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ARG self-publishing the descendant

The self-publishing experiment part 7: Publicity and marketing

You really have to take your hat off to some of the work done by successfully self-published authors, who’ve managed to sell bazillions (well, tens of thousands or more) of ebooks. For a comprehensive list of what’s possible, take a look at Jenny Blake’s spreadsheet for the self-published.

It’s important to remember here that you aren’t a traditional publisher, so you shouldn’t waste energy trying to behave like one. Trade (traditional) publishers mainly operate via business-to-business (B2B) marketing. That is, they both sell/market to the trade.

They also engage in a small amount of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing.

The trade (i.e. bookshops) relies on the fact that the publisher will be doing some or all of the work to shift a book; in fact this is an important factor in how heavily a book will be purchased and how prominently a book will be displayed by a bookstore. Big advertising campaign? Hello, truckload of books to display front of house, face out and discount promotion! No consumer marketing at all? We’ll take one copy, please. Spine-out only.

Hence all the fuss you see about new books in The Bookseller, Publishers Weekly and their ilk, is aimed at the trade.

As a self-published author, you don’t need to worry about any of that. You need to go directly to the consumer – your reader.

Indeed, in the digital world it is being suggested that traditional publishers too need to shift to a mainly B2C model.

Instead of telling you what you can do (I refer, again, to the excellent spreadsheet of book marketing), I’m just going to tell you what I’m doing.

    • Publicity – I’ll be emailing my list of Joshua Files readers with information about the new book – a techno-thriller aimed at older readers and set in the fictional world of THE JOSHUA FILES. (click on the logo above if you’d like to sign up!)

Introducing THE DESCENDANT on Prezi

  • Alternate Reality Game – THE DESCENDANT – was the basis of an Alternate Reality Game which Richard Howse, my agent Peter Cox and I developed for the launch of ICE SHOCK. There are about a dozen tie-in websites scattered across the Internet. In this ARG, a third story unfolds, one that bridges the experience of Josh Garcia just before ICE SHOCK and of characters in THE DESCENDANT. Buried somewhere in all of this is a new code I’ve developed especially for this publicity campaign…and the winner of the competition to crack the code gets the grand prize – a Kindle!

    The Descendant facebook page
  • Facebook – A dedicated page at fb.com/thedescendant will serve as the focus for discussion and news about the book and the ARG. Over a month I’ll post a walk-through of the ARG so that casual ‘players’ can drop in on the story without having to make the intuitive leaps by themselves. The first clue is available in the book itself…
  • A book trailer for THE DESCENDANT. Who knows if they’re important but I enjoy making them very much, and also use them in author events. More content for the facebook page and my website!

  • Press release – apparently Monday morning 7.30-8am is the best time to do a press release. That’s when journos are looking for material. Be sure that your book is listed as IN STOCK on Amazon, etc. Worst times are Thursday afternoon and Friday. Here’s the press release we wrote: Best-selling author self-publishes new technothriller with competition to win a Kindle Touch
    Optimize for SEO and submit to free press release services such as PRLog, 1888PressRelease and freepressrelease.com. Also to your own press contacts if you have them.
  • Advertising – there’s a tiny budget to try this out, either on Goodreads or a popular book blog via Blogads.
  • Giveaways – I’ll probably try this via Goodreads.
  • Starshipsofa.com – this lovely sci-fi podcast like to feature 10min excerpts of authors reading from the opening of their novel. So naturally I volunteered to read from THE DESCENDANT!
  • Review copies – I’ve lined up a small group of readers in the book trade and media to read the book. Hopefully some of them will like it and post a happy review!
  • This series of blog posts about my self-publishing experiment. Well, for now, self-publishing is still a novelty for authors who’ve been successfully published by the trade. It’s vaguely newsworthy. (Enough to get GP Taylor an article in the Daily Mail when he announced his first self-published book.)
  • Price promotion – ebook. The RRP of the ebook will be £1.99. (That’s right – bargain!). During all promotions though, it will be 99p. (Bigger bargain!)

An important factor in marketing is to track the effect of any action. It’s not always easy. One way is to separate the actions and measure sales during each activity. I’ll probably do the advertising at a different time to the ARG. Everything else is scheduled to happen during the first month of the book’s launch.

I’ll report back in about a month!

Meanwhile, next: Things you didn’t ought to do or Easy mistakes in self-publishing – a snagging list.

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self-publishing

The self-publishing experiment part 6: Materials and Methods

Be Methodical! SIMON FRASER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

In scientific papers this part is written in dense type, and you don’t worry about making it easy to follow. Why? Well, even though the rules of science say that your work has to be replicable, you may not like giving away your lab secrets.

Usually with business processes, you don’t give information away to potential competitors. Yet in these early days of the self-publishing revolution, there’s a tremendous spirit of cooperation. Without the dozen of blog posts and a 99c Kindle book I’ve read about the process, I couldn’t have reached this stage.

So here, in approximate order, are all the steps  we at DARKWATER BOOKS went through to bring forth our first title: our Materials&Methods. (please note the Disclaimer at the bottom of the post).

  1. Start a limited liability company, if you want to have books printed via Lightning Source.
  2. Find a designer and an editor and agree a contract. An email laying out the task and what you agree to pay is valid as a contract, but you may want to be more specific. Remember to ask a designer to be clear about what IP permissions he/she assigns to you for the jacket design. Ask for global permission to use the images anywhere to promote your book.
  3.  Think hard about picking a book trim size which can use crème-coloured paper and be printed to paperback, hardback and the Espresso Book Machine – it will save you extra tweakage costs and the need to upload separate exterior and interior files to LSI. (How I wish we’d done this. It’s a rookie error and I hate to see it.)
  4. Schedule all tasks so that all interior and exterior content are finalised at least six weeks before publication. If planning to sell books in the USA (Createspace via Amazon, say) but the company you’ve created (i.e. you) has no presence there, get a tax exemption number so that 30% of your royalties don’t go to the IRS. Make an account on Createspace, Kindle Direct Publishing and Lightning Source (LSI). LSI will need administration time to process each stage of applications and paperwork.
  5. Apply to Neilsen/Bowker for ISBN numbers – you need to print out the form and mail it to them, with the payment. Turnaround is about 10 days.
  6. Start setting up an account on LSI as soon as you have your limited company and the ISBN of your first title.  The paperwork seems more complicated but their email support is friendly, fast and efficient.
  7. Read contracts with LSI – you’ll need to sign a separate contract for each location you want to have books printed/sold – US/Canada, UK/Europe, Australia and Espresso Book Machine.
  8. When you have the ISBNs use an online ISBN barcode generator to make the barcode images that your designer will need if you are also having a print edition.
  9. Once you’re registered with Neilsen you’ll be offered access to PubWeb, which also takes a few days to come through. PubWeb is the database of book data. It replicates across most retail data systems. It can take 3-4 weeks for PubWeb to input the ISBN information that you supplied. Schedule accordingly!
  10. Make sure that Neilsen/PubWeb have the correct distributor details for your titles. Once your data is in their system, the PubWeb feed is picked up by retailers. At this point you may begin to see your title listed by online retailers as available for pre-order.
  11. However don’t forget that you can directly input your book data to Amazon and that this, esp for self-publishers, is an important marketing opportunity. Write your jacket copy and Amazon copy etc.
  12. If you’re not going for the KDP Select Program, you don’t need to worry about giving your ebook 90 days exclusive access in Amazon. Create an account on Smashwords or BookBaby and prepare to have epub editions created/uploaded.
  13. The easiest way to get a file ready for Kindle is to pay Createspace to do it. Simply uploading filtered HTM pages correctly formatted from Word .doc or .docx files to KDP comes close to a good online conversion of .docx and .HTM files but the converter program still has some glitches. These may disappear soon – the online converter is pretty new. You could also try software – Calibre or Kindle Writer
  14. Upload your ebook files to Kindle/BookBaby/Smashwords as appropriate, and interior and exterior book files to Createspace and/or Lightning Source. Pay for a print proof to be sent (strongly advised).
  15. Check your proof carefully before you finally sign it off. Createspace have cool online digital proofing tools which are a must! Lightning Source also provide e-proofs.
  16. BEFORE YOU GO TO PROOFING: Check that the ISBN matches across all the key fields:
    1. On your book’s cover
    2. On the copyright page
    3. In your spreadsheet from Nielsen (or whatever Bowker provide)
    4. On your PubWeb data entry
    5. In the book details for Createspace and Lightning Source.
      This step is detail work. MAKE YOURSELF MATCH THEM ALL BEFORE YOU APPROVE A PROOF! 
  17. Order some author copies and line up some people to read them.
  18. Did you think about marketing and publicity? Whoops. You should have. That’s a whole other post. It’s not boring Materials and Methods, though, so I’ll  even make it pretty.

Disclaimer: This is NOT actually a scientific paper, it isn’t even a business paper, this is just a list of the processes we went through at the neophyte publishing imprint, DARKWATER BOOKS, to bring forth our first publication, from the first M.G. Harris manuscript. No guarantees that I haven’t accidentally missed out a step, that this is a comprehensive list of everything you should or could do, or that the suppliers mentioned are the best ones or even reliable. It’s just a list of what Mr Harris and I actually have done to date. Only to be used as an informal guideline, and read every contract you sign carefully!

Next: #7 Publicity and marketing

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self-publishing

The self-publishing experiment part 5: Pricing of indie-published POD and ebooks

Price, Price, baby.

When you go to marketing school they teach you about the  ‘marketing mix’, a.k.a the 4 Ps: Price, Promotion, Product, Place.

As an indie-published author, you can’t compete with the big marketing cash of a major promotion that a publisher might give. On the other hand, you have fewer mouths to feed in your own publishing chain. By charging much less than a traditional publisher for a digital product, you can make the same royalty as you might via trad publishing, selling far fewer copies.

By lowering the price barrier, you can hope to achieve the quick-buy reaction that only a great author brand OR terrific (often expensive) marketing can achieve with a book priced around $7.

This is proven, btw, by the 149+ (at the time of posting this!) self-published authors who have now sold more than 50,000 ebooks, also by the fact that in a few cases, these authors were previously unknown. (i.e. they were not not Joe Konrath, with eight traditionally-published books, or Barry Eisler, a New York Times best-selling author).

Price, therefore, is the indie-publishers’ ace-in-the-hole.

(N.B. This doesn’t mean that people will actually read your book. For that, there’s nothing like word of mouth. It’s the Holy Grail of book-selling and darned expensive and/or labour intensive to achieve. If you think that word of mouth ‘just happens’, read this article about the heroic efforts of Scholastic USA to promote The Hunger Games back when it was just a manuscript.)

So what’s a good price?

A good rule of thumb, I find, is to price your paperback to deliver a royalty as close as possible to what you make for a traditionally published MMP, i.e. 7.5%x7.99=60p = roughly $1 (US).

If you use Createspace you can probably price your POD paperback close to the normal price a similar book published in trad paperback format, and make close to your dollar, distributing at Amazon.com and the five Amazons in Europe.

If you use Lightning Source, you’ll need to factor in a discount of at least 35% for retailers (realistically more – most publishers offer up to 60%). In practice, this means that your US version may be more expensive than a similar book published in trad paperback format. Australian books prices are fairly high, so you might just be able to make your royalty whilst setting close to a market price.

The main thing, I think, is not to be greedy. Keep the product as affordable as possible. One day POD books may be cheaper. When that day comes, indie-publishers can compete a little more effectively. For now though, print remains the domain of the traditional publisher.

So don’t sweat it. Do what you need to make your book available in print, if that’s what you’ve decided to put in your product mix. A book that’s also available in print may look like a  more complete product via the online retailer.

Pricing the ebooks is a whole other game. A complex issue indeed! Here are some articles you should read before deciding.

  1. Joe Konrath on ebook pricing (Sept 2010)
  2. It’s hard to figure out pricing for ebooks from anecdotal evidence (April 2011)
  3. How to Price an Ebook for Indie Authors, 5 Best Ebook Prices (July 2011)

I decided to go in with a 99p promotional price for THE DESCENDANT ebook, and mix in some freebie days that are offered as part of the KDP Select Program.

The Createspace version (on sale exclusively at Amazon US, UK, DE, FR, ES, IT) is a competitive $9.99. The LSI version  is a competitive at £7.99 in the UK (the same as a Joshua Files book) and $11.99 in the USA, but booksellers are free to discount it since they buy it at a discount. The LSI version in Australia is $16.99, which is actually less than I paid for a copy of ZERO MOMENT in a Melbourne Borders in 2011.

With THE DESCENDANT aim isn’t primarily to make money but to build a new digital readership, and to attract readers to my traditionally-published novels. They retail at a far higher price so a low-cost introduction to my writing will hopefully serve as a nice enticement.

Next: #6: Materials and Methods

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self-publishing

The self-publishing experiment part 4: Design and Decisions: Which POD (print-on-demand) people?

Lightning Source With so many decisions to make, it’s a relief when one is made for you. Digital version or not?

OF COURSE. It’s only the advent of digital that makes it possible to gain a wide-enough readership to recoup the cost and effort of self-publishing.

Successful self-publishing is all about the ebook.


However – to print or not to print, that is the question.The successfully self-published author Catherine Ryan Howard (of Catherine, Caffeinated fame) sold her ebooks at a 11:1 ratio to her print book.Afterwards she wondered whether it’s worth doing a print version at all. In the end, it may not be worth the effort and cash, but for some other considerations.To Catherine’s  most business-critical consideration, I will add TWO more.

  1. Catherine raised this one – print versions are best for getting reviews. Reviewers enjoy hard copies; it’s s small gift that appreciates the time and effort of their review. Even if they can’t store everything they receive, the books can be found a good home. Think of it as a marketing cost.
  2. Print versions are inclusive. Most people don’t have ereaders. The Joshua Files have sold in seventeen language territories and are read mainly by teenagers. Even though THE DESCENDANT is an older readers’ book, it’s perfectly accessible to anyone with GCSE-level science and has less violence and sex than some YA books (more science though). I don’t wish to exclude those readers. So that’s a plus for a print version.
  3. When people browse the Kindle/Nook stores, a novel that doesn’t also have a print edition is a dead-giveaway as a self-published book. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld. If you want to do the job as professionally as possible then, a print version is worth the investment.

It’s hard to make more than $1 US on a POD book in the cheaply-priced book markets of the UK and USA. In Australia and much of the EU, books are more expensive and rarely discounted, so you can do better, quite easily up to $2 US. Bricks-and-mortar book stores are unlikely to order a POD book unless you allow returns – a potentially costly strategy. However, with the growth in online retail of print books, your print edition, making you a neat dollar on most sales, might bring in a healthy trickle of sales. It’ll cost you upwards of $500 USD extra  to make available a print edition, plus all the extra work with Nielsen/Bowker.

For my established readership, it’s essential. If you’re new to publishing, it may be best to start with ebook only and see what happens.

The reality is that without a sales force to get your book into all the high street stores, a promotion (such as 3-for-2 or other discount at a major retailer – all The Joshua Files books have benefited from these) print media coverage, advertising and a fancy/textured/foil cover to attract attention etc:  in other words, without all those things that Anthony Horowitz’s publisher described as “peripherals“, then your print books won’t shift enough to make real money.

The print version is a loss leader for a self-publisher; a marketing tool. Using loss leaders makes your marketing strategy more aggressive. It reduces one more potential buyer-objection: ‘if this book is so good, why isn’t there a print version?’.

The more interesting question is how to print.

Catherine Ryan Howard is the expert here: read her blog or her book Self-Printed for the full story.

Here’s a very quick summary of the state of play at the time I made my decision. (see important update at the end of this post!)

The two main print-on-demand suppliers of the moment are Createspace (part of Amazon) and Lightning Source (part of Ingrams). Createspace are good, easy to use, will deal with individuals not just companies BUT they are in the USA. UK customers will face steeper shipping charges if they order via Amazon.com. Lightning Source  are more old-skool printers set up to deal with corporates, and you need to have your own company to use them. However, if you want your books to be available as POD via other retailers including in the UK, Lightning Source is the current best bet.

The business and economics of the Createspace vs Lightning Source  decision are not simple. I read a 99c ebook on the subject, which is short and worth a look.

In the end I decided to go with BOTH. Two editions of the book – one for sale only via Amazon.com printed by Createspace (the US edition). And one for sale via any retailer that chooses to order from the Ingrams catalogue (the UK edition).

However, pricing a paperback at a realistic level (for the market) is often incompatible with making a profit. It might be worth a whole blog post on pricing.

In summary, that is a total of three editions; ebook, Createspace – and Lightning Source -printed.

Remember – POD is your loss leader. 

For me, it is key to have the book available in print, and priced to the bone, because I am doing this for my readers. I want existing readers to be able to enjoy another story, and I’d love to introduce new, older readers to the twisty, often complex plots of The Joshua Files.

IMPORTANT UPDATE RE CREATESPACE!

On May 17th, Createspace took an action which might just make this decision (Createspace vs Lightning Source) much simpler. They allowed European distribution of books via Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.es, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr and Amazon.es. You can set the price of a book and see your royalty, as with the Amazon.com channel. It’s perfectly possible to charge a market price and earn about a US dollar per sale.

This leaves the following reasons for still going with Lightning Source:

  1. The option of matte laminate covers. (CS are all glossy)
  2. Potential distribution in Australia (but even with postage, most Amazon.com books cheaper than books in Aussie bookstores)
  3. UK delivery of the author copies – faster and cheaper (but if you’re patient, the basic shipping option from Createspace works out about the same)
  4. The potential for bricks-and-mortar stores to buy your book (not likely for non-returnable POD though)
  5. The establishment of a relationship which can diversify to allow short print runs, hardback versions etc
My conclusion for now is that it’s better for new publishers to start with Createspace and ebook only. Lightning Source are set up to deal with ‘publishers’ – organisations, not author-publishers. I’m not at all certain that if this European option had existed when we started, that I’d have signed the contracts with LS. However, it’s done now. We’re going to order 50 books, which means the set-up fee is waived. 50 books won’t be a problem to sell or find sympathetic homes for…

Next: #5  Pricing of indie-published POD and ebooks – Pricing. It’s a self-publisher’s most significant marketing ‘P’ word. What to do?

 

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self-publishing the descendant

The self-publishing experiment part 3: Designing the experiment

Good old ALCS. Thanks for the bootstrap finance!

Question: How much work does it take to write a self-published book?
Answer: about as much as for a traditionally published books

The first part of any experiment, and in many ways the most enjoyable part, is the experimental design.

I love to design experiments. It’s the beautiful phase, where everything is theoretical, and in your head, everything works. That’s some time before you spill radioactive isotopes in the water bath and incur the wrath of the entire lab.

Even executing the experiment isn’t too bad. It’s the eventual failure of most of them that makes science so hard. Starting out, you know that the experiment will almost certainly fail; either at the pathetic stage of not actually working, because you need better reagents, or at the heart-breaking stage where it worked, but the answer was NO.

No, that is not how I, Nature work. Try again. Or give up. Who cares, puny scientist? For lo, I am Nature.

Remember that – the answer is very often NO. If you can fully accept this setting out and still work hard, stay positive and concentrate on all the details, then you have much of what it takes to be a scientist.

The experimental question is this:

Can a modestly successful, internationally-published author (but not a ‘household name’), produce a quality product that will engage existing and new readers and make the author more money than if the manuscript had been sold for a modest advance?

(N.B. It’s important to stress that whatever the results of the experiment, certain extrapolations will always be invalid. Failure won’t mean that all self-published authors will fail. Success won’t mean the end of traditional publishing. Success/failure can’t even be successfully applied to MY next project. Once in a while an author has a runaway success. More frequently we provide a regular drip of content, slowly building an audience. I’m guessing that I’ll be in the latter category. This isn’t pessimism, just an acknowledgement of the balance of probabilities.)

Let’s say that I might have been able to get £5k for this manuscript. (Given that THE DESCENDANT is an adult novel set in the world of a YA book series, a sale would have been impossible via my own publisher, since Scholastic only publish children’s books, but let’s just use £5k as a representative advance).

My ALCS & PLR fund is about £2,000 this year. I’m a strong believer in bootstrap finance for start-ups, so this means I can use this as surplus profit from The Joshua Files to be invested in my imprint.

£2,000 is the total cash budget. So the book needs to make £7,000 for me to break-even including an opportunity cost*. (but only £2K to recoup the cash.)

Designing this self-publishing experiment, I asked myself a few questions:

  1. Which formats should I produce? ebook only? Enrol in Kindle Select? Make a print version too? POD or short-run offset print?
  2. Availability of any print edition – make available for sale in the UK and US? Or just one of the two?
  3. What kind of revenue model are we looking at? How many copies need to sell at what price to recoup the cash investment?
  4. Marketing – how much to spend and how?

The one thing I never had to consider was this – would I hire an editor.

OF COURSE. No question. Not only that but I’d substantially rewrite the original manuscript, which was the first thing I’d written since my days of Blake’s 7 fan fiction. The manuscript couldn’t be structurally edited too severely, because the Joshua Files mythology and the details of the Alternate Reality Game rest on many elements in THE DESCENDANT.

But edited as much as the manuscript could take? Hell, yeah! The first thing I did was to spend six weeks rewriting the 2005-version of the script.

My accomplice in this was, I’m delighted to say,  the experienced senior children’s book editor, Polly Nolan. Polly and I worked together on ZERO MOMENT and DARK PARALLEL while Polly was Editorial Director of Fiction at Scholastic Children’s Books, UK. When I told Polly my plan to publish THE DESCENDANT, she was incredibly supportive and agreed to take the project on. I couldn’t quite afford the three rounds of editing I’d had with all the Joshua Files books, but I knew Polly well enough to know that if the manuscript isn’t too structurally flawed, she can do most of the job in one round.

Imagine my relief when Polly declared that the manuscript ‘didn’t need too much work, structurally’. (Another nice comment was “I’m enjoying very much.  I can tell it’s one of your early books, but that doesn’t mar my enjoyment of it.” See how lovely it can be to have an editor?)

I had to do my own proof-read. Not ideal, but here’s a tip – use a Kindle and make the font really large. Mistooks juts lep out.

All in all, the actual creation of a manuscript that I felt able to publish took the following: 9 weeks (first draft – intense writing whilst recovering from a broken leg) + 6 weeks rewrite + 3 weeks editing + 1 week typesetting (Amazon help a good deal with hand-holding an author through this). Plus Polly’s fee.

Total time of mine? 19 weeks. ICE SHOCK took less (about 13 weeks) and APOCALYPSE MOON  took more (about 21 weeks).

THE DESCENDANT, at approx 90,000 words, therefore represents a similar authorial effort from me as one of my Joshua Files books.

Next: Design and Decisions: In which I ponder formats (print? ebook? US/UK?)

*:
For pesky business pedants; yes I admit that the opportunity cost is arguably higher. I could have used that time to write another bestseller, or even this book, with a traditional publisher, might have sold more. But creating ‘entertainment products’ is a very unsure thing. No-one knows what will be a hit or not. Nicholas Nassim Taleb correctly identified best-sellers as ‘black swan’ events.