were a lot of adjectives, slowing the first few paragraphs down unnecessarily, but otherwise the writing seemed decent. Based on what I read, if I'd received the manuscript as a submission, it would have gone on my "read the whole drat thing" pile, which is the top 8% or so. So great work! If you don't do it already, it would be worth your time hanging out on Reddit's /fantasy board for a while, and getting to know them there (as a participant, obviously, not as a book marketer). They're a supportive community, and they've made the careers of worse books than this appears to be. Worst, you'll make some pals.
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Sep 5, 2015 11:41
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Will of the Emperor posted:It feels ludicrous one week after putting out a single book to say anything with authority, but my advice to anyone else doing the same thing is get a basic understanding of modern project processes. It takes out so much stress. Absolutely. Personally, trying to sit down and begin writing something I'm visualising as a physical book being purchased from a book store is a great way to make sure I get lots of cleaning, tidying, and net-surfing done. It's not a monolith you carve from a block of mind. When I'm working, I'm working on one of a bunch of almost unrelated phases -- concept, rough outline, detailed outline, messy draft, second draft, cover brief, edit, synopsis, blurb, strap-line, launch prep, format, ebook conversion, market, launch, post-launch. Sure, they all happen to be related to the same overall product, but at no point am I actually trying to force a finished book out of nothingness. Makes it so much more acceptable.
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Sep 5, 2015 12:24
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Plankhandles posted:Are friends worth it? Short answer: Not really. Longer answer: Eh. If you want to make money from your writing, what you really want, more than anything else, is (a) a serious release schedule, and (b) fans signing up to your 'new releases' mailing list. Blogs, podcasts, review sites, even newspapers and radio, not many people take much notice of the content. Everyone's too inundated. So don't waste much time on supposed "promotion opportunities". Hanging out in a community -- like /r/Fantasy -- and being a mensch rather than a spammer is better. It's a decent, if slow way of getting some people to think you're OK, and then they'll hopefully look at your work and move towards becoming a mailing list member. But if you want to make a living off this, you're much better off sinking that time into working up to a new book every 4-6 weeks, and focussing on building up your mailing list.
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Sep 5, 2015 15:16
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Yeah, link the list in your books. Link the list in your webpage. Link the list in your promotions. Maybe offer freebies to get people to sign up (opinion there is divided). But basically, link the list anywhere you're doing something market-y. For the first few books, really the goal is "use writing to get interested mailing list members", not "use writing to get the moneys".
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Sep 5, 2015 17:31
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Some months ago, I did a very quick 'n' dirty estimate of how many sales a really successful book in a range of genres could hope to be pulling in a day, at its peak. I've done another slurp of data and updated my info, so I thought I'd share again in case there was any interest. METHODOLOGY ---- Take a look at the 20th bestselling book in a genre and also the 100th bestselling book (never look at the #1 book because that could be an outlier). Take the ranks of those books and use their average as the denominator for the equation (100000 / sales rank). That's an estimate -- but a decent one -- for number of sales per day that you can expect from a decent selling book from the genre. Multiple the sales by royalty -- most likely about $2 -- to see daily peak income. KEY ---- Genre Link to Top 100 Overall Amazon Kindle Sales Rank of #20 in top 100 + #100 = Average Position = Est. sales per day for average position If there's a second line, this one is today's (if not, the only line is today's) == Est sales per day for average of previous data points. DATA ---- Contemporary Romance http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Contemporary-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/158568011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_6487838011 73+ 311= 192= 520 96+ 457= 276= 362 == 441 Romantic Comedy http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romantic-Comedy/zgbs/digital-text/6487841011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_158568011#5 193+ 958= 575= 174 == 174 Paranormal Romance http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Paranormal-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/6190484011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_158568011 233+1098= 666= 150 == 150 College Romance http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-New-Adult-College-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/6487838011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_158568011 120+ 863= 491= 200 205+ 970=1175= 85 == 142 Romantic Suspense http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romantic-Suspense/zgbs/digital-text/158574011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_4_6487839011 321+1327= 824= 121 259+1208=1467= 136 == 128 Erotica http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Erotica/zgbs/digital-text/157057011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_3_157028011 900+4727=2813= 35 == 35 LGBT Romance http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-LGBT-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/10886541011/ref=zg_bs_nav_kstore_3_158566011 1813+5712=3762= 27 1556+5144=3350= 30 == 29 All Romance http://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Romance/digital-text/158566011/ref=ntt_dp_kar_B00OS6RR0I 56+ 226= 169= 591
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Sep 27, 2015 17:11
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Sundae posted:KU makes the data harder to work with now that we can't see how many borrows we get anymore. If I assume that 100% of borrowers in a given day read the book to 100% in the same day (this is clearly a completely awful assumption, but it creates a conservative lower-bound to the number of borrows a given rank gets). That's good to know. Ta. I've been assuming that KU2 makes the overall financial returns less accurate, but it seems likely that the comparative performance of sectors is still going to be potentially useful.
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Sep 28, 2015 22:42
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a shameful boehner posted:I'm just wondering how the author of this: Satirical use is very difficult to fight legally. So long as you make the case that it's intended as a fictional lampooning rather than a description of fact, there's no libel there to answer. EDIT: There's almost no chance you'd be sued, because people are well aware of the Streisand Effect. If you _did_ get sued, sales would shoot through the roof, and you'd probably be able to rally people around you anyway.
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Sep 30, 2015 21:42
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Sundae posted:This is the saddest truth. "If voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal", and other such 
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Oct 15, 2015 14:47
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There's a worrying post on selenakitt about how Amazon just dumped a whole heap of innocuous romance into the erotica dungeon. On top of the KDP withering, it seems like unusually turbulent times. But to answer an earlier question, no, publishing at large has never really treated writers well. During my full-time years as an editor at a London publishing house, the MD and his upper mgmt team were vocal about how annoying it was that writers were a necessary part of the loop, and there were times when I was ordered to lose invoices, downplay sales figures, and once even to deny an entire second print run. I never obeyed. Desk and line editors were almost as unpopular as writers, and had very little influence over project selection. Design and production were seen as a bit better, but it was only really sales, marketing and accounts who were considered 'real staff'. None of this was seen as the least bit unusual, new, or predatory. It was just publishing as it had always been. As a mainstream writer, you only become protected when you're a big enough name that publishers -- that is specifically publishers' sales departments & upper management -- need to keep you sweet. Until then, you're just a really tiresome resource to exploit as hard as possible.
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Oct 15, 2015 16:42
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magnificent7 posted:Has anybody had experience with booktrope.com? Looks like a great solution for self-pub+ options. (like, you WANNA self publish, but would benefit from people who can help you). OK. Looking at their website, a bunch of stuff becomes clearer. Booktrope aren't a publisher, a vanity press, or (precisely) a scam. They're like a book-oriented version of freelancer.com. You sign up, they help you rope other random member "experts" into a project team, then they skim 30% of the money off the top and divide the rest up amongst the team. Just like freelancer.com, it _could_ work well, if you happen to get really lucky, but in practice, my assumption would be that it would only attract mediocre people who can't get actual paid work in those field. Sadly, royalty percentages are almost never worth working for, if you can possibly avoid it. For ever E.L. James you turn your nose up, there'll be 100,000 one-copy wonders. The trouble with "teams", particularly ones mediated through collaborative websites, is that (a) no-one else really gives a poo poo about your baby (this is the same trouble start-up founders have); and (b) the more people are involved, the higher the chance that one weak link will sink you all. So. As the author, you're getting 33% of 70% of 70% from Amazon eSales. That's 16% of cover. Clearly, the 'book manager' who signed up with you is just some idiot who's hoping to farm a few dollars from doing gently caress all by taking a cut of lots of tiny-performing books. I'm sure the Booktrope contracts have clauses preventing release, because they'd be scared that a book would start doing well and the author would yank it out to keep all the cash themselves. If it's not specifically forbidden by the book contract -- and it probably is -- then personally, I'd put it up free somewhere, tip off the price-match on Amazon, and hope to use it as a marketing tool for a follow-up novel. You _could_ try promotion efforts, but without access to the price, it's going to be a monstrous nightmare. So, if you can't get it out of the contract -- and again, you probably can't -- all you can really do at this point is chalk it up to experience and write something else.
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Oct 21, 2015 12:40
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Quite a few 4-5 figure a month authors have noticed a huge drop in revenue that started around Prime Days. Book ranks and Also Boughts are taking longer to update as well. So it's possible a book's recent poor performance isn't just due to the book itself. Does anyone here know whether this picked back up? I've been haunting this thread (and its predecessor) for a few years now, and I finally have a space to consider KDP as a business, but I'm getting concerned that it might not be that viable any more.
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Jan 25, 2020 13:33
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