Embracing Change

It would seem Sue Grafton caused a bit of a stir in the Indie (self publishing) world this last week or so. I personally thought what she said carried a lot of truth. There are a lot of good Indie ideas out there but also a lot of books published way before they're ready. Mostly that's because every book at some stage isn't very good, no matter who has written it. Good books are crafted. Once you have the first draft you need to edit and proof - two vital stages that many Indie authors don't realise exist or don't embrace because they require time and cost. I have written often on this subject and I'm not going to talk about that here.

What I do want to briefly discuss is change. Humans typically don't like it. The world we grow up in is our world, the normal world. The world that evolves away from what we know can be daunting and frightening for some people. We particularly refuse change when our current world offers us a position of power and accomplishment, especially if we worked hard for it. Nobody can deny Sue Grafton's wariness of this new world, where anyone can throw 60,000 words into a Word doco and call it a book. But we do need to accept publishing is changing and it will never be the same. If you want in on the ride you're going to need to embrace change, or at least study its evolution.

I read a fair number of Indie books because that's the world I function in. At the beginning of the year I was approached by an Indie author who was about to release her book. I'm also a high ranked Amazon reviewer. Would I review her book? I read it and despaired at the woefully stilted dialogue, story telling that’s almost constantly expositional and pages littered with endless inconsistencies. I struggled mightily, commended her for a good idea I thought needed a lot more work and never heard from her again, at all. The book as is, was published that month and went on to become one of the biggest selling Indie books on Amazon during 2012.

I'm always going to lament the publication of an unfinished book but I'm not going to bemoan the author her success, not for one second. Indie publishing is showing us there is an audience beyond the strict genres spoon fed to us for decades. The audience is wide and there is to some extent a level of novelty and experimentation, both from writers and readers. You might consider the parallels between the current change and the modernist wave of the late 19th and early 20th century. You can bet there was an equally wide scope of experimentation and outcry as modernist writing took shape. It is the audience that will determine this publishing future as it's up to authors to seek out new directions.

Another Indie author come blogger: Ashley Barron, recently considered Christmas 2013 would be a threshold for digital publishing. I'm not sure it will happen that quick but Indie publishing will go through a great many changes in the coming years. Amazon's core philosophy across their business is to create a platform you will go to before any other. The moment the digital publishing novelty wears thin and people start looking elsewhere for quality, they will shift policy. Probably Amazon will see the need to change before we will. I personally think they will generate long term consumer confidence in digital publishing by introducing publisher subscriptions and annual maintenance fees, or something along those lines, which will see the demise of the truly independent author. I noticed last week the first viable competitor to Smashwords in Autharium, a digital equivalent of an Indie distributor who will only publish your book once it passes a number of human assessed quality tests. Autharium don't charge to publish but do take a percentage profits. So they are equally invested in quality or they don't make money.

Change is inevitable, sometimes it happens suddenly, often it evolves slowly. Complaining about it and deriding it, as I'm sure people did throughout the modernist movement, is more detrimental in this commercial age where authority counts for less and consumerism rules. We can either sit here bitching about it, or get our heads down and make sure we leave our own footprints in history.

Pricing your Kindle book

Pricing digital books has been in the press a lot lately. Digital publishing is still an emerging platform and many are still figuring what a good price for a kindle book is. As ever, context is important. Let us take a quick look at the commercially successful Lee Child, who's books are now movies headlined by Tom Cruise. On Aug 30 this year Lee Child's latest book will be released. The Kindle version at launch will be £10.53 ($16.49), slightly less expensive than the Hardcover. The price of last year's The Affair is currently £6.83 ($10.80) on the Kindle and 2010's Worth Dying For is £4.49 ($7.10). The pricing of Lee Child's Kindle books keep pace with the most recent printed version. Each of his back catalogue are priced slightly cheaper than the paperback. Lee Child sells about two books every second of every day.

My one indie published book looks like it might be commercially produced but has nothing other than the cover, Amazon reviews and word of mouth to commend it. The reality is Kindle owners will pay seven bucks for their favourite commercial authors and thankfully, they will pay to try an indie author. They will not pay much though. I can't really say I blame them. I'm one of them. Quality is a big issue (and the topic for a future post).

On releasing Chasing Innocence I knew slightly more than NOTHING about selling Kindle books. I priced the Kindle version at £3.45 and it sold 21 copies that month. I knew every one of the people that bought it. Out of a desire for the book to be read over a desire to make money, I scheduled a two day Amazon Select promotion and suddenly it was on four thousand Kindle devices across the UK and US. During the promotion I'd researched prices for indie books and immediately after the promotion dropped the price to £1.53 ($2.99). I was surprised to see it purchased 800 times over the next month with sales dropping off over that time. If I dropped the price to 99p sales picked up. If I ran a Select promotion I had a spike in sales after the promotion and a slow drop-off. If I kept the price at £1.53 sales ticked-over at about five units a week. If I dropped the price to £1 then sales picked up to 10-30 units per week. If I set the price to £3.45 sales drop to one a week. I discovered people are more likely to leave a review of your book if they downloaded it for free or bought it for a buck or two.

As a reader I love a series character and good story telling over literary concepts, which usually results in me buying more of an author's books. If you want long term success as an indie author you will need more than one book, probably upwards of five. If you're building your writing brand from scratch expect to price your book a lot lower than commercial authors. By pricing low and working Amazon Select you will find an audience, you will spend less time marketing and have more time to write the best selling sequel.

The next indie publishing post is going to be about tagging and categorising your book on Amazon KDP. If you have stories or advice to share or questions on indie publishing you'd like answered, then I'd love to hear from you. 

So you want to publish a (Kindle) book? (2 of 2)

In eighteen months Amazon have turned the publishing industry on its head. You could not deny them any of their success. Ebooks had been around for a while. Publishers were puzzling the long term impact of digital books and charging more for the convenience of reading them while they deliberated. The Kindle for me was a natural evolution of technology and consumer needs. Today consumers expect a book to be on the Kindle, where a year ago they might just have been grateful it was. Buying Kindle books gives you an almost limitless personal library never to be lost, that can be accessed practically any where, any time. With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) anyone can publish a book for free and it would seem many have. This post though, is not about that. It's NOT about making a Kindle book, designing a snazzy cover or making the content a thrilling, error free ride. This WHOLE site is about that. This post IS the second in two detailing what happens after you have published on Amazon. The first was about printed books, this is about Kindle books.

We should start with a repeat of the parameters.

1. I've started every single stage of this writing/publishing journey with my eyes wide open and little comprehension for what I was getting into
2. I REALLY didn't have any clue at any stage for what I was getting into
3. I'm constantly analysing, absolutely everything. I hope this analysis is at least interesting. I'm human and sometimes do get things wrong. Sometimes I get it horribly wrong

We start with Amazon. As an ebook publisher there are many places to pitch your stall. Mine for the time being is set in Amazon alone. Many people don't subscribe to the Amazon world view. They will buy from Barnes and Noble, or Kobo or from the Apple store. If I want to hit these stores then Smashwords will publish there for me. I know I'm missing out on a lot of potential sales by sticking with Amazon. Here is why I am staying with Amazon for the time being.

1. Smashwords do not accept pre-formatted ebooks. You give them a word doc and they will convert your book into the different formats. I'm obsessive about quality, I will always be reluctant to use a distributor if I don't have control over the quality. I don't know enough yet about how Smashwords works as a distributor and promoter, especially promotion. That said I'm probably going to add Chasing Innocence to Smashwords later in the year (2012)
2. Amazon Select is a program that requires selling your book on Amazon alone. In return for not selling anywhere else the Select program will promote your book as a free download for a maximum of five days every three months. The Select program allows you to potentially make more money by loaning your book to Amazon Prime customers, than you do in sales. This is unlikely for indie authors though as it's only available to US Prime customers
3. Time is the biggest reason for staying at Amazon. I have so little spare time outside of a job, commuting, a wife and writing. I need a sales mechanism that functions with little maintenance. That I trust. Amazon Select is all that right now. I'm busy writing two back-to-back books that will be published in 2013. Multiple good books multiply the chances of success. I only have one right now. I need to finish these other books to build success. I could push Chasing Innocence a lot harder right now, across multiple platforms, but it would take me away from writing. Success in 3-5 years time means I need to be writing now and not actively selling

Amazon Select has been a blast. The key is the five days of free promotions every ninety days. During these promotions Amazon will put your book in-front of their customers. This will also suck it into the Amazon trending and recommendation tools, as well as the charts. Here's a few things I've learnt along the way.

• Amazon is almost totally automated. It's a giant shiny machine that constantly analyses trends across continents and millions of buyers. It's not interactive. Learn how it works and adapt. It's not that it doesn't care, it's just too big to change direction quickly or go back for bits that fell off. Work with it but don't expect interaction. When you're emailing people at Amazon remember they're likely to be very busy and equally bound by the mechanics of the system, they just know a little more about the cogs and where they all are
• For the reasons above Amazon provide a lot of very informative documentation. If you're publishing a Kindle book you should probably read it. http://kdp.amazon.com
• The higher priced your book is immediately prior to any promotion the more often it will likely be downloaded during the promotion
• Never, ever start a promotion at the weekend. The Amazon databases are very busy and the promotion might not even start until the Monday. Each weekend promotion day will be counted against your available days even if the promotion doesn't start that day. Sending Amazon an indignant email isn't going to change anything
• Likewise, if your promotion is scheduled to end at the weekend, don't be surprised if your book keeps getting downloaded for free right up to the Monday
• Never, ever change the pricing or product detail of your Kindle book in the THREE days leading to the start of a promotion. Sometimes the changes can take a while and MAY hold up the start of the promotion
• You will NOT be paid for any books downloaded for free, even after your promotion ends
• Promotions start at midnight Central Standard Time (CST) which is seven hours behind British Summer Time (BST). If you're in the UK the promotion won't start until about seven AM and finish at the same time
• I've found sales and free downloads alike, dip daytime during the weekend. The busiest download day for me has been Thursday
• The KDP sales reporting tool is not always to the minute or hour accurate. If you're refreshing this every two minutes to check on sales you're wasting your time
• The book's sales rank on its product page IS an hourly updated and pretty accurate indication of sales. Remember there are different sales charts for the printed and kindle books, the ranking is displayed on the relevant product page. Here's my rough approximation of Kindle sales against ranking

• #100 - 150+ books sold in the last 24hrs
• #1000 - 20+ books in last 24hrs
• #3,000 - sold 5-8 books in last 24hrs
• #10,000 - sold two books in the last 24hrs
• #14,000 - sold one book in the last 24hrs
• #20,000 - not sold a book for 24+hrs
• #25,000 - not sold a book for 36+hrs

• You will very likely sell a higher proportion of books after a promotion ends. In the week following each of my two day promotions I sold a figure roughly equating to fifteen percent of the total books downloaded for free
• Promotion one: Chasing Innocence £3.45 - downloaded for free 3800 times. 550 copies sold
• Promotion two: Chasing Innocence £1.53 - downloaded for free 360 times. 60 copies sold
• Do not underestimate word of mouth. I have lost count the number of times I've heard: 'I'm reading Chasing Innocence because my friend...' These free downloads matter in getting the book out there
• Expect refunds after a promotion ends even if your book is only 99 pence or cents
• It is very easy to get hooked into your books position in the Kindle charts. You can find yourself doing bits here and there to promote it and get it up the charts. It is very painful to see your book slip down the charts. It is very easy to find yourself not writing the important next book. Probably the best thing you can do to promote your book is to write two or three more that are at least as good
• About half of one percent (0.5%) of people that buy your book will write a review without coercion
• About two percent of the people looking at your books product page will click the Helpful Yes/No button on reviews
• Twitter can be a good tool for discovering people that are reading your book. If you're using Twitter to find an audience you'll likely be disappointed. You will probably meet lots of writers that had the same idea
• Goodreads IS a great tool for discovering people reading your book 
• I have found people to be very helpful. I'm not sure I thought they wouldn't be, but it has been heart warming to discover just how helpful. If you are nice to people they are generally nice right back. They might even write you a review

Finally, I did a lot of research into ebook pricing before I published Chasing Innocence. Initially I priced the Kindle as I had tried to with the paperback, to be contemporary with authors like Lee Child and a little bit cheaper. £3.45 was the first price but I discovered this was too much for an unknown author with only one book. I've had some people say they won't buy a Kindle book from an unknown author for anything more than 99 pence. I hadn't even thought about that. The wave of indie author's publishing on the Kindle has driven down prices. If you're an established author then people will pay, otherwise you're in the mix vying for attention. I've tried all kinds of pricing, from £0.99 pence to £1 to my preferred price of £1.53, which is the minimum you can sell a book on Amazon's seventy percent plan. This plan is key for me as this last price means I make £1 on each sale. I've sold a thousand books so far and need to sell another two thousand by the end of the year if I'm to break even on the cost of copy/proof editors and graphic design. Which is vital because my mantra is to produce books at LEAST as good anything produced commercially. I found I sold EXACTLY the same number of books priced at £1.53 as I did at £0.99 pence. I'd like to think that's because most of my sales are recommendations.

I think that's about it. While I'm busy writing the next two books I'm going to stay with Amazon Select. It can be frustrating being tied into one sales platform when the sales start to dry-up, but for now a combination of time and only having one book makes it a necessity.

I hope this and the previous post have been informative.

So you want to publish a (paperback) book? (1 of 2)

Publishing a book was something I never envisaged doing. I did it because lobbying agents seemed a terribly ineffective way to get published. I wanted people to read my book. I also wanted the experience for the reader to match anything produced by commercial publishers. I knew I had a great thriller but I would need help turning it into a polished product. I hired a model for the cover and a photographer to take the imagery. I worked closely with a literary consultant to copy, proof edit and use my cover imagery to design a jaw dropping cover. They also typeset the paperback book. Over a period of three months my story was transformed into a book. This post is the first of two detailing what happened next.

Before we get going, you should understand the following:

1) I have started every stage of this writing/publishing journey without any understanding at all for what I was getting into. That goes right the way back to 2002 when I started writing with a vague notion I'd create something Peter Jackson might want to make into a movie.

2) I REALLY didn't have any clue at any stage for what I was getting into. I've learned a LOT!

3) I analyse. I do this all the time and for everything I set my eyes on. I hope the analysis you are now reading, of my attempt to publish a paperback book, informs your journey. Or at least entertains you. The parameters that comprise this analysis may change, so my analysis might not now be accurate. It may have been weighted by factors I have now forgotten. Or I might just have got it all horribly wrong.

I'm selling through Amazon. I love Amazon as a consumer and I love them as a publisher. I would struggle to sell anything without them. Selling Kindle books through Amazon has been a dream. I will cover Kindle in the second Publishing post. Selling paperbacks through Amazon has not been such a fluid experience. Mostly because I didn't comprehend one simple detail - that Amazon is almost totally automated. Here is what should happen when you publish a paperback book. It is most of what I did with a few notable exceptions.

1) You calculate how much profit you want from each paperback book. Of course you have to compete. Commercial thriller paperbacks typically sell from between £4 - £6. Lee Child's The Affair is currently £5.39 I chose Lightning Source as a printer as they also act as a warehouse distributor. They are part of the giant Ingram's chain. Amazon will order from them direct. As will other online resellers. Your paperback book will typically cost you 70p per copy to print + 1p per page. You add whatever profit you want and then add 20% on top, which will be your reseller discount. The total will be the Recommended Retail Price.

Example: Chasing Innocence = 366 pages

• Base cost £0.70
• Per page cost £3.66 (1p per page)
• Add profit = £1
• Total so far = £5.36
• Add 20% reseller discount (£1.08)
• Recommended Retail Price (RRP) £5.36 + £1.08 = £6.44

2) You submit the book's cover art and book content to the printers. You set the RRP and you set a publish date about three weeks into the future. You STICK to that date come hell or high water. Never ever change it.

3) You register your book's ISBN with Nielsen's (I'm based in the UK, I think it's Bowkers in the US). You give it the same RRP and importantly the same publish date you set with your printers. You STICK to it come hell or high water. Never ever change it.

4) A week or two after registering with Nielsen's Amazon will automatically suck in the books details from Nielsen's including the Publish Date. If this happens before the publish date your book will be made available as a pre-order. Do not be tempted at any stage to change the publish date. Not ever. This is one of the key factors that keeps Amazon hooked into your book's pricing and to the reseller discount. The reseller discount is VERY important.

5) Remember that bit about Amazon being automated. It isn't really aware of your book as a sell-able entity. Your book is a database record amid hundreds of thousands of other records. Amazon is not worried about profit or loss on your individual book, it's about the collective profit. Amazon will buy in your book from the printers at the RRP minus the 20% reseller discount. As Amazon wants to be competitive it will list the full RRP and sell at a discount. Your book will likely appear at any price between the full RRP or as low as the price Amazon bought it for (RRP - 20%).

6) As Amazon is fully automated it will sometimes sell your book at a lose in the name of the greater good. While my book was listed as pre-order it was available for £5.20

So that's how it might happen if you don't at any stage foolishly change the publish date, like I did.

At the outset I set my publish date to four weeks into the future. January 31st 2012 as it happens. When my book became available to order from the printers on 6th January I got over excited. I didn't know just how automated Amazon are and I didn't know just how much they were clued into the publish date. I contacted Amazon and asked them if they could change the publish date to 6th January. They very kindly obliged.

Two days later they shipped my book to the people that pre-ordered and they ran out of stock. They went to the printers and ordered more books but the publish dates didn't match. They bought books and shipped them but the Amazon pricing jumped from £5.20 to the full RRP I had at that time of £9.99 This is when I had the reseller discount set at 45% The Amazon price stuck at a despairingly uncompetitive £9.99 I changed the publish date at the printers and Nielsen's to correspond with Amazon. It made no difference.

Somehow even Ingram's the HUGE parent company of the printers got confused. I had changed the publish date at the printers hoping it would synchronise the price with Amazon. Instead Ingram's listed the book as 'hard to find'. There is nothing, it seems, I can do to alter this. Hard to find books are sold from the printers without the 20% reseller discount applied.

I tried to shift the Amazon price down from £9.99 and to get the book de-listed from hard to find. I would succeed on the former and fail on the later. I made sure Amazon, Nielsen's and the printers publish date all matched the original 31 January publish date. The pricing didn't change. In mid-February I joined the Amazon Advantage program and changed the RRP to £12.99 out of necessity to meet the Advantage program's need for a 60% discount on the RRP. This still gave me a theoretical profit of £1 per book. Except by the time I'd shipped them six books I'd lost £2 on the deal. I couldn't take advantage of the printers ability to drop-ship cost effectively because Amazon require specific packing information to be enclosed with the books. The price stayed at £9.99

At the end of February I published Chasing Innocence via CreateSpace in the US - Amazon's own printing and distribution service. I priced this once more with a £1 profit and hoped the US dollar price would shift the UK price. It did. Based on the exchange rate the UK price dropped to £8.90 then for some reason I don't yet know, down to £7.05 It stayed there. While this was going on I'd had a brain wave. I changed the RRP at the UK printers to £6.89 and applied a 20% discount, just in case I could lift the hard to find tag. I closed my Advantage account with Amazon and brought back all but two of the Advantage stock I'd shipped to them. This forced them to go and find more stock. They found it listed as hard to find at the printers, but at least the RRP was £6.89. Which is why, if you look at the paperback on Amazon right now, you will see it's listed at £6.89 with no discount. The automated processes of Amazon are selling it for the exact price they bought it.

So that's what I have struggled through in getting the book on Amazon and priced almost competitively. And what can go wrong if you mess with automation. Despite all these problems I've sold forty-five paperback books via Amazon to family and some great friends. In the ten weeks Chasing Innocence has been available the printers have reported shipping thirty-four books to anonymous other buyers. Probably to other online sellers like the Book Depository. Which brings us to the next stage. Finding a platform from which I can market the book. £6.89 is about £1.50 from being competitive but it's the best price it has been. I now feel I can at least start pushing the book to magazines and newspapers and see what happens.

Check-in next week for the Kindle journey to date. I'm off now to hunt down that 'hard to find' tag.

Biting the Advantage Bullet

I had a dream to sell  paperback books on Amazon at competitive prices. The plan focused around registering my book on Nielsens, printing through Lightning Source and Amazon sucking in the detail, which included the 45% discount on the £9.99 RRP. And for a short time it actually worked. I had a book that was being sold for £5.50 and it sold. But then the different distributor databases stopped talking to each other and Amazon couldn't see where to order the book from. So they brought it at the RRP (from somewhere) and sold it at the same price. And that's how it stayed.

I have talked with Nielsens, Ingram's and Bertram's and they don't know what's wrong and I can't find anyone who can fix it. It boils down to time and control. I haven't got any spare time to hunt down the glitch. So after a month of struggling, I gave up and joined Amazon's Advantage program this afternoon. This is not going to make my book as competitive as I hoped but it should make it more competitive than 9 bloody 99. This has necessitated a couple of changes and this is how it should work.

Lightning Source print my books. It costs me a base price of .70p to print each and every book plus .1p per page. As there are 366 pages in Chasing Innocence we have a base unit cost of £4.36

The RRP for Chasing Innocence was £9.99 but as Amazon's Advantage program demands a discount of 55% I'd be making 13p per unit. So I hiked the RRP to £12.99, which means I make £1.48 per unit, except I don't. Because I have to pay for books to be shipped from the printers to Amazon. A box of 22 books weighs a lot.

So I should clear £1.00 per book selling with Amazon Advantage. Which is exactly what I was going to clear before. So what's the deal you may ask? The deal is people won't ordinarily pay more for an indie book unless they're looking for indie books, which is a very niche market.

We persevere. I just registered Chasing Innocence with Amazon and should get their first order through in the next few days. In the medium term I will probably switch printing over to Createspace, Amazon's own printing arm. We will see. All a little depressing when you consider Chasing Innocence got it's first independent rating on the Kindle Book Review yesterday. Sarah Burns the reviewer scored it 5/5. You can read the review here.