Tag Archives: indie publishing

Reviews v. Endorsements v. Critiques. A Proposal for Writers.

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Writers want to support other writers, but when it comes to leaving reviews, we’re torn. What if we don’t like a book? What if we spot flaws? Fortunately there are options — if we change the way we think about “reviews.”

If you’ve ever hit the “publish” button on Amazon or Smashwords or D2D, you know how terrifying it is to put your novel out there for everyone to see — and judge.

You also know how badly you need reviews.

And as you meet other writers on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, chances are you’ve faced another dilemma: should you review other writers’ books? And if you’ve read a book and don’t like it — or, worse yet, spot what you think are flaws — what should you do? Share your thoughts publicly? Contact the writer privately? Drop the whole thing and enter the witness protection program? All of the above?

As a writer, you know first-hand how much negative reviews hurt.

Negative reviews dampen sales — and that’s not even the worst of it. Getting a negative review is personally painful for writers. It’s discouraging. No matter how thick-skinned we try to be, it feels so, so personal.

On the other hand, you also know the importance of feedback.

I speak from experience! As much as I hate negative reviews, I learn a LOT from them. I get data from negative reviews that helps me become a better writer and better understand my audience.

I’m currently doing a completely re-write of a novel based on input I got via negative reviews. Yes, those reviews tanked my rankings. I was just starting to get traction as an author, and poof. Everything I’d built was gone; years later, I still haven’t fully recovered. But when I’m done with the revision, the novel will be a better book. MUCH better. (If you’re interested in this story, by the way, stay tuned. I’ll be sharing more about it in a future post.)

In other words, there’s nuggets of gold buried in negative reviews, if you can stomach looking at them.

But that doesn’t mean that writers should use reviews to point out flaws. Especially when there are other ways to support each other. Better ways.

  • Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen
We interrupt this post to remind you that I have a new book out. And it’s the best book I’ve ever written. Available on Amazon for print or Kindle, or click here to browse other e-formats.

A New Framework: Review, Endorsement, or Critique?

As writers, we need to get more comfortable — even a little cynical — with what we all know is true. Reviews exist because the platforms where we sell our books use reviews to drive sales.

Reviews may benefit authors, too, but that’s not really why Amazon lets us post them. Amazon lets us post reviews for one reason only: because it’s good for Amazon!

Writing and posting reviews also requires us to invest time and energy. When you publish a review, you’re creating content and giving it away. Sometimes it makes sense to do that. But every minute you spend creating content to enrich the Amazon platform is time you could have spent working on your novel.

Fortunately, there are two other ways to support our fellow authors.

The first way is an endorsement. You publicly praise a book and recommend it to others.

And see what I did there? Because guess what. You can use a review to make an endorsement. But all that really means is that reviews are a vehicle for publishing endorsements. It doesn’t change the fact that reviews and endorsements are two entirely different animals.

In fact, when I stopped mixing up the concept of “review” with the concept of “endorsement,” I saved myself a ton of headaches, because the question “review or not review?” is now extremely easy to answer.

“No. Nope. And no.”

I never just “review” other writers’ books.

Instead — time permitting — I sample read other writers’ books, and sometimes buy and read other writers’ books, and then, if I really like something I’ve read, I’ll endorse it. I’ll post an endorsement (what everyone else calls a “positive review”) on Amazon. I’ll sometimes share my endorsement in other ways, e.g. Twitter.

“But Kirsten,” you say. “What if I read another author’s book and for some reason I don’t feel I can endorse it?”

Glad you asked, because that leads me to the last category: critiques.

Critiques, unlike reviews, are private. They’re feedback — just like negative reviews are feedback — but they don’t embarrass the writer or hurt rankings and/or sales.

I’m a lifelong reader and a lifelong professional writer. I’m also a self-published author who has been working on novels for over twenty years, now.

I’m far from perfect! But when it comes to novels, I’ve learned a little bit about what works and what doesn’t. And I’ll be blunt: I immediately spot serious flaws in the majority of self-pubbed novel I sample.

Am I going to buy a flawed indie-pubbed book, slog through it, and post a public review that details its problems?

Hell, no.

Because who would benefit?

Not me! I’d be taking time away from writing and from reading books I actually enjoy — not to mention the rest of my life.

And certainly not the writer! See above. Negative reviews do real hurt. And what writer wants to hurt other writers?

On the other hand, if you came to me and asked me for an HONEST critique, I’d read a few pages and don my fire suit and tell you what I honestly think could be made better. Even though, mostly likely, you won’t like it. Even though there’s a very good chance you’ll think I am completely wrong and don’t understand your book and don’t understand you as a writer or what you’re trying to do and everyone else who’s looked at your book told you it’s AMAZING.

I know you’re likely to respond that way, because that’s the way I respond to “negative reviews” (which are actually critiques … by people who have chosen to make them public).

But I’d be supporting you in a way that is a lot kinder and more useful than pretending your book is wonderful when it’s not, or telling the world I think your book has issues …

Or staying silent.

So, what do you think?

Maybe, instead of committing to public reviews, we could start offering other writers either:

A. Public Endorsements or

B. Private Critiques …

We’d be helping each other.

We’d be avoiding sticky promises that make us feel deeply uncomfortable.

We’d avoid hurting each other.

What do you think?

Learning from failure (indie book marketing)

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There's a pattern in there, somewhere. If only we could see it ...

There’s a pattern in there, somewhere. If only we could see it …

In my last couple of posts about indie author marketing, (one here and one here) I’ve referenced the need for data.

You need data to market. You need data to even plan how to market.

That probably sounds almost too reasonable to challenge, right?

But it also brings us to a couple more questions:

1. What data do we need, and

2. How do we make sense of it?

It’s All About the Data

The answer to the first question also sounds almost too easy, doesn’t it?

What data do we need? Why, data on how indie authors are successfully marketing their books, of course!

But is that really the best answer?

Maybe not.

The BBC published a fascinating article last week about surviving disasters. It cites the work a guy named John Leach, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth who studies how people respond when their ferry starts to take on water, or their plane crashes, or a terrorist bomb goes off in their office building.

But surprisingly, he’s not interested so much in the people who survive. He’s interested in the people who don’t.

Stories about survival often focus on the 15%, and what is so special about them that helps them stay alive. But Leach thinks this is the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking, why do so many people die when they need not, when they have the physical means to save themselves?

Huh?

This goes against everything we’re “taught” about learning, doesn’t it?

We’re taught to study success. We’re taught to seek out winners and copy them, find mentors and ask them to guide us.

And there’s a place for that.

But we also need to look at losers. We need to look at failure. We need to look at what doesn’t work.

And so often, we indie authors ignore the failures. We focus on the success stories.

Focusing exclusively on success creates problems, guys …

It creates a couple of serious problems.

First, it introduces cognitive bias — specifically, a subset of confirmation bias that’s called survivorship bias.

Author Tobias Buckell wrote a great piece on this in 2013.

It ought to be required reading for every indie author.

“The problem, right now, in eBook direct sales,” Buckell writes, “is that everyone is paying and listening to people” who have broken out. Writers who have achieved bestsellerdom.

“They’re listening to everything they say, and sifting everything they say as if it’s a formula for success.”

That ignores the vast — the overwhelming — number of indie authors who never sell more than a handful of books.

And what can we learn from them?

What have they tried that does not work?

How many times have failed authors applied the same “proven formulas” as successful authors?

We don’t know.

We. Don’t. Know.

And because we don’t know, we don’t really understand what variables are at play.

Focus on that for a moment.

Variables. Those tricky little gremlins that sneak in and try to skew every experiment ever conducted.

You have to control them if you want to understand the experiment.

But you can’t control them if you don’t know what they are.

I’ll write more about cognitive bias in a future post (or posts). But today I want to focus on the psychological consequences of falling under the sway of survivorship bias.

Don’t be hypnotized by dangerous illusions

Buckell touches on one of those consequences in his post:

Like in most cultish behavior, if you follow the rules and don’t get the results, you’re either ostracized, ignored, or it’s pretended you don’t exist. Many who don’t get the same results just shut up and go away.

When you apply some “winning formula” and it doesn’t work, you often find yourself marginalized.

And that hurts.

Now we’re all big boys and girls. And you know this as well as I do: we must grow thick skins if we’re going to survive as indie authors.

So I’m not bringing this up to whine. I’m not bringing it up so that I can decry how horribly unfair it all is.

I’m bringing it up because you and I and every other indie author out there on the long tail needs to be aware of what’s going on. We need to wake up. We need to know what we’re up against.

Which leads to the second psychological consequence of survivorship bias:

Discouragement.

You look out there and it seems like everyone else is succeeding.

And that’s a dangerous illusion.

You are a writer.

Write.

Don’t become transfixed with an illusion.

Don’t start comparing yourself to Internet spirits who seem to have achieved something that you also want.

Write.

Write.

Write.

Like This Post? Want to Stay In Touch?

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Why marketing indie books is so hard: competition, value, pricing (Part 2)

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You can’t market without data.

Well, okay, you can. But you’re shooting blind. And if you’re spending money, you’re throwing it away.

There’s not a professional marketer in the world — and by professional marketer, I mean someone with education and experience in marketing, who has been hired by a bona fide company to run its marketing programs — who would dream of spending marketing budget without first validating a whole slew of assumptions.

Another word for it is metrics.

Hang out on any marketing forum for any period of time, and the conversation will turn to metrics.

When social media first became a “thing,” the marketers became obsessed with metrics. They’d ask each other all kinds of really hard questions.

  • Have you tested Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? That other social-media-platform-of-the-day?
  • What were your results? How many visitors did you get? How many clicks per visit. How many conversions per click?
  • What was your cost per click?
  • What was your cost per conversion?

Dear fellow authors: have you ever once heard any indie book marketing company talk about ANY of those things?

Bet you a steak dinner you haven’t.

Because those kinds of questions poke holes in most of the author marketing “strategies” out there. Holes big enough to heave a trad pubbed book through.

What Indie Books Are Up Against

You can’t find a solution unless you understand the problem.

So pull up a chair, because I’m about to lend you my brain so that, together, we can understand a bit more about the challenges we face when we decide we’re going to “market” our indie titles.

The way I’m going to do it is through a little thought experiment.

Put on your pretend business person hat. Pretend you were going to found a new business which would be based on an ideal product, and you were going to launch it in an ideal marketplace.

I’ll go into this in more detail in my book, Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing (click for details) but here’s the gist. Here are a few characteristics that define an ideal product in an ideal market:

  • The product would have an enormous potential market.
  • It would have little-to-no competition.
  • Prospective customers would need the product. Or if they didn’t need it (as in, they die without it, like food) they want it so badly it hurts.
  • The perceived value of the product is very high.
  • The cost of producing the product is very low, relative to the price you can set for it.

Now comes the painful part.

(I’ll wait while you find the Kleenex …)

How do indie books compare to that marvelous ideal?

Answer: they don’t.

The only possible exception is the first  bullet — market size — and that comes with a few caveats.

If you’re writing genre, for example, you may be creating a product with a large potential market. Sources day that the market for romance novels is around 29 million readers, for instance.

But if you’re not, your potential market is smaller — potentially much, much smaller.

And market size hardly matters anyway, because of the other factors we’ve listed.

Competition? Hey, you know how flooded the market is. Amazon carries over 30 million book titles, guys. That’s not even a flooded market. That’s darn near a saturated market.

So what about bullet #2. Do prospective customers need books? Guess what. They don’t. They might want them — and there’s a segment of the market that wants them badly — but nobody’s gonna t die tomorrow if he/she doesn’t get his/her hands on a new book.

Perceived value? Tell you what: if the perceived value of books was high, people wouldn’t be giving them away. They wouldn’t be pricing full-length novels at 99 cents.

Which leaves us cost. I’m having a lot of fun with cost in my book! But the bottom line (har har) is that you have to look at cost in terms of cost per unit sale.

And here’s the cold truth, my fellow writer: most indie authors aren’t going to sell more than a few dozen copies of their books.

Yeah, I know, I know, e-books are forever, your title might take off someday, and so-and-so sold zillions of copies, didn’t he/she? (Don’t worry, we’ll come back to that last claim early and often in future blog posts!)

But you’re investing your time and money today.

You’re paying your bills today.

No professional marketer in his right mind would ever dare turn to his boss and say, “I know, my marketing program didn’t result in any sales this year. But not to worry! I’m sure you’ll recoup you costs sometime in the next coupla decades.”

So suppose you churn books out at lightning speed, and keep your costs to almost negligible levels.

You’ve got to clear at least $5000 per title to break even.

At least.

(I will show the math on that in a future post.)

So plug that number into your calculator, along with how you’ll price your book and your expected royalty cut. And figure out how many copies you’ll need to sell.

1500?

2500?

5000?

I’m hunting down numbers as I research my book. Numbers. And one of the numbers I’m researching is how many copies/title the average indie author sells.

Not the big guys. Not the Hugh Howies and the Amanda Hockings and the JA Konraths.

The no-names.

I have yet to find any source that puts that number at higher than a couple hundred copies.

Got that?

On average, indie authors can only expect to sell a couple hundred copies of any given book.

Have you soaked your Kleenex yet?

Look, I have a huge problem, here, and I know it.

Nobody wants to buy a book that’s a total downer.

Hunt around on Amazon for titles on how to market your indie book. You’ll find a happy place, I promise. This works! That works! Five simple steps! Seven simple steps! All you have to do is xyz!

It’s a fantasy.

And I have nothing against fantasy. In fact, I adore dreams, fantasies, imagination. I write novels because there’s almost nothing in the world that makes me feel better than conjuring a fantasy and committing it to a Word file and then sharing it with other people.

So if you want to buy into some fantasy about how easy it is to market indie books, I say: more power to you.

But speaking for myself, I’m a professional writer. I’m in this as a career, not a hobby. I’m into this indie publishing thing as a business.

Not a get-rich-quick scheme.

A business.

So I want a clear-eyed view of what I’m up against.

Won’t you join me?

Everyone who subscribes to my Getting to the Truth email list before midnight, E.S.T., on Sunday February 15 will be entered in a drawing to win a free e-copy of the book.

Subscribers will receive brief, periodic updates on the book, including links to blog posts like this one that share information I’ve dug up about indie marketing. These will be hard-hitting, extremely useful posts that you do not want to miss.

I will not share your contact information with anyone else, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Subscribe by using the form below, and please pass along this link to your indie author friends so they can participate as well.

Thanks for your interest. Thank you for your support.





Speaking of misinformation

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Quote of the day:

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a business where there’s so much poor advice or lousy, limiting thinking than the writing business, nor so much misinformation.

—Russell Blake, novelist.

He’s writing about the myth that only “hacks” write novels quickly, but that observation could be applied to a looooot of other things as well.

(For context, see my posts on indie author marketing, e.g. here and here.)

Speaking of data

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a terrific blog post up that looks at a number of publishing metrics that have been reported by industry peeps lately.

I’ve just added this line from the post to my list of favorite quotes:

There’s an awful lot of common knowledge floating around in the publishing industry, most of which is not based on any reality at all.

Yep.

(For context, see my posts on indie author marketing, e.g. here and here.)

Why Marketing Indie Books is SO Hard (Part 1)

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Getting to the Truth about Indie Author Marketing, by Kirsten Mortensen

Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing: A clear-eyed guide to promoting your self-pubbed book

As a fellow writer, I’m sure you share my fascination with the trickiness of the human mind.

It is, after all, one of the primary sources for conflict in fiction. Pick up any decent book or article on the craft of fiction, and you’ll soon find yourself reading about character motivation: what your characters want or desire.

“Desire drives the action,” notes novelist Carol Edgarian. “It is what makes characters real.”

But characters’ desire is only half the equation. Their desires must also be thwarted.

And very often, the thwarting comes not from external factors but from internal ones. Characters’ desires are thwarted because of their internal flaws and mistakes. Characters become their own worst enemies.

We writers are also, often, our own worst enemies

One of the most fascinating internal character flaws, in my opinion, is what author mentor K.M. Weiland calls “The Lie Your Character Believes.”

A character realizes he has a problem in his life. What he doesn’t realize, subconsciously or otherwise, is the true solution to his problem.

He thinks that if he can just have what he wants, all will be well.

In the the great English novel Middlemarch George Eliot follows a number of characters who are their own worst enemies, because they’re unable to see past the fantasies they’ve erected in their thinking. Their fantasies obscure reality.

Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

900 pages later, and she finally realizes it was Rhett all along.

Dorothea, for example, believes that marrying Edward Casaubon will fulfill her deepest desire. It will allow her to align herself with a cause that is larger than herself, that will make a mark on the world. Throughout the courtship period of the relationship, she builds a fantasy in which Casaubon is a man of extraordinary gifts, destined to publish a great scholarly work, The Key to All Mythologies.

Marrying Casaubon is what Dorothea thinks she wants.

But within a few weeks of being married to the man, she begins to realize she’s completely mistaken about her husband’s greatness and destiny. Much of the novel explores the sorrowful consequences of that mistake.

There are a zillion other examples in both literary and genre fiction. Think Scarlett O’Hara’s fantasy about Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, for example. She’s so committed to that fantasy that she fails to understand her true love is right there under her nose. A tragedy for the ages!

But here’s the thing: it’s not just our characters who struggle with this.

All humans do.

Including writers.

We think we know what is “real,” but we don’t.

In Getting to the Truth About Indie Author Marketing, one of the topics I explore is how difficult it is for we writers to really know what author marketing tactics work.

This is hugely important, because if you don’t really know what works, and what doesn’t work, you’re guessing.

You’re gambling.

And if you’re gambling with your money, chances are you’re going to get burned.

One problem is lack of data.

Professional marketers don’t make uninformed bets.

They make bets that are based on years’ of experience — and on DATA.

We indie authors don’t have data.

But we fool ourselves into thinking we do.

We think that by reading what other authors have done, we’re getting a true picture of how to market our titles.

Okay.

I’m going to be completely blunt here.

That’s a fantasy.

No matter how much time you — as an individual — invest in gathering information about how to market your indie book, you can’t begin to grasp the entire industry. You can’t begin to see the “big picture” information about what authors are doing that works, and what authors are doing that doesn’t work.

Think about it. There are some 300,000 indie titles published every year. In some cases, authors are publishing multiple titles, but even if we account for that, there are hundreds of thousands of indie authors out there.

You could read ten or 20 or 50 or 100 case studies about those authors, and what they’ve done to market their books.

You still wouldn’t have a representative sample of the industry from which you could draw any meaningful conclusions.

There’s a second factor as well: the information you do gather is almost certainly dated.

This industry moves at lightning speed. Factors that influence the effectiveness of specific marketing tactics change overnight. (Just look at the way Amazon’s introduction of Kindle Unlimited roiled the status quo for many authors.)

Third factor: there are so many indie authors out there trying to market their books, that if anyone gets a clever new idea that proves successful, within a matter of weeks thousands of other authors are doing the exact same thing. By the time you tumble to the idea, the novelty has worn off. Readers have tuned it out.

(Blog tours probably fall into this category; I’ll be including a chapter on blog tours in my book, and will write more about my research on blog tours in a future post.)

Last but not least, there’s the issue of cognitive bias. I’ll be exploring that in more depth in a future post, so be sure to come back, but in a nutshell: the human mind is wired in a way that makes it hard to make sense of data, even when we do have access to it.

So Is There Any Hope?

Actually, yes, there is.

However, making money at indie publishing is FAR from “a sure thing,” and if you think it is, odds are you’re going to be disappointed.

What we writers need to do is to approach marketing our books the way experienced, professional marketers approach their consumer products challenges.

We need to use data. We need to cultivate expertise in the principles of marketing so that we don’t so easily jump to erroneous conclusions. And we need to be honest with ourselves.

We need to be clear-eyed about what bets make sense, and what bets are just a waste of money.

More Coming!

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Have You Had an Experience with Author Marketing That You’d Like to Share?

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An Author’s Amazon Wish List

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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?