Wherein I Roll My Own in the Publishing House Line

I've priced my paperback at $19.95 each, including a 53% bookstore discount and, as I've said, around $2.15 royalty for me. This tells me that E&D is even more of a brick than mine is. Which is only right, since yours is an epic and mine is atypically long for Romantic Suspense. I have to stop apologizing for that, because people who have read it say it goes fast.

I intend to buy the paperback version of Eagle and Dragon from you, because that cover is so pretty, and because I like to flip back and forth, and whatever Kindle says about that, it isn't the same.

 

Go to my Author's Page https://www.facebook.com/LewisMcIntyreAuthor/?ref=bookmarks, and order a signed copy from me. I haven't had anyone actually do this yet, and I would like to see it work, Pay is via PayPal, so it is secure. I will include a check with the book for the $5 discount I am giving you.

I did a beta read for a classmate who picked up writing, for a while, the Tom Clancy OpCenter series, then branched out on his own spy thriller series, and asked him to take a look at my half-finished sequel to E&D, because we both had lots of widely separated POV characters, and I was concerned with whether it was too discombobulated. He said it not only wasn't, but that it was an interesting read. So good praise for a half-finished work, motivated me to move on with a few more chapters. The latest kidnapping, which move my FMC from Italy to the Middle East, is also going to be used by Trajan as a casus belli for invading Parthia. He had amassed a considerable force of 100,000 men, far too much to invade Armenia over a royal succession issue, but enough so that if the Parthians intervened he could repel and invade them. But now he need not wait for them to attack him, he can take the initiative. Fictional explanation for a little understood change of plans.

 

While it's nice having people tell me they loved my book, it got very old having most of those readers be people I know. I need to do a more professional job with my author platform, driving sales, getting reviews, and so on.

So this evening I pulled the trigger and signed up for Mark Dawson's Self Publishing 101 course. Took advantage of the payment plan he set up to allow for reduced incomes during the COVID-19 crisis. (If anyone's interested, enrollment is open till midnight Wednesday, April 1st, I believe it is.)

What I'm paying for here is clarity and the incentive to self-discipline. I'm sure I'll find out I know a lot of what the course covers already. Or that I've attended a webinar about the subjects some time or other. But I have a hard time keeping it all straight, especially when I don't need the information right away.

I intend to check out as much of it as I can during the 30 day trial period. I need to make sure it's a good fit for me, or that I can adapt my ways to it.

 

Attended an SPF University webinar this afternoon, presented by Stuart Grant, on Instagram Stories for Authors. It got me off my rear to do up my Instagram and Facebook author pages.

Lots of trial and error, lots of Oops and Oh no! as I temporarily replaced my real name personal IG profile with my pen name and its info. But that's straightened out.

No followers on IG yet. The interesting thing is that when I created the Facebook page it asked me if I wanted to invite any of my Friends on my personal profile. Sure, why not, let's choose them all.

And so far about 10% of them are following me, and did it right away.

Not a large percentage, but good considering I thought I was going to have to beg to get anyone to follow me on the business side. And not bad when you reckon in how few of your FB friends see any of your posts.

We'll see how it works on Instagram. Maybe I'll have to stick a notice on my real name page to let my followers know the author page is up.

I've been putting off doing this for ages. And now it's done. And I've put the links on my website. It all looks very new and green and unpopulated just now, but it's early days.

 

Sorry if this has been asked already....

What do you have for people who don't have FaceBook, FaceTime, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever the newest fad is?

I have an e-mail account at yahoo.com - if I was to send you a p.m. with the address, would you be sending me a quarterly update?

I really simply do not have time for all the social media out there and I have such a horrible time learning it.....if I ever get an author page of any kind, I'm going to hire someone to maintain it for me.

 

Honestly, you need it. You don't have to sit on it all day, I know I don't, but I have writer accounts on Facebook and Twitter and that's where I interact with a lot of fans. It is a professional account only, I have no personal presence there and I may stop by once every couple of days to see if anything has happened on my page. I ignore everything else.

 

Why? If I am ever lucky enough to make a living with my words, isn't my job to write stories/books? Why do I need all this social media to provide my fans with updates...?? I mean, can't they just buy my next book or story when it hits the shelves?

This is the one thing that attracts me to traditional publishers the most - they handle the public relations and the promotion, and I write, maybe sign copies of any books I sell at a local bookstore.

Honestly, I miss the early days pre-internet when nobody knew everything about everybody. I really feel like there is too much information available about everyone online.

Bah....maybe I'm just an old grump...

 

Really? I wasn't aware of that.....very disappointing.

What exactly do traditional publishers offer if I have to do my own p.r. and promotion? I really thought they handled that stuff....

 

No, your job is to SELL stories to people who are willing to pay you for it. Trade publishing isn't just handing over manuscripts either. They expect you not only to be active on social media, but to make personal appearances, often at your own expense and effort, to sell your book. If you think sitting around in your underwear is all it takes to be a successful writer, you've got another thing coming.

 

And what little they do isn't aimed at finding new readers for your book, it'll be geared toward retailers, trying to get them to order your book.

 

I'm not sure I see the value they bring then.... I can probably hire a freelance editor for editing services and a freelance artist to do the cover art. I suppose they might have an "in" with a bricks-and-mortars store where they convince them to order X number of copies of my book.

For that I'll need to give them the lion's share of the royalties?! Hell, NO!

I can self publish and then hire someone to do all the other stuff - a website, editing, cover art/illustrations. There must be people starting out that will want to build a long term relationship with potential clients and understand the first two or three books will not pay that much but once I develop a following, more work and more money could develop.....

I guess I'll just treat it as a hobby and improve my skills as I go, then one day a book will pop out and I'll look at self publishing it, earning a few bucks.

 

I thought I had to develop my talent, write a great story and put it in front of a publisher. Then I would sit back and relax as the money rolled it to fund book #2, #3, etc.

I really don't see the value traditional publishers are providing. Especially if I have to take time out from my day (writing, researching, relaxing) to do public relations and promotions. I thought that was the publisher's job! If they don't do that.....why do I need them?

I'm really starting to understand why the original poster, Catrin Lewis started this thread. Maybe I'll write a best-selling (fingers crossed) and see if she wants to publish it. I'm hoping she'll be more reasonable than traditional publishing houses. 90% of royalties is insane.....I really thought 30% to maybe 50%.....

 

Nope, that's not the reality. It's why a lot of people self-publish. You get 70% royalties and a lot of freedom, but you have to do all of the work. Personally, I prefer it because I don't trust trade publishers to do what I want done. I want control over my covers and I'm better at marketing to the right people than they would be. It's why, even though I had a very good trade publishing contract on the table, I turned it down.

A lot of people have a very unrealistic view of what writing actually is. It's why I tell people that it's one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. Traditional publishers will give you an advance vs. royalties, usually about $5k per book, keeping in mind that you will only get a book published a year at best, with an 18-24 month lead time and most books never sell out of their advance. Just to keep numbers simple, assuming that you make $1 per book sold, you'd have to sell more than 5000 books to end customers to make another dime. There are returns to contend with, there are lots of appearances that you need to make, depending on your book and publisher. Actually writing becomes something you do in your spare time and it isn't like you can make a living off of your writing unless you are very successful, so you have to have another job anyhow. This is why you need to do your research before you get these big ideas in your head that are completely wrong.

 

I'm still on the fence about whether I will market this way.

I agree with you that it's a huge element of modern marketing, and that trade publishers are pushing their authors to share the load with market stimulation and personal branding.

Self published authors, I think, have a choice. To me, one of the attractions of self-pub is that I can choose how I'll market my product. I can weigh the costs and benefits and leverage my alleged creativity to carve out a marketing model I'm comfortable with.


:: downsides ::
1. Privacy

One of the misunderstandings about social media is the belief that if we sign up and don't use it much, that we're avoiding the danger. This is untrue. The signup is an agreement to let the company operate surveillance on our browsing and other online activities in toto, even if we're logged out of the site, or have our account on temporary voluntary suspension.

Anything with advertising - and even hidden advertising called tracking pixels - is reporting what we're reading and watching, how long we're on the page, how we got there, and where we went after. It's worse if we log in with their credentials, they are authorized to text capture on those sites. Good lord, who logs into Writingforums.org with their FB credentials and doesn't think FB is logging what they're reading and typing. Thats the whole purpose of the affiliated logins, to extend the surveillance to other sites.

What's the value to the platforms? The results are packaged and sold to third parties so they can extract as much profit as possible from us or persuade us to behave differently in our daily lives to align with their interests. eg: FB makes about $160/yr off each of us on average, so it must be worth more than that for the advertisers to pay that for our data, estimates are in the $500/yr range. What 'worth it' means is that they extract that much more money from the user through pricing APIs that interact with the user's consumer model.

All this, just from signing the EULA, even if you never use the site again.

So, I have to weigh my work/life balance. Is being able to flog my crappy books in social media worth the personal intrusion of letting the marketing modellers know I bought lube last weekend and like Red Dwarf reruns.


2. ROI for Time and Money

I'm not naiive enough to believe that good product sells itself, but knowing there are *many* ways to sell books, is the return from social media channel spending in time and money better than other channels. I'm thinking specifically of website and email list.



:: upsides ::
1. Maybe it's too late to salvage my privacy, maybe they're tracking whether I gave them permission or not (who told Equifax I permit them to monitor my credit?), so maybe abstaining has no value since they're pretty cavalier with privacy laws anyway and have paid fines for dealing in non-user data.

2. It might be worth the investment per #2 above, TBD

3. Some people enjoy social media and the time spend is not a cost, but a benefit. Their privacy is valued at $0, so there's no cost associated here, and they value the experience provided by the platform more than the money extracted from pricing manipulation based on their user data.'



:: my tentative strategy ::

So, for now, based on my valuation of privacy and my estimate of my ROI on time invested in using the platform, I'm still holding off on social media participation in favour of giving website and email list a shot.

 

I am giving myself a 5 year runway to learn the ropes before attempting to "full time it".
About 3 more years to go. (July 1st 2023)

I *do* think there's a lot of options out there, from publishing at a huge loss to fulfil a life wish, to building a lifestyle and community at a breakeven cost as a rewarding hobby, to actually making enough money to quit the day job and support a family.

I'm shooting for that third option, and I'm hoping to learn through other people's experiences as much as possible before investing significant time and money.

 

Good luck. Most people who try it fail.

 

The short answer is: even if they offer nothing else, a trade publisher can offer distribution, which is nearly impossible for indies.

Even with a trade publisher back in the old days, the author would have marketing commitments. Book tours, for example. As sales shift from brick and mortar to online, it's reasonable to expect the author's publicity time to follow.

90% may or may not be insane, depending on how the numbers work out.

For one thing, it's all upside, you don't spend money, you can't lose money. In contrast, as an indie, if your costs are high and your sales are low, you're out of pocket. There's some threads on how to reduce costs and some threads on how to boost sales. Ask around to see how many made more than 10% profit at the end of the project.

The second thing is the percentage is a bigger slice, but it could be of a bigger pie. Distribution means deals with the big retailers. We use the expression 'brick and mortar' but these sales are mostly ebooks. Chapters/Indigo through Kobo, I think there's still some Nooks and equivalents out there. The library system. And they sell to Amazon. And they may pay for advertising, which they buy in bulk and can get cheaper than indies can. With these additional channels and marketing, you could be expanding your market so much that you're getting 10% of 100,000 ($10,000) sales instead of 35% of 1,000 sales ($350).

Which brings me to thirdly, compare to KDP. Trades sell to Amazon. Amazon has a stake in that 90% that's definitely bigger than the 35% they get from a $5 indie book, so they are incentivized to outbid indies on ads, which they obtain at cost.

 

I'm hoping to learn from others instead of doing too many expensive forays on my own, so I do appreciate when people on this and other forums share their experiences, good or bad.

 

How many posters in here, those who have responded to this thread in the last 3 days, have published traditionally? How many of you have self-published?

I'm concerned that I am getting a biased picture of the situation. Do people have actual, recent experience with traditional publishers? Or are people just passing on what they have heard about traditional publishing?

I'm fine with giving away a larger share of my royalties if the publishing houses WORK for it. I just got the impression that I was responsible for everything - public relations, promotion, writing the actual book, etc.

I do agree that 90% of $100,000 in sales is larger than 35% of $1,000 in sales. I also agree that traditional publishers probably have an "in" to getting my books on the shelves of bricks-and-mortars stores that I might not manage on my own.

With regards to online stuff, I am very uncomfortable interacting with people I don't know. I'm an introvert and I'm a deaf guy in a hearing world - I have had TONS of misunderstandings with hearing people when we spoke verbally. Online in text/print would probably be better but it would be a considerable time commitment that I am not sure I want to make.

EDIT : 10% of $100,000 NOT 90%.

 

As I said before, I wouldn't do that unless a) the other author's work fit in with what I was trying to do, and b) I thought I could add value to his or her product. Otherwise, what use would I be?

But thanks for the thought. Never say never.

 

Oh, crap, Lew, when I made my April 1st post, I didn't scroll up and see this one of yours. Is your offer still open--- assuming we can get print books in the Season of COVID19?

 

Dropping in to report I've made my first boosted post on Facebook, all because they offered me five whole dollars (expiring May 19th) to boost one from my new(ish) author page. I've knocked down the price of my ebook as a stay-at-home special, and figured it was a good one to try.

To be honest, I felt like I was working blind with this, and whether it will do any good, heaven only knows.

Here's what I've learned, though:

1. Apparently, once you hit "Boost Post," affirmed that you've read and accepted the FB non-discrimination policy, and clicked whatever it is you click to get them to review your post, you're stuck with the verbiage you've got. I feel a little stupid because I headed the post with "Important news!" figuring I was aiming it only at my 55 followers. That's a little pretentious when you're going after targeted strangers, and I'm wondering if I should go through the hassle of a fake delete and redo.
2. Facebook will ask you if you want to put a pixel on your website in connection with the post boosting. Now, the link on my post sends people to my Amazon book page, but I figured what the heck, what I read online tells me this pixel thing is good. But it means a) that your website better be updated, and b) your website's privacy policy has to say Facebook is involved as a third party. This took me awhile.
3. It's a very good thing, I gather, to take the time to focus your audience. Maybe it's my laptop, but it's a fiddly mess to do that. You can't use your mouse to scroll down the lists of demographics, interests, and behaviors. You do that and the list box will close and you'll have to start over. No, use your down arrow, or it will take FOREVER.

The websites that claim to know about these things say to boost only posts that are already getting a lot of traction. I'm not sure why, unless the object is Exposure. Me, I figured I'd use the $5 credit and a few bucks more to make my book known to people who aren't in my friends and family group, but who might like a book about architects who like classical music. Don't know if I'll do it again, but it's worth a try.