Better Than "Used to Be" for Self-Publishers

by Stella Atrium
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Last week a self-publisher complained to me that the lag-time between a GoodReads giveaway and posted fan reviews on Amazon was three weeks.  I turned away to hide my smirk.  I supposed it's true that we're so spoiled by the internet, we don't remember how it used to be. 

A decade ago I trusted a small publisher to produce a paperback fantasy novel I wrote. Turns out, he was really a printer masquerading as a publisher with no press release plan or distribution plan.  The weight fell on me to get the word out.

I did research and surfed the web for compatible sites and posted articles about writing and even a "glass bead game" that asked readers to buy the book.  This was before FaceBook in the days of listserv — remember listserv?

I attended sci-fi conventions and traveled to bookstores in the Chicagoland area and staged and attended author appearances.

I begged friends to lend support at my author appearance at the local and famous bookstore where the proprietor could boost my contacts inside the industry.  Except it rained cats-and-dogs that night and I felt sorry for the four friends who did make it to the event, late and drenched.

My efforts went nowhere.  It used to be that a self-promoter expended time and treasure and never reached the intended audience. Listed are a few memories that are burned into my mind.

1)    Introvert at Tradeshow — Did you ever see a booth at a trade show inhabited by a painfully shy writer who spoke to three people the whole day?  I have.

2)    Author Appearance with No Fans — Did you ever see an author at Borders seated alone at a table with stacks of her books and a blank expression of defeat? I have.

3)    Retail Marketing to Bookstores — One writer told me he boosted sales by driving up the California coast visiting bookstores for a personal pitch to owners to place 4 books on the shelves of each stop. An E for effort, but the price of gasoline makes this adventure prohibitive — even if the retail stores are still there.  A hit-or-miss method at best.

4)    Book Signings at Conventions — Writers hate this duty and function like turtles out of the shell. I count Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Jordan in this number. Writers often drink to get past the dread, so they function like hungover shell-less turtles at the morning signing, drinking copious amount of water.

5)    Regional Conventions — Did you ever attend a regional convention where you negotiated a giveaway of your book as part of the "fan appreciation" bag, only to discover the 80 attendees preferred stories about zombies and were really there to get laid?  I have.

6)    Listings on Industry Websites — These were accomplished using a form with no personal contact and no acceptance of connected blogs or Amazon listings.  Some of these still hover online, static and aging and misleading.

7)    Fan Websites — These genre lovers accepted articles and shameless self-promotion to boost traffic by adding your fans.  Except your fans and hers together came to five, including your mother.

8)    Getting into the Pipeline — Used to be... All promotion was accomplished with paperbacks, so each event included shipping a case of forty books to the hotel that hosted the convention, and then shipping them home again. 

9)    Managing Remainders — Did you ever work with a printer who wanted to be certain the check cleared before he shipped the books, even at 40% off?  Did this same printer dump remainders on the market so they hung around for three years at $1.89 sold by resellers on Amazon?  I have. 

10)     Tardy Reviews -- Did you ever find a complimentary review of your novel three years later by a respected reviewer on LibraryThing who must have picked up a remainder book?  Guess what...  that happened to me too!

So don't bring your complaints here that GoodReads or Twitter or LibraryThing aren't working for you.  Industry connections today are accomplished without shipping cases of books to neighboring states, and without leaving the house. 

Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.

Self-Publishers: Pricing for Hardbacks

by Stella Atrium
6/12/12
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So I went to purchase the textbook for a freshman course to write a syllabus for fall term.  I know textbooks are obscenely overpriced, so I was expecting to pay $35.  The university bookstore wanted $65 for the reader and $87 for the handbook.  I was appalled at the greed.  These books were required and guaranteed to sell, so where's the risk to the publisher that justifies a higher retail price?

By comparison, for those of you who only open free ebooks, I bought a handbook for Wordpress online for $35 – but it teaches how to use Wordpress!

Once a friend was moving to another state and giving away whatever he was not willing to drag along.  In the pile was a complete set of hardback copies of Harry Potter, except Book 3 was missing.  I asked him about Book 3 and he said the cat threw up on it. The set has no value if it’s not complete. It’s an artifact of history more than a repository of the living truth.

When I was young – in the previous century – I owned Norton editions of university books that we treasured and displayed to show our smarts. I held onto the valuable ones such as Martin Esslin’s Theater of the Absurd.  The price printed on the back (I just looked) is $14, which I’m certain I thought was outrageous at the time.

Book publishers are experiencing hard times, and we should feel bad for them, right?  Just like we should feel bad for Usher and JayZ because new singles are available on iTunes for 99¢.

Book publishers are pricing themselves out of business.  They set the retail price high so Amazon can offer a discount, and so publishers get the investment back from the naïve author who buys HIS OWN book for HIS OWN marketing efforts.

No wonder epub is expanding and Smashwords is a global marketplace. My point of view is that publishers get what they deserve.  I know this stance doesn’t make me popular, but I’m not the one who set hardcover copies of my fantasy novel at $32.95.  Not a soul in the world will pay that, especially since the ebook is listed on Amazon at $5.28.

I didn’t want to print hardback copies of the fantasy novel, and argued with the publisher to drop that option, but hardbacks were included in my “package”.

Supposedly, the existence of the hardback version of my novel makes me a legitimate writer.  Raspberries.

I lost the argument, and Amazon is winning the conflict.  The writer waits on the sidelines for sanity to return to the marketplace.  But then, I’m also waiting for my balloon mortgage payments to be ameliorated.

I'm a writer, and I want the publishing industry to succeed. I want the consumer to believe he got a good deal, and to become a fan, and to buy the next book in the series.

But I hang my head these days when I see how each group grabs profits at the expense of the very people who should be partners or colleagues. Is this any way to run a business?

I'm called cynical at the dinner table.  Am I the only one?


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Self-Publishers: The Problems with Statistics

by Stella Atrium
6/5/12
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I had a screaming fight one time with my brother about which brought in the most money – Chicago sports franchises or Chicago museums.  My stubborn stance was that museums had long hours and no off-season.  He insisted that one need only look at the stadiums and know sports fans live here.  

Chicago is home to great sport franchises – Chicago Cubs (go Cubs!), White Sox, Chicago Bulls, Chicago Bears, Chicago Blackhawk and more.  Then we have the college teams including DePaul Blue Demons (yeah, Demons!).

Chicago is also home to world-class museums – The Art Institute (of which I am a graduate), The Field Museum, The Shedd Aquarium, The Planetarium, The Museum of Science and Industry – and those are just the ones along Lake Shore Drive. 

So… which brings in the most money? Care to vote?

Of course, I wouldn’t blog about a fight that I lost – dead giveaway.  The museums bring in half again as much money as sports in Chicago.

Statistics can be surprising.  Before computers were ubiquitous enough to compile cross-platform statistics, information was gathered in a more casual manner.  An urban legend holds that for music lists, compilers called their favorite stores along the East Coast and asked the store owner what was selling.  Of course, the music store owner named his favorite artists as best-selling – in rock, funk, classical, rap, or easy listening genres.  When the real statistics were published for the first time in the late 1980s – Garth Brooks outsold them all.

Here’s a caution for self-publishers.

Statistics that include all ebooks for a quick look at what’s selling are impacted by the fact the romance novels outsell all other genres.  The most successful indie ebook writers/marketers are women, because the biggest fan base is women who read romance.

For non-fiction writers, maybe with a story about the struggles of raising a child with cancer, do you really want to follow the methods used to sell romance? Racy cover, short paragraphs, paced story with few surprises, long backlist for branding.

For fantasy writers, do you really want to follow the methods used for selling Hunger Games?  If you have read the hype, but not the story, it’s about teenagers killing each other for sport.

My publisher tried to sell me a module where my new release HeartStone sits on THEIR website in a colorful page with bells and whistles about searching for favorite characters and tweeting friends for which page you’re currently on.  The sales person – selling me – said more than once: “This is how Hunger Games did it.”

Yes, and Nicole Kidman and I have the same color hair.  So why aren’t I married to a country-western star?

Here’s an alternative method of developing a fan base.  Look at what books are successful in your genre.  Non-fiction is especially treacherous for follow-the-leader because books for marketing that reach out to confused self-publishers sell almost as well as romance.

Fantasy writers should look at the successful marketing strategies of Robin Hobb (Farseer Trilogy and more) and Lois MacMaster Bujold (Curse of Chalion and more), for example.  Brandon Sanderson used this method, in part.  He’s from Australia but joins the conversations on Reddit where Hobb and Bujold are certain to appear.  He piggy-backs on their fan base to promote his similar works.

I like Mistborn by Sanderson. I like Theft of Swords by Sullivan.  I watch them for marketing techniques and to puzzle out what might work for me.

I’m not making my hair black, though, to fit into that group.  It’s me and Nicole Kidman all the way on that score…

The Middle Story of a Trilogy

by Stella Atrium
5/25/12
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Consider for our example The Lord of the Rings in movie form.  The Fellowship of the Ring got all the acclaim, and The Return of the King got all the awards.  But The Two Towers (with the walking trees and the assault on Isengard), um… not so much.

I’m aware of this odd pattern with the middle story carrying much the weight, but none of the praise. So for HeartStone: Book II of the Dolvia Saga, I went the extra mile to secure a Kirkus Review and also petitioned some friendly GoodReads reviewers to look over ARC versions of the story.

____________

The complete paragraphs provided by Kirkus Reviews are below, and one GoodReads reviewer said this:

“The plot of HeartStone revolves around several offworld characters, including Dr. Edna Edwina Greensboro, Lieutenant Michael Peter Shaw, and Dr. Henry Beecham, in addition to Dolviet tribal members, leaders, and outcasts.
      Readers will be reacquainted with old friends and like them try to determine who is truly the enemy of Dolvia, a new one or the same enemy with different tactics.  Either way, the tribal people of Dolvia are the pawns, along with those who choose not to see or act or those who are just naive.

         As an orphaned child of an offworlder and a Dolviet, Brianna Miller is condemned to be an outcast among the tribes.  Yet, she strives to better herself so that one day she may travel to Earth, the planet of her father's birth.  With the gifts that Dolvia has provided her, the generosity and teachings from the various characters, the pain that she endures, the compassion she feels for others, and the risks she takes, Brianna prepares for a future...a future she will choose for herself!

        You have a really great series going here.  I love your descriptive writing style!  I really can't wait to see what Brianna thinks of Earth and then what happens when she returns to Dolvia!”

-- Phoenix Carvelli
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KIRKUS REVIEWS

HeartStone: Book II of the Dolvia Saga
Atrium, Stella
$19.95 paperback, $6.99 e-book
ISBN: 978-1462070442; June 15, 2012

The second installment of Atrium’s Dolvia Saga is a character-driven sci-fi tale that explores profound—and timely—themes of sexual oppression, environmentalism and cultural intolerance.
      Atrium’s intricate novel ranges widely in theme—gender, politics, existential philosophy, mysticism, etc. Set primarily on the planet of Dolvia—where the females of the indigenous, frequently warring tribes of the savannah maintain few rights and are forced to wear burkas—the storyline revolves, at least initially, around Dr. Edna Edwina Greensboro, a bush-clinic doctor whose courage, compassion and vision have begun to change some of the insular ways of thinking.
       Getting married to Lt. Mike Shaw, an off-world military man, and keeping two female gualareps—oversized and sentient iguana-esque reptiles—increases her status. But when she witnesses a “mixed blood” girl being brutally abused, she realizes that she’s working against centuries of oppression reinforced by cultural mores, folklore, myth and cruel men dead set on guarding the status quo. After all, the victims “are only women.”
        The commentary on gender politics benefits from a foreign setting; it’s an exercise in considering discrimination without finger-pointing. But that’s only one aspect of this multifaceted story—as Greensboro fights to save lives and educate the tribespeople, nefarious individuals and companies seek to profit from the chaos.
        Aside from a few instances where the storyline becomes erratic—as with Greensboro’s marriage, for example—Atrium’s saga continues with another entertaining and powerful read, reminiscent of Octavia E. Butler and Margaret Atwood.
         An allegorical, emotionally intimate narrative for sci-fi fans, with broad themes that could appeal to a mainstream audience, too.

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HeartStone is “live” this holiday weekend.  Yeah!
As an incentive to get started with the series, we’re offering the ebook version of SufferStone: Book I of the Doliva Saga at the 55% discounted price of $3.09 on Amazon.com.  The offer is good through June 2012.


Sign up for GoodReads giveaway of softcover copies of SufferStone to celebrate the release of Book II.  Ten days only!

Self-Publishers: Taking the Long View

by Stella Atrium
5/15/12
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I live in Old Town in Chicago, as I have mentioned in previous blogs.  We have a series of street fairs in the summer here, and I like to attend to watch the well-heeled residents. At one fair last summer a kiosk was set-up outside the entrance to the actual fair where bright-faced young people were giving away samples of a new energy drink in a red and black aluminum can with a twist top.  I carried my sample around for forty minutes so they couldn’t force another one on me when I passed again.

I was headed home at two in the afternoon when the fair was just going into full swing, and one of the young venders at the kiosk announced that they had sold out.  “We sold out,” she proclaimed, even though there was no cash drawer for receiving funds. “That other booth still has product, but ours is gone because we had the better-selling item.” I didn’t argue with her. It’s not good to discourage young people.

The booth she indicated was actually selling their drinks, at Chicago prices, street fair prices, and was stocked for the entire day, rather than with enough product to last only five hours.  

I turned the corner and passed some overfull trash bins, many holding unopened cans of red and black design.  I threw my unopened can on top.

Self-publishers can take a lesson from this incident. Best-selling is an abused term when talking about 99¢ items, or free items. Maybe more pieces moved out of the kiosk, but what profit was made?

You may argue that promotions are not about profit, but about branding. I would counter that a free sample is not the same as a purchase, and doesn’t imply that I will remember the product’s name, open it, or look for one later at the store. Branding didn’t happen.

Some entrepreneurs advise writers and self-publishers to work at providing the personal touch, spend hours on Twitter and Tumblr, solicit interviews on the websites of other writers, engage with giveaways at reading sites, join in blog tours, lower the prices for ebooks, and constantly reassess what works for your genre or your story. These advisors are the people who are making money – from writers – If we stop the rat race, they would have no audience.

Maybe in the old paradigm short-term sales pushed visibility of a new book. A flurry of reviews followed by a prime location in chain bookstores were coordinated with a print run that ensured enough copies to meet demand after the writer appeared on the Today Show.

Monthly sales were monitored by chain bookstores so that, if a book didn’t move in six weeks, copies were returned to the distributor.

The new era of ebooks changed that need for quarterly sales figures and lists of top ten sales numbers.  In ebook form, the item is not returned so bookstore inventory stays fresh. An ebook is published forever and can gain an audience by word-of-mouth, and by good reviews, over six months or eighteen months.

Or eighteen years.

The writer can reinforce her brand by publishing a second book in a series.  I learned on Reddit that some fans of fantasy (my genre) don’t pick up the first book of a trilogy until all three books are available.  That’s the long view. I’m not published to my fan base until Book III is in print.

But where’s the downside of taking the long view?  Book II of my Dolvia Saga titled HeartStone is due out in June 2012.  I paid for a Kirkus Review so some quality press accompanies the release, and a couple reviewers from GoodReads were kind enough to review ARC copies.

I’m considering RAISING the price of the ebook version to a level more in keeping with other writers in my cohort – equalizing the price for Book I and Book II at $6.99, similar to Lois MacMaster Bujold or Robin Hobb or Jacqueline Carey. After all, the paperback copy sells for $19.95.

What is lost if I take the long view? A lot of busywork to keep pace with the Smashwords crowd?


So… if you made it this far.  Please BUY NOW.  SufferStone: Book I of the Dolvia Saga is still priced in ebook version at $3.19 on Amazon.  BUY NOW at this 55% discounted price before June 2012. 



Each ebook version of the Dolvia Saga is well worth $6.99, just like the fantasy novels of Bujold, Hobb and Carey are each worth the cover price. That’s equivalent to two cups of Starbucks coffee.  But today, you can BUY NOW at the discounted price of $3.19.


And you can claim that you’re in with the in-crowd.

Self-Publishers: Unrequited Love is Key to Keeping Fans
by Stella Atrium
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I recently read Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey over several days – that’s one long story.  I was completely enamored with the well-drawn characters and descriptions of Europe before the 100 Year’s War. The politics for a game of thrones in tangent kingdoms were intricate and multi-various.

I admired the level of diction using Old French, Old German and Celtic, and the writer’s many stories taken from the myths of several religions.  Plot keeps the reader engaged, so I thoroughly enjoyed the later surprise about Master of the Straits (I won’t give it away here).

I was crazy for the writer’s courage to kill her main character in the middle and turn the reader’s attention (as well as the narrator’s) to more than one focus for a potential ‘chosen’ lover. The pantheon of characters was easy to follow, and several women characters took prominent roles.  The writing style found a rhythm that was comfortable and measured, leading the reader into delight of strange words from many languages.

I even started to compare the work to my own writing and felt I was second-rate.

So I decided to find some fans of Jacqueline Carey, and looked around at the many websites developed to keep the fantasy alive and maybe start some group role-playing adventures using character names and the milieu of the story (similar to the old game of claiming a character from Jane Austen as your muse).

Fan sites for Jacqueline Carey’s characters are often highly developed.  I was green with jealousy.

I was shocked to find, though, that few fan sites provided a map of the territory or artist depictions of the weapons used by Jocelin or the many warriors with well-described fighting styles. Artist depictions of The Master of the Straits don’t show up anywhere!

Rather, fan pages focused on scrolled fonts and provided wallpaper, and images of women with tattoos on their backs.  Some showed famous actresses with (added) tattoos or smoldering looks under mussed hair. Kushiel’s Dart was narrated by a courtesan in a discipline of yielding, and the heroine (along with many others) decorated her body with a ‘marque’ or back tattoo that designates her status as indentured or free.

But what about the great writing, plotting, sense of history, shared languages, old myths, and plot surprises?

I guess I’m an old fart.  I enjoyed the aesthetic qualities of the writing style.  Fans looked more to the fantasy of a dominant male and yielding lover who tolerates pain.

Oh, jeez…

How do we apply this revelation to our search for loyal fans? Online advisers for self-publishers encourage us to find our ‘fan base’ and go to where they congregate for promotions.  But who and where are they?

I read A Canticle of Lebowitz at age 18 and was swept away. Today I cannot find the appeal in the story.  Like Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, the Lebowitz story must be read at a certain age to display its magic.  A reader must devour The Once and Future King before age 14, for example, or miss that opportunity to be enthralled with experiencing the world as a fish or a bird.

I read the The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe at age 35 and read everything else he wrote within a year.  Now the books on my shelf look like ashes of a bygone era.

For those of you who haven’t explored the canon for the fantasy genre, a likely comparison is the Shrek movies that are cartoons about cartoon characters with slapstick humor and fart jokes – beloved by children everywhere. But the movies include in-jokes and adult references (that hopefully get past the kids) such as Pinocchio’s ability to make wood. The parents who took the kids to the movies also had a good time.

I love Shrek for breaking the mold of fainting princess and providing work for Fiona and her mother, along with the shrinking violet princess characters -- compared to Disney’s cartoon for Beauty and the Beast that remains so stilted, I cannot sit through the full hour of its run-time.

But Shrek suffers from the same problem of all trilogies.  When Shrek and Fiona are wed and start making babies, the sexual tension flows away. The introduction of Artie and the need to bring a new Prince Charming to FarFarAway revives the interest of young viewers, but not so much the parents.

Sexual tension keeps the fan engaged.  You can write that in stone.

For the TV viewer, now that Bones and Booth are wed with a baby in diapers, where do we find the titillation that kept us engaged for six seasons?

For the fan of Old Hollywood, the tension between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that made To Have and Have Not a box office hit was largely settled by the time Key Largo was shot four years later when they were an old married couple.

Are you still following the thread here?  When I finished Kushiel’s Dart the ‘couple’ who leave the newly wedded king and queen to retire on a country estate don’t wed and make babies. The warrior sworn to her protection makes excuses that he cannot be her lover and her protector, choosing the latter to define his life.

I found the ending so unsatisfying because of the lack of resolution. But the lead character is a courtesan and barely eighteen.  If she settles in, sexual tension flows away and there’s no need for a sequel (of which there are twelve).

Here we find the real problem of women as heroes.  A female hero succeeds when she finds a protector while she goes about producing the next generation.  A guy hero succeeds when he rides off into the sunset to the next adventure.

No matter how well written for style, scholarship, pacing, plot, or level of diction – the fans of our stories ride along on a fantasy that resides in the hero’s (or heroine’s) unrequited love.

It’s the story of unrequited love that captures the fans.

Self-Publishers: Is Your Work Good Enough for ePub?

by Stella Atrium
4/11/12
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I produced a couple plays in Chicago small theater and worked with great performers, directors, fight instructors, and crew who gave their hearts as well as their time to display new works in non-profit theater.

One director was experienced from her country-of-origin and talked often about how she procured costumes and set decorations and good press for a theater group there that was attached to a high school.  Of course, Chicago is a world-class market, even for non-profit -- and finding these treasures was also a bigger effort in our fragmented communities.  

Small theater is about vision, and also about compromise as the group approached opening night and made choices for what could get completed in time for that first raised curtain.  Occasionally, we had to settle for what we could accomplish rather than the original vision.

We were lucky to generate some buzz about the production, and a famous reviewer from The Chicago Tribune was scheduled to visit a performance in the first week of an eight-week run.  When this director learned that the reviewer would write about our production, she broke out in hives – literally.

Suddenly, none of the completed work was good enough.  The director started driving the production manager, the crew, the actors, and everybody for improved choices, better flow, smoother cues, enhanced lighting, additional costume choices.  Finally, I realized that she had not experienced this level of scrutiny from reviewers and was gripped with fear that the production was not good enough for the Tribune.

Time to step up to prime time.

Self-publishing is similar to this example in that, for a good part of the project, the writer can please herself and complete the amount of work needed to meet personal goals.  The writer can make a website, join Twitter and FaceBook, and create a blog submitted to Tumblr.

The writer can solicit reviews from friends and from companies that sell services, and post the kind words mined from a few paragraphs posted by a reader who only has her own reading arch to draw on for comparison.  This work – and it’s real work – takes dedication and vision and commitment to selling the value of the story.

Except at some point a world-class reviewer will notice your story.  At some point a fellow writer who has reputation and sales will look at your story.  A writer who you have read and admire will follow you on Twitter.  Eventually, an agent or publisher who is trolling Twitter and GoodReads for the next break-out novel will stumble across your book cover.

Will you make the grade? Or are you trying to publish your dreams more than publish a real-world classic.

•    Is your story more than 90 pages? Was the story copy-edited more than once?

•    Is the cover derivative from similar stories so they all look alike?

•    Is the grammar correct? Does the reader engage within the first 4 pages?

•    Is the blurb truthful and informative? Do the promo paragraphs respect the genre?

•    Is the primary character fully drawn? Are side characters interesting and various?

•    Does the plot teach the reader something about herself while moving along at a good clip?

•    Is the story satisfying for growth in all character? Where is the surprise?

These concerns cannot be changed after the reviewer has found fault or expressed a wish that the story was better presented. The writer cannot argue with the reviewer and claim his view ignores all your good work.

What writers among you have taken a story off the market and reworked it after the reviewers wrote unkind comments that more work is needed?

Is your story only good enough for epub, or is your story ready to endure the scrutiny that you think you seek? Some opportunities happen only once.  Some creative work exists in solid form (museum quality) and is no longer available for re-edit.

Is the story ready for prime time?