About Last Month

So as many of you know I did a few special free promotions last month, utilizing Amazon's Kindle Select Program. Well, I got my statement today, and while I knew I had sold a lot of ebooks, it turns out I sold a lot more than I had first thought. To give you an idea, November and December of 2011 were my best two months of the year in terms of sales, mostly because it was the holiday season. Well, in January I made about the same amount of money that I did in November and December combined, if not a little bit more. Sounds great, right? Well, it is, but we have to keep in mind that this past holiday season was the biggest so far for ereaders, so ebooks were being bought up like crazy.

My best seller for the past several months has been The Calling, which usually maintains the same sales ranking, bouncing back and forth between the 2,500-4,000 area. Typically that means I'm selling 20-30 copies a day in the US Kindle Store (in the UK Kindle Store, it bounces back and forth between 1,500-2,500 and sells maybe 10-15 copies a day). In January, it kept the same ranking, but I was selling a lot more. In fact, for the month of January alone, between the US and UK Kindle Stores, I sold 1,379 units of The Calling alone. To put that in perspective, that number is more than all of the ebooks I sold in October combined. I'll talk more about The Calling next month, when we come up on its one-year anniversary (hard to believe, really, it's only been a year), and it should be interesting. But for now, let's look at the promotions, shall we?

In the first week of January, I made The Dishonored Dead and No Shelter a Kindle exclusive and free for several days. My reason for doing this? Well, they weren't strong sellers to begin with. In December The Dishonored Dead sold only 45 copies, while No Shelter sold only 30 copies. They definitely needed a boost, so I thought I'd see what a few days free might do for them. Well, here's what happened for these two titles in the month of January:

The Dishonored Dead 

• Free Units: 2098
• Units Sold: 93
• Units Borrowed: 45

No Shelter 

• Free Units: 14,735
• Units Sold: 894
• Units Borrowed: 130

As you can see, there was quite an increase, especially with No Shelter.

The next week, I did another special promotion, making Man of Wax and Phantom Energy free for a few days in the Kindle Store. In December, Man of Wax had only sold 127 copies, while Phantom Energy (which has always ever been a labor of love) brought in a whooping 3 copies. Here's what happened for those two titles in the month of January:

Man of Wax 

• Free Units: 25,520
• Units Sold: 1055
• Units Borrowed: 112

Phantom Energy 

• Free Units: 374
• Units Sold: 7
• Units Borrowed: 2

As you can see, Man of Wax had an incredible increase, though it should be noted that, unlike No Shelter which I didn't mess with the price, after the promotion I made Man of Wax 99 cents for a few days, to try to propel it back up the charts. My hope was that it might breeze its way into the Top 100, where then I could change it back to $2.99 and it would, in theory, stay for a few days, as most readers browse the Top 100 constantly. As for Phantom Energy, well, again it has always been a labor of love and I never expected it to make much money to begin with. But I'm proud of that little book. Oh yes I am.

Anyway, the main question at hand is was all of this worth it?

I believe so. I definitely made more than I would have on Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, and I even gained a bunch of new readers (I received some emails, a lot of readers signed up for my newsletter, etc), though of course the downside is that, as is the case with free books, readers who normally don't read dark violent thrillers downloaded Man of Wax, tried it, and hated it so much they posted one-star reviews. Three one-star reviews out of eighteen ain't bad, I guess, considering that eleven of those reviews are five-star, but it still doesn't help the algorithm. Yet despite that, Man of Wax is selling better this month than No Shelter, which has thirteen reviews, most of which are five-star. So that's surprising.

After all, a promotion like this is a short-term boost. In the month of January alone, I sold nearly 4,800 ebooks. That's quite a lot, compared to what I had been selling (it helps, too, that I have a lot of ebooks available). But what is the lasting effect? Well, currently here are my sales for those titles which I'd run the special promotion on last month:

The Dishonored Dead 

• Units Sold: 41
• Units Borrowed: 6

No Shelter 

• Units Sold: 57
• Units Borrowed: 3

Man of Wax 

• Units Sold: 98
• Units Borrowed: 6

Phantom Energy 

• Units Sold: 4
• Units Borrowed: 1

Obviously the sales haven't stayed the same, but I never thought they would. The purpose of the promotion was simply to give those books a boost, and it looks like, for the most part, it has, considering that we've just entered the second half of the month. Will those sales increase as the year progresses? It's impossible to say. Unfortunately, much of it has to do with Amazon's algorithm, which can be unpredictable. As I mentioned before, one bad review can suddenly make your book stop selling, or at least slow down quite a bit. Which is scary, really, when you've started to depend on the money coming in.

The Calling, which I mentioned at the beginning, continues to sell very well. Will it continue? I certainly hope so, but I can't count on it. Do I plan on making it free anytime soon? No. Right now I don't want to do anything to jinx it, and while making it free for a few days might shoot it up the rankings even more after the promotion, there's no telling how high (or low) it might go. And once it peaked, the sales might dip and keep dipping, way below what it's selling now. So it's a gamble, like everything else in life. You have to look at the long-term, but at the same time you have to worry about the short-term, because who knows what will happen in a year (or even next month). Everybody talks doom and gloom of what will happen when Amazon becomes a monopoly and decides to screw over writers, and while that might happen, I figure it's best to take advantage of the 70% royalties right now than to be screwed over by the 25% traditional publishers offer. Besides, Amazon really isn't doing much of anything with their self-publishing program; they don't really have to lift a finger and can just sit back and continue to take 30% or 65% royalties, so why they would eventually mess with it is beyond me.

But that's something to worry about later.

For now, I'm focusing on prepping The Inner Circle for an April release. At the moment, making sure the book is the best it can be is the only thing I'm worrying about.

As it should be.

Manipulating The Reader (And Not In A Good Way)

I wanted follow up on my post from the other week, which ended up getting a lot of traction around the Internet (when your blog has been Reddit'd, you know you've made it). Again, it's a sad and disgusting thing that happened, but it's a reality that we all have to face. After I noticed the plagiarized book and contacted Aaron, my first question was if someone was stealing his stuff or if this was a promo stunt. After all, the cover image was the exact same, and who knows, maybe Aaron was trying something different. Had Aaron said yeah, he was trying something different and please keep it quiet, I would have said sure and left it at that. But he didn't -- he apparently had no idea that someone had stolen his book, and so here we are now.

And while what happened is disturbing, here's an even disturbing thing -- some writers, apparently, do this all the time.

On purpose.

I was talking to a pretty well-known writer friend of mine about what had happened to Aaron. He said he knew some authors who purposely repackaged their ebooks with new titles and bylines and covers just to get more sales and was it possible that Aaron had done the same, and if so would he admit it? I told him how Aaron hadn't known at all, and the conversation fizzled out from there, but still that statement of his -- how he knew authors who purposely repackaged their ebooks -- has stuck with me ever since.

Don't get me wrong, I like selling ebooks. The more ebooks I sell, the more money I make.

But there comes a point, I believe, when sales aren't the most important factor.

At least not for me.

I, after all, want to build a readership. Sure, I would like to sell as many ebooks as possible, but at what point do sales become more important than readers? Surely at some point a reader who purchased Book A will purchase Book B and see they are exactly the same. Both books would be in the same genre, and many readers generally read in the same genre, so you have to figure someone would eventually stumble upon these duplicate books.

Then again, with the ease and low cost of ebooks, many readers purchase and store up ebooks on their ereaders like squirrels getting ready for winter, and a good majority of those ebooks go unread (note: this isn't an ebook vs print debate, as just as many print books are purchased and go unread).

So, in that case, it's very likely that a writer who repackaged the same ebook might get away with it for quite some time.

But, again, what good comes from manipulating the reader besides selling a few extra ebooks? What if the second book -- the fake book -- is the one that catches on and readers really like? And what kind of hell will be brought down upon the writer when readers suddenly realize that writer has been repackaging the same ebooks just to make a few extra bucks?

If this is a new part of the game, leave me out of it.

Living Inside The Bubble

The Guardian published a worthwhile article today on what they're calling the "self-epublishing bubble." Here's an excerpt:

All of this ebook talk is becoming a business in itself. Money is being made out of thin air in this strange new speculative meta-practice: there are seminars, conferences and courses springing up everywhere, even at the Society of Authors (a writers' union which, until recently, was largely against epublication). Television and radio programmes are being made about self-epublishing (I've personally been asked to speak about it on 12 occasions since August). Everyone can be a writer now: it only takes 10 minutes to upload your own ebook, and according to the New York Times "81% of people feel they have a book in them ... And should write it"

But all of this gives me an alarming sense of deja vu. There's another name for what happens when people start to make money out of speculation and hype: it's called a bubble. Like the dotcom bubble, the commercial real estate bubble, the subprime mortgage bubble, the credit bubble and the derivative trading bubble before it, the DIY epublishing bubble is inflating around us. Each of those other bubbles also saw, in their earliest stages, a great deal of fuss made over a "new" phenomenon, which was then over-hyped and over-leveraged. But speculation, as we've learned at our peril, is a very dangerous foundation for any business. And when the epub bubble bursts, as all previous bubbles have done, the fall-out for publishing and writing may be even harder to repair than it is proving to be in the fields of mortgages, derivatives and personal debt. Because this bubble is based on cultural, not purely economic, grounds.

Self-epublishing has indeed, as many of you are aware, become all the rage in the past year. With bookstores closing and ebook sales growing every month and major publishers lowering their advances while keeping their standard digital royalty rates at 25%, the possible 70% royalties an author can earn on their own self-published work becomes very alluring.

But, as I always say, just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean you should.

That's not to say you should never self-publish, but if you do it you have to make sure you do it right.

Everyone is looking for a quick buck, and while some self-published authors are finding success, the majority aren't. Then again, you have to ask yourself just what does success mean. If it means making over six figures in a year selling ebooks alone, then you probably shouldn't hold your breath. If it means bringing in some extra income to help pay bills, then that's much more realistic.

The other day I was asked to come speak to the Garden State Horror Writers about the success I've had self-epublishing (I'll be there April 14th, BTW). While I'm happy to go speak, I stressed the fact that I wasn't going to talk about "tips and tricks" of selling digital content so much as what I've been doing personally to market my own work. After all, what works for one writer most likely won't work for another. Everyone went crazy for John Locke's How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! (which currently has over 170 five-star reviews, in case you were wondering), but how many writers have since also sold over one million ebooks? Locke's get-rich-quick ebook was published in June of last year. Seven months have since passed. Where are all those newly successful writers?

The Guardian article provides the seven stages of any economic bubble. The last stage--"Revulsion/Lender of Last Resort"--gives us this insight:

After a long year of trying to sell self-epublished books, attempting to self-promote on all available networking sites, and realising that they have been in competition with hundreds of thousands of newcomers just like them, the vast majority of the newly self-epublished authors discover that they have sold less than 100 books each. They then discover that this was in fact the business model of Amazon and other epub platforms in the first place: a model called "the long tail". With five million new self-publishing authors selling 100 books each, Amazon has shifted 500m units. While each author – since they had to cut costs to 99p – has made only £99 after a year's work. Disillusionment sets in as they realise that they were sold an idea of success which could, by definition, not possibly be extended to all who were willing to take part.

The now ex-self-epublished authors decide not to publish again (it was a strain anyway, and it was made harder by the fact that they weren't paid for their work and had to work after hours while doing another job – and they realised that self-promoting online would have to be a full-time job.) They come to see self-epublishing as a kind of Ponzi scheme – one created by digital companies to prey on the desires of an expanding mass of consumers who also wanted to be believe they could be "creative". They also become disillusioned with their ereaders, which are now out of date anyway. And so they return to the mainstream publishers to look for culture. Unfortunately, as a result of the ebook market implosion it is impossible for publishers to push their prices back up to pre-bubble levels (from 99p to £12.99), and so their infrastructure continues to decline. And since they have decided to look for new talent in self-epublishing, they are trapped in the very same bubble that everyone else is trying to get out of.

And this is in fact very true. Many writers, when they don't get that immediate success, will stop self-publishing (maybe even writing completely). These are the same writers who idolize bestsellers like King and Koontz and Patterson, failing to remember that it took each of those writers many years and a lot of hard work to gain the kind of readership they now have (say what you will about Patterson, but the man is a marketing machine). Not many writers enter the field with a massive following and sell a ton of copies of their debut. Those that do were given a very hefty advance from a major publisher looking to recoup that money. It's in that publisher's best interest for the author to succeed, so they do everything they can to ensure it happens.

So no, self-epublishing is not a guaranteed success, and any writer going into it thinking it is is way beyond delusional. Again, some writers will have success, but many will not. Some will have success for the first year or two and that's it; some won't have success for the first five years, and then suddenly bam, their books take off. Nobody really knows how publishing works, and anybody telling you otherwise is full of shit.

Speaking of which, did you know Jonathan Franzen hates ebooks? It's true. Though curiously, when Freedom sold a ridiculous amount of ebooks two years ago, he didn't seem to have a problem with them then.

Anyway, do I think self-epublishing is a bubble? Yes and no. Yes, eventually many writers who are having success now will fade away, but it doesn't mean digital publishing will vanish. As we have all seen from the music industry, digital is where we are headed and where we will stay. So it's best for writers to take their work seriously and understand that success won't happen overnight. As long as they keep writing, then they're at least doing something right.

Worse Than Pirating

So just about a half hour ago I'm browsing through the top 100 horror Kindle titles on Amazon, as I am wont to do (I don't check the New York Times bestseller lists anymore, but the Kindle top 100 lists), and I noticed this title was currently free:

It stuck out to me immediately, because my friend Aaron Polson not too long ago published a new book with this cover:

As you can see, a very striking resemblance.

So then I thought, Okay, somebody just stole his cover. That's ridiculous but not too awful.

Then, on a whim, I clicked on the "look inside" option, and guess what.

It was the same book.

Word for word.

I immediately contacted Aaron and let him know.

The first book -- the plagiarized book -- according to its pub date, has been available since November.

But that's not all.

I noticed a few other suspicious-looking e-books and brought them to Aaron's attention, too.

One of them, he told me, was his as well -- a short story published under a different title.

Clearly this is a very fucked up part of digital publishing. Many e-books are published without DRM, which stands for digital rights management. E-books with DRM basically make that title only available on that device. Most authors are encouraged to publish their e-books without DRM to make it easier for the reader.

And while it is easier for the reader to transfer the e-books from different devices (you can even take Kindle titles, download them to your computer, and convert them to epub or anything else using Calibre), it makes it even easier for pirates to take your work and put it up for anyone to download for free.

As I've said before, while I don't agree with pirating, it's a reality we all need to face. And, to be honest, it doesn't really bother me. The way I see it, those who download my books from pirate sites wouldn't have even considered buying the books in the first place. And, who knows, maybe they'll really enjoy that pirated book and seek out more of my work.

But someone taking my e-books and putting them up on pirated sites is one thing.

Someone taking my e-books and doing like they did to Aaron -- republishing them under a different name and cover for profit -- is fucking despicable.

How can we fight this sort of injustice?

By being vigilant, for one.

What else?

I'm not so sure.

And that, when it comes down to it, is what I find really scary.

Newly Edited And Revised

I've been seeing that phrase in a lot of self-published e-book product descriptions lately. Newly Edited And Revised.

Oftentimes there will even be an exclamation point after the phrase, as if it's something to celebrate. Sometimes there's even an addition of Now Proofread! or something along those lines.

When I talk about self-publishing, I always start with the same adage:

Just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should.

What does that mean, exactly?

Well, believe it or not, self-publishing takes a lot of work.

And, believe it or not, a lot of writers are impatient.

I know I am.

But here's the thing -- you as a writer are a brand. This always has to be in the back of your head, especially when potential readers encounter anything in which you're involved. I like to think while I take my writing and self-publishing seriously, I don't take myself too seriously. That's why you might see some silly things said by me on Twitter and Facebook. But when it comes to my work? You better believe I take it very seriously. As should every other writer out there.

You only get one chance to impress potential readers.

Make sure it counts.

Including phrases like Newly Edited and Revised and Now Proofread! come off as amateur. Even if it is true, why bring it to the attention of new readers?

Well, some might say, because that writer got some poor reviews previously for having a bunch of typos and stuff.

Okay, then let me ask you this: Why were those typos there to begin with?

While it's nice giving yourself deadlines when it comes to self-publishing, you still are in complete control. So take a breath. Take a step back. Look at your work extremely closely before you release it into the wild. There isn't any hurry.

That's why The Man on the Bench hasn't been released yet. It's almost ready. But it's not yet 100%. So I'm putting it off for another week or two. You know why? Because I can. Because that's what the work deserves.

So respect your work.

In doing so, you'll also be respecting yourself.