The overnight success of two successful indie authors

Well, isn’t this something. Their “overnight success” is only “overnight” to those of us who haven’t slogged alongside them for the past decade or two.

From a Guardian story on Amanda Hocking — who btw is now 27 years old:

[B]y the end of high school she estimates she had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she actually completed, Dreams I Can’t Remember, was written when she was 17. She was very excited by the accomplishment, and printed it out for friends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.

“I got rejection letters back from all of them. I don’t blame them – it wasn’t very good,” Hocking says.

Hocking went on to develop an intimate relationship with rejection letters. She has somewhere in her new house a shoebox full of them.

Yet she would not give up. She wrote unpublished book after unpublished book. “Sometimes I’d say: ‘I’m done, I’m never going to write another book,’ but then a couple of months later I’d have another idea and I’d start again. This time it was bound to work.”

And here’s Mr. Konrath himself, he-who-has-made-$3500-per-DAY this January via Kindle sales. He starts with stuff like this:

I wrote 9 novels and collected over 500 rejections during a 10 year period before I made a dime in this business. I sold my tenth novel in a three book deal for $110,000 back in 2002.

My publisher refused to tour me for my first book. They also refused to let me do any official book signings because they would have had to pay coop. So I began doing bookstore drop-ins and handselling my books. I’d stay anywhere from four to eight hours in bookstores. Have you ever sold one hundred $25 hardcovers in one place? I have. It’s hell.

And sums up the whole thing a bit later with this:

I got my first rejection letter in 1988. I’ve worked hard for 24 years, waiting for this kind of success.

I’ve got two novels pubbed and am working now to finalize a third. And it seems sometimes like it’s taking a long time for my books to get any traction. I sometimes start to feel a bit discouraged.

So finding those two stories this morning came at a good time.

I’m going to keep pushing . . .

I am editing. Loose Dog.

So I’ve got this novel, you see.

I love the concept. It’s a first person novel, narrated by a woman who is an animal control officer.

And she’s got problems.

Man problems, for starters. Her ex-fiance has shown back up in her life. And here, she thought she was completely over him.

Before you know it, she also ends up with dog problems — particularly when she stumbles on evidence of a dog fighting ring that is out of her official jurisdiction but very much on her conscience.

I first drafted Loose Dog several years ago. Shopped it to exactly one agent, who requested a full, but eventually passed on it.

I should probably have kept pushing, but instead I set it aside and wrote Libby, and a bit after that Can Job.

And you know what? That was the right decision. Because what that one agent told me is that Loose Dog was well-written but needed work on pacing. So I focused on improving my plotting, and as you can see from my Amazon reviews, plotting is one of the things readers like about my novels.

So now I’m back to Loose Dog, and my first New Year’s resolution for 2012 is to tweak it until I absolutely love it.

Get ready, world :-)

UPDATE: Out now…

KDP Select. My experience so far.

I’ll be honest. I initially bristled at the whole idea of KDP select:

  • Don’t like the exclusivity clause. Don’t really see how that benefits Amazon, either. Just seems to me it’s their way of throwing their weight around.
  • The $500,000 pot is a joke. What are the odds that some Amazon Prime member will pick my book as the one book he/she borrows that month? Vanishingly small. I’m an unknown, remember? I’ve read that an estimated 27,000 titles were enrolled in KDP Select within the first 24 hours. Explain to me how my book stands out among tens of thousands of other titles? Answer. It won’t.  The writers who are going to collect a more than a few pennies from that pot are the same writers who are making money self-publishing already.

So why enroll?

Because my sole hope, as an indie author, is that my novels are good enough that over time I’ll start generating word of mouth.

And that comes down to a numbers game. Everyone who has read my novels has told me they think they are really good. (Yes, I realize that’s a sample that self-selects — i.e. people who don’t care for it aren’t too likely to let me know.)

But “everyone” so far consists of a really small group of people. Embarrassingly small.

As a side note, there are two categories of indie author who have an easier battle.

First: genre writers, because you have a ready-made audience and all the benefits of the publishing industry’s genre-centric communications apparatus. Your books fit neatly into the categories and tags for example.

Second: the mid-listers — people who have a backlog of titles they can take over and self-pub.

Notice that in almost every indie “success story” you read, the writer fits into at least one of those two categories (and very often both).

Me? I don’t write genre, and worse yet my books incorporate elements of genre but also elements of lit fic. And I’m starting from absolute scratch — I had a couple of non-fic books published traditionally but other than that, nobody knows who I am.

I love the idea of Smashwords, but if there’s a way to leverage it to generate exposure, I haven’t figured it out. For example, I’ve participated in several of the Smashwords Facebook promos (such as Freebie Friday, where you post a coupon code for a free copy of your book). At most it’s gotten me a handful of downloads.

And here’s the thing: with KDP Select, Amazon lets you give away free books.

So I talked it over with one of my best indie author buddies, Peazy Monellon (here’s her debut horror novel, Meany) and enrolled Can Job.

Yesterday I offered a 24-hour promotion.

285 people downloaded my novel.

I don’t know how else to put a free copy of my ebook in the hands of 285 Amazon customers.

Now, how many of those people will actually read my book? Who knows.

But if even a fraction do, and if out of that fraction one or two write reviews, or decide that they want to buy When Libby or something else I publish — well, then I’ll count this experiment a success.

Stay tuned. I’ll let you know how it works out long term . . .

An Author’s Amazon Wish List

Via the top-shelf blogger Passive Guy, here’s a top-shelf post by Mike Stackpole about Amazon and the book biz.

One of the points Stackpole makes is that as an online/digitally savvy company, Amazon has real time access to data about what its customers are buying — i.e., “statistics and analysis that tells them which authors are trending or about to trend.”

Amazon can act on those stats to “cherry pick talent and promote their ‘discoveries.'”

Amazon also has the ability to promote digital sales of books and later on produce a print compilation of digital novels, offering a unique print product. This is actually stated as a plan in their press release.

Good on Amazon. And I agree. This gives them a huge advantage over brick & mortar publishers/distributors.

But I do wish one thing: that Amazon would share more of its statistics with its writers.

As Passive Guy writes in his post, indie authors are in many respects Amazon’s partners in the e-publishing trend. He also writes:

Indie publishing has changed authors from helpless little children who cry and wait for their agent or publisher to come and wipe their noses into savvy and intelligent entrepreneurs, people who know how to do things for themselves.

To which I add: entrepreneurs need data.

I’d like to know how many clicks I get on my stuff on Amazon — my book pages, my author page.

I’d like to know how many book samples are being downloaded.

I’d like to know what percent of sample downloads convert to sales.

I’d like to know when/where people abandon my page or for that matter quit reading the sample.

And I’d like to know how all those stats compare to data about other authors’ Amazon activity.

I mean, think about it. For indie authors, Amazon pages and samples are marketing tools.

With the right kind of data, we’d better understand how well those tools are working — or how they can be tweaked.

Of course Amazon has reason to keep its data inside its kimono: competitors. But there’s a workaround, too: just release it in the form of trends and percentages rather than raw numbers.

So how about it Amazon? Please? Pretty please?

Can Job and New York’s Gay Marriage Bill

So this cracks me up.

One of my characters in Can Job — the heroine’s best friend — is gay, and in one of the first scenes in the book Taylor joins her at a protest related to a gay marriage bill in New York State.

Mind you, the book is not really political, unless you count poking fun at politicians as “political.” The particular pol that figures in this scene is Bo Valgus, whose biggest mistake was not his position no the issue necessarily but that he wasn’t quick enough to voice support for it during a local radio interview. This being fiction, I also couldn’t miss a chance to take a dig at a certain former state governor :-)

The DJ had asked his opinion about same-sex marriage and he’d answered “I haven’t had a chance to think about it, to tell the truth.” The idiot. Everyone knew that a same sex marriage would have come to the floor if ex-Governor Eminent Flipzer’s ungovernable hetero sex drives hadn’t led him to disgrace and ruin. Well, if not ruin, then a brief time-out to think about what a bad boy he’d been.

Overnight, the legislature had become suddenly paranoid about any issue associated with the letters s-e-x.

And so here they were, to express their chagrin with Bo Valgus.

Anyway, I’m laughing today because only a couple months after self-pubbing the novel, a same-sex marriage bill has now passed in our state.

My book is already dated!

lol

But I really couldn’t be more pleased :-)

As one of my FB friends posted, it’s a great day to be a New York Stater.

In praise of authorial intrusion

An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

— opening sentence in the novel “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” by Henry Fielding, 1749

Shakespeare relied upon the audience and, with such devices as the soliloquy, extended the play towards it; the drama did not comprehend a completely independent world, but needed to be authenticated by the various responses of the crowd.

Shakespeare, The Biography, Peter Ackroyd

I’ve broken a rule in my latest self-pubbed novel, and I’m worse than unrepentant. I’m defiantly unrepentant. It’s the rule forbidding “authorial intrusion.” Here’s how my novel opens.

There are a ton of stories about it floating around on the web. Half of them are baloney. The other half—baloney and cheese.

The woman is a biologist. A trained scientist. Meaning: for her, things either stack up to the measure of the five senses or you brush them aside.

So forget what you’ve read.

Forget what you’ve read from people who say she’s some kind of New Age Messiah.

And while you’re at it, forget the stuff that denounces her as a cynical fraud.

Here’s what really happened.

The book, not by coincidence, is about a woman who discovers she can see fairies. This makes it a fairy tale, and I’ve begun it with my own little twist of Once Upon a Time.

Which makes me, of course, a Bad Writer.

I wouldn’t have been judged so harshly a couple centuries ago. There was a time when authorial intrusion was not only accepted, but expected. Not today. Today, if you were to pester an agent or editor with a novel that opens like mine, your book would go straight to the reject pile.

Now I’m not saying this new novel I’ve pubbed is good. On the contrary. A) It’s not my place to say whether it’s good. And B) the experience of attempting fiction is a humbling one. Writing a good novel is extraordinarily difficult. And having finished four, I am still only a rank beginner.

It would be presumptive of me to suggest I’ve managed to produce anything that might be objectively described as “good.”

So my thoughts on authorial intrusion, or any other stylistic convention, don’t carry any particular authority. But hell. This is the Internet, and I have an opinion ;-)

It goes something like this.

There was a time when fiction was closer to its oral roots.

Before the emergence of a literate middle class, stories were told, not read, and the teller — the author — was therefore a part of the experience. It doesn’t take much imagination to put yourself in a village square in the 12th century, somewhere in Europe, where a small crowd has gathered around someone telling a story — relating an account of some battle, perhaps, or the death of a monarch, or a shipwreck, or pirate raid. A person gifted with a sense of timing, and an expressive vocabulary, a sense of how to play the audience’s emotions, would hold their interest longer. People would ask the speaker to repeat the story. The story teller would gain a reputation, would become sought-after.

And then there were the tales that were repeated orally, the epic poems and fairy tales. Why are there so often multiple versions of these stories? Because some of the people who got their hands on these stories changed things, edited things, added embellishments. These were the storytellers who knew how to juice the plot, how to better engage listeners.

Early novels translated this oral experience to paper.

When Fielding begins the tale of Tom Jones, he does so by inviting the reader to come into a public house, put down a bit of money, and have a listen. Fielding is there, in the room, not self-consciously but because it’s assumed he should be there. It’s Fielding, telling the story; reading his novel is simply a way of inviting him into your drawing room. There’s no 20th Century  conceit that he be invisible, that the story is somehow “a completely independent world.”

So what happened?

Why did authorial intrusion become taboo?

I’m no lit scholar, but I can hazard a guess. As more and more people fancied themselves novelists, the pool of second- and third-rate novelists grew. And many of these writers handled authorial intrusion clumsily.

You’ve probably come across an example, if you’ve ever picked up a badly written 19th century novel in a thrift store. It can be extremely off-putting to find yourself lectured by some long-winded boor in the middle of what is supposed to be a novel.

But our fiction taste-setters haven’t decided that authorial intrusion is taboo only if it’s badly done. They’ve made it taboo entirely. The reason for this (they say) is that authorial intrusion breaks the spell. Even the phrase itself suggests a despoiling: something intrudes on that “completely independent world;” the author has become an interloper, a violator.

Again, I agree that if done badly, authorial intrusion can spoil the mood.

But how strange that in, say, television dramas or comedies, the Fourth Wall is no longer off-limits, but in fiction it’s assumed the reader must be continually immersed in an alternative world; that the experience will be ruined if the author calls attention to the fact that the work is fiction, the characters are fiction — that you’re reading an invented tale spun by another human being.

Perhaps we’ve lost the ability, as novel readers, to switch back and forth from “suspension of disbelief” to an awareness that that novels are actually a collusion between reader and writer.

But I don’t think that’s the case.

Our literary gatekeepers have done too good a job at screening fiction against a master list of taboos.

And as a result, writers haven’t had the option of experimenting with authorial intrusion. We don’t know when it works, or doesn’t work, because it’s a tool that’s been locked away.

And that’s too bad.

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece up on Vanity Fair that you’ve maybe come across. [UPDATE: link sadly no longer works…] Hitchens’ cancer has now progressed to the point where it is destroying his vocal cords. The piece is about the interconnectedness of self/personality, writing, and voice.  “To a great degree, in public and private,” he writes, “I ‘was’ my voice.”

And now that he’s losing his voice, he appreciates how much the quality of writing depends on the quality of one’s speaking.

In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page.

He closes the piece with advice for writers, starting with this:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”

The ability to hold an audience’s interest orally is no different than the ability to hold an audience’s interest on the page.

Now in the oral tradition, speakers used literary devices to invite their listeners into a fictional world. But it’s silly to assume that once you were past the “once upon a time” gate, the story teller never again “intruded.”

Of course they did. “Once upon a time” the spinner of tales was an active participant in the experience, casting a spell, then withholding it, teasing, making promises and then pretending to back off of them — like the grandfather reading the story in Princess Bride, interrupting a scene to tell his grandson not to worry, Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by eels. Yet.

Authorial intrusion was once part of the experience.

Not only that, but it added to the listener’s pleasure — just as Fielding’s greeting adds to the pleasure of reading Tom Jones.

So yeah. It’s a shame we’ve thrown out this particular baby on account of some stinky Victorian bathwater. But maybe now that indie authors are retaking the industry, we’ll see some authorial winking and nudging inserted here and there.

And maybe readers will actually enjoy it.

Maybe writers will begin to understand that the notion of a “completely  independent world” is itself a conceit, and in some respects an increasingly tiresome one.

Maybe we’ll start to realize that authors don’t need to always be invisible.

Maybe we’ll welcome our story tellers back into the room with us, pull up our chairs and start to listen . . .

The coming nonfiction e-tsunami. Watch out for floating “Babe Ruth bars.”

Website Magazine cites a research report from Yankee Group [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry!] that estimates ebook sales will reach $2.7 billion in sales in 2013. That’s compared to $313 million two years ago, in 2009.

Quite the leap.

Average prices, meanwhile are expected to drop to $7.

The article suggests that the downward price trend is one reason for the explosion in sales. Makes sense — it’s basic economic principle, after all.

Given that Website Magazine‘s audience is web developers and small business owners, it’s no surprise that the article veers to the topic of self-publishing white papers, how-to’s, and re-packaged blog posts. It also suggests business owners jump on the trend by publishing ebooks themselves:

Expertise in any industry can be used to create an e-book in short order, then sell that material or use it as a promotional or cross-sell incentive.

True. But I hope business owners realize that self-publishing a badly written, poorly organized ebook will be a liability, not a smart business decision. And I think it’s a stretch to suggest that the average small business owner can expect to “add revenue along the way.”

Business owners who self-publish should expect nothing more than pocket change. They should focus instead on the value of the ebook as a promotional tool.

Yes, there will be exceptions, but only if the venture meets at least one or two of the following criteria:

  • It already has an audience — i.e. it’s an established business vs. a start-up nobody’s ever heard of;
  • The topic is both catchy and compelling;
  • The business does a great job at PR and marketing the ebook;
  • The ebook offers information of genuine value;
  • The ebook is well-written enough that readers can understand and apply whatever it’s trying to teach them.

What percentage of ebooks in the coming nonfiction tsunami will meet at least two of those conditions, do you think?

And what percentage will more resemble floating Babe Ruth bars?

New Kindle feature a soft sell tool for writers?

Article on the MSNBC Technoblog by Wilson Rothman [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry] leads with the news that the next Kindle OS is going to support “real” page numbers.

That’s a good thing — but what really caught my interest is another upcoming new feature, “Before You Go . . . ” which Rothman says will let readers more easily rate books — and buy new ones:

Just as you’re finishing a book, you’ll now get a “seamless” invitation to rate the book, share it on Twitter or Facebook, and of course, buy more books like it, or by the same author.

It will be interesting to see how this is handled.

On the one hand, this might help writers build audiences. After all, what better time to sell another book than when your scintillating prose is fresh in a reader’s mind?

But I also wonder whether I might personally find it a bit annoying to have my e-reader suggest I take an action of some kind.

Will there be a forced interim step between the last page of a book and the home screen?

Will it seem intrusive?

UPDATE 10/1/2011: New post on how to rate a Kindle book.

So I haven’t been blogging about the writing biz lately

Because I’ve been mostly writing — for my job during the day, and on evenings & weekends my personal WIPs. But I have to say I am so grateful to folks like JA Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith, who have invested enormous amounts of time in educating the rest of us about the changes in the publishing industry and what writers need to do to adapt to them.

Here’s another one — Kristine Kathryn Rusch, (Smith’s wife). Another established writer who is incredibly generous with her time. She has a post out today directed to mid-listers who own rights to out-of-print books, but this line I think is one all of us should write on a post-it and stick it to our monitor frames:

If your agent decides to go into e-publishing and print-on-demand, fire that agent immediately.  I am not kidding about this.

Do click through to read the rest . . .