Are publishers really interested in good writing?

The first thing I think we should consider is, if self publishing were to become lucrative, what specifically would be the product? Back to the netflix, HBOGO analogy, the shows you find on there vs the shows you find on cable television are vastly different. How I Met Your Mother or Two and a Half Men is not what HBO is looking for. There's cable for that kind of crap. I'm not saying there's no overlap between the audiences, but the audiences are definitely different.

Similarly, if you've got a standard romance or a standard angsty teen dystopian novel, you already have a great platform for your novel. The majority of literary agents listed online are searching for exactly that. You don't need to self publish, assuming your writing isn't horrendous.

Amazon self publishing shouldn't be about promoting badly written books or books that could just as easily be traditionally published. They should be about promoting "risky" novels that will develop cult followings. It's a different market than traditional publishing.

This simplifies the picture, because we don't have to worry about number of reviews (so much) or reviews like "this rocks" or "this sucks" anymore. What matters to people who are looking for unique and well written novels, not genre crap, and not "literary" stuff that is actually remarkably conformist, are intelligently written reviews that can convince them that yes, this book has a voice, and it has a perspective, and it is different.

Maybe I didn't make this clear earlier, but when I was talking about a reviewers club, I was originally really thinking about getting not professionals, but book nerds--people who love to read and also love to give reviews. You put them in a club, maybe let their reviews get ranked, give them some incentive to go through self pubbed novels, and let them do their thing. If a book is horrible, this unprofessional club member doesn't have to read the whole thing. "I stopped at page 2 because of grammar." Amazon engineers are smart. If they wanted to figure out an interesting program that incentivices the right kind of people to go out there, burn through a pile of self pubbed novels, find a gem, and promote it within the club, via reviews and member sharing, they could.

In spirit what we'd be looking at is an alternative to the agent, someone who is not going through books as a career, but as a passion, someone who doesn't have to posses the same cookie cutter mentality as most other agents do, doesn't require 15% of the novel's earnings (maybe we want a rewards system for members who "find" self pubbed books that go on to get hundreds of reviews), and spends relatively little time doing it. No offense to agents, but finding good books doesn't really take a career, you can do it as a hobby. Most of us here do when we want to read something new, don't we? We don't need professionally paid agents to tell us what is good and what isn't.

About the editing. Let the self pubber pay for his own professional editor. If he's serious, he'll do it. Self pubbed books with professional editors could even be given a special status. Maybe reviewers would go through those first.

ETA: I think the ingredients are already out there. You have Amazon. You have book nerds who like to review out-there stuff and hate the mainstream. Now it's just putting it together.

ETAA: The book club can be more than that. It can help connect self pubbers with quality writing and similar literary visions.

Amazon used the name kindle because it meant to "light a fire." The book club would be about intellectualism, letting unconventional authors come together, help each other market, maybe even improve one another's manuscripts, and letting reviews who know how to craft a sentence find these works. A writer's utopia.

 

Let me weigh in there, E&D has got at last count 27 ratings and 4 reviews on Good Reads, almost all of them 4 or higher, 14 on the Amazon site, same breakdown, and some more on the Amazon UK site, seven the last time I checked. Except for perhaps the first 4 0r 5, they were all spontaneous from people I don't know. I have had one review from the historical Novel Society, though I wasn't happy with it, that is the breaks. She took me task for using "crotchety" in dialogue, as that word did not come into use until the 19th century (news flash, the entire English language didn't exist when these people were speaking) There are a number of sites that do reviews on independently published books, and as I find them, I will share them

Problems finding E&D on Good Reads may be my problem, how I described my book, so I am still learning!

I have had good success with sales and Amazon rankings, which is one key to visibility, the higher the ranking, the quicker it comes up on Amazon searches. I gave a talk on marketing to our local writers' group, with the key point "If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, will it make a sound? If the greatest book ever written is put up on Amazon, and no one knows it is there, will anyone ever read it?" That is the crux of self-publishing, that you must also self-promote. That means getting reviews, finding the magazines that will review your work, and advertising. It is not cheap, I am spending two or three times what I make in royalties in advertising. I bought a half page spread in the Historical Writers of America Conference program for both my books, I am giving a presentation on "Roman Maritime Trade in the Indian Ocean" there and consigning sixteen of each book for book sales, and attending their rather pricey conference in Albuquerque. What the heck, look at it as a special vacation! I am laying out for facebook boosts, BookDaily blasts and so forth. I realize that I am at the age (coming up on the big 7-0) when I have money to throw at this problem. But I think anyone who wants to publish also wants to have people read the book, and must come up with some kind of affordable plan to market the book. There are plenty of facebook sites that cater to indies of various genres, where you can post your book for free.

I think there is a critical mass of sales, when a book starts to sell itself, since the best advertising is what @jannert just gave me (thanks, Jan!), a word of mouth recommendation to her friends. I think word of mouth has a success rate between one in ten and one in a hundred, whereas the success rate of advertising is one in a thousand or much less.

 

One free marketing tool is Kindle giveaways, if you use Kindle Select and agree to be exclusive on Kindle for all ePubs. The Kindle giveaway lasts up to 5 days, and costs only the sales you would have made on Kindle that period. KENP/KOLL page counts continue for that period. At the end of both my last giveaways at the beginning of April and July 5-10, paid sales more than doubled following the giveaway, and that went on for about six weeks until returning to baseline. I am getting ready to do another giveaway in early October (basically you are allowed one per quarter), and will see if that pattern repeats.

 

I'm hoping that after you attend the Historical Writers of American conference this weekend, and give your speech, you'll get more people on board to do the word-of-mouth spread. That sounds like an ideal venue and opportunity.

 

Romance in particular is largely self-published these days for a number of reasons:

1. Traditionally lousy contract terms for Romance writers. For example, there was a big kerfuffle a few years back about a Romance publisher licensing ebook rights to a related company for a pittance, so the authors--who'd been promised something like 50% of ebook royalties--got a few cents on each sale.

2. Voracious readers who want the next book NOW, not when your publisher gets around to publishing it.

3. Lack of interest from publishers in non-standard Romance books. It's a small part of the market, but one that pretty much only self-publishers are selling into.

If you're good at writing Romance, you can make a living at it by self-publishing a book a month. There's no need to give money to publishers and agents.

 

To get one book out a month, you'd have to get down approximately 250 original words an hour, 11 hours a day for 30 days to make an 80,000 word first draft. That work schedule seems pretty intense doesn't leave a lot of room for other things like editing and advertising and all of the things self publishers have to do that publishers usually take care of..

 

1. From what I've seen, Romance novels tend to be more in the 60,000 word range. Maybe even shorter.

2. 250 words an hour is extremely slow for a professional writer who isn't already a bestseller who can live on one book every year or two. I wrote 500 words in the fifteen minutes before I had a shower this morning, and most of them will end up in the finished book.

Usually they farm out editing, covers, formatting etc to freelancers. Because once you're selling thousands of copies of your books, you're better off paying the money so you can spend more time writing.

This isn't some theory. This is what many successful modern Romance writers do. Lots of books, rapid release, farm out the work when you're better off writing.

 

No offense, but I've read Space Weasles.

Which unless you're an already established author will cost you thousands of dollars just to get to the point of putting it on the shelf and hoping it sells.

Many high output novelist in the romance field or whatever really aren't one author, they're one or several teams of writers working on getting lots of novels out as quickly as they can. They usually just publish under the name of a single author to boost brand identifiability . That author occasionally is either a leader of the team, or more likely someone they just use as a face piece in their advertising, often with a sweet or dark backstory to boost sales.

 

Do you have citations for any of this? I don't mean that as a challenge, necessarily, I'm just interested in seeing the source documentation.

 

I'd like a cite for this as well in regards to the romance genre. I know a fair number of high output romance writers who, like @BayView can write multiple books in a year. They are all individuals unless I'm being catfished hardcore.

 

I'm not saying all of them are, I'm saying many of them are. But you have to admit, even @BayView in all her glory probably doesn't publish one book per month. Though she might, I can't really keep up with the pseudonyms. I'd love to give you a reference, but all I have is personal experience.

 

Oh, agreed. Personally I don't know any romance authors who write a book a month; I'm just totally unfamiliar with that phenomenon.

 

Do you have personal experience of romance authors who are multiple people? Do you have names?

I'm familiar with the practice with thrillers, like James Patterson Inc., but I haven't heard of it in romance...

 

I used to work for a team doing Sci-Fi, but our spec. sheets also had guidelines for romance. From what I remember length for romance was supposed to be between 70,000-100,000 words with a butter zone between 80,000 and 90,000 words. I'd love to give you names, but I don't have name for a romance novel and I'm kind of hoping to get that job back if my situation changes, and that's worth more to me than internet pride.

 

Many of them post on other writing forums. It's what they've said over the last few years about how they work.

 

If she does, they are all remarkably good and 100% consistent at imitating her style, which I honestly find fairly distinctive. I've read that she very much sees writing as a job and regularly puts in 8 hours a day writing, which personally would make me mental.

I believe she puts out somewhere around 6 books a year, and @BayView said if she were to write full time she could do 4 a year, so it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch for me. I kind of feel like there's a certain amount of "muscle memory" involved with Nora's writing at this point.

I agree with you on that army of editors though!

 

I write four a year now, spending about ten hours a week on all aspects of writing.

I assume I could approximately double this if I were doing it full-time... I know I couldn't write 40 hours a week, but I assume I could do 20-ish, based on how things go when I have stretches of time off. So that'd be about 8 books a year, and I assume I'm not the fastest writer on the planet.

Actually, based on Roberts' current release schedule, she's only putting out 4 books in 2017 (http://fallintothestory.com/2017-release-schedule/) but I think her books tend to be a bit longer than mine, and I think she used to produce more.

Anyway, I'm not saying there are no authors out there who are writing by committee, or even secretly writing by committee, but I don't think Nora Roberts is an example that it must be happening.

 

I don't think word count matters if it is a series.
But if you want to get into shorter works, most
Erotica is shorter than 80k. Sometimes they
barely break the 10k line. At least that is what
I have seen while browsing.

 

I probably average around 80K. Category romances are shorter, maybe around 60K, but I don't write all that much category.