Smashwords

New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More eBooks

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Last year at the 2012 RT Booklovers in Chicago, I released a first-of-its-kind study that analyzed indie ebook sales data. Our goal was to identify potential factors that could help authors sell more ebooks.

Last week at the 2013 RT Booklovers convention in Kansas City, I shared new, updated data in a session titled, Money, Money, Money — Facts & Figures for Financial Payoff. Now I'm sharing this data and my findings with you.

Some of the results were surprising, some were silly, and some I expect will inform smarter pricing and publishing decisions in the year ahead.

For the study this year, we analyzed over $12 million in sales for a collection of 120,000 Smashwords ebooks from May 1, 2012 through March 31, 2013. We aggregated our sales data from across our retail distribution network, which includes the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Amazon (only about 200 of our 200,000 titles are at Amazon). As the world's largest indie ebook distributor, I think our study represents the most comprehensive analysis ever of how ebooks from self-published authors and small independent presses are behaving in the marketplace.

As I mention in my free ebook, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, its helpful to imagine dozens of levers and dials attached to your book that you can twist, turn and tweak. When you get everything just right, your book's sales will increase through viral through word-of-mouth. In my Secrets book, I refer to these tweakable things as Viral Catalysts. A Viral Catalyst is anything that makes your book more available, accessible, discoverable, desirable or enjoyable to readers.

This survey attempts to identify Viral Catalysts by analyzing the common characteristics of bestselling (and poor-selling) Smashwords ebooks.

We posed a series of questions to our data - including several new ones - to reveal answers that might help authors reach more readers.

The questions included:

Do frequent price changes help authors sell more books?
Do longer or shorter book titles sell more books?
Do longer or shorter book descriptions sell more books?
How do sales develop over time at a retailer, and what factors might spark a breakout?
Do longer or shorter books sell better?
What's the average word count for the 60 bestselling Smashwords romance books?
What does the sales distribution curve look like, and how many books sell well?
How many words are the bestselling authors selling for a penny?
What are the most common price points for indie ebooks, and what changed since last year?
How many more downloads do FREE ebooks get compared to priced ebooks?
How have Smashwords sales grown at the Apple iBookstore in three years?
How does price impact unit sales volume?
What price points yield the greatest overall earnings for authors and publishers?
What does the Yield Graph portend for the future of publishing?

New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More eBooks from Smashwords, Inc.

KEY FINDINGS

1. Ebook Sales Conform to a Power Curve
Most books don't sell well, but those that do sell well sell really well. This finding wasn't a surprise. Just as in traditional publishing, very few books become bestsellers.

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However, the underlying dynamic of the power curve is extremely significant, especially when you consider it as a framework for evaluating the survey's findings. As a title moves up in sales rank, its sales grow exponentially. We see this in our sales results all the time. On any given day, a #1 bestseller in an ebook store might be selling twice the number copies as the #5-ranked title on that day, and triple or quadruple the number of copies as the #10 bestseller. In our data over this 11-month period, the #1 Smashwords bestseller, measured in dollars, sold 37 times more than the book ranked #500, and #500's sales would put a smile on most authors' faces.

The opportunity for every Smashwords author and publisher is to make decisions that cause their books to move up in sales rank. This is power of my Viral Catalyst concept. When you consider that there are potentially dozens if not hundreds of factors that can make your book more (or less) discoverable, desirable and enjoyable, then you realize that you - the author/publisher - have more control over your book's destiny than previously thought. Your opportunity is to make dozens of correct decisions - big and small - while avoiding the poor decisions that will undermine your success.

The next finding, when viewed through the lens of the power curve, is especially significant.

2. Viva Long Form Reading: Longer Books Sell Better
For the second year running, we found definitive evidence that ebook readers - voting with their Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Krone, Krona and Koruna - overwhelmingly prefer longer books over shorter books.

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The top 100 bestselling Smashwords books averaged 115,000 words. When we examined the word counts of books in other sales rank bands, we found the lower the word count, the lower the sales.

Now consider how authors can use this finding, combined with the knowledge of the power curve, to make smarter publishing decisions, and to avoid poor decisions. Often, we'll see an authors with a single full-length novel break the novel into chunks to create a series of novellas, or worse - they'll try to serialize it as dozens of short pieces. When you consider that readers overwhelmingly prefer longer works, and you consider that bestselling titles sell exponentially more copies, reach more readers and earn more money than the non-bestsellers, you can understand how some authors might be undermining their book's true potential.

Like every finding from this survey, you should use this information as one data point. There will always be exceptions to any rule. If your story deserves 50,000 words - nothing more and nothing less - because this is the length packs the biggest pleasure punch for readers, then by all means don't bloat your perfect story with extra words just because the data shows that longer books, on average, sell more. Do what's right for your story because that's what's right for your reader.

3. Shorter Book Titles Appear to Have Slight Sales Advantage

This year we asked our data if bestselling books had shorter or longer titles. We looked at character count, which indicated slight advantage for shorter titles, and then we looked at word count, where the advantage appeared to be more pronounced.

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The top 100 bestselling Smashwords books averaged 4.2 words in their book title.

For titles ranked #1,000-#2,000, the average word count was 5.7, or about 36% more words than the top 100.

Books ranked #100,000-#101,000 (not a sales rank any author wants!), the book title word count was 6.0 words.

Why might shorter book titles have an advantage? I can only speculate. Maybe shorter titles catch the reader's eye and attention more effectively. After all, reading requires mental energy, so maybe the additional mental energy to read and comprehend a longer title creates friction that causes some readers to click away? Or maybe some retailers' inability to list super-long book titles on the merchandising page reduces effectiveness?

My advice: Think less about word count and more about choosing a title that, like good writing, is concise, clear and intriguing.

4. How Indie Authors are Pricing Their Books: $2.99 is the Most Common Price Point

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At Smashwords, our authors and publishers set the prices.

The most popular price points are FREE through 2.99.

They chose $2.99 more frequently than any other price point. In last year's survey, $.99 was a more common price point than $2.99. In this year's survey, $2.99 was about 60% more often.

$.99 remains a popular price point.

$5.00 and up has lost favor with indie authors and publishers compared to the same data a year ago.

5. How Price Impacts Unit Sales Volume: Lower Priced Books (usually) Sell More Copies

How does your choice of price impact the number of books you sell? It's an important question, because as an author or publisher, you want your words to touch the eyes of readers.

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As you might expect, we found there's a definite relation between price and unit sales volume. Lower prices generally sell more copies than higher prices. But not always.

We normalized the data so we could understand how the average book priced at a given price would perfom compared to a book priced over $10.00+. We set $10.00+ as equal to "x."

So, for example you'll see in the chart that $.99 is 3.9x. This means that a $.99 book will on average sell 3.9 times as many books as a book priced over $10.00. A $2.99 book sells about 4 times as many units.

Note how books priced between $1.00 and $1.99 significantly underperform books priced at $2.99 and $3.99. $1.99 appears to be a black hole.

What price moves the most units? The answer is FREE. Although not shown in the chart, my presentation includes an analysis I performed of our sales at the Apple iBookstore over the last 12 months. FREE books, on average, earned 92 times more downloads than books at any price. If you've written several books, consider pricing at least one of the books at free. If you write series, consider pricing the series starter at FREE. Nothing attracts reader interest like FREE. But remember, it's one thing to get the reader to download your book. It's an entirely different challenge to get them to read it, finish it and love it.

Smashwords can get your book priced at FREE at every retailer.

6. The Yield Graph: Is $3.99 the New $2.99?

It goes without saying that a $.99 book will usually sell more units than a $10+ book. But will the $.99 book make up in volume what the $10+ book earns in margin?

That's the question answered by the Yield Graph. We computed book earnings for all the books in each price band, and then divided the results by the number of books in that band to determine the average yield of for a book priced in each band.

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We labeled each bar with a percentage so you know how the yields of each book in that band, on average, compare against against the overall average of all the bands.

So, for example, books priced at $3.99 will earn about 55% more than the average book at any price. Books priced at $1.99 are likely to earn 67% less than the average.

One surprising finding is that, on average, $3.99 books sold more units than $2.99 books, and more units than any other price except FREE. I didn't expect this. Although the general pattern holds that lower priced books tend to sell more units than higher priced books, $3.99 was the rule-breaker. According to our Yield Graph, $3.99 earned authors total income that was 55% above the average compared to all price points.

The finding runs counter to the meme that ebook prices will only drop lower. I think it offers encouraging news for authors and publishers alike. It also tells me that some authors who are pricing between $.99 and $2.99 might actually be underpricing.

What might account for the magic of the $3.99 price point? First, I think it means readers will pay for quality books. You don't become a bestseller at any price - including FREE - if you haven't written a great, reader-pleasing book. Next, it might indicate that some percent of the readers are shying away from the ultra-low price points. Anecdotally, I've hear multiple reports from authors where they raised prices and unit sales increased. While I do believe some of this is happening, I don't think all readers operate the same mindset.

As much as we all would like to discover that one magic secret for success, reader behavior is much more nuanced and diverse. Diversity of behavior was certainly the primary high-level finding in my ebook discovery survey in September, 2011. We found that different readers have different methods of discovering books. Some readers will be attracted to low-priced books, and other readers will be repulsed. Viva diversity!

Other highlights from the Yield Graph: Books priced between $.99 and $1.99 continue to underperform when we look at the book's total earnings. $1.99 performs especially poorly. It's a black hole. I'd avoid that price point if you can. Price the book instead at $2.99 and you'll probably earn more, AND sell more units if your book performs near the average.

7. A Closer Look at the Yield Graph Reveals Why Indie Ebook Authors Have a Competitive Advantage over Traditionally Published Authors

I think the most important findings of the entire study are found in these last two charts above about how price impacts unit sales, and in the Yield Graph, where I examine how price combined with unit sales impacts author earnings.

The Yield Graph reveals why indie authors are gaining significant advantage over traditionally published authors.

When an author sells a book, they receive two primary benefits. 1. They earn the royalty from the sale. 2. They earn a reader, and a reader is a potential fan, and fan is a potential super-fan who will rush to buy anything you publish, and who will evangelize your book to everyone they know.

I'd argue that readership - the key to building your author brand and fan base, is more important to your long term success than a dollar in your pocket today.

Indie ebook authors are earning royalty percentages that are 3-5 times higher than what traditionally published authors earn. Publishers are overpricing their books relative to indie ebook alternatives. This means that indie authors can reach more readers AND earn more money selling lower priced books at higher unit volumes all the while earning more per book sold than traditionally published authors at higher prices. The significance of these economic dynamics cannot be overstated.

Allow me to break it down this way. An indie ebook author earns about $2.00 from the sale of a $2.99 book. That book, on average, will sell four times as many units as a book priced over $10.00. In order for a traditionally published author to earn $2.00 on an ebook sale, the book must be priced at $11.42 (if the publisher has agency terms, as Smashwords does) or $16.00 (if it's a wholesale publisher). Remember, traditionally published authors earn only 25% of the net, whereas Smashwords authors earn 85% net. If your book is traditionally published, and your publisher sells under the wholesale pricing model, you earn only about $1.25 for a book priced at $9.99, whereas an indie ebook author would earn $6.00-$8.00 at that price.

If a reader has the choice to purchase one of two books of equal quality, and one is priced at $2.99 and the other is priced at $12.99, which will they choose?

If the publisher prices at $2.99 to be competitive, and they have agency terms with the retailer, their author earns only 52 cents (25% net of the 70% list received by the publisher), compared to the indie author's take of $2.00.

These economic dynamics will not play out well for large publishers or their authors. If ebook sales continue to increase as a percentage of overall book sales, and if print continues to decline as a format, and especially if brick-and-mortar bookstore closers continue or accelerate, it'll become increasingly difficult for publishers to hold on to their best authors.

Publishers need to pray that print remains a strong-selling format, and that the physical bookstores stop closing. For now, print distribution - a benefit available only to traditionally published authors - is a strong selling point in favor of publishers.

Even with the continued importance of print, I'm seeing signs that some bestselling indie authors are beginning to hold on to their ebook rights and do print-only deals with the publishers. Recent examples include Bella Andre with her Sullivans series, Hugh Howey with Wool, and Colleen Hoover with Hopeless.

In a future world dominated by ebooks, publishers need to find a way to lower prices while increasing per-unit earnings for the author. It'll be difficult because the cost structure of traditional publishing is so high. Publishers aren't feeling the pain yet because the bulk of their sales are still coming from print. However, look at any ebook bestseller list and you'll see indie ebook authors are taking sales from the bigger traditionally published authors.

I predict that within three years, over 50% of the New York Times bestselling ebooks will be self-published ebooks. It's possible I'm being too conservative.

Indie ebook authors can publish faster and less expensively, publish globally, enjoy greater creative freedom, earn higher royalties, and have greater flexibility and control. It's not as difficult to successfully self-publish as some people think. The bestselling traditionally published authors already know how to write a super-awesome book. That's the most difficult task of publishing because the best books market themselves on reader word-of-mouth.

Already, many successful indies, borrowing from the playbook of publishers, are assembling freelance teams of editors, cover designers, formatters and distributors. Tell me again, what can a publisher do for the ebook author that the author already do for themselves faster, cheaper and more profitability?

As an indie ebook author, your e-rights are valuable. Don't give them up easily. Your indie ebook is immortal. It'll never go out of print. Your e-rights are an asset - much like an annuity - which will earn income for years to come. If you write fiction, great stories are timeless. Your book could earn an annuity stream of income for you and your heirs for many decades to come. In the presentation, I show charts of how books can sell over time. For great books, the sales continue long after the pub date.

This doesn't mean that publishers will become relegated to the dustbin of history. Many authors - including many bestsellers - will continue to want the support of a publisher partner so the author can focus on writing books rather than assuming all the responsibilities of a great publisher like the editing, proofing, packaging, sales, marketing, distribution, foreign rights and backoffice.

I think the percentage who go indie will continue to increase. What do you think?

How to Make Use of the Findings

Our study drew upon an enormous data set, and the findings are distilled down to averages. We also included both fiction and non-fiction in the survey, and didn't differentiate between the two. The vast majority of our titles and sales are fiction, so please consider that as you evaluate our findings.

Your book is unique and may not conform to averages. Although some of our findings will help you make more informed publishing decisions, I urge you to use caution.

Think of some of the Viral Catalyst ideas that came out of this study as the opportunity to fine-tune your publishing. Consider each finding as a single data point. Consider it as an option for possible experimentation.

Data-driven decision-making can give you an edge, but the edge is worthless if you don't start with the foundation of a super-fabulous book. If you want to reach a lot of readers, write a book your fans market for you through their word of mouth and positive reviews.

Don't let data-driven decision-making cause you to make stupid decisions. If the data shows (and it does) that shorter book titles might give you a slight sales advantage, don't change your title to two words if the absolute best and necessary title is seven words. If the data shows that books over 100,000 words sell the best (and it does), but you think your story works better at 70,000 words, don't bloat your story. Use common sense and do what's right for you book, and do what's right for your reader, and what's right for your personal ambitions as an author.

Also consider that this survey, like last year's survey, will be read by thousands of other authors and publishers, and may influence their decision-making. Last year's presentation on Slideshare has already been viewed over 75,000 times (wow, that blows me away!). Today, $3.99 price point appears to be an underutilized opportunity because there are fewer titles than $2.99 and readers respond favorably to $3.99. However, if thousands of authors shift their pricing to $3.99 tomorrow, would the edge diminish? I don't know the answer to that.

Please Share This Survey with Your Friends

Thanks for reading. If you found this information useful, please share it with your friends. If you like the charts and what they represent, please post them to Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter and then link back to here so writers can benefit from the full survey.

Our mission at Smashwords is to empower all writers with the tools they need to become successful authors. We provide the free ebook printing press, the distribution to major retailers and libraries, and the best-practices knowledge that helps self-published authors publish more professionally. This survey fulfills one element of the best-practices piece. I hope it helps all authors and publishers, even those who don't use Smashwords.

If you're not yet using Smashwords, I invite you click here to learn how to publish and distribute with us.

Don't Miss uPublishU, the Self-Publishing Conference of BEA Featuring Jim Azevedo of Smashwords

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:56:00 +0000

If you're planning to go to Book Expo America this year, or if you live nearby, don't miss uPublishU, the one-day self-publishing conference of BEA that takes place Saturday, June 1 at the Javits Center in New York City.

In one day, you'll learn how to publish like a professional from nearly 40 experts - including several best-selling indie authors.

One of those experts will be Jim Azevedo, Smashwords' very own marketing director. Jim is giving two 50-minute workshops.

Jim's first workshop is titled, A Crash Course In eBook Self-Publishing: How To Do It Fast, Free & Easy! He'll provide a great introductory checklist addressing every new author's most common questions about ebook formatting, conversion, cover images, ISBNs, copyright, piracy, pricing and distribution. If you know someone just starting out in ebook publishing, it'll provide them the foundational knowledge they need to get a smart start.

Jim's second workshop is titled, How To Become A Bestselling eBook Author! This session explores the best practices of the most successful Smashwords authors, drawing upon information in my free ebook, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, and spiced up with new tips, tricks and case studies.

In between his sessions, Jim will man a Smashwords table, so please stop by and say hello.

Lest you think Jim is all straight-laced and stuffy, at left for your viewing pleasure is Jim in orange chicken outfit. Jim's the drummer for Rivals, a Bay Area indie punk band that has been helping your children bang their heads in the air for nearly a decade. Jim's also writing an ebook titled, How to Get Your Band out of the Garage. He's been blogging about it, and sharing draft chapters, over at Punkrockbathrooms.

Enough about Jim. Don't miss uPublishU.

For a full list of the amazing speakers, including Nina Amir, Bella Andre, Barbara Freethy, Jim Milliot, Sally Dedecker, Guy Kawasaki, Mark Leslie Lefebvre and more, click here.

Registration is only $99.00 if you register before May 15. Registration after May 15 is $199. Register early because I won't be surprised if the event sells out. Click here for more information about uPublishU, and click here to register.

How Libraries Can Launch Community Publishing Initiatives with Self-Published Ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:46:00 +0000

Libraries have long provided an essential community service by making books and other information products freely available and accessible to local community patrons. Libraries play a critical role in promoting literacy, a culture of books and the joys of reading.

With the rise of ebooks, public libraries are at a crossroads. Some large traditional publishers, which fear digital lending might cannibalize retail sales of both print books and ebooks, have been hesitant to supply ebooks to libraries at the very time that library patrons are clamoring for access to such products.

On March 21, I gave a three-part presentation at the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services symposium held in Lansing, Michigan. I outlined the opportunity for libraries to expand their community role by developing programs that promote a culture of authorship.

I've embedded the presentation below.

Libraries are uniquely qualified to orchestrate community resources and talent to help local writers become professional self-publishers. By holding seminars and classes, and by bringing local authors together face to face with readers and aspiring authors, libraries can help unleash the talent locked inside the minds and fingertips of their local community's writers. They can also help ensure a steady future supply of library-friendly authors who will want to supply their ebooks to libraries.

Smashwords stands ready to support public libraries around the world that have a desire to develop such community publishing initiatives.

Here in Los Gatos over the last six months, in partnership with the Los Gatos Public Library, Smashwords has been conducting a community publishing pilot program. I'd like to thank Henry Bankhead and the entire staff at LGPL and the Town of Los Gatos for their support and encouragement.

The elements of the program are simple, and can easily be replicated and expanded-upon by other libraries.

We recognized that in order to e-publish, writers needed three important tools:

The knowledge to professionally publish
Access to an ebook printing press
Access to retail and library distribution

We focused first on step one, the educational component.

We created three, one-hour seminars to educate patrons, aspiring authors and library staff about ebooks, and ebook publishing best practices. The three workshops included:

An introduction to ebooks - Provided library patrons and library staff a general overview of ebooks, ebook market trends, and ebooks at libraries. Attached to the presentation, Henry Bankhead of LGPL provided a tutorial on how readers can check out ebooks from LGPL.
An introduction to ebook self-publishing - Provided aspiring authors an introductory primer on how to prepare, create, self-publish and distribute an ebook. The presentation provided a detailed checklist of the most important steps necessary to publish an ebook.
Ebook publishing best-practices - This session focused on the best practices of the most commercially successful indie ebook authors, drawing upon the 29 best practices I outline in my free ebook, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success.

At Smashwords, we're happy to share the Powerpoints of these and other workshops with any library who requests them. The embedded presentation above contains updated versions of two of the tree LGPL presentations (#2 and #3).

Libraries could develop other workshops as well. A couple of the librarians from Michigan last week suggested to me that they could leverage their new media labs to bring together local graphic artists who could help local authors design ebook covers. What a great idea! And it's only the tip of the iceberg once libraries start considering how to marshal local talent toward the common objective of helping local writers produce quality books. How about classes on writing, or editing, or cover design? How about connecting local authors with library patrons who'd like to serve as beta readers or proof-readers?

Following the completion of the first three parts of the seminar series, Smashwords and LGPL worked on providing the last two pieces - the access to the ebook printing press, and the access to retail and library distribution.

Luckily, these latter two pieces were already built at Smashwords. The new thing we created for LGPL - which we can now offer to other public libraries - was a co-branded publishing portal.

At the LGPL website, they offer a link titled, eBook Self-Publishing Partnership. If a local author clicks the link, they're led to a co-branded version of the Smashwords web site, where the author can sign up for a free account and begin accessing the breadth of our publishing and distribution tools. The signup-confirmation email they receive can be customized by the library. We set this up for the library at no charge.

Each time the author clicks to upload a new book, they're greeted with another co-branded image that reminds them of their connection to Los Gatos Public Library.

The co-branded publishing portal is based upon the same technology we use to power the co-branded publishing portals for Sony and Diesel.

LGPL offers ebooks to its patrons by using an ebook aggregator which operates LGPL's ebook checkout systems. Soon, our books will be available through most of the leading ebook aggregators. This means that soon, local Los Gatos authors will be able to "Publish to the Library." Libraries have the opportunity to encourage local authors to publish locally and distribute globally though our partnerships.

As a Smashwords author or publisher, you have an opportunity to assist your local library. Contact your local library and offer to do a talk about your own e-publishing adventure. Or join with local indies and do a panel discussion. Download the presentation above and customize it for your own library workshops about ebook self-publishing. You have an opportunity to mentor your community's next generation of indie authors!

Encourage your local library to sign on with one of the many leading ebook aggregation services, such as Baker & Taylor Axis 360, 3M's Cloud Library, or Overdrive. Our books are available through Baker & Taylor today, and should be available through the other two in the weeks and months ahead.

If they're deploying their own ebook checkout systems following the Douglas County Model, tell them about Smashwords Library Direct.

Good luck, and have fun!

Apple iBookstore Enters Japan, Now Operates in 51 Countries

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 07:58:00 +0000

The Apple iBookstore today announced its entry into Japan. Apple now operates iBookstores in 51 countries. Over 140,000 Smashwords titles are available in Japan today.

Apple announce their entry into Japan with a rare press release. Click here to read it.

The press release contains an interesting tidbit I hadn't read before. It says the iBooks app, which powers the iBookstore on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, has now been downloaded 130 million times. Impressive.

Below, for your global ebook distribution pleasure, is the full list of countries in which Apple is now selling your Smashwords ebooks.

List of Apple iBookstore Countries

Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Bolivia
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Guatemala
Honduras
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malta
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Norway
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela

If you're not already distributing your book to Apple's 51 iBookstores, I invite you to work with Smashwords. Smashwords is an authorized global aggregator for the iBookstore. We make it fast, free and easy to reach these and other global markets to come. Click here to learn how to publish and distribute ebooks to the Apple iBookstore with Smashwords.

Apple iBookstores in the U.K. and Ireland Promote Self-Published Authors in Breakout Books Feature

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 06:31:00 +0000

Apple's Breakout Books is sweeping the globe, bringing unprecedented merchandising visibility to dozens of self-published Smashwords authors.

Apple’s U.K. and Ireland iBookstores today elevated self-published ebook authors to the top of the store in the latest example of Apple’s successful Breakout Books merchandising feature. This week’s Breakout Books feature showcases 55 self-published titles, approximately 40 of which were distributed to Apple by Smashwords.

Breakout Books is an ongoing promotional feature at Apple iBookstores. Today’s news follows massive Breakout Books email blasts to iBookstore customers last week in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland, and a growing drumbeat of Breakout Books features at iBookstores in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The Breakout Books feature was first piloted in Apple’s Australia iBookstore in December. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal covered the US rollout last month.

The featured titles are selected by Apple’s merchandising teams in each market, and showcase breakout titles from self-published authors around the world.

The criteria for inclusion is largely customer-driven - selected titles exhibit strong reviews and ratings, and have shown exceptional sales performance. It means that Smashwords authors who do a great job of wowing readers with their books stand a shot at gaining similar merchandising attention in the future.

The selected titles span recent bestsellers in romance, mysteries and thrillers, general fiction and literature, and sci-fi & fantasy.

To understand the significance of Apple’s Breakout Books feature, it’s helpful to note that such high profile merchandising attention has historically been limited to large, long-established publishers. By placing the Breakout Books feature front and center in the iBookstore, Apple is throwing its tremendous merchandising weight behind the self-published author community, and in the process is helping to level the playing field for all writers.

The increased worldwide merchandising by Apple of self-published ebooks speaks, I think, to the rising importance of indie authors to the future of book publishing and book retailing. Self-published ebooks satisfy a large and growing segment of the book-buying audience. These readers appreciate high-quality books at affordable prices. Most of the featured Smashwords books today are priced around £1.99 (around $2.99 USD), and several of the books featured today are priced at FREE.

39 Smashwords Books Featured in Breakout Books

Here’s a list of the Smashwords books featured in this promotion, in alphabetical order by title. If an author blogs about their inclusion in this feature, I'll try to provide a link below their name so readers can visit their blog.

A Highland Home - A Contemporary Highland Romance by Cali MacKay
   Cali MacKay celebrates Breakout Books (here too)
A Tangle With Werewolves by Reese Currie
Afterlife Saga by Stephanie Hudson
   Stephanie Hudson celebrates Breakout Books (here too)
Breathe by Elena Dillon
   Elena Dillon celebrates Breakout Books
Control Room by J. Daniel Sawyer
   J. Daniel Sawyer celebrates Breakout Books
Dangerous Evolution by Gregg Vann
Dazzle (Delaney's Gift #1) by Amber Garza
Easy Bake Coven by Elizabeth Schulte
Elizabeth Schulte celebrates Breakout Books (here too)
Edge of Infinity by Jeremy Reimer
   Jeremy celebrates Breakout Books
Elfblood by Kyra Dune
End Storm by Maz Marik
   Maz Marik celebrates Breakout Books
Fallen Too Far and Predestined by Abbi Glines
Abbi Glines celebrates Breakout Books
Harvest Moon by C.L. Bevill
Hopeless by Colleen Hoover
Just a Little Crush by Tracie Puckett
   Tracie Puckett celebrates Breakout Books
Moon Island (A Vampire for Hire Novel) by J.R. Rain
Needle In The Groove by Jeff Noon
Noah (5th Street #1) by Elizabeth Reyes
   Elizabeth Reyes celebrates Breakout Books
Red Spirit by Humphrey Hawksley
Shudder by V. J. Chambers
Solar Island (A Tara Shores Thriller) by Rick Chesler
Sophie's Secret by Tara West
   Tara West celebrates Breakout Books
Sparks by David Quantick
Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0 by Randolph LaLonde
Taunt (Ava Delaney #2) by Claire Farrell
The Attribute of the Strong by Stephen Sweeney
   Stephen Sweeney celebrates Breakout Books
The Boy Who Sneaks In My Bedroom Window by Kirsty Moseley
   Kirsty Moseley celebrates Breakout Books
The Charmer by Autumn Dawn
Autumn Dawn celebrates Breakout Books
The Curse of Credesar by Robert E. Keller
Robert Keller celebrates Breakout Books
The One You Fear and The One You Love by Paul Pilkington
   Paul Pilkington celebrates Breakout Books (here too)
The Penal Colony by Richard Herley
   Richard Herley celebrates Breakout Books
Thirst (Ava Delaney #1) by Claire Farrell
Too Close For Comfort by Adam Croft
   Adam Croft celebrates Breakout Books
Wanted by Kelly Elliott
   Kelly Elliott celebrates Breakout Books
When Summer Ends by Isabelle Rae
Wicked Game by Matt Johnson
Matt Johnson celebrates Breakout Books

The Breakout Books feature is a permanent, rotating feature updated by Apple over time as new indie books break out. The feature can be found on the iBookstore at http://iTunes.com/BreakoutBooks. If you're outside the U.K., this will show you the current Breakout Books selection in your local store.

Please join me in congratulating these Smashwords authors on their success. Their success will open the door for many more Smashwords authors in the future.

Six Tips to Bring Your Book Back from the Doldrums - Reading the Reader Tea Leaves

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:34:00 +0000

A few times each month, I’ll receive a plaintive email from an author asking me why their book isn’t selling better.

It’s always tough to receive these emails, because I know behind the email is an author who’s feeling disappointed, or possibly depressed their years of effort have borne no fruit. The impossibly of answering such a question makes it all the tougher. There’s no one single magic bullet.

Some of the authors who contact me are considering throwing in the towel. I always try to respond with some feedback that might set them on the right course, often by encouraging them to study the best practices of their fellow authors, as I chronicle in The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide and The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. Sometimes my feedback is well-received, and other times they’re offended when I share opinions they don’t want to hear.

The cold hard truth of the matter – which we advertise front and center in our account registration emails, the FAQ, the about us page, and in my free ebooks about e-publishing – is that most books don’t sell well. Period.

In my RT Booklovers presentation last year, I shared some charts on the sales distribution curve. One such chart is at left (slide 16), and it’s the friendliest, most sugar-coated of the charts.

Book sales tend to conform to what’s known as a power curve. There are a very small number of books that breakout big, as shown on the left side of the chart, then there’s a middle area where a bunch of authors are doing reasonably well, and then there’s the long tail that stretches out a mile beyond the right perimeter of the chart. Most books land in the long tail. They might sell a few copies here and there, or sell none at all.

Your mission as author/publisher, should you decide to accept it, is to take the necessary steps to move your book’s performance up to the left side of the power curve.

In the traditional world of print publishing and brick and mortar distribution, you had only one shot. If your book didn’t take off immediately, stores would pack up your book and ship it back to the publisher for a full refund. Stores effectively forced your book out of print before it had time to find its audience. Stores had no choice – they were hamstrung by limited and expensive physical shelf space, and they needed to make room for the flood of incoming, potentially more-promising books on the way.

In the new world of self-published ebooks and democratized ebook distribution, the virtual shelf space is unlimited. Even if your book sells zero copies per year, the retailer will still happily list it. This means your book is immortal. If you don’t get the formula correct, right out of the gate, you always have another day, another month, or another year to improve your book so it can start selling.

This is the topic of this blog post. I’m going to share six tips on how to take a fresh, honest look at your book and evaluate what you might do to improve your results. Most of my tips help you discern what it is about your book that's preventing readers from connecting with it. I should note that many of these tips below apply to authors with free books too, because there are many books that get very few downloads.

Six Makeover Tips: How to Bring a Book Back from the Doldrums

Makeover Tip #1 – Look at your reviews at Smashwords, Apple, B&N and Amazon. Ignore the reviews from friends and family, they don’t count. Average them up. How many stars are you getting out of five?

Reviews of Never Too Far by
Abbi Glines (Apple iBookstore)

Today, when I look at the top 20 bestsellers at the Apple iBookstore, they’re averaging 4 stars. On other random days I’ve done this test, they averaged 4.5. The #1 bestselling book today at Apple is Never Too Far by Abbi Glines (distributed by Smashwords), and it averages 4.5 stars. Some of the representative comments are, “loved this book,” “Amazing,” “couldn’t put it down,” “couldn’t stop reading,” “such a wonderful story,” “cannot wait for book 3!” and, “this book hasn’t been out 24 hours and yet I read it twice already.” If you want to be a bestseller, good or good enough is not good enough.

You need to WOW your reader. It doesn’t matter if you write romance, mystery or non-fiction, if your book doesn’t move the reader to an emotional extreme, your job isn’t done. Take the case of my novel, Boob Tube. It averages around 3.5 stars. That’s not good enough. We’re not wowing readers. My wife and I should probably do a major revision if we want better reviews. Our sales range from 20 to 40 copies a month. What if after a revision, we averaged 4.5 stars? Imagine how that would move the needle on sales.

What if you don’t have reviews? – This is as big of a problem as poor reviews. If your book has been out for more than three months and it’s not selling well and you don’t have reviews, I’d set the price to free, at least for a limited time. What do you have to lose? Readers aren’t finding you anyway. That’s the decision we came to with Boob Tube. For the first two years (2008-2009), Boob Tube sold maybe 20 copies. It had only one or two reviews. My wife and I decided to set the price to free for six months. We got 40,000 downloads, a lot of reviews, and even our first fan mail (yay!). Then we set the price to $2.99 and it started selling. Without reviews at the retailers, Goodreads, LibraryThing and elsewhere, few readers will take a chance on you. FREE helps readers take that chance.

Makeover Tip #2 – Redo your Cover Image. If your book’s reviews are averaging over four stars, yet the book isn’t selling, your cover is probably the problem. This was the case last year for Smashwords author R.L. Mathewson. She was earning fabulous “WOW” reviews from readers, yet she was only selling a few copies a day (even still, a few copies a day is way above average for most authors). Read the interview with R.L. here.

When she upgraded her cover images, her books immediately took off and hit the N.Y. Times bestseller list. Great reviews plus a great cover can make all the difference. A great cover image makes a promise to the reader. A poor cover image chases potential readers away. Does your cover make a promise?

Here’s a quick test, and a challenge: If you were to strip away the title and author name, does the image tell the reader, “this is the book you’re looking for to experience [the feeling of first love for romance; fear for horror; edge of your seat suspense for thrillers; knowledge for a non-fiction how-to; an inspiring story of personal journey for a memoir, etc].”

Is the cover image professional? Does it look as good or better than the top-10 sellers in your category or genre? The human brain is programmed to process imagery faster than written words. When a reader is browsing book listings, they’re looking to have their attention arrested by something that speaks to them. Everything else is noise. Don’t be the noise.

Back to my novel. A couple bestselling Smashwords authors have told me that the cover of Boob Tube doesn't work. It took me awhile to come around, but I agree with them now. The image focuses on breasts, which are an obsessive, almost-debilitating focus for the actresses on daytime television soaps. We explore this in the book. Yet to the reader, the image sends conflicting messages. Is this book erotica, or pornography? No, of course it’s not, but the reader doesn’t know. Because the image isn’t resonating with the right promise, we’re probably chasing away readers who would otherwise be drawn to the story.

Makeover Tip #3 – Is your book priced too high? When a book is priced too high, it makes the book less affordable to the reader. If you're an unknown author, it makes the reader less willing to take a chance on you. For readers who could afford it, the high price can makes the book less desirable when there are alternative books of equal quality at less cost. Last year, when we conducted a comprehensive study of the impact of price on unit downloads and gross sales, we found that lower prices moved more unit sales than higher prices (no surprise there). We found $1.99 and below underperformed in terms of gross sales (unit sales * price). We found books priced at $2.99 earned slightly more than books priced over $10.00, yet enjoyed six times as many unit sales.

Dollars in your pocket are nice, but over the long term, the greater number of readers is what will drive your fan base and future sales. If your book is priced over $5.99, and it’s not selling well, experiment with a lower price and see what impact it has. There’s one other potential advantage of lower prices: if the reader feels they received a great read for the price, they may be more likely to give you a positive review, and a positive reviews will lead to more readers.

Makeover tip #4 – Look at your sampling to sales conversion ratio. The Smashwords store has a little-known feature I think is entirely unique in the ebook retailing world: We tell you how many partial samples were downloaded. If you click to your Dashboard, you’ll see a column for book sales and a column for downloads. The download count is a crude metric, but if you understand how it works, you’ll be able to use it as a relatively good tool. This data is only for sales and downloads in the Smashwords store.

The download data includes both sample downloads and full book downloads for purchased books. If a customer or sampler downloads in multiple formats (such as epub and mobi), or downloads multiple times, each time will tick the download count higher. To make the data cleaner, subtract your paid sales from the download count. Divide your sales at Smashwords.com by the number of downloads. This will tell you, roughly, what percentage of downloaders actually purchase your book.

When I do the numbers on my priced book, The 10-Minute PR Checklist, I find that approximately 13% of sample downloads lead to sale. That’s pretty good. When we last ran the average numbers a couple years ago, we found that site-wide, about 1 in 50 sample downloads led to sale, but when we looked only at books that had actually sold, the number was closer to 1 in 25 (about 4%). I’ve seen multiple recent bestsellers at Smashwords where the conversion ratio is 50%. That’s amazing! Use these numbers as rough guides. If you have multiple books at Smashwords, you can see how the numbers compare across your list. Compare with your friends. If you’ve had 150 sample downloads and zero sales, such as in my Tip 6 example below, it’s fair to say readers are sending you a message.

Makeover Tip #5 – Are you targeting the right audience? As a writer, you’re never going to satisfy every reader. That’s okay. Don’t try. Readers who love horror novels may not love romance. Know your target audience, and then make sure your title, book cover, book description, categorization and marketing are all aligned to target that audience with fine-tuned precision. If you send the wrong messages, you’ll fail to attract the right readers. Instead, you’ll attract the wrong reader, and the wrong reader will give you poor reviews. Again, I’ll use my own novel as an example (since I’m not afraid to illustrate my mistakes!). Early in our novel, a dead body is discovered, so there’s a bit of a mystery about who did it. It’s a minor plot point, and the book isn’t categorized as mystery. However, at one time in 2011, our book description played up the mystery surrounding the murder. For at least one reader, after she read the description she downloaded the book thinking it was a murder mystery. It’s not. It’s a book about the dark side of Hollywood celebrity.

As a result, we disappointed her, and received this one-star review:

“If you want to read about drug use, masochism, naive behavior leading to wrecked lives and truly disgusting eating disorders, this book is for you. If you were looking for a murder mystery, look somewhere else. I got more than 50% into the book and no one was calling the death a murder. So, no investigation, no questions, none of the things that make a book a murder mystery.”

Following this review, I removed the murder-mystery subplot from the description and focused on the top themes. So take a fresh look at your description, cover, categorization and marketing and make sure you’re targeting the right reader. Avoid the temptation to target a broader-than-necessary market.

Makeover Tip #6 – Pride goes before the fall. It’s tough being a writer. You pour your heart and soul into your words, and then lay your words bare before the world to judge. It takes bravery and confidence to publish. Speaking from personal experience, it’s heartbreaking to receive your first one-star review. We all get them.

Over at Amazon, where I have the most reviews, I received this about Boob Tube:

“A total waste of my time. As another reviewer said, the best part was when I decided to stop reading it! If I could give it a minus star, I would.”

OUCH! Nothing’s worse than when the reader hates the book so much they don’t even finish it, and then they leave a review like that just to drive the knife deeper. What if the book got better later? What if everything started making sense on the next page? Readers are a fickle bunch.

To press forward as a writer, we have to decide what we can learn from, and what we can ignore. Find your strength from your five-star reviews (we have those too!), and carefully find your inspiration about where you might improve from the negative reviews. I try to learn something from every review, even if I don’t agree with it. Some writers, after receiving such scathing criticism, might feel inclined to curl up in a fetal position, unpublish their books, and give up. Never give up!

The opposite response to reader feedback, however, can be equally destructive, and that’s to let pride leave you deaf and dumb to the bread crumb clues your readers are giving you. If you want to be a successful writer, you have to be willing to listen to the judgment of readers. Your readers, through their word of mouth, will determine how many other readers you reach.

I think the chat transcript below serves as a good case study in pride (in fact, it was the spark that led me to write this blog post). The author contacted me on my personal Facebook page. As much as I try to separate my personal life from my private life - and I discourage Smashwords inquiries over my personal page - at Facebook it’s difficult to divorce the two without coming across as a rude ogre. If someone messages me, I try to respond. I omitted his name, country and other details to protect his identity. I made minor edits for typo fixes or clarity. Warning: There's not a happy ending.

Author: Hey Mark. Good evening

MC: hi there

Author: I have published 3 books on Smashwords around a year back. But I haven't been paid a penny since then as [Smashwords] claims that there have been no sales of my book. Same is the case with Createspace where I have published 5 books since last two years and same with KDP where I published 6 books since last two years.

MC: Sign in to your Smashwords account, click to the Dashboard, then click to the Sales and Payments report, then click to the different years. You've got sales but you haven’t reached the payment threshold of $10.

Author: Since American Government is behind my ass as they are working on my brains and spiritual development for last 15 years, I suspect they have hacked into my accounts everywhere. I live in [country omitted] but have briefly worked in US with [employer omitted] and then In England for [employer omitted] for [X] years

MC: No. That's not happening. Take a look at my two free ebooks, The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, and The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. You'll learn what the bestselling authors are doing. It's tough to sell books, so you're not alone. Also check out the FAQ to learn how to take fullest advantage of the Smashwords platform, and if you have additional questions, please contact our support team via the "Comments/questions" link.

Author: If you go to Amazon.co.uk and just search on [name omitted] the auto search features lists my name on top still I have zero sales. Is it possible ??? On amazon.es and amazon.it if you search on [category omitted], my four to five books are in top 20 out of some 200 books still I have zero sales for last two years. I am an MBA from [country omitted]'s top business school.

MC: Completely. Just looked at your books at Smashwords. You're not allowing sampling. That will almost guarantee no sales. Also, your books are only 3,000 words. The bestselling books are over 80,000. If you think Amazon is underreporting your sales, buy your own book there and see if they report it to you. Sorry I don't have better news for you, but readers are not responding to your books. My two free books might help you. Good luck.

Author: My books are a collection of [category omitted] so word count is not a factor for their being bestselling or not. I purposely stopped sampling as in first four months of my book’s launch on Smashwords there were around 150 downloads of my books but no purchase.

MC: Alright, so you need to take that as a message from readers that your book didn't meet their needs. Cutting off sampling only guarantees no chance of sales, because people rarely buy sight-unseen.

Author: which I failed to fathom

MC: This stuff is covered in my books [and on the Smashwords site].

Author: Also on [country omitted] retailers ( Online ) every 15 days my books go out of stock How would you justify that with zero sales worldwide.

MC: I can't answer that. We don't do print books. But if you're looking for a conspiracy, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. You should address the stocking question to the retailer, or to your print provider.

Author: First of all don't take this as an offence, i am neither barking , Just seeking help from someone who I thought would be considerate to my plight. As it turned out it is not the case. Goodbye

The author then unpublished his three books at Smashwords. I was sorry to see that. His decision only seals his fate.

Conclusion

If you never give up, you never fail. As long as you remain open to listening to what your readers are telling you, as conveyed through their action, inaction and reviews, you’ll be more likely to learn how to grow as a writer and publisher.

Read an Ebook Week Kicks off at Smashwords Sunday March 3

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 05:09:00 +0000

Read an Ebook Week, the world's largest global celebration of ebooks, kicks off this Sunday at Smashwords.

The celebration runs March 3-9. Enroll your books now on the RAEW enrollment link on the Smashwords home page. You can enroll your books to be 25%-off, 50%-off, 75%-off, or FREE. Your enrollment doesn't change the list price of your book. Instead, it generates a coupon code your readers can redeem during the sale.

The week-long celebration of e-reading is the brainchild of Rita Toews from Winnipeg, Canada. Rita is a soft-spoken mother of two and grandmother of one, and an author and cover designer. I profiled Rita three years ago over at The Huffington Post (click here to read the profile of Rita Toews).

Each year under Rita's volunteer leadership, the Read an Ebook Week website becomes a clearing center for authors, publishers, retailers and device-makers offering special one-week ebook giveaways to help attract new converts to the joys of ebooks. The celebration is also a favorite for device-owners who like to stock up their readers and tablets with deep-discounted books.

This will be our fifth year year sponsoring the event. The last couple years, as Smashwords as grown, the Smashwords Read an Ebook Week catalog has become the epicenter of much of the action.

Thousands of Smashwords authors will participate this year, and many will do so without lifting a finger. All free books are automatically included in the catalog.

Each year, the event breaks sales, download and traffic records for our web site. More than a couple times, it crashed the site as thousands of readers overloaded our servers by stocking up on ebooks like there was no tomorrow. Each year, it's a great test of our infrastructure.

Interestingly, although site sales drop off in the weeks after the sale, they always settle in at a higher average rate than before the sale. I think what this means is that the event brings new fans and eyeballs to Smashwords authors.

The promotion benefits from a concept known as network effects (more on the concept at Wikipedia). Although the network effects concept is usually applied to computer networks and social networks, it can also be applied to Read an Ebook Week as well. The more authors who enroll, the greater collection of books, and thus the greater value the collection is to readers, and thus the greater the word-of-mouth excitement. The more authors promoting their participation, the more readers who are drawn in to discover the works of all Smashwords authors. In other words, for every author and reader participating, the event becomes all that much more valuable to the other participants. Do your part, participate, support your fellow authors and readers, and above all, have fun!

Whether you participate as an author, publisher or reader, visit the official Read an Ebook Web Site to learn more. Also visit their banners page where you can download RAEW banners, badges, buttons and bling to promote your participation on your blog or web site. The graphics are available for both English and Spanish.

Apple iBookstore Email Blast Features Multiple Smashwords Authors

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:21:00 +0000

Apple's US iBookstore, building on the momentum from the February 4 launch of their new ongoing Breakout Books promotion, today sent out a massive email blast to iBookstore customers spotlighting 16 Breakout Books from indie authors.

11 of the featured titles are distributed to Apple by Smashwords. Most of the other five authors distribute other titles to Apple via Smashwords, so congrats to everyone!

The promoted books include some new titles that weren't included in the February 4 debut.

Featured books and authors, distributed to Apple by Smashwords, include:

Romance
Always You by Kirsty Moseley
Hopeless by Colleen Hoover
When Summer Ends by Isabelle Rae

Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Elfin by Quinn Loftis
Ember by Jessica Sorensen
The Unsuspecting Mage by Brian S. Pratt

Mysteries & Thrillers
Dead in Red by LL Bartlett
The Witch's Ladder by Dana Donovan
A Dream of Death by Harrison Drake

First in a Series for Free
The Soulkeepers by GP Ching
Bridesmaid Lotto by Rachel Astor
Unenchanted by Chanda Hahn
Ethereal by Addison Moore

More to Explore
The Seventh Mountain by Gene Curtis
Sagebrush by William Wayne "Bill" Dicksion

Please do your part to support these authors by clicking on their title and purchasing their books. Several of them are free so you have nothing to lose.

The success of these and hundreds of other Smashwords authors at Apple opens doors for all indie authors. Indie authors are gaining increased respect in all book industry circles, from customers to retailers to agents to publishers.

Email promotions like this are among the most powerful merchandising tools for retailers. The email is landing in thousands or millions (I don't know how many!) of inboxes right before the weekend when book sales are the greatest.

All these authors will benefit not only from increased sales and downloads, but their names - their brands - have now be further exposed to thousands or millions of readers. This means these authors will become that much more familiar to iBookstore customers the next time they're browsing for their next read. It's a level of marketing support money can't buy.

Unlike one other retailer that shall go unnamed which reserves preferential promotional opportunities and royalties for authors who go exclusive, Apple plays no such games. Apple's Breakout Books feature, which is now rolled out in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.K. and U.S., is more democratic and open to all indies. Readers, though their purchases, reviews and ratings, are helping to surface these promo-worthy books to Apple. Indies who wow their readers have a shot at this.

My thanks to these authors for writing books worthy of such promotion, and my thanks to Apple and their iBookstore customers for showing the indie author community such amazing support.

Ebook Self-Publishing Takes Center Stage at San Francisco Writers Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 01:23:00 +0000

I just returned from an action-packed weekend at the San Francisco Writers Conference, one of the best writers conferences in the country. On Monday, I also attended Carla King's Self-Publishing Boot Camp, which was co-sponsored by SFWC.

For the four years I've been presenting at SFWC, I've always found the organizers enthusiastic and open-minded about self-publishing, but this year's conference took that enthusiasm to a new level. Multiple self-publishing keynotes and presentations from the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Bella Andre and even presentations from yours truly (embedded below!) helped educate newbie and experienced authors alike on how to advance their writing careers.

The vibe at SFWC is always positive, a top-down attitude that emanates directly from the amazing organizers Michael and Elizabeth Pomada, as well as a team of dozens of hard-working and enthusiastic volunteers. Speaking with organizers it was apparent that the vibe for this, the 10th Anniversay of the conference, was the most positive ever.

The reason? Self-publishing. Self-publishing took front and center stage this year. Writers left the conference confident that one way or another, their books will be published and available to readers.

Although many of us were ringing the bell for self-publishing, SFWC did a good job of presenting self-publishing and traditional publishing as equally legitimate paths. I think authors, publishers and agents alike are starting to realize how it can be advantageous for even traditionally published authors to dip their fingers into the self-publishing pool, because indie ebooks are incredible platform-builders.

I gave two workshops over four days and participated in two panels. Below, I'm sharing the two presentations which are uploaded to Slideshare.net.

The first presentation from Friday morning, titled, How the Ebook Revolution will Transform Writer Careers, examined 10 big publishing industry trends shaping your future as an author.

How the Ebook Revolution will Transform Writer Careers - 10 Big Trends that Will Shape the Future of Book Publishing from Smashwords, Inc.

The second presentation, given yesterday at Carla King's workshop, was titled, How to Reach More Readers with Smashwords, though it's really about how to reach more readers with self-published ebooks. Even if you don't yet work with Smashwords, I trust you'll find it valuable.

How to Reach More Readers with Self-Published Ebooks from Smashwords, Inc.

Please share these presentations with your fellow writers. You can click the "Share" link on the bottom pane of the presentation to embed these same presentations on your blog or website. Even if you don't yet work with Smashwords, I trust you and your writers friends will learn something useful.

If you're new to ebooks, here's how to publish and distribute ebooks with Smashwords.

See you next year at SFWC!

Smashwords Authors Gain Seat at the Merchandising Table with the Apple iBookstore’s Breakout Books Promotion

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:11:00 +0000

If anyone doubts the speed at which the epicenter of book publishing is shifting from publishers to self-published authors, doubt no more.

Apple’s iBookstore today launched Breakout Books in the U.S., a new book merchandising feature that showcases books from popular self-published authors, including several that have already achieved New York Times bestseller status (update: Cool beans - The New York Times covered the story today!). The Breakout Books section can be found on the iBookstore at http://iTunes.com/BreakoutBooks.

Most major retailers reserve such high profile merchandising attention for large, long-established publishers.
Although the iBookstore has always carried and supported self-published ebooks, today’s launch signifies an escalated commitment on the part of Apple, whose iBookstore currently sells books in 50 countries. The iBookstore first piloted the Breakout Books feature in their Australian store and has since implemented similar features in Canada and the U.K.

In the process, Apple is helping to shape a brighter, more democratized future for book publishing. More writers will have the freedom to publish and more readers will have the freedom to discover and enjoy a greater diversity of high-quality books than ever before.

Indie authors are hitting all the major bestseller lists, supported by retailers such as the iBookstore that are now promoting self-published titles alongside traditionally-published books.

The bulk of the titles featured in the Breakout Books promotion were distributed by Smashwords, the world’s largest distributor of self-publishers. The books Apple selected share several common attributes such as positive reader reviews, author popularity at the Smashwords.com store, quality cover design, sales performance across the Smashwords retail distribution network, and other data-driven factors.

The Breakout Books feature is now running with heavy exposure throughout the iBookstore. The selection of titles will continue to be refreshed with new breakout books and remain accessible at its own unique destination on the iBookstore at http://iTunes.com/BreakoutBooks.

WHY BOOK MERCHANDISING DRIVES BOOK SALES

A retailer’s merchandising decisions are among the most important drivers for book sales. To appreciate the significance of Apple’s move, it’s helpful to understand how readers discover books, and how a store’s merchandising decisions impact customer decision-making. In order for a reader to discover and purchase a book, the book must be:

available - in a store where readers are looking for books
discoverable – visible and findable in the store
desirable – the book must satisfy the reader’s desire for entertainment, escapism or knowledge. Key levers that determine desirability include bookseller recommendations, customer reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, author brand, author platform, and price.
affordable - the reader must perceive the value of the book to be greater than the retail price and the value of their time to read it

With many ebook stores now carrying over one million books, books that receive merchandising love have a significant discovery advantage over those that don’t.

When a retailer features a book, whether it’s placed in a feature collection such as Apple’s Breakout Books, or on the front table at a brick and mortar retailer, the retailer is essentially telling their customers, “Try this book first, you’ll like it!”

WHY EBOOK RETAILERS ARE EMBRACING SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHORS

Why are book retailers like Apple increasing their commitment to self-published ebooks?

Over the last five years, we’ve all heard about the advantages of ebook self-publishing from the author perspective (an opportunity to bypass publishing gatekeepers with fast, free and easy self-publishing; faster time to market; access to global distribution; higher royalties; greater creative control; etc.).

Few in the publishing industry, however, have examined why retailers are stepping up their support for self-published books. The significance of the iBookstore’s Breakout Books promotion becomes all the more apparent once this question is answered.

Self-published ebooks, combined with the power of online retailing, bring positive advantages to retailers, consumers and authors alike:

Quality – The job of the retailer is to connect readers with books they’ll enjoy reading. The quality of self-published ebooks – measured by reader reviews – has increased significantly over the last few years as indie authors publish with greater professionalism, from editing to cover design to pricing and promotion. The most successful self-published books often match or exceed the quality and desirability of traditionally published books.
Low prices – The average Smashwords ebook is priced around $2.99. Readers love low cost books, especially if the quality is as good as or better than what’s released by traditional publishers. High quality books sold at low prices makes customers happy, and what makes the customer happy makes the retailer happy.
Unlimited shelf space – In the old print world of brick and mortar book retailing, retailers had a limited amount of shelf space, so they could only stock a small fraction of available books. In the new world of democratized ebook publishing and distribution, self-published writers have the freedom to publish what they want, and readers have the freedom to read what they want. Unlimited shelf space enables more books to be published, and some of these books will go on to find large audiences.
eBooks never go out of print – In the old world of publishing, if a book sold poorly at first, the retailers would pack up the books and return them to the publisher. These returns would essentially force a book out of print. With ebooks, the books are immortal. They never go out of print. They’re always available to be discovered and enjoyed by new audiences. This means retailers can sell them for as long as the author wishes them to be sold. It means every ebook represents a permanent annuity stream for the retailer, the author and the author’s heirs.
Readers are the new curators - Readers have always been the ultimate arbiters of what’s worth reading, and reader word-of-mouth drives book sales. In the old world of publishing, publishers and retailers could only guess what readers wanted to read. Today, each time a reader downloads, purchases or reviews an ebook, this data becomes an expression of reader sentiment that ebook merchandisers can mine to identify books worthy of extra promotion.
Sales! - Self-published books are selling. Smashwords books are hitting all the bestseller lists. Smashwords retailers are selling millions of dollars of our authors’ books each year, and that makes me happy because it gives our retail partners strong financial incentive to support our authors with even greater merchandising opportunities in the future.
FREE series starters – Many of the bestselling Smashwords authors are writing full-length book series, and they’re pricing the first book in the series at FREE. FREE series starters give indie authors a significant discovery advantage over traditionally published authors who invariably see their book’s full potential squandered by high prices.
High unit volume – Follow the eyeballs. Since Christmas, iBookstore customers have downloaded an average of over 1 million FREE and priced Smashwords books each week. Apple, like many other retailers that also produce their own e-reading devices, gains two benefits from every download or sale: 1. They sell a lot of books. 2. The millions of hours I’d guess iBookstore customers spend each month to browse, download, purchase and enjoy Smashwords books makes the iPhone or iPad that much more essential to the customer’s life. Books make devices more valuable to customers. For indie authors, the high unit volume enabled by low cost, high-quality books means that the indie author can develop fans and author platforms faster than traditionally published authors.
Rapid publishing helps authors be more responsive to reader desires – Indie authors enjoy faster production schedules, which allow them to satisfy reader desires more quickly, or to cater to hot trends before the trends fade. Our authors can transform their fully edited manuscript into a professionally published ebook in a matter of minutes, and achieve worldwide distribution at Apple and our other retailers in a matter of days. Most traditionally published writers must wait a year or more before their book reaches the market (imagine all the missed sales!).
Indies are always iterating and evolving – Unlike traditionally published print books which remain relatively static and unchanged after publication, indie authors are iterating their books. As I documented here on the Smashwords blog, after R.L. Mathewson uploaded a new cover image to her Smashwords Dashboard, within days of Smashwords delivering the new cover image to the iBookstore, the book broke out. A couple of weeks later, her book hit the New York Times bestseller list. Since indie ebooks are immortal and never go out of print, the author can always experiment with different covers, pricing or book descriptions. I document these and other discoverability levers in my free ebook, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. The book identifies the 28 best practices of the most commercially successful indie authors.

Multiple Smashwords Authors Featured in Breakout Books
Below is the list of Smashwords authors who account for 54 of the books in today’s Breakout Books catalog. Some have more than one book listed. Each book is hyperlinked to its listing at the iBookstore. Several of the participating authors are blogging about Breakout Books. As I collect their links, I'll post them below their books. Visit their blogs and learn more about these great authors!

Addison Moore - Someone to Love and Ethereal (Celestra Series Book 1)
* Addison celebrates Breakout Books
Alan Sepinwall - The Revolution Was Televised
Alison Pensy - The Amulet (Custodian Novel #1)
   * Alison celebrates Breakout Books
Amanda Hocking - My Blood Approves
B.L. Hoffman - Mystery at Shadow Lake
   * B.L. celebrates Breakout Books
Bill Clem - Microbe
Brian S. Pratt - The Unsuspecting Mage: The Morcyth Saga Book One
C.L. Bevill - Disembodied Bones
   * C.L. Bevill celebrates Breakout Books
Camilla Chafer - Armed and Fabulous (Lexi Graves Mysteries, 1)
   * Camilla celebrates Breakout Books
Chanda Hahn - Unenchanted
Claire Farrell - Verity (Cursed #1)
Colleen Hoover - Hopeless
   * Colleen celebrates Breakout Books
Dana Donovan - The Witch's Ladder
   * Dana celebrates Breakout Books
Harrison Drake - A Dream of Death
   * Harrison celebrates Breakout Books
HP Mallory - To Kill a Warlock
Isabelle Rae - When Summer Ends
Jami Alden - Private Pleasures
Jamie McGuire - Providence
   * Jamie celebrates Breakout Books
JC Phelps - Color Me Grey: Book One of the Alexis Stanton Chronicles
JD Nixon - Blood Ties
   * JD celebrates Breakout Books
Jessica Sorensen - Ember and The Fallen Star (Fallen Star Series, Book 1)
JL Paul - All The Wrong Reasons
   * JL celebrates Breakout Books
John Locke - Lethal People
John O'Brien - A New World: Chaos
Joseph Lallo - The Book of Deacon
   * Joseph celebrates Breakout Books
Julie Ortolon - Almost Perfect
K.A. Tucker - Anathema (Causal Enchantment, #1)
   * K.A. celebrates Breakout Books
Kaitlyn Davis - Ignite (Midnight Fire Series Book One)
Kim Richardson - Marked, Soul Guardians Book 1
   * Kim celebrates Breakout Books
Kira Saito - Bound, An Arelia LaRue Novel
Kirsty Moseley - Always You
   * Kirsty celebrates Breakout Books
Kristen Ashley - Rock Chick
   * Kristen celebrates Breakout Books
Lindsay Buroker - The Emperor's Edge
   * Lindsay celebrates Breakout Books
Lizzy Ford - Katie's Hellion
   * Lizzy celebrates Breakout Books
Lorena Angell - A Diamond in my Pocket
   * Lorena celebrates Breakout Books
Penelope Fletcher - Glamour (Rae Wilder #1)
Quinn Loftis - Elfin and Prince of Wolves
   * Quinn celebrates Breakout Books
R.L. Mathewson - Playing for Keeps
   * R.L celebrates Breakout Books
Rachel Astor - Bridesmaid Lotto
Rachel Higginson - Reckless Magic
   * Rachel celebrates Breakout Books
Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0
Rebecca Forster - Hostile Witness
Sarah Burleton - Why Me?
Sarah Woodbury - Footsteps in Time (A Time Travel Fantasy (The After Cilmeri Series)
   * Sarah celebrates Breakout Books
S.C. Stephens - Collision Course
   * S.C. celebrates Breakout Books
Shayne Parkinson - Daisy's War
   * Shayne Celebrates Breakout Books
T C Southwell - Slave Empire and The Queen's Blade
   * T C celebrates Breakout Books
T.M. Nielsen - Heku: Book 1 of the Heku
William Wayne "Bill" Dicksion - Sagebrush
   * Bill celebrates Breakout Books

Please join me in thanking the iBookstore team for their tremendous support of indie authors, and celebrate the success of the Smashwords authors above.

The Breakout Books section can be found on the iBookstore at http://iTunes.com/BreakoutBooks.

iBookstore promotion tools for Smashwords authors:

Badges - right mouse click on a badge, copy to your desktop, then place on your blog or website. Hyperlink each badge to your book.

How to find direct hyperlinks to iBookstore books - For each of the featured books above, I have linked to the book at the iBookstore. Another option is to use Apple's LinkMaker tool at http://itunes.apple.com/linkmaker. Yet another simple method, especially if you're linking to multiple books, is to Google 'book title author name Apple iBookstore' which is often even quicker. Then click to the listing and copy the URL from your web browser.

Related posts regarding ebook merchandising:

How to Sell Ebooks at the Apple iBookstore

RL Mathewson Shares the Secrets to Her Success

Mark Coker’s 21 Book Industry Predictions for 2013

Multiple Smashwords Authors Hit NY Times Bestseller List

Will Book Publishers Become Irrelevant?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 02:44:00 +0000

(updated) I was interviewed today on NPR's All Things Considered by the amazing Audie Cornish. We talked about how the rise of ebook self-publishing will transform publishing for the benefit of writers and readers.

I shared how when we launched Smashwords five years ago, self-publishing was seen as the option of last resort, and today it has becoming the option of first choice for many writers.

But what about publishers? Where do they fit in the future landscape? I expressed my view that in publishers' attempt to acquire books that they think have the greatest commercial potential, they are excluding many of the potential breakout bestsellers. These authors will find their way to market via ebook self-publishing platforms, and once they learn they can do it better, faster, more profitably and more enjoyably on their own, it'll be tougher and more expensive for publishers to win them back. For this reason, I said, "over the next few years, traditional publishers are going to become more and more irrelevant."

At the end of the interview, they interview Michael Pietch, the current top Editor of Little Brown, and the incoming CEO of its parent company, big 6 publisher Hachette.

He takes issue with my comment about the future relevancy of publishers. He says:

"I think Smashwords is an amazing opportunity for people who want to publish themselves. I love the diversity of the publication that is possible now, but I object strenuously to the notion that publishers are irrelevant because publishers are doing things now that are extraordinarily complex [and] exciting. The ways that publishers can work to connect readers with writers now are the kinds of things that publishers have dreamt of doing since Gutenberg first put down a line a type."

It's a cool comment, and I don't disagree with him.

It's tough to capture my complex thoughts about publishers in a five minute interview. I don't want to see publishers suffer as the industry evolves over the next few years. I think the world is a better place with publishers, especially if publishers can do for authors what they can't do for themselves.

Will publishers become irrelevant? No, I don't think so, and I hope not. In the future I see, indie authors and publishers will co-exist and co-mingle along the publishing spectrum.

Four years ago, here on the blog, I wrote a piece titled, Why Book Publishing is Like Venture Capital. It's starts with a summary of how VCs aren't as necessary for some Silicon Valley startups as they once were, and it ends with a word game you can play with your word processor. If you're writer, the game is fun. If you're a Big 6 publisher, not so much, because the transition will be difficult.

Publishers once controlled the printing press, the access to retail distribution, the knowledge of professional publishing, the access to professional editors, and the marketing capacity to give their books merchandising advantage in stores. These advantages are dissolving. The playing field is leveling, readers are propelling indie ebook authors to the top of the charts, and the field is tilting to the indie author's advantage.

If you like interview above, please share it with your friends, embed it on your blog or on Facebook, and share your views about the future of publishing.

FEB 5 UPDATE:
The next day on All Things Considered, Mr. Pietch shared his perspective on the future of publishing, and why he thinks publishers will remain relevant. It's a great interview. I like that Hachette is putting a former editor in charge. Editors are the heart and soul of good publishers.

Smashwords Year in Review 2012 - The Power in Publishing is Shifting to Authors

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 01:40:00 +0000

Welcome to my annual Smashwords year in review.

In the last 12 months, tens of thousands of new authors and publishers have joined the Smashwords community. I welcome you.

A brief introduction to Smashwords is in order.

I founded Smashwords in 2008 to change the way books are published, marketed and sold. I realized that the traditional publishing industry was broken. Publishers were unable, unwilling and disinterested to take a chance on every writer.

Today, Smashwords has grown to become the world’s largest distributor of ebooks from self-published authors and small independent presses.

The idea behind Smashwords was simple: I wanted to create a free ebook self-publishing platform that would allow me to take a risk on every writer. I wanted to give every writer the freedom to publish, and every reader the freedom to read what they wanted.

Back in 2007, we designed our logo with this revolutionary ideal in mind. The up-thrusting fist holding the book represented our desire to transfer the power of publishing to writers and readers. Today, we still refer to it as our “Power to the people” logo.

The revolution is now in full swing. Indie authors know ebook self-publishing is the future of publishing. Ebook retailers know this as well. Traditional publishers, however, have been slow to grasp the transformative impact the self-publishing revolution is having on the industry.

We’re entering a golden age of publishing. The ebook self-publishing revolution will lead to a more great books being published than ever before. More books will touch the souls of more readers, because indie ebooks make books accessible, affordable and discoverable to more people. These books, in all their diverse and controversial glory, are cultural treasures.

Our authors know that every writer – every one of us – is special, and those who doubt this truth will become the dinosaurs of tomorrow. You can’t truly honor the culture of books without honoring the writers who create them. You can’t truly honor the value of books if you measure their value by perceived commercial merit alone. You either value the human potential of all writers, or none at all.

Every day, I’m thankful that so many writers, readers and retailers have supported the cause of self-published ebooks. Every day, I’m tickled pink that so many authors, publishers and retailers have partnered with Smashwords, because without your trust and support, we wouldn’t be here.

Unlike self-publishing services that earn their income by selling over-priced services to authors, Smashwords doesn’t sell services. The money flows to the author. We earn our commission only if we help sell books. We think our approach aligns our interests with the interests of our authors and publishers.

Since most books don’t sell well, and we rely entirely on commissions, it’s incredibly difficult to build a profitable business doing what we do. We figured out how to do it.

Smashwords highlights for 2012

2012 was another incredible year for the Smashwords authors, publishers, literary agents, retailers, libraries, and customers we serve.

Here are some of our key milestones for 2012:

Catalog growth: We're ending the year with more 190,500 books at Smashwords. 98,000 new titles were added to the Smashwords catalog this year. This is up from 92,500 at the end of 2011, and up from 28,800 at the end of 2010, 6,000 in 2009, and 140 our first year in 2008.

More authors/publishers/literary agents choosing Smashwords: Smashwords today supports 58,000 authors and small publishers around the world, up from 34,000 at the end of 2011, 12,100 in 2010, 2,400 in 2009, and 90 in 2008.
Profitability: Smashwords has been profitable for 27 straight months, and our profitability is growing as our business grows. We’ve done this without bringing in outside venture capital, which means we’re free to pursue our unconventional business model without the interference of outside investors. Profitability is important, because it means we’re here for the long haul. It means we have the resources to reinvest in our business for the benefit of the authors, publishers, retailers, libraries, and readers we serve. Nowhere is this investment more apparent than in our staffing numbers (next item).
Employee Count: We’re ending 2012 with 19 employees, up from 13 in 2011, and 3 in 2010. This year we continued to invest heavily in customer service and software development.
Faster-Faster-Faster: Thanks to investments in technology and staffing, we’re providing faster conversions, faster Premium Catalog approvals, faster response times to support inquiries, faster distributions to Apple, Kobo and Barnes & Noble, and faster sales reporting. We will improve further on all counts in 2013.
Libraries: We signed new distribution deals with library aggregators such as Baker & Taylor Axis360, 3M Cloud Library and one other major aggregator not yet announced. We added support for custom library pricing, and we introduced Library Direct to support libraries that operate their own ebook checkout systems under the Douglas County Model.
Ebook Distribution Systems: We began a complete re-architecture of our ebook distribution systems to enable faster, more accurate ebook distributions and metadata updates.
Smashwords Profiled in Forbes Magazine: This was a big deal for us. For the first time ever, we revealed to the world our revenues (Forbes requires that startups they profile reveal numbers). Later in the year, we received coverage in the New York Times and Time Magazine. The indie ebook revolution is starting to go mainstream, though I think we're all still flying below the radar. That'll change in 2013.
Improved categorization: We completed adding support for thousands of BISAC categories to help our author's books land on the correct virtual shelf.
Merchandising collaboration with retail partners: We ramped up our merchandising collaboration with retailers, especially Apple, which has been incredibly proactive and creative in working with us to create new opportunities to connect Smashwords books with millions of their customers (See Apple’s Breakout Books promo). We continued to build tools to help our retailers identify books worthy of promotional love, because these tools help Smashwords authors sell more books and help retailers satisfy more of their customers, which is their primary objective.
Retailers earning millions of dollars from the sale of Smashwords books: Our retail partners have made incredible investments to help list, maintain, promote, merchandise, and sell our books to their customers. I’m pleased to say their investments are paying off. We want our retail partners to do well with our books, because the value they provide to our authors and publishers far exceeds the sales commission they earn.
We released the Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success: In March, I released this free ebook, which identifies the 28 best practices of the most commercially successful Smashwords authors. It's the lastest in a series of free ebooks I've written that promote professional publishing best practices. Along with The Smashwords Style Guide (how to publish an ebook) and the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide (how to promote any book and build author platform), my three books combined have now been downloaded over 250,000 times. Thousands of our authors and publishers have since put these practices to work.
Amazon: Our relationship with Amazon has been frustrating. Even though Smashwords authors have the freedom to bypass Smashwords and work directly with many of our retail partners, about 80% of our authors choose to distribute through Smashwords. They appreciate the time-saving convenience and simplicity of centrally managing their books and metadata from the Smashwords Dashboard. Unlike every other major retailer, Amazon has not yet provided us the ability to do large, automated distributions and metadata updates. As a result, our authors who would prefer to reach Amazon through Smashwords are forced to upload direct to Amazon. Although I remain hopeful Amazon will one day see fit to treat us as a partner rather than a competitor to be crushed, killed and destroyed, I’m not holding my breath. We’ve built a healthy, profitable and fast-growing business without their help, and we’ve done this despite their attempts to harm us and our retail partners. Unlike traditional publishers which would probably go bankrupt if they stopped distributing to Amazon, we face no such noose. In the meantime, we focus our energy on helping our true retail partners succeed in the marketplace.
We protected your right to publish legal content: When PayPal tried to ban certain categories of “objectional” books, we pushed back, and led a broad coalition of authors and pro-books advocates to overturn PayPal’s proposed policies. PayPal and the credit card companies decided to do the right thing. It was a victory for all authors, and demonstrated the growing power of the indie author movement, especially when we stick together and work toward a common cause. At Smashwords, we’re always advocating for the rights of our authors. Much of this advocacy happens quietly behind the scenes, outside the glare of press releases and media spotlight. We’re all in this together.
Smashwords Direct: Today, we released Smashwords Direct, a new publishing option at Smashwords that allows authors and publishers to upload professionally designed .epub files for distribution through the Smashwords network. The service complements our Meatgrinder conversion engine by enabling us to support ebooks with more complex formatting requirements.

Industry Highlights:
When we started Smashwords five years ago, self publishing was viewed as the option of last resort, and 99.95 of writers aspired to publish through traditional publishers. The stigma of self publishing that was so prevalent five years ago has given way to new credibility, as Smashwords authors top all the bestseller lists and set the example for the next generation of writers.

At the same time, we’re seeing a growing stigma develop around traditional publishers, which continue to underserve authors and readers. Just as traditional publishers were slow to embrace ebooks before they began their breakout in 2009, publishers have also been slow to recognize the transformative impact self-publishing will have on the business of books. Self-published ebooks still account for the minority of ebook sales, but just as ebooks will one-day eclipse print books, so too will self-publishing eclipse traditional publishing.

In 2012, some Big 6 publishers bumbled their way into the self-publishing business, starting with Pearson/Penguin’s acquisition in July of the granddaddy of vanity presses, Author Solutions (ASI). In November, oblivious to all the screaming indie authors who called foul about the business practices of ASI, Simon & Schuster introduced its own self-publishing imprint called Archway Publishing, powered by none other than ASI, and proudly offered publishing packages ranging from $1,000 to $25,000. Twenty-five thousand dollars? How do they sleep at night? By adopting the worst practices of the worst vanity presses, publishers telegraphed to the writer community what they really think about authors: Only a few of you are worth the investment of our time, talent and resources, and the rest of you are worth only the money in your wallet.

It was a cynical move. A move that will damage the already diminishing credibility of large, traditional publishers, even those which haven’t made such a bone-headed move.

In my 2011 Smashwords Year-in-Review post last year, I wrote:

“I think few people in the traditional publishing industry comprehend how this indie author revolution will transform their business in the next few years. Their world is about to be turned upside down.”

They still don’t get it. From the perspective of indie authors, it’s starting to not matter. Publishers risk irrelevanance if they don’t adopt more progressive business policies soon.

The writing is on the wall. Traditional publishers are earning well-deserved ridicule and stigma at the very time indie authors are shedding their stigma by blazing a better path forward. What I tell you here isn’t pie-in-sky theory or empty pontification. The numbers tell the story.

In 2010, it was virtually unheard-of for an indie ebook author to hit the bestseller lists at retailers, let alone the NY Times bestseller list. In 2011, indies began to hit the bestseller lists on a more regular basis, but it was still rare. In 2012, indie ebooks were frequently listed among the top 10 bestsellers at major retailers, and multiple indie authors landed books in the bestseller lists maintained by The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and others. For example, the week of August 4, 2012, four Smashwords authors hit the NY Times fiction ebooks list in the same week. Next year we’ll see more, and within a couple years indies will dominate all the bestseller lists and it’ll be seen as business as usual.

Some industry watchers might label my prediction delusional. Indie authors know it’s real because some of them are experiencing it today, and they’re sharing their results with their fellow indies.
At Smashwords, where we distribute books to most major retailers, we see the sales numbers. We see how our books are starting to earn more dollars than many traditionally published books. This growth is not because Smashwords is wonderful, it’s because all writers are wonderful. You can’t love books without loving the writers who write them.

What’s driving the rise of indie ebooks? There are multiple factors, chief among them include:

Indie authors are learning to become professional publishers – Indies are pioneering the publishing best practices of tomorrow, as I note in the Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. They’re becoming more sophisticated publishers, and they’re starting to publish better books, priced more competitively, written more responsively to reader tastes, and more broadly distributed.
It’s a game of numbers – Although only a small fraction of indie ebooks grace the bestseller lists, the publishing output of indie authors is unprecedented. Authors are now releasing over 9,000 books per month on the Smashwords platform. Thanks to such democratized publishing and distribution, the business of publishing has become available and accessible to all writers, for FREE. Writers who were previously shut out of publishing – simply because the conventional publishing business was broken and unable to take a risk on every author – are now publishing for free at Smashwords and elsewhere. Writers who previously gave up on writing are now writing again, because every writer can now confidently begin a book and know that it will be published, one way or another.

In my 2013 book publishing predictions post, I talked about how future bestsellers are like baby black swans. They’re extremely rare, and hidden and indistinguishable amid flocks of baby black geese. Publishers devote enormous energy trying to cull the flock and eliminate the geese, yet at the same time they’re also indiscriminately culling black swans. Self-publishing changes this. Self-publishing gives all writers – the geese and rare swans alike – the freedom to publish direct to their readers, today, and be judged. Readers are the only ones capable of reliably identifying the black swans. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Readers have always created bestsellers through their impassioned word-of-mouth.

When we analyze the future of publishing, where authors become more professional, and all books are given a chance in the marketplace, the law of numbers would indicate that it becomes a reasonable and inevitable conclusion that self-publishing will hatch more black swan bestsellers of the future than traditional publishing. The vaunted editorial gatekeeping function of publishers, long mistakenly believed to be a public service, has become a public disservice. At the end of the day the smart folks in publishing can only guess at what readers want to read. Publishers have long been in the business of throwing spaghetti against the wall, and then retroactively taking credit for the few books that become bestsellers. Now writers can throw their own spaghetti, and when it’s cooked just right, the author can take the deserved credit.
Retailers welcome indie ebooks – Retailers have been true enablers in the ebook revolution. Ever since 2009, every major retailer has welcomed self-published ebooks. These retailers have collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars to bring readers to their stores, and these readers are purchasing these books. Retailers and authors alike are earning millions of dollars for their efforts, which makes it a win-win for retailer and author.
Ebook Self publishing is simply a superior method of publishing – Ebooks cost less to produce, package and distribute than print books. There’s no inventory, and therefore no returns of unsold inventory. With a traditional publisher, it often takes 12 months or more before the book is released. With indie ebooks, the book is published instantly to a worldwide market. The indie author enjoys greater creative freedom, a closer relationship with their readers, the ability to earn 85-100% net as opposed to the paltry 25% of net paid by publishers, and the ability to price lower - which has the virtuous effect of driving greater sales volume, faster platform-building and greater author profits. Unlike the static print books of yesteryear, ebooks are living creatures. Indie authors can leverage Viral Catalysts (see my Secrets ebook for more on these) to make their books more available, more discoverable and more enjoyable. Unlike print books, most of which quickly go out of print, Indie ebooks need never go out of print. Ebooks are immortal.
Reading is moving to screens – Ebooks as a percentage of the overall trade book market will reach about 30% in 2012, up from 19% in 2011, 8% in 2010, 3% in 2009, and 1% in 2008. Within two years, ebooks will account for over 50% of book sales. As noted in my 2013 predictions, I predict that the number of books read on screens will exceed the number read on paper in 2013. If authors want to reach readers, indie ebooks are the fastest, most efficient method of doing so.
The global opportunity – The ebook retailers expanded their global footprint in 2012, and will expand further in 2013. This means an author in Columbia can upload their book to Smashwords today and see that book available for sale in the Apple iBookstore in their home country in a matter of days. And because that book is written in Spanish, it’s also available in the world’s largest Spanish-speaking markets across North, Central and South America (and Spain too!). Authors can publish locally and reach readers globally. This kind of global publishing and distribution simply wasn’t feasible under the old print model.
Stigmas of traditional publishers increasing as self-publishing gains street cred – Many Smashwords authors now publish direct to their readers and don’t even bother to shop their books to agents and publishers. At multiple writers’ conferences this year, I lost track of the number of times authors approached me and said words to the effect of, “I’ve been waiting for years to get picked up by a publisher. I’m done waiting. I’m going to self-publish and get out there now.”

What's Coming to Smashwords in 2013?

At Smashwords we consider our business in constant beta. Every day we’re tweaking our business processes and technology to make everything we do faster, more reliable, more scalable, more efficient and more competitive.

In 2013 we will continue to invest in people and technology to better serve our authors, publishers, retailers, and libraries.

Here’s a brief sampling of what you can expect from Smashwords in 2013:

Discovery – We’ll improve our metadata to make our books more discoverable by readers. One such example is series. Currently, we don’t offer an elegant method of identifying books in a series. You’ll see this in 2013.
Retailer Merchandising – We’ll continue building tools, processes and relationships that give Smashwords-distributed books increased visibility to the merchandising managers at the major ebook retailers. By serving our retailers, and helping them identify Smashwords books that are worthy of extra in-store promotion, many of our authors will enjoy merchandising advantages not available to other authors.
More Distribution – We’ll continue to create new distribution opportunities for our authors and publishers. We believe the more high-quality retailers promoting our books to readers, the better.
Faster Distribution – In 2011, we shipped books to our retailers once per week. In 2012 we began shipping multiple times daily to Apple, once-daily to Kobo, and twice-weekly to Barnes & Noble. In 2013 we will continue to work with our retail partners to allow faster shipments and faster metadata updates. This will give authors greater control over their distribution.
Faster Reporting – We provided faster sales reporting in 2012, compared to the previous year, but we still have much improvement to make, both in speed and schedule consistency. We will continue to make incremental progress here in 2013.
Faster Premium Catalog Approvals – Six months ago Premium Catalog approvals took up to 13 days from the date of upload. Today approval times range from 1-5 days. We will continue to add staff and technology to improve the speed of reviews so your books can reach retailers faster.
Improvements to Smashwords Store – When people tell us the design of the Smashwords store is so circa 2000, we take it as a compliment because we think they’re being generous by at least a decade. The Smashwords web site user interface is outdated. We’ve neglected the design and customer experience of the Smashwords store, in favor of investing our limited resources on the distribution side of our business where we generate over 90% of our revenue.

2013 is the year we will give the Smashwords store a facelift, not because we have designs on becoming a large ebook retailer (well, actually, we already are, even though that’s not our focus), but because we think an updated site will help us attract more books and more customers that we can feed to our retail partners. In 2013, expect to see us start adding links to some of our retail partners, so the millions of visitors to the Smashwords site can enjoy greater freedom to purchase our books and support our authors at their favorite ebook retailers. Although an individual ebook sale at Smashwords earns the author a higher royalty than a book sold at our retail partners, a book sold at our retailers brings a multiplier advantage, because it drives their “also bought” algorithms. Put most simply, our retailer partners with their broader customer reach have the ability to turn each sale into more sales than we can at the Smashwords site.
Improvements to Smashwords Direct – As I write this, Smashwords Direct has been operational for about one day. We’ll make multiple iterative improvements to Smashwords Direct in 2013 because we want to make it as easy as possible for Smashwords to become the ebook distributor of choice for as many authors and publishers around the world as possible.
Expansion of “Mark’s List” – A couple of years ago, we created a simple auto-responder email (email to list@smashwords.com) that contains a list of recommended, low-cost ebook formatters and cover designers. When you hire off of this list, all your money goes straight to the service provider performing the work. We don’t receive a commission, advertising fee or kickback of any sort. This means you gain access to valuable services at the lowest possible cost. Most of the providers are fellow Smashwords authors. We’ll expand the list in 2013 to contain more service categories. The application process will be announced at Smashwords Site Updates as we open up the list to more providers. There may be some surprises, but I’ll save that for another time.

My thanks to you

I want to express my sincere appreciation to every Smashwords author, publisher, reader, retailer, literary agent, service provider partner, and angel who has supported Smashwords over the last few years. I want to especially thank authors who continued distributing their books through Smashwords despite the inevitable growing pains experienced by both Smashwords and our retailers. Those of you who left and are considering returning, I thank you too. Your support of Smashwords – especially your decision to distribute through Smashwords – is what fuels our ability to serve the greater community of all writers around the world.

Although I’m excited by what we’ve accomplished thanks to your talent and support, I’m even more excited by the future that lies ahead of us. I still believe we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. I believe that within five years, the majority of bestselling ebooks will be published by self-published authors, and I want those authors to be Smashwords authors. Help me realize this, because working together we can create a better future for writers, readers, retailers, libraries, and all those who contribute to the culture of books.

Happy New Year and safe holidays. Peace to all.

Smashwords Supports EPUB Uploads With Smashwords Direct

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:28:00 +0000

One year ago in my 2011 annual year-in-review here at the Smashwords Blog, we committed to support direct EPUB uploads to the Smashwords platform in the second half of 2012.

Today we fulfilled that commitment with the launch of Smashwords Direct.

This new capability allows our authors and publishers to upload their own professionally formatted EPUB files for sale at the Smashwords store, and for distribution to the Smashwords retail distribution network.

This first iteration of Smashwords Direct supports two methods of direct EPUB upload:

You can replace your Smashwords-generated EPUB with your own EPUB. To do this, click to your Dashboard, then click "Upload New Version," then upload your file.
If you're preparing to publish a new book not yet at Smashwords, sign in to your Smashwords account, click the regular Publish link, then fill out the publish page as you would normally, but upload your EPUB instead of a Word .doc. Later, if you wish, you can add more ebook formats to your book page by uploading a Word .doc, formatted to the Style Guide.

EPUB files uploaded through this new Smashwords Direction option must still adhere to the formatting best practices listed in the Smashwords Style Guide. Books will still be reviewed by our vetting team before shipping out to our retailers.

Smashwords Direct has some important limitations compared to our standard Meatgrinder workflow. For example, when fed a Word .doc file, Meatgrinder converts the book into as many as nine different ebook formats, making it readable on any e-reading device, and ready to be sampled both through our two browser-based formats or a downloadable file. If you upload an EPUB instead of a Word .doc, you won't get the multiple formats (PDF, MOBI and browser formats are most important), nor will you get the downloadable samples. At least not yet. We do plan to add better sampling later, plus the ability to upload your own PDFs and MOBIs.

To overcome this limitation, you can upload your book as a Word .doc file first, formatted to the Style Guide, and then replace our EPUB with your own (assuming your EPUB is higher quality). This way, you'll have the major formats covered.

You'll find the latest documentation for Smashwords Direct here: https://www.smashwords.com/swdirect This is a public beta, so we invite interested Smashwords authors and publishers to begin using it and reporting their feedback direct to the email address, beta@smashwords.com.

Over the weekend, we sent out a call for sample files over at our Site Updates page to assist with our internal alpha testing, and multiple authors helped out. Thank you!

A few observations from our tests:

Smashwords authors and publishers are using multiple workflows to create their .epub files. Their workflows are as unique and varied as the writers themselves!
Smashwords authors and publishers are using various (and often multiple) tools to create their epubs. Some of the tools mentioned include Adobe InDesign, Nisus writer pro, OpenOffice, Jutoh, Atlantis, Epubmaker, LibreOffice, Writer2epub, Scrivener, HTML, Sigil and Calibre. HTML, Sigil and Calibre were the most often cited among the suppliers of our first test files.
Nearly 1/3 of the files failed EPUBCHECK validation. Yikes! The Apple iBookstore requires 100% compliance. None of the other retailers do. This means that a large percentage of people are using non-compliant EPUBs that will need to be repaired by the author (or their service provider) before we can add the files to our Premium Catalog. Because the authors are using so many different workflows and tools to create their files, our support team will be unable to assist with EPUBCHECK validation repairs. Our standard Meatgrinder conversion system, which relies upon Word .doc source files formatted to the Smashwords Style Guide, performs a lot of magic to auto-correct many common EPUBCHECK errors without the author's intervention, and we've long offered an EPUBCHECK help page for how to repair other common sources of problem from within Microsoft Word.
If the book says "Kindle Edition" or "Kobo Edition," we can't distribute it. This is your Smashwords Edition. Similarly, if the book contains buy links to Amazon or other retailers, we can't distribute it. The Style Guide has a complete set of guidelines, most of which are common sense and will improve reader experience, or as with the above examples, prevent customer confusion.

Smashwords Direct will allow us to support ebooks that contain richer, more sophisticated formatting than is supported through our standard Meatgrinder process. That's the idea, at least. Some of the sample files we received were beautiful, and contained features such as drop caps or nested NCX navigation that we don't support in Meatgrinder. This made us happy, and validated our decision to support this.

On the other hand, we observed several .epub files that were no better (and some worse) than what the average Smashwords author is already creating with Meatgrinder. The high rate of EPUBCHECK failures illustrates just one problem.

Meatgrinder has been vilified and demonized over the years, despite its proven ability to produce high-quality ebooks. Although Meatgrinder's not perfect, some of the criticism has been unfair. Many authors have needlessly avoided Smashwords out of misplaced fear.

One author volunteered that they'd heard such horror stories of Meatgrinder from their publisher that they kept their books off of Smashwords for that reason. That's really unfortunate, both for the author and Smashwords, because the vast majority of Smashwords authors have received professional-quality results with Meatgrinder. Our Meatgrinder-generated Premium Catalog books are pleasing millions of readers each month with rarely a complaint. Our retailers have told us in the past that our books have dramatically lower failure rates (measured in the fraction of a percent) compared to others. This tells me many authors who have avoided Smashwords out of misplaced fear have unnecessarily missed out on up to five years of sales and platform-building opportunity. I suppose if there's a silver lining to the launch of Smashwords Direct, it's that maybe we can help writers do the right thing (achieve full Smashwords distribution) for the wrong reason (availability of Smashwords Direct).

Another author, upon us presenting him with the list of EPUBCHECK errors (these errors read like gobblygook to anyone who's not an HTML expert!) decided he was going to go back to Meatgrinder, even though the name unnerved him.

We have never claimed Meatgrinder to be the be-all, end-all of ebook publishing tools. We created Meatgrinder as a low-cost automated means to the ends, where the ends are to help any writer, anywhere in the world, publish a quality ebook at zero cost. The only tool they needed was a word processor. If they couldn't afford Microsoft Office, a free word processor works great too.

I still expect that most authors will continue to choose Meatgrinder over the Smashwords Direct option. Meatgrinder does great for the vast majority of books readers are actually buying, and the Style Guide shows how to incorporate sophisticated styling for those who need it. For the books that require even more sophistication, we now have a solution in Smashwords Direct.

In the end, we don't care which option our authors and publishers choose. We want our authors and publishers to have the freedom to choose what method is best for their book.

Our #1 interest has always been to facilitate the release and distribution of indie ebooks, and do it at the lowest possible cost for our authors and publishers. We're excited that Smashwords Direct will enable us to better support the distribution needs of current and future Smashwords authors and publishers, and we're excited that many of these books will contain professional-quality formatting that is above and beyond the capabilities of Meatgrinder.

We also look forward to working more closely with the community of professional ebook designers. We view them as valued service providers who can offer authors an upgrade path for the books that need it.

The next step is up to you!

Quick links:
Smashwords Direct documentation: https://www.smashwords.com/swdirect
Smashwords Style Guide: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52

Apple iBookstore Sales Surge Over Christmas Holiday

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:50:00 +0000

Apple today reported sales for the recent post-Christmas period.

Santa was generous to Smashwords authors at the Apple iBookstore.

The chart at left shows daily unit sales. Sales the day after Christmas surged 76% from the same day a week earlier. Sales for December 27 increased 65% over the same period a year ago.

This data is aggregated for over 125,000 Smashwords titles at Apple, so it gives a good representation of the overall strength of the store. Each author's individual performance will vary. Bottom line, there are more iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches in the world today than one week ago, which means your books just became that much more available, discoverable and purchasable by new readers.

The chart at left shows Smashwords unit sales at the Apple iBookstore for the last 24 months. If previous seasonal trends stay true, we'll see a record December, followed by a strong January, and then sales will moderate but probably settle in at a stepped-up level compared to October or November.

Congrats to Smashwords authors who remained fully distributed this holiday season, and thanks to our friends at Apple for their great support of Smashwords authors, publishers and literary agents.

Mark Coker's 2013 Book Publishing Industry Predictions - Indie Ebook Authors Take Charge

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:08:00 +0000

It’s that time of year when book people make their predictions for the year ahead. I bring you, my dear reader, my epic predictions for 2013.

I say "epic" tongue in cheek, because I went a bit overboard this year. When I sat down to write this, I was thinking of maybe eight or ten predictions with short narratives. I'm bringing you 21 predictions with expansive narratives. Skim the headlines then read what grabs you.

All of us in this business, from writers to readers and everyone in between, have a vision for where things are going.

Vision is an odd thing. To see something which doesn’t exist either makes one a prophetic seer or a delusional nut. At the wonderful Pikes Peak conference in Colorado Springs earlier this year, I had the pleasure to meet Donald Maass, an author and top tier literary agent for whom I have much respect. I attended a surprising session in which he trashed self-publishing. The mood in the room changed from optimism to dejection when he spoke words to the effect of, “If you don’t care to reach readers, then by all means self-publish.” I was floored by his comment, because it’s not what I expected from someone of his smarts. I’ve met with dozens of literary agents over the last 18 months, and 95% of them see things differently than Donald Maass.

When I saw him later that night at a dinner, I told him I thought he was underestimating the transformative impact self-published authors will have on book publishing. He looked me in the eye, smiled, and said, “and I think you’re delusional.” Touché! I think it was one of my favorite moments of the year. One of us will come to our senses eventually.

We are all on a journey. None of us know with absolute certainty what happens next. All we can do is position ourselves for the future we prophetically or delusionally imagine. History will judge us all. Those who position correctly will be rewarded. Those who aren't prepared will face the harsh realities of the future marketplace.

Every one of us holds the power to change the course of history by taking actions today that enable the future we desire. Our actions mirror our aspirations, which means the future of publishing will be determined by our collective and sometimes competing aspirations. Readers are our gatekeepers.

I challenge you, my dear writer, publisher or reader, to take charge of your future. Imagine a brighter and better future ahead, where the culture of books reigns supreme, where more people are discovering, reading, purchasing, publishing, selling, and profiting-from books. Imagine a future where more readers than ever before will enjoy a greater diversity of books than ever before. Imagine a future where the power center of the publishing business shifts from traditional publishers to ordinary writers where it belongs. This is the future I imagine, and it’s the future we’re working to realize at Smashwords on behalf of our 50,000 authors and publishers around the globe.

The utopian and often self-serving aspirations of industry participants don’t always intersect. Sometimes, objectives are at odds with one another, and at other times objectives are aligned. Our experiences, biases and fears color our perceptions, and sometimes distort them.

Much is at stake. The world's 50 largest book publishers alone achieved $68 billion in sales in 2011, according to Publishers Weekly. When so much money and power is up for grabs, industry players have a lot to fight over, and much to protect. Books are worth fighting for, so fight for the future you want. Otherwise, someone else may determine your future for you.

When I started Smashwords almost five years ago, I felt I had a clear vision for how ebooks could transform book publishing for the benefit of authors, publishers and readers. I positioned Smashwords and its services to serve self-published authors and small publishers. Although I believed we could build a large business helping authors publish and sell ebooks, I had no idea our revenues would grow so slowly in our first year, 2008, when our revenues totaled under $1,000. In early 2009, I had no idea that by the end of the year, we'd fundamentally change our business from that of simply a publishing platform to that of ebook distribution. Although I believed in ebooks, I had no idea the market would develop this fast. When I first started working on the Smashwords business plan, ebooks accounted for less than one quarter of 1% of overall US trade book sales. Although I believed self-published authors deserved to become future bestsellers, I had no idea that so many would hit the bestseller lists so quickly. I definitely had no idea that less than five years after starting Smashwords, we'd be supporting the e-publishing and distribution efforts of so many authors, small publishers and literary agents. None of us can truly predict the future, but we can still prepare for it by remaining flexible. We must be willing to roll with the punches when fate tries to smack us upside the head, and adjust our course and our beliefs when we make mistakes.

My crystal ball gets murkier from here on out, and for reasons you might not expect. The doubters like Donald Maass are becoming the exception, not the rule, and that worries me. When everyone starts swimming in the same direction and believing the same group think, that’s when I start wondering about what comes next. It's the job of any entrepreneur - and we are all entrepreneurs of our own destiny - to prepare for the future while surviving today.

My 21 Book Industry Predictions for 2013:

1. In the US, ebooks sales will reach 45% of US trade book market

Ebook sales growth in the US is slowing, but we’ll still continue to see ebooks take eyeballs from print books. Brick and mortar retailers will reduce shelf space for print as more readers turn to screens as their new paper of choice. Ebooks as a percentage of overall trade book sales in the US should hit 45%, up from what I’m estimating will probably be 30% in 2012. I might be underestimating both numbers. It’s tough to find reliable market share data.

2. Follow the eyeballs: 2013 will be the first year unit volume of ebooks exceeds print

The dollar sales growth of ebooks understates the profound shift to ebooks and screen reading. 2013 will be the first year more books are read on screens than on paper. To really understand the seismic shift toward screens, follow the eyeballs. Ebooks cost less than print books. The price of ebooks is declining, which means that the dollar sales growth cited above understates the increase in unit sales volume, and unit download volume. Furthermore, the data doesn’t measure free downloads.

Here’s a newsflash, and you’re reading it here first: Smashwords authors are generating about 3 million downloads at the Apple iBookstore each month, for books priced at FREE. Annualized, that’s over 36 million downloads. I expect we’ll do more in 2013. My 36 million number doesn’t include the millions of readers our authors are reaching each month across Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Diesel eBookstore, Page Foundry, Blio, the Smashwords.com store, and at public libraries. Our authors are building platforms and fan bases at a faster rate than many traditionally published authors.

When customers have the option to purchase two books of equal quality, and one is priced at $2.99 and the other at $10+, our data indicates the books generate essentially the same amount of dollar sales, but the $2.99 price yields six times as many unit sales. If you’re an author, and you have a the option to earn the same earnings at $2.99 as $10+, but at $2.99 you’ll build your platform six times faster, what price is the right price? It's a no-brainer.

Indie authors are leveraging the agency model, earning royalties of 60-70% list. This allows them to price lower, earn more per-unit at lower prices than traditionally published authors selling at higher prices, and all while the lower prices help them sell more units and build author brands faster than authors stuck with traditional publishing deals. Tell me again why authors of the future will want to hobble their careers working with a big publisher that over-prices their work, starves them of readers, and pays per-unit royalty rates of 25% net when indies are earning triple to quadruple that when they self-publish?

3. The current glut of books will become even more pronounced

Even before the indie ebook revolution, there was a glut of books. There are simply too many great books worth reading, and not enough eyeballs or hours in a lifetime to read them all. 2013 will remind us we haven’t seen anything yet. Thanks to the increased awareness and street cred of indie ebook publishing, and free online tools like Smashwords that make ebook publishing fast, free and easy, the next generation of writers is realizing they need not bow subservient before the altars of publishing gatekeepers ever again.

Smashwords authors are publishing direct to their readers and achieving global distribution. This is leading to a surge of new titles that never stop coming, and never go out of print. In 2013, self-published ebooks will swamp the titles put out by traditional publishers. This is good for the future of authors, readers and publishing. We’re in the early stages of a full scale publishing renaissance. Readers now have access to an amazing diversity of high quality books.

Some industry participants – some authors included – fear this glut, because they think it’ll either increase competition or decrease discoverability. Yes and no. More high-quality titles than ever will be released, because the barriers to publication have been eliminated. Readers will discover the best books and propel them forward through word of mouth. More poor-quality books than ever will also be released, and these books will be summarily ignored by readers, reviewed poorly, and will fail to spark word of mouth. Yes, competition will increase, but so will author opportunity, because more readers than ever will be reading ebooks.

4. It’ll get tougher to sell books

The easy days are behind us. In the next few years, I expect millions of out of print books will come back to life as ebooks. Millions of writers will self-publish new titles. The virtual shelves of online ebook retailers will expand to accommodate a limitless supply of ebooks.

In the early days of self-published ebooks when there were fewer books to choose from, the act of making your book available in the ebook format helped you reach a lot of readers. In 2013, authors will face more competition for reader eyeshare. Most of that competition will come from fellow indie authors.

Indies, as a collective organism, are become more knowledgeable, professional and sophisticated in their publishing. They're pioneering the best practices of tomorrow. All authors will need to up their game. That means more professional editing, more professional cover design, broader distribution, smart pricing, and more books. Unlike their static print counterparts of yesteryear, ebooks are living, dynamic and immortal creatures. You can upgrade your ebook to make it more available, accessible and enjoyable to readers at any time.

5. Publishers, in search of Black Swans, will lose authors to self-publishing platforms

Publishers are in the business of selling books, not publishing books.

The dirty business of publishing is simply the means to the bookselling ends. The publishing industry has always been built around a model of scarcity and exclusivity. Publishers want to acquire and publish only those titles they think have the greatest commercial potential. They reject all the rest as riff raff, and then they carefully meter out their chosen books in seasonal catalogs.

Publishers have built barriers – let’s call them dams and dykes and parapets – to protect against the hordes of aspiring writers seeking publication. Publishers require writers to work through agents, who are charged with identifying titles publishers will want to publish. Many top-tier agents reject 5,000 authors for every author they sign on. Publishers still reject many of the agented books as well.

Big publishers see the great unwashed masses of aspiring authors as a problem, and these walls insulate them from the problem. Publishers are simply unable to take a risk on every author. They realize most of these books don’t have strong commercial potential, and on that count they’re correct.

Publishers devote tremendous energy and expense trying to build barriers to hold back the flood, but in the process of rejecting the riff raff they’re also rejecting the unrecognizable future breakouts. These breakouts are the Black Swans of publishing, to borrow a term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of The Highly Improbable. As described by Taleb, a Black Swan event is unexpected, unseen, unanticipated, improbable, and unpredictable. When it hits, it turns everything upside down and changes the world forever.

Since most books fail, we can think of a true breakout book as a Black Swan event. The newly hatched Black Swans are invisible to the publisher because they're hiding in a sea of baby black geese. By sheer luck, numbers and some skill, Publishers pick out a few of the swans, but miss the others. Only the full marketplace of readers can reliably identify the black swans. In the dark ages of publishing, prior to five years ago, the baby swans were culled by publishers, denied any chance to reach readers. How many great classics have been lost to humanity simply because publishers missed the black swans?

This philosophy and attitude among large publishers that “most authors are a problem” and are unworthy of publishing is deep-seated. Yes, most authors don’t sell well. Most authors published by big publishers don’t sell well either, and therefore are unprofitable to publishers.

The secret to capturing the Black Swans is to embrace all authors. It’s what we do at Smashwords. I created the Smashwords publishing platform so I could take a risk on every writer, the swans and geese alike. We believe every writer is special, every writer has a right to publish, every book is valuable to the world regardless of commercial potential, and only readers can determine what’s worth reading. We don't sell services. We earn a small commission only if we help sell books.

Until publishers learn to honor, respect and embrace every writer, unequivocally and independent of perceived commercial merit, they’ll continue to lose the Black Swans to Smashwords, and they'll continue to disenfranchise writers. Publishers can’t embrace authors with platitudes. To succeed at self-publishing, the publisher must learn to embrace authors in a way that the publisher’s interests and author’s interests are properly aligned. Proper alignment is only possible if publishers help authors sell books, and if the money flows from publisher to author. If money flows from author to publisher, that publisher is a parasite.

6. Overall ebook prices will decline, though author brands will retain pricing power

It’s simple economics. Excess supply of books, unlimited supply of alternative non-book media forms, and limited supply of reader eyeballs means that the producers of books – authors and publishers – will continue to compete on price. When quality is equal, price is one of the dominant levers (convenience and selection are the other two) that drives consumer behavior.

Will book prices fall to zero as authors and publishers compete for readers? No. But authors and publishers must compete against free. Luckily, what writers write is completely unique. This unique creation has value, and if it’s desirable to readers, and the perceived desirability outweighs the price, readers will pay. Readers will favor trusted author brands. That means your opportunity as a writer is to build your brand.

7. Passive discoverability trumps other book marketing methods

Most books don’t sell well, even when backed by expensive marketing. It’s really tough for authors to earn a return on their marketing investment. Many marketing service providers will happily take thousands of dollars in fees, yet deliver few sales.

Authors need a better solution, and part of that solution is to recognize that marketing isn’t quite as important as most people think it is. Marketing is a catalyst, not a fuel. The book, and the customer's reaction to that book, is the fuel. In the year ahead, authors and publishers will place increased attention on passive discoverability.

Passive discoverability is all about making books findable by readers. The secret is to apply viral catalysts, a term I introduced and describe in detail in The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. A viral catalyst is something that makes a book more available, discoverable, accessible, and enjoyable to readers.

Think of your books as an object, and attached to the object are dozens of dials and levers (the viral catalysts) you can twist, turn and tweak to make your book more available, discoverable and enjoyable. When you get the combination just right, reader word of mouth kicks in and propels your book sales forward.

Think of these viral catalysts as beacons that are working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to broadcast your book’s virtues to readers looking for a book just like what you published. The beacons will shine on ebook retailer shelves, and readers will discover them through retailer-operated merchandising systems, search engines, reader reviews, and social media hyperlinks. By leveraging viral catalysts for passive discoverability, your book becomes findable forever.

8. Tablets will become the new paper as E-Ink becomes niche product

In the brief history of ebooks, 2012 was the first year that dedicated e-reading devices saw a unit volume decline, even though overall ebook consumption continued to grow. The cause? Readers are showing a preference for multi-function tablets like the iPad, according to a report released this month issued by iSuppli.

In 2013, this trend is likely to continue as readers are drawn to tablets, and these tablets become faster, better and cheaper. It's unclear how this will impact ebook sales.

On the one hand, as books become woven into the hyperlinked fabric of the Internet, books will become more available and discoverable to more people, even to people who aren't looking for them. On the other hand, these tablets are media consumption devices, which means books will once again have to compete against an ADHD-inspired array of alternative media consumption options.

With dedicated e-reading devices, such distractions are less prevalent. E-Ink devices won't go away because they still provide compelling advantages for many consumers.

9. Global will be the biggest story of 2013 for indie authors

The market for English-language ebooks outside the US will eclipse the US market in 2013.

As I predicted above, in the US, ebooks as a percentage of the overall trade book market will probably reach about 45% in 2013, up from approximately 30% in 2012, 19% in 2011, 8% in 2010, 3% in 2009, and 1% in 2008 (these are AAP numbers, with 2012 and 2013 my personal estimates).

This means that while the US market is still growing, the growth is slowing. Ebooks broke out first in the US market. Now they’re breaking out internationally as other countries enter the exponential phase of growth for their ebook markets.

Indie authors have a similar ground floor window of opportunity to become big fish in the small pond of these fast-growing markets, like the early indie ebook authors had in the US market in 2008 and 2009. And like the market of 2008 and 2009, larger publishers were slow to enter the party. Today on the global front, they’re struggling to overcome decades of legacy territory rights practices that have hamstrung their ability to distribute ebooks to all countries. They’ll get there soon.

As an indie author, you can get there now.

The rise of global also means that authors should modify their marketing to become more world-aware. Each store in each country has its own reviews and its own web page addresses. A great review at Apple or Amazon in the US is invisible to customers shopping in their UK stores (Amazon provides a link in their UK store to view additional reviews in the US store, though US customers aren't given a link to view reviews from other Amazon stores). Each store in each country represents its own micro-market, and your opportunity is to build fans everywhere. On your blog and website, start providing direct hyperlinks to the different stores operated by each retailer in each of your primary countries. Outside the US, English-language authors will do best in Australia, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand, but you'll still sell into other countries. Your social media marketing on Facebook, Twitter or on your blog will cross most international boundaries.

10. Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo will redouble global expansion efforts

It’s a land grab. In 2012, all the major ebook retailers expanded their global operations. Amazon is now in about 10 countries. The Apple iBookstore is operating stores in 50 countries. Barnes & Noble entered the U.K. in 2012, and will probably make 2013 the year it goes completely global. Kobo has always had an international focus, and following its acquisition by globally-minded ecommerce juggernaut Rakuten in Japan, I expect more global expansion from them in 2013.

11. Apple iBookstore will be the breakout story of 2013 ebook retailing

With little fanfare, the Apple iBookstore dramatically expanded its international reach in 2012, starting the year with iBookstores in 19 countries and ending the year with 50 countries - far outpacing the global expansion of other retailers. Internationally, iBookstore sales surged on the strength of explosive growth in iPads and iPhones, and with readers showing preference for multi-function devices over single-purpose e-readers.

For the month of November 2012, sales of Smashwords-distributed titles at the Apple iBookstore more than tripled compared to the same month a year ago, a growth rate that exceeded the growth at other retailers in the Smashwords distribution network.

Despite the fantastic growth at Apple, many authors still treat Apple as an afterthought compared to the bigger book retailing brand of Amazon, and to some extent Barnes & Noble. It's not uncommon for many authors, in their email signatures, blogs, websites, and other social media networks to link only to their books at Amazon. This is a mistake because when analysts start estimating ebook market share for 2012 in 2013, I think Apple's growth will turn heads.

The growth of the Apple iBookstore is inextricably linked to the growth of Apple devices, such as the iPad, iPad Mini, iPhone, and iPod Touch. If sales of these devices continue to surge, the iBookstore will enjoy above-market growth rates. Apple's primary competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, both offer competing tablets, which, although lower priced, are starting from a disadvantage in that they don't have the hardware and software design experience of Apple, or the same fanatic brand loyalty.

It's interesting to think that the winner of the ebook retailing wars may be the company that designs the best e-reading devices. Screens are the new paper.

As 2013 progresses, keep an eye on market share data for the different tablet platforms. If the recent iSuppli data is correct, and if tablets continue to take market share from dedicated E-Ink devices, then the market share numbers will serve as a leading indicator of which retailer is gaining advantage in the ebook marketplace. Two days ago, an industry analyst at Pacific Crest Securities came out with a report that said his channel sources have provided him data that led him to conclude that the Kindle Fire tablet is selling more poorly than he expected as buyers choose Apple devices instead. If true, it could be a turning point.

Ever since launching the iBookstore in early 2010, Apple has been aggressively adding content and capabilities to their store, and has expanded its global footprint faster than any retailer. Despite their progress, they maintain a low key public profile when it comes to touting their growth and accomplishments. I'm not sure why they've taken this low-key approach. Apple keeps their future plans close to the vest.

Apple has always been supportive of indie authors. They pioneered the agency pricing model, which dramatically increased author earnings over the industry's conventional wholesale model. Agency pricing puts pricing decisions in the hands of authors and publishers, where it belongs. It's counterintuitive to some, but the agency model actually leads to price reductions. It gives authors greater flexibility to compete on price, and earn more at lower prices compared to what they'd earn under the old wholesale model.

Apple's global merchandising team is impressive. They're customer centric. They're giving our authors a seat at the merchandising table. They've been more proactive than any other retailer at promoting Smashwords titles, both individually and within larger creative promotions, such as the Breakout Author promotion that happened in Australia and New Zealand featuring thousands of Smashwords authors.

Apple's pro-indie merchandising efforts have paid big dividends for Apple. These books are getting great reviews from Apple customers. Our books are selling. Smashwords titles routinely grace the top 10 bestseller lists at Apple iBookstores around the world. Apple's earning millions of well-deserved dollars selling our books, and that makes me happy.

2013 will be the year people start paying fresh attention to Apple. Thanks to Apple's success, indie authors will gain increased credibility and respect in the publishing industry.

12. Amazon’s global ebook market share will decline

Amazon deserves immense credit for catalyzing the ebook revolution. Although Sony beat Amazon to market with a solid e-reader, Amazon helped put ebooks on the map in a way that no other retailer could. In the process, they’ve helped create livelihoods for many writers who previously faced few options.

That said, Amazon’s star could dim in 2013, even as its ebook business grows. Amazon’s ebook sales volume will grow significantly in 2013, but their global market share will decline amid increased competition from well-funded competitors such as Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others. We’ve seen it already in the US market. A few years ago, Amazon held about 90% market share in the US. Today, thanks to the rise of its competitors, Amazon’s market share has dropped to somewhere around 60% (Amazon doesn’t disclose its numbers, so the industry is left to guess the true number).

Amazon also faces a backlash from authors, publishers and partners who have grown weary of Amazon’s heavy-handed business practices. Amazon’s a fierce competitor and a brilliant strategic player. They play the game of chess like few others. Every move today is calculated based on its impact five years from today. By making moves today to exploit opportunities that don't even exist yet, they have shown an uncanny ability to outflank and outmaneuver their competitors.

Amazon's potential undoing, however, is greed and bullying. They don’t just play to win, they play to grind their competitors into bloody submissive pulps. They also have a more expansive, more inclusive definition of their competition than any other ebook industry player. Amazon’s working to vertically disintermediate everyone that stands between the content producer (the author) and the content buyer (the customer). In a cover story in Fortune Magazine this month, writer Adam Lashinsky notes that a favorite Jeff Bezos aphorism is "Your margin is my opportunity." That attitude may come to haunt Amazon in 2013.

If Amazon could invent a system to replace the author from the equation, they’d do that too. Actually, it's already happening, though not directly by Amazon's hand. One innovative publisher, ICON Group International, has patented a system that automatically generates non-fiction books. Over 100,000 of these titles are now for sale at Amazon, according to this story at Singularity Hub. As the field of artificial intelligence increases, how long until novelists are disintermediated by machines? It's a preposterous idea worthy of science fiction.

But maybe it's not so preposterous after all. Amazon has already shown a willingness to replace one author with another. Witness their KDP Select program, announced one year ago, which encourages authors to remove their books from Amazon’s competitors. The opt-in program aims to remove indie ebooks from the shelves of its retailer competitors, while at the same time making participating authors more dependent upon Amazon. By providing favorable sales advantage to those who opt in to their exclusivity program as compared to KDP authors who don’t opt in, they’re punishing their own non-participating KDP authors by providing KDP Select books preferential discoverability over non-participating books.

As Amazon enters new markets, as they did this year with India and Brazil, they’re making KDP-Select participation a mandatory requirement if authors want to earn the full 70% royalty rate which is otherwise standard in other Amazon territories, and standard at other retailers (and without the corresponding exclusivity strings attached). If you don’t opt in, you earn only 35% in these emerging countries.

Exclusivity works to Amazon’s advantage, but for the author it’s a crapshoot. From the author’s perspective, exclusivity carries with it a set of knowns and unknowns, placing authors in the difficult of position of playing Russian Roulette with their careers. The author can’t accurately predict or measure what they’re giving up by going exclusive (though based on what I’m seeing, KDP Select authors are harming their platform building in other channels), but if they don’t go exclusive they don’t know what KDP Select benefits they passed up.

For some authors, Amazon’s attempts at exclusivity speak to their worst fears about the company. Despite the criticism and bad will generated by these policies, Amazon soldiers on, doubling down on its exclusivity strategy. Either we’re witnessing Amazon making a strategic blunder, or Amazon sees a future none of the rest of us see. A future where Amazon's the dominant controlling player and any author who wants to reach readers will be forced to do so under the thumb of Amazon’s rules, which are already the strictest and most vigorously enforced in the industry. Time will tell.

I think Jeff Bezos is brilliant, and Amazon is a great company, though I think they’d be better served if they dropped a bit of their crush, kill, destroy, turn-to-bloody-pulp attitude. It’s a high risk strategy that will either work well for Amazon, or it"ll blow up. At a minimum, Amazon’s “everyone is my competitor” attitude encourages its potential partners, like Smashwords, to pursue fruitful relationships with other kinder, gentler partners.

Amazon's actions, such as their controversial Price Check app, have revealed their intentions to do to all brick and mortar retailers what Wal Mart did to Main Street America. Competitors such as B&N (next item below), now have an opportunity to strike mutually complementary partnerships with companies that won't partner with Amazon.

13. Barnes & Noble will rise again like a Phoenix

Barnes & Noble is the Rodney Dangerfield of ebook retailing.

Industry watchers have been predicting the demise of B&N for a few years. Premature causes of death were said to be the rise of Amazon, or the DoJ or EEC’s anti-agency rulings, or B&N’s slow global expansion, or their poor cash position.

In 2012, B&N received a $300 million cash infusion from Microsoft, and entered the U.K. with an innovative brick and mortar strategy backed by 2,500 retail outlets. This strategy can’t be easily replicated by Amazon because retailers are rightly wary of inviting the Amazon fox into their brick and mortar hen houses.

B&N, by comparison, has a broader palette of synergistic and welcoming partners to choose from, because unlike Amazon, B&N isn’t hell bent on vertically disintermediating the retailing of all physical and digital goods in the universe. B&N hired a new global chief, and now stands ready, I predict, to execute an aggressive global expansion in Europe and elsewhere, in symbiotic partnership with allied retailers, that will solidify B&N as one of the top global brands for e-reading.

14. In the self-publishing gold rush, more money will be made in author services than in book sales

With the shift to self-publishing, writers must carry the publishing burdens once borne by traditional publishers, such as the cost of editing, proofing, book production, packaging, and distribution, as well as backoffice tasks such as accounts receivable, accounts payable and year-end tax reporting. Third parties are building businesses to serve the needs of indie authors. Most indie ebooks sell poorly at first, so it’s not uncommon that writers will invest an amount of money in their books that far exceeds their near term return.

This is a problem. Writers want to publish books that reach readers, but to reach readers they must produce books that are as good or better than what the big NY publishers are putting out. This means writers must invest time and talent in their books, and if outside talent is required, it usually costs money. With this burgeoning demand for professional publishing services, thousands of service providers will open up virtual author services shops in 2013. The challenge for writers is to procure the highest quality services at the lowest cost. Plenty of scamsters and over-priced service providers will be standing by to help.

The smart Kristine Kathryn Rusch, blogging on December 12 in a posted titled, Writing Like it's 2009, likened what happening today to a gold rush:

Here’s the thing: From 2008-2010, e-publishing on the early e-readers was a gold rush. And if you look at the history of any gold rush, you’ll see a familiar pattern.

A few people hit it big in an unexpected way. They make a small fortune. They broadcast the news of that fortune, and then hundreds, if not thousands, of people follow. They hook their horses to their wagons, drop everything, and head to the land of riches, expecting to become millionaires with very little work.

And what happens? Millionaires. Hundreds of them. Only those millionaires don’t get rich panning for gold. They open the supply shops, they serve food to the miners, they supply blue jeans and work boots and equipment, hay for the horses and rooms to rest in at night.

It’s not a coincidence that S&S [Simon & Schuster] has opened up an expensive do-it-yourself shop in indie-publishing land. It makes perfect sense. Think of S&S as the chain hotel who heard that there was a fortune to be made by offering rooms to miners who are too tired to pitch their own tents.

There’s gold in them thar hills, folks. And the gold is for business people who know their way around a profit-and-loss statement.

By the way, scammers always show up in the middle of a gold rush. Scammers know they can make a fortune off the ignorant. We’re in the scammer/chain hotel phase of this gold rush.

I think Rusch nailed it.

How can writers protect themselves? I have two recommendations:

1. Pinch Your Pennies - As I write in Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, pinch your pennies. As a self published author, you're the publisher. You're running a business. The lifeblood of a business is profit, because profit generates cash. If you run out of cash, you go out of business. Since profit equals sales minus expenses, and sales are difficult to predict and often minimal, it's important to minimize expenses. DIY as much as possible, especially when you're starting out. Invest your sweat equity (your time and talent) first. If you can't afford editing, barter for editing, and leverage beta readers. Once you start earning a profit, then carefully reinvest. Never borrow money to finance your ebook publishing adventure. Never spend money you need to pay the mortgage or to put bread on your table.

2. Work directly with the individual providing your service - When you hire professionals (cover artist, editor, proofreader, marketing pro), hire the professional directly, so your money goes straight to them, and not to some author services firm who will farm the job out to someone then mark up the fee several-fold. At Smashwords, for example, we have a free autoresponder email service called "Mark's List," where I maintain a list of low-cost ebook formatters and cover designers (send an email to list@smashwords.com), with prices starting around $50.00 (that's all!). You're hiring the freelancer directly. We don't get a referral fee, listing fee, commission or kickback, which means you're getting the service at-cost, as low as possible, and your money goes directly to the service provider you choose. Most of the service providers are fellow Smashwords authors.

Writers beware. This brings me to my next prediction.

15. Pearson/Penguin/Random House/Simon & Schuster will either cut bait on Author Solutions or ride this anchor to the bottom of the sea

In 2012, Pearson, the parent of Penguin, acquired Author Solutions (ASI), an author services company backed by Bertram Capital, a private equity firm in Silicon Valley. Author Solutions maintains a less-than-stellar reputation, right alongside fellow vanity publishing posterboy, PublishAmerica. Blogger Emily Suess has been running a series of damning posts for months at http://blog.emilysuess.com/tag/author-solutions/ where she exposes ASI’s business practices.

Author Solutions is a provider of over-priced author services, and that’s about the kindest description I can share. They earn 2/3 or more of their income selling over-priced services to authors, and these services are of nebulous value and invariably print-centric. According to Publishers Weekly, ASI's ebook sales accounted for only $1.3 million, or 1.3% of their $100 million in revenue for 2011, and that was with a staff of about 1,600 employees, 1,200 of whom are in the Philippines, where the bulk of their work is performed. By contrast, Smashwords will do around $15 million in ebook sales in 2012 with 1/100th the staff.

Author Solutions is not in the business of selling author books to readers. Instead, they’re in the business of exploiting the dreams of newbie authors who don’t know better. Pearson/Penguin’s acquisition of ASI left me befuddled. Although Pearson/Penguin was smart to recognize that self-publishing represents a tremendous growth area, their acquisition of ASI – a company that helped put the “V” in Vanity – demonstrated an utter disregard for the best interests of writers. It demonstrated a deep-seated cynicism that valued the money in authors’ pockets ahead of good business ethics. Newbie writers who don’t know better are easily exploited by the heavy-handed sales tactics of ASI, as so aptly documented by Emily Suess. Yes, Pearson/Penguin can make money with ASI. But it’s blood money. With the acquisition of ASI, Pearson/Penguin made the decision to become a blood sucking parasite. The indie author community raised a stink when the news came out. Did publishers listen?

The acquisition placed Pearson/Penguin in an inextricable pickle. As I blogged in July in my post titled, How a Traditional Publisher Could Harm a Writer's Career, if they want their $116 million acquisition to pay off, they’ll have to continue the same author-fleecing services and business practices, and by doing so they’ll tarnish the once sterling Penguin brand. In the proudest tradition of the great publishers, money should flow from book buyers to publisher to author, not from author to publisher. If Pearson/Penguin decided to clean up the act of ASI, they’d find themselves facing a print-centric business model that doesn't help authors, and the specter of huge operating losses due to what is likely ASI’s $100 million operating expense overhead. It’s a lose/lose situation, no matter how Pearson/Penguin proceeds.

But wait, there’s more. On October 29, 2012, Pearson announced a deal that will help it divest itself of Penguin, and along with Penguin, the newly acquired ASI albatross, by merging it into a new joint venture with Bertlesmann’s Random House division. Soon, to borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams, ASI will become “Somebody Else’s Problem” when Random House gains majority ownership over Penguin/ASI. You'd think Random House would have been paying attention to the bad smell surrounding ASI.

And yet there’s more. Another Big 6 publisher was asleep at the wheel. Despite all the author community outrage over the ASI acquisition, less than a month later, on November 27th, Simon & Schuster decided to launch its own self-publishing “imprint” called Archway Publishing - sporting a logo that proudly advertises it's powered by none other than Author Solutions. They're going to sell publishing packages priced up to $25,000. $25,000? How could Pearson/Penguin/Random House/Simon & Schuster make such a massive series of blunders? Do they really have so little respect for writers? The pattern is very disappointing for those of us who want to see the big publishers survive and thrive.

16. The Big 6 will become the Big 4 as bean counters take over the farm

Warning: I get a bit wonky with financial acronyms at the end of this one (that's what I get for going to business school).

Pearson, the UK media conglomerate parent of Penguin, and Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate parent of Random House, agreed to merge Penguin and Random House into a joint venture in 2013, pending regulatory approval. I think the union will produce an ugly baby. The convoluted financial details contain a circus of financial machination hula-hoop acrobatics and if-then-what variables that only their proud investment banker parents could love.

The merger’s benefit to authors, or to the employees of the publishers, is less clear. Ostensibly, the merger would give the larger combined firm more negotiating leverage against the channel, and specifically Amazon. I don’t buy that, unless they’re willing to pull their books from Amazon. Amazon will either laugh in their face and say no to their demands, or will say yes while it continues developing direct relationships with authors, thereby neutering publishers by denying them the sustenance of future authors.

Within a couple of years, it'll be game over for publishers who think they can push the channel around, because there will be hundreds of thousands of other high-quality indie-published books to take their place. I had a conversation earlier this week with a smart publishing industry veteran who told me, "Publishers created Amazon, so I don't know why they're acting so surprised now."

What the merger really says is that the shareholders, parent companies and executives of Big 6 publishers are starting to view their catalogs as no- or low-growth assets to be milked, when in fact they should instead be focused on growing the farm for future harvests. I expect them to eventually saddle the operation with more debt (their merger press release contains an option for that very outcome), and then merge and eliminate redundant operations (lay off employees in HR, finance, editing, marketing, sales, distribution, merge or eliminate imprints) to reduce costs so they can make the debt servicing expenses.

Each of the publishers is sitting on a goldmine of back catalog, ready to be milked. Perhaps the investment bankers will push a path forward for some publishers to stop or reduce their publishing exposure altogether, and instead become asset manager custodians of their backlists. They can abandon big print runs, move to POD, digitize their lists, focus on distribution and marketing, cut back on new title acquisitions, impose stricter reversion clauses upon authors so digital books never go out of print, and harvest the profits that will come from the reduced operating expenses of not having to be a publisher. Although this would create an insanely profitable business for their shareholders and debt holders, it would also mark a capitulation of sorts.

None of these moves help authors at a time when authors want more support from their publishers, not less. It also limits employment opportunities for the brain trust of passionate book lovers who work at the big publishers, and who now risk having their livelihoods eliminated in the name of “strategic realignments” and other unpleasant euphemisms for lost jobs.

Expect the remaining Big 4 to get frisky with the mating and M&A dance. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of the remaining Big 4 acquired by private equity firms. Private equity firms typically acquire operating companies with mostly borrowed cash, and then saddle the company with debt. With little of their own money invested, the private equity firms generate high ROE – return on equity, even when the company's profits drop under the weight of debt servicing obligations.

They’ll cut costs to raise EBITDA, another favorite and dehumanizing finance metric that stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes and Depreciation. Finance folk love EBITDA as a tool to determine how much debt they can load on a company before they choke it to death with debt payments. More debt means higher ROE, but if they pile on too much debt, the company dies. Think of EBITDA calculations as a form of auto-erotic asphyxiation administered by bean counters. It's a risky business. These financial metrics, when abused, are dehumanizing and will sap the soul of publishers. Watch out, bean counters are in control now.

17. Stigma of Big 6 (or Big 4 or Big 3) publishers will increase as prior stigma of self-publishing evaporates

The stigma of self-publishing is disappearing. Each week, indie authors are hitting the ebook bestseller lists at all the major ebook retailers, as well as lists maintained by the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, GalleyCat, and Digital Book World. A year ago, this was rare. A year from now, it’ll be commonplace. The future bestsellers of tomorrow are the indie authors of today. Indie authors are poised to take more market share in 2013 as the next generation of writers turns its back on traditional publishing.

Five years ago, back in the dark ages of publishing, self-publishing was seen as the option of last resort. It was seen as the last refuge for failed authors. Publishers controlled the printing press, the access to distribution, and the knowledge to professionally publish, which made authors entirely dependent upon publishing gatekeepers. Today, these three elements of professional publishing are fully democratized.

Indie authors now have the tools to publish faster, smarter and more effectively than traditional publishers. Many indies are publishing books of equal or greater quality than what’s put out by large publishers. Indies are pricing more aggressively, and as a result they’re building bigger platforms faster than many traditionally published authors who are now disadvantaged. As ebooks continue to take market share, and as physical brick and mortar shelf space disappears, the allure of traditional publishers will fade further.

At the same time the stigma of self-publishing evaporates, the stigma of traditional publishing is increasing. Authors are questioning what big publishers can do for them that they can't already do on their own. Authors are realizing, as mentioned earlier, that the traditional publisher business practices (high prices, slow release schedules, limited marketing support, etc) can actually harm a writer's career.

Traditional publishers are also showing themselves skilled at adding their own self-inflicted injuries. Traditional publishing's cynical misadventure into vanity publishing will stain the reputation of all big NY publishers, even those that haven’t made the same mistakes. That's sad, because I think the world of books would be better off if we could maintain a healthy and vibrant ecosystem of large publishers in addition to smaller ones.

18. EPUB 3 will disappoint

EPUB 3, ratified in October 2011 as the next generation of the popular open industry EPUB file format, is likely to see slow and disappointing adoption in 2013.

The new standard offers a range of promising benefits, such as improved book navigation, improved language support, support for fixed format books, more sophisticated metadata management, and improved support for multimedia. Unfortunately, such promised benefits come at a cost to authors, publishers, device makers, distributors, ebook stores, and consumers in the form of increased complexity, new workflows and questionable backward-compatibility between EPUB3 books and prior reading systems.

If the marketplace concludes that the benefits of EPUB 3 outweigh the costs, it’ll gain traction in the marketplace. Otherwise, we'll either see slow adoption, increased file format fragmentation, or proprietary file formats if major retailers decide they can support these next-generation capabilities more effectively on their own, outside the purview of the IDPF standard-setting body. If EPUB 3 increases production complexity for authors, publishers and the digital supply chain, we could also see a decline in the number of titles released. As a member of the IDPF, the standards-setting organization that manages EPUB, we support standards, though I do have cost/benefit concerns about the transition.

19. Ebook subscription offerings will face uphill slog

In 2012 there was a wave of promising startups talking about creating the “Spotify of Ebooks,” or the “Netflix of ebooks.” I admit, at first the notion of an all-you-can-read smorgasbord of reading material held appeal to me. I’m always interested to consider new models of book distribution that help us achieve our overall mission of connecting our authors with readers. However, as the year progressed and new subscription hopefuls came to the fore, I found my enthusiasm waning.

Ebook prices are declining as authors and publishers compete on price. Indies have released thousands of high-quality books priced at FREE, more than any voracious book lover could ever read in a lifetime. Traditional publishers are dropping their ebook prices to become more competitive – even independent of the DoJ’s ill-conceived crackdown on agency publishers. Ebooks are already free or dirt cheap, and likely to become cheaper as big publishers drop their prices, so the potential advantages of an all-you-can-read buffet are diminishing. The challenge for some enterprising entrepreneur is to find a method of connecting books to readers that’s more effective and profitable than what the major retailers are already doing, and that’s a tall order because the retailers are doing an awesome job.

20. Indie authors poised to capture a growing percentage of library ebook market
Libraries are the forgotten stepchildren of the publishing industry, yet they operate 230,000 public library buildings across the globe where patrons come to find, read and enjoy books. Libraries purchase hundreds of millions of dollars worth of books each year, making books available and discoverable to all readers. They promote a culture of reading among readers which benefits the entire publishing industry, and they're where millions of readers first discover their new favorite authors. Libraries are engines for book discovery and consumer retail purchases.

Traditional publishers have been wary to distribute ebooks to libraries, for fear that library ebook sales will cannibalize publishers' ebook and printbook sales through traditional retail channels. As a result, many publishers refuse to sell to libraries, or will sell to libraries under onerous terms.

Publishers' refusal to provide adequate ebook support for libraries has created a window of opportunity for self-published authors, and it's a window we're looking to pry open even further in 2013. In 2012, we signed distribution deals with the leading library aggregators. We launched Library Direct, which this month alone will sell and deliver nearly $200,000 worth of ebooks to libraries. Self-published authors will find their books in greater demand in 2013 as libraries implement ebook checkout systems.

21. Indie ebooks will start driving more film & television projects

Books have long been a popular source of material for film and television producers. A proven bestseller means that audiences find the story compelling, and this increases the appeal to film and television producers for a couple of reasons:

1. A successful book creates a built-in audience more likely to want to view the film or television derivative.

2. A successful book helps lower the risk to the film or television producer because the story has already proven itself an audience-pleaser in the marketplace.

A film or TV deal is great news for the author and publisher, because it sells more books. It helps more prospective readers discover the story or want to read the story again. The dynamic between publishers and film and television producers is not perfect, however. Most books come out 12 months or later after the publisher acquires it, so if a book is sold to film or television before publication, the film/television producers face the risk that they begin production only to learn later that the story didn’t resonate with readers.

If you believe that indies are the future of publishing, and that the world’s best and most commercially successful future stories will come from indies, then it’s inevitable indie authors will begin to fill the production pipelines of film and television producers. Indie authors – not hamstrung by the slow book release schedules of traditional publishers – are reaching the market instantly with stories better tuned to audience desires. Indies achieve instant market feedback in the form of sales data, reviews and retailer bestseller rank. Expect many indie ebooks to be optioned for film and television in 2013. Maybe one or more of the 9,000+ titles uploaded to Smashwords in the last 30 days will find its way to a theater near you.

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Thanks for reading. I think this was my longest post ever. Believe it or not, I had other predictions I left out regarding the ebook supply chain, retailer-operated publishing platforms, and more. There's too much. Back to work now. Prior to year-end, I'll do a Smashwords 2012 year in review.

Just for kicks, here are couple of my past predictions:
2011 Predictions at GalleyCat by Mark Coker (published Dec 28, 2010)
10-Year Predictions at GalleyCat By Mark Coker (published Jan 4 2010)

Did my crystal ball miss anything? Please add your own predictions below.

Apple Launches Breakout Books Promotion in Australia and New Zealand Featuring Thousands of Smashwords Titles

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 07:29:00 +0000

Apple has launched an exciting "Breakout Books" promotion in its Australia and New Zealand iBookstores featuring thousands of Smashwords authors.

This is the largest, broadest and most significant Smashwords-specific promotion yet undertaken by any ebook retailer.

The implications are exciting for our authors and publishers. This gives thousands of Smashwords books a promotional advantage that would have been unheard-of in the old days of traditional publishing. It means that during this promotion, many Smashwords titles will enjoy some measure of promotional advantage not available to authors of traditional publishers.

The promotional image at left shows the opening "Featured" page in the iBookstore, as viewed on an iPad for the Australian store. At the center of the large promotional graphic are three Smashwords books - Kirsty Moseley's Always You, Isabelle Rae's When Summer Ends and Chanda Hahn's The Iron Butterfly.

Two of those books are today among the top 10 bestsellers in the Australian store. Congrats to Kirsty and Isabelle!

Once the customer clicks the promotional image, they're guided to the special Breakout Books promotional catalog organized around the following categories: Top Picks; Latest Releases; Free; Romance; Young Adult; Crime & Thrillers; Sci-Fi & Fantasy; and All-Time Bestsellers.

This special promotional catalog, which for two weeks will receive top-of-store promotion in their Featured Books section, includes titles sourced exclusively from Smashwords. After the initial two week promotion, the catalog may become a regular feature in the Australia and New Zealand stores, providing yet another path for iBookstore customers to easily discover, sample and purchase Smashwords titles.

The promotion was formally kicked off on Sunday in an email blast Apple sent to its iBookstore customers in Australia and New Zealand. The promotional email states:

We've gathered some of our highest customer-rated books, all of which are $4.99 or less (many are actually free). Following in the footsteps of Fifty Shades of Grey, all are independently published directly to the iBookstore.

Screen shot of Apple's email blast to iBookstore customers
in Australia and New Zealand

Apple has always been amazingly supportive of our authors, but this promotion takes their support to a new level. Of all 50 territories in which Apple operates their iBookstore, Australia is the second-largest-selling iBookstore for Smashwords authors.

How can you get your books included in this catalog?

First, make sure your books are distributed to Apple through Smashwords. Next, this promotion includes books priced $4.99 or below, so if your books are priced higher they won't make the catalog.

Beyond these first two steps, the decision is up to Apple and its customers. However, there is more you can do to maximize your chances of inclusion if you're not included already. This new Breakout Books catalog appears to give preference to books with great reviews and strong sales. Do what you can to encourage your fans to purchase and review your books at Apple. Since millions of readers shop at the iBookstore, make sure your fans know your books are available there. This can involve simply listing hyperlinks to your books at Apple on your website, blog or in other social media outlets. In my previous post, How to Sell Books at the Apple iBookstore, I shared tips.

Based on my observations, Apple's merchandising decisions appear to be both customer-driven and editorial-driven. By customer-driven, I mean that the more Apple iBookstore customers who purchase and review your book, the more visible your book becomes in the store. Sales increase your sales rank, which leads to greater visibility and more sales, more "People who bought this also bought this" automated recommendations, and great reviews drive sales as through reader word-of-mouth. By editorially-driven, I mean that the Apple merchandising team hand-selects quality books that meet the interests of their customers. If Apple observes that its iBookstore customers are responding well to a title as measured though purchases and customer reviews, they're more likely to to give a book extra promotion. If an author has performed well with previous titles at Apple, their new titles are more likely to get attention. All of this is pretty much common sense, and not really different from how other retailers merchandize. The reader is king, and all else flows from there. What's different here, however, is that Apple has thrown some serious promotional weight behind this.

To determine if your book is in the promotion, from your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, sign in to the Australia or New Zealand iBooks app on your device. To learn how, see my November 1 tip in Site Updates for how to view Apple stores in different countries. If you don't have an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, consider adding one to your Christmas stocking-stuffer wish-list! The promotion might also be viewable in iTunes, but I haven't had a chance to personally confirm that yet.

If your book is already in the promotion, here's what you can do to support it: Let your fans in Australia and New Zealand know that your book has been selected for promotion in the Breakout Books feature. Celebrate it. Post on Facebook, Twitter or on your blog something like, "My book [insert title] is included in the Apple iBookstore's "Breakout Books" promotion this week in their Australia and New Zealand iBookstores!," and then provide direct hyperlinks to the books in those countries. For cool tools for making the hyperlinks, visit Apple's LinkMaker page at http://itunes.apple.com/linkmaker/

Who are some of the many Smashwords authors included? Here are some random names, in addition to those mentioned above: Denise Grover Swank, Elisabeth Naughton, Lacey Weatherford, Quinn Loftis, Kira Saito, Danielle Girard, David Dalglish, R.L. Mathewson, Ranae Rose, Oksana Vasilenko, Adrianne White, Julie Ortolon, Derek Ciccone, Autumn Dawn, M.H. Strom, L.L. Bartlett, Ruth Ann Nordin, Ellen Fisher, Lucinda Brandt, JD Nixon, Marquita Valentine and hundreds and hundreds of others.

My thanks to Apple for giving so many Smashwords authors this great opportunity to connect with new readers, and my thanks to Smashwords authors and publishers who earned this opportunity by writing books that have pleased so many thousands of iBookstore customers.

Amazon The Grinch Who Stole Christmas? Amazon Doubles Down on Exclusivity

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 14:08:00 +0000

Will Amazon be the grinch who steals Christmas from thousands of indie authors this holiday season?

Last year, a mere three weeks before a record-breaking Christmas for ebook sales at the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony and other retailers, Amazon convinced thousands of indie authors to remove their books from the virtual shelves of all Amazon competitors.

The lure: KDP Select, an opt-in program that requires authors to make their books exclusive to Amazon for a minimum of three months. I blogged my opposition to the program here at the Smashwords blog, and in the months since also spoke out against it here, here, here and here.

The controversial program has its share of opponents and supporters. Some authors have done well with it, and others have not.

I contended, and still contend, that exclusivity is a devil's bargain. When authors go exclusive with any retailer, they increase their dependence upon that single retailer, limit long-term platform building at other retailers, disappoint fans who shop at other stores, and hobble the development of a thriving and competitive ebook retailing ecosystem.

KDP Select places authors in a difficult position. They must decide if the short term benefits of KDP Select outweigh the long term harm caused to their writing career. The potential benefits are uncertain, and the harm is impossible to measure. How does one measure a missed opportunity? One thing is for certain: When I look at the Smashwords bestsellers, they're authors who maintain non-stop, uninterrupted distribution of all their books. They're the authors who are working to build their audiences at each retailer for the long term.

This Christmas season is shaping up to be another record-breaker for Smashwords authors. In the last 12 months, sales at the Apple iBookstore have surged as Apple continues to dominate the tablet and smartphone markets, and has built the world's largest global ebook retailing network with stores in 50 countries. Barnes & Noble has expanded to the U.K. with the support of 2,500 brick and mortar retail storefronts promoting, displaying and selling the NOOK family of e-readers. Kobo was acquired by Rakuten, a global ecommerce juggernaut, and has aggressively grown its global footprint and sales for the benefit of Smashwords authors.

Amazon's response to the rise of its competitors? Today, Amazon doubled down on its exclusivity strategy. It sweetened the KDP Select lending library pot with an extra $1.5 million to be paid out over the next three months (press release here).

Undoubtedly, some indie authors will reach for the carrot and immediately pull their books from distribution, and as a result will never know what they missed out on this holiday season. It's somewhat ironic that after decades of writers bowing subservient to traditional publishers who controlled the only path to retail distribution - and after so many traditionally published authors saw their books forced out of print when retailers dropped their books - that so many indie authors will now pull their books from distribution with their own hands.

What affect has KDP Select had on the growth of Smashwords? Not as much as our detractors might think. After Amazon announced KDP Select last year, some authors speculated it would put us out of business. Quite the contrary. We and our authors have enjoyed another record year this year, thanks to growth across the Smashwords distribution network. We've enjoyed record profitability, and have grown our staff to 19 professionals, all singularly focused on creating success for the 50,000+ authors, publishers and literary agents we serve. We're reinvesting our profits to provide faster support, improve the speed and reliability of our distribution, and open up new distribution and sales opportunities (I'm writing this post from The Hague, the Netherlands, where I just concluded two days of exciting meetings with representatives of the International Federation of Library Associations). We'll end the year with nearly 100,000 new titles added to the Smashwords catalog. Last Christmas was a blowout record for us, and I suspect Smashwords authors who remained fully distributed last Christmas and thereafter benefited by the reduced competition when thousands of KDP Select books disappeared from retailer shelves. I expect this Christmas will be no different. I expect some of our authors will pull some of all of their books, and the authors who remain fully distributed will become stronger for it.

Amazon is smart to realize that indie authors are the future of publishing. If they can convince a large percentage of indies to surrender their independence to Amazon, Amazon will enjoy long term competitive advantage.

Indies have a choice to make. They can support Amazon's strategy, or reject it. I don't envy the decision many authors must now make. It's unfortunate Amazon would play indie authors as pawns in its larger battle to harm its retail competitors. I wish the best to all self-published authors, regardless of their decision.

Image credit: Wikipedia

How to Sell Ebooks at the Apple iBookstore

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 19:17:00 +0000

R.L. Mathewson tops Apple iBookstore
charts for second day running

The Apple iBookstore, which last week expanded its global reach to 50 countries, has always been kind to Smashwords authors. Numerous Smashwords authors have graced Apple's bestseller lists over the last two years, and this week is no different.

Four days ago, R.L. Mathewson uploaded Checkmate to Smashwords. In under 24 hours, we distributed it to Apple and it went live worldwide in 50 stores. Yesterday, this contemporary romance hit #1 in Apple's US, Australia, U.K. and Canada stores. As I write this, it remains #1 at these same stores.

Three days ago, Kirsty Moseley uploaded Always You to Smashwords. The next day, we distributed it to Apple and it went live worldwide in 50 stores. Today, Always You is the #7 bestseller in Australia, #20 in the U.S. and #20 in the U.K.

Last week, the US Apple iBookstore ran a special promotion of romance titles priced $1.99 and below. We suggested they consider Mia Dymond's Playing with Fire, and they included it.

Last week, in conjunction with Apple's iBookstore launch in New Zealand, they named Shayne Parkinson's Sentence of Marriage their "Book of the Week" for both their New Zealand and Australian stores. Sentence of Marriage is a free series starter. Shayne's next book in the series, Mud and Gold, priced at $3.99 (NZ dollars), is today the #8 bestseller in the New Zealand store, and #54 in Australia (after the U.S. store, Australia is the next highest earner for Smashwords authors, just edging out the U.K., which is also big for us). I suggested they consider promoting Shayne because she's one of our bestselling authors at Barnes & Noble. She's also one of the few authors we distribute to Amazon, where she sells well. I suspected that since she was performing well at our other retailers but hadn't yet broken out at Apple, a dose of pixie dust merchandising love could help launch her to a new audience. That's what's happening.

The Smashwords authors above aren't the only ones doing well at Apple. Other notable standouts now in the top 10 store-wide bestsellers include Jillian Holmes, author of Temporary Kiss (#7 in the U.K. iBookstore), Isabelle Rae, author of When Summer Ends (#8 U.K.), S.H. Kolee, author of Love Left Behind (#5 Australia, #10 Canada), and Marie Kelly, author of Billionaire's Revenge (#2 Australia, #8 Canada).

Apple is today the largest retailer for Smashwords authors. The chart here shows the growth in monthly dollar sales for Smashwords books at Apple. I omitted the dollar figures, but you get the idea how Apple has grown. For all its incredible growth in ebooks, Apple is conspicuously mum when it comes to talking about their accomplishments. Did they do a press release or a press conference on their launch of 18 new stores last week? I don't think so. Most authors I meet have no idea Apple is distributing to 50 countries.

I think their low key approach has led many in the industry to underestimate their progress. My advice to authors: don't underestimate Apple. If you're not there, you're missing out. Every new country they launch represents a new micro-market, an opportunity for you to become a big fish in a small but growing pond. The authors who get out there first and establish footholds today will become the bestsellers of tomorrow.

All the authors mentioned above? Keep an eye on them. They're all headed toward the New York Times bestseller list in the months and years to come if they keep up their great work.

Our relationship with Apple started prior to launch of the iPad in early 2010. I, like the rest of the world, had heard rumors that Apple was preparing to launch a bookstore, so I got on the phone and called their main switchboard. Within about a week, I met with a senior executive at our office in Los Gatos.

Keep in mind that at the time, Smashwords was only three people. It was myself, Bill Kendrick our CTO, and Keri McKie our CFO. He asked me a lot of questions about our business, my background, and how we ran things. He told us that Apple was looking to form relationships with a small number of authorized ebook aggregators, their term for distributors. We had already signed distribution deals with Sony, Barnes & Noble and Kobo, so of course we were interested. He laid out their integration requirements, and told us if we met the deadline and requirements, we were in, and if we didn't, maybe later. In this industry, "maybe later" can easily mean never because things change so quickly. We wanted to be in on the ground floor, so we dropped everything and in two weeks completely reworked how we produce .epub files, we performed dozens of other technical enhancements to our platform and processes, and we met the deadline. We had 2,200 books on the iBookstore on day one.

Today, we supply approximately 125,000 ebook to the Apple iBookstore, and we're one of a small number of global aggregators supplying books under their aggregator program. To remain in the program, we must undergo (and pass!) rigorous quarterly audits.

As you might imagine, I've got warm feelings for the team at Apple. They took a gamble on us early on, and that gambled paid off for everyone, especially our authors. They've shown our authors incredible support over the last two years. They've also been especially proactive in terms of working with us to identify opportunities for them to promote our authors to their customers.

Below I'll share some tips for succeeding at the Apple iBookstore. 90% of these tips apply to every other retailer. These tips are based on my personal experience, opinions and observations, and are not endorsed by our friends at Apple.

Read my Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success - My free ebook identifies 28 best practices of the most commercially successful Smashwords authors. Many of the authors above are poster children for the best practices I recommend. My Secrets book is all about what you as an author can do to publish professionally. I underscore in the book how it's critical you publish a book that's as good or better than what the big New York publishers are releasing, and how you can employ my methods (such as pricing strategy) that will give you an advantage over them.
Get there and stay there - Once your book lands at Apple, don't remove it. In the Secrets ebook, I show charts of how prior Apple bestsellers have developed at Apple. For many of the charts, you'll see that many bestsellers sell poorly at first, but then something sparks a breakout. That something might be a new cover image (See our interview with R.L. Mathewson, and don't miss the chart there that shows what happened after she updated her cover image), the release of a new book, or any mix of myriad viral catalysts.
Link to Apple in your promotions - I'm always surprised how often I see authors complaining that all their sales are coming from Amazon, and then I look at their website or blog and see they're only linking to a single retailer, Amazon. Support all your retailers. Not just Apple, but Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, every one. Your blog, website and social media promotions should provide direct hyperlinks to your book pages at every retailer, so your fans can purchase your book at their favorite retailer. For millions of readers, one of their favorites is the Apple iBookstore. Use Apple's free Link Maker tool to create direct hyperlinks to your books at any of Apple's 50 stores. Use their Widget Builder tool to create and embed interactive widgets on your web site or blog. Click here to download Apple's badges and buttons that you can place on your website or blog. Smashwords author Russell Phillips has also developed some free link- making tools of his own on his Tools for Authors web site.
Sales lead to more sales - Every time you send a buyer to Apple (or any other retailer for that matter) and they purchase your book, you gain five important benefits: 1. You get money in your pocket. 2. You build your platform, because you get a reader, and a reader is a potential fan, and reader word-of-mouth is your single most powerful marketing catalyst. Fans give you great reviews, and reviews lead to more sales. Fans also await your next release, which means you have a built-in audience for your next book (definitely one of the catalysts for R.L.'s huge success with Checkmate, which is R.L.'s ninth book at Apple). 3. Each sale gives you an incremental lift in Apple's sales ranking algorithms which by my observation is heavily weighted to unit sales. As you rise in the sales ranking, first in your genre or category, and later in the store-wide rankings, you become more visible to more readers who are looking for a book just like yours. 4. As you start rising in the lists, you'll grab the attention of Apple's merchandising team, which means they're more likely to give your book an extra promotional boost (more on that next). 5. Apple's iBookstore, like most other ebook retailers, does automatic online merchandising so that when readers view a book page, they can see other books purchased by people who bought this book. Each sale to an Apple customer gets your book cycling in their "Customers Also Bought" algorithm.
How to get the attention of merchandising managers - This is a challenge. I could probably do an entire separate blog post on this (Next year at RT Booklovers in Kansas City, I'm actually moderating a session on the topic of retail merchandising best practices). From my experience, Apple's merchandising team works much the same as the merchandising teams at other retailers (though I've got to say, Apple's team is impressively proactive).

First, it's helpful to understand their job. The merchandisers have responsibility for identifying books that are worthy of special promotion, and most merchandisers at Smashwords retailers have a remarkably similar approach. They're looking for books that will please their readers, and this focus usually trumps the retailer's desire to earn money. Most merchandisers I've spoken with, if given the choice to promote a $2.99 book or a $12.99 book, will promote the $2.99 book first if they think it'll make more readers happier. They want confidence that if they recommend a book, that book will deliver satisfaction, and extreme five-star satisfaction trumps 3-star.

Merchandising managers have multiple methods of showering promo love on a book. At Apple, the promotion can come in the form of getting your book highlighted under their "New and Notables" section, as R.L. Mathewson is highlighted this week, or you might be selected for a special promotion such as the $1.99 romance promo mentioned above, or the "Book of the Week," or any myriad other promos they're doing.

All the retailers, Apple included, keep their promotional calendar close to the vest. There's no "editorial calendar" that mere mortals such as myself can access.

It's tough to get a merchandiser's attention because they operate in a world where hundreds of thousands of authors and publishers want the attention. There's simply too much noise. Nothing gets a merchandising manager's attention faster than a book that is already selling, or a book getting great reviews by their customers. In this sense, the merchandiser's attention is democratically applied. If your fans drive you into the bestseller charts, it increases your opportunities for merchandising love. The most reliable method of attracting the attention of a retailer's customers is to write a great book, give it a great cover image, distribute it to the store, and promote its presence at the iBookstore.

As I mention in the Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, different books break out at different retailers at different times, and often for reasons you can't determine. Just as each country represents a micro-market for your books, so to does each retailer. To the extent you cultivate a fan base at each retailer, your follow-on books will have much greater success. This is one of the reasons I am so staunchly opposed to exclusivity programs like KDP Select. Audience cultivation is a long term endeavor, requiring nonstop presence, patience and participation (I shared more thoughts on KDP-S in the November 2 Smashwords author/publisher alert).

If you've previously sold well at the iBookstore, your next release is likely to get more attention, both because you've developed a fan base among the retailer's customers, and because you've begun building brand awareness among the merchandising team.

It was an Apple merchandiser, for example who contacted me and asked if Kirsty Moseley had a new release planned. Kirsty's prior title, The Boy Who Sneaks in my Bedroom Window, has sold well at Apple worldwide for months, and continues to do well. As luck would have it, she did have a new title coming, the above-mentioned Always You. We coordinated with Apple so they knew when it was coming, and when it arrived they were ready to give it some love. It's now rising in the charts.

Another way to get their attention is to get the attention of your distributor's merchandising team, which in our case is me. If you've previously sold thousands of copies at Apple, and you've got a new title coming, let me know. Beyond that, I'll find you. If I see your Smashwords-distributed book is selling well at our other retailers (like the example of Shayne's books), I'm more likely to pitch your book, because your performance across the Smashwords distribution network gives me the confidence I need to pitch you.

Another method of getting Apple's attention is through social media. If you're on Twitter, for example, consider incorporating their Twitter address (@iBookstore) in your Apple-focused tweets. Apple has nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter, and they will occasionally retweet the tweets of authors (see the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide for twitter tips if you're new to twitter). To maximize your odds of a retweet, tweet something interesting or compelling or complementary about your readers at the iBookstore, and provide a direct hyperlink to the book at the iBookstore. Apple, as a massive corporation, is really strict about naming conventions and corporate identity, so if you don't identify them or the store properly, you're unlikely to get a retweet. For example, the store is called the iBookstore, not iBooks. They call ebooks books, not ebooks or e-books. They like to see books referred to as on the iBookstore, rather than in the iBookstore. Interact with @iBookstore by tweeting at them. Follow them and retweet them if they tweet something you think would interest your Twitter followers. Keep in mind that behind their Twitter address is a live person, not a machine, so you want to give them reason to retweet your tweets. Keep your retweet expectations reasonable, because retweetage is a long shot. Click here (downloads a PDF file) if you want to torture your brain with Apple's full list of identify guidelines.

Finally, if you write a great book that pleases your retailer's customers, those customers will propel your book forward with their reviews and word of mouth. Also remember that the merch teams at the retailers are populated by book lovers. They read what they sell. If they read your book and love it, you're more likely to get promo love. A little birdie tells me someone at Apple read R.L. Mathewson prior to the store putting their weight behind her and naming her a breakout author back in July. They probably read her because their customers were reading her.
Support your retailers, maintain positivity - When you walk into a room, do you bring sunshine or storm clouds? I've written about this topic elsewhere, put it in the Secrets book, and I've been talking about this in my recent workshops. For some reason, a lot of authors adopt an online persona of, "I complain, therefore I am." Apple has never mentioned this to me, nor has any other retailer, but I can bet that everyone on the merch team has Google alerts on the "Apple iBookstore" search phrase, and if an indie author is out there trashing this or that about Apple or the iBookstore, I imagine it causes their hearts to sink. If the day comes where they're considering giving you promo love (and 95% of the time, they'll give you the love without giving you advance notice), if they recognize your author name and brand as that [insert explicative] on [insert the name of your favorite author forum] who's always complaining about them, that's not the type of brand awareness you want.

New York Times bestseller Jonathan Maberry said it best, here in his interview at the Smashwords blog:
Think about a party. If there’s someone who is bitching and moaning and someone else who’s getting folks to laugh and loosen up, which way do you drift? If a kid in a playground is constantly bitching about the quality of the toys, and another kid has turned a cardboard box into a sideshow funhouse, who’s getting more attention? Who’s going to be remembered in a positive way?

And, even if you are a naturally cranky, snarky, sour-tempered pain in the ass, for god’s sake share that with your therapist or priest. When you go online to promote yourself and therefore your products, try not to actually scare people off your lawn.

Good luck! I might add more tips later.

Barnes & Noble Opens U.K. Ebook Store Supported by Heavy Brick and Mortar Nook Distribution

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 05:12:00 +0000

Barnes and Noble launched their U.K. ebook store (www.nook.co.uk) yesterday, bringing with them over 114,000 Smashwords titles. B&N's move to the U.K. has been rumored for over a year, and publicly confirmed by B&N a few months ago.

It's great news for Smashwords authors and publishers. Some publishing industry pundits have poo-pooed B&N's U.K. entry as too little too late. I think the pundits are underestimating Barnes & Noble, and not just because they're flush with $300 million cash from a recent Microsoft investment.

Here's why I think their U.K. launch is compelling: Brick and Mortar Distribution. For day one of their launch, Barnes & Noble amassed a massive network of brick and mortar retail partners that will display, promote and sell the NOOK family of e-reading devices. According to B&N's press release yesterday, their retail network will soon include over 2,500 store locations in the U.K. To put this in perspective, Barnes & Noble operates 689 stores here in the U.S. In the same way that B&N leveraged its U.S. brick and mortar presence to become a powerhouse in U.S. ebook retailing, it's now poised to do the same in the U.K, only this time it's amplified by a broader footprint. The benefit of broad retail footprint is that it makes it easy and non-threatening for prospective customers to touch, feel, test and buy NOOK devices.

Also innovative in their approach is that they're not just merchandising the devices in book stores. One of the new partners they announced yesterday is Asda, a large supermarket chains that will carry the NOOK line in 300 stores. If you assume that most book buyers spend most of their out-of-home time in places other than bookstores, it makes sense to get your devices in front them in as many different outlets as possible. In addition to Adsa, the other retail partners include John Lewis, Argos, Sainsbury’s, Dixons and Waitrose, Blackwell’s and Foyles.

The Foyles home page prominently promotes NOOK

In addition to the brick and mortar benefit, B&N is also tapping into the online merchandising might of each of the retailers. Both Foyles and John Lewis, for example, are prominently promoting NOOK at the top of their store's home pages as I write this post.

Earlier this year, B&N was rumored to be courting bookseller Waterstones as its flagship brick and mortar partner. Waterstones has less than 300 stores. Waterstones surprised the industry in May by wedding itself to Amazon instead. At the time, the deal was viewed that as a setback for B&N's U.K. aspirations. In retrospect, the loss now appears inconsequential, and Amazon looks to be the online ebook retailer at a brick and mortar disadvantage.

It will be interesting to see if B&N utilizes the same partner strategy as it enters other countries. I expect it will, and I also expect they'll have an easier time than Amazon signing up retail partners. In a sign that 2013 will likely be a year of rapid international expansion for B&N, the company announced last month they hired Patrick Rouvillois for the new position of Vice President - International. Previously, Rouvillois headed marketing and ecommerce for Carrefour, the world's second largest retailer with 15,000 stores in 30 countries.

Publish Locally, Distribute Globally

The ongoing global expansion of our retail partners to multiple markets means that it's now fast, free and easy for our 50,000+ Smashwords authors and publishers around the world to reach readers that just a couple years ago were impossible to reach with either self-published or traditionally published books.

Also exciting is that markets outside the U.S. (long the world's largest single book market), will begin to dwarf the U.S. market in the aggregate (lots of smaller markets combining to create a single large global market). As I mentioned in my post last week about Apple's iBookstore expansion into 50 countries, Smashwords authors yielded 46% of their iBookstore sales in September (2012) from stores outside the U.S.

The U.S. ebook market has grown exponentially in recent years. In 2007, ebooks represented a mere 1% of the US market. For 2012, ebooks will probably surpass 30%. Despite the growth, the U.S. market is already showing signs of maturing. The exponential growth the US has experienced cannot continue forever. Although there's still much room for growth in the US, gone are the recent years where the market grew over 100% per year.

Not so in the global market, where most countries are now entering the steepest and most exciting periods of their exponential growth phases.

Screens are the New Paper

The competition among ebook retailers is quickly shaping up to be a battle for eyeballs. The eyeball glue is the e-reading device, whether is a dedicate e-reader, a multi-function tablet, or a smart phone. The ebook retailer who puts their devices in the most hands will become the dominant ebook seller of tomorrow. The major device makers, drawn from conventional booksellers such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon, consumer electronics manufacturers such as Apple and Sony, and online-booksellers such as Kobo, are all battling it out in the marketplace to get their devices into consumer hands.

Each operates their own ebook store, and for most of them, their store is tethered to their device so that the quickest, most convenient path (and sometimes the only path) to book discovery and purchase is through their own store. This is why B&N's broad-based brick and mortar strategy for getting its devices into the hands of readers is so compelling, and why I think B&N is likely to be successful in its endeavor. It also means that B&N's entry into each market is likely to accelerate the growth of that market, rather than just steal customers from existing players, because B&N will reach customers not reached by the other ebook players. To the extent B&N is successful, there will be more readers for Smashwords books.

If your book is already distributed by Smashwords to Barnes & Noble, there's nothing you need to do to get your book distributed into their U.K. Nook store.

If you're new to ebooks, visit our How to Publish with Smashwords page to learn just how fast, free and easy it is to reach a global audience with Smashwords as your ebook distribution partner.

Apple iBookstore Expands Global Reach of Smashwords Ebooks to 50 Countries

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:02:00 +0000

This week Apple expanded the reach of the iBookstore to 18 new countries, bringing the total reach of the iBookstore to 50 countries.

Over 120,000 Smashwords ebooks now enjoy global distribution through the Apple iBookstore, these new stores included.

The new countries include Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, and New Zealand.

With little fanfare, Apple has assembled the industry's broadest distribution network for indie ebooks. As an indie author or small press, if your ebooks aren't at Apple, you're missing out.

Concurrent with the launch of the New Zealand store, Apple selected Sentence of Marriage by New Zealand Smashwords author Shayne Parkinson to promote as its "Book of the Week" in both their New Zealand and Australian stores. Congrats Shayne!

Smashwords makes it fast, free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to reach all of these stores. Our Smashwords Style Guide (quite possibly the world's most-read ebook formatting guide with a quarter of a million downloads), is available in translated editions for Spanish, French, Dutch, Bengali, Italian, German, and Danish.

I'm excited about the global distribution opportunities available to Smashwords authors. In the U.S., ebooks as a percentage of the overall trade book market will reach approximately 30% in 2012, up from about 19% in 2011, 8% in 2010, 3% in 2009, and 1% in 2008. Every market outside the U.S. is now entering that same exponential growth curve as the primordial soup of supportive ebook ecommerce ecosystems come into their own. Apple will help drive this growth, as will the 50,000+ Smashwords authors, publishers and literary agents that use Smashwords to publish and distribute ebooks.

Within the next few years, the market for your books outside the US will dwarf the US market. Think globally, and get there now.

For the month of September 2012, Smashwords authors and publishers yielded fully 46% of their Apple sales from stores outside the United States. With the launch of these 18 new stores, I expect November will easily cross 50%. For the month of September, our largest markets outside the US were Australia, the U.K. and Canada, in that order.

The global sales opportunity goes beyond just English-language countries, however. Sweden was our fourth largest market, and not because we sell a lot of books in Swedish. Every day, we're selling English-language books (and other languages too) into multiple countries. Although each country in isolation represents a small market, in the aggregate these markets add up. Apple, with Smashwords as one of it's global aggregators, makes it fast and efficient to reach this global market.

Apple's move has exciting implications for international authors. Brazilian Smashwords authors can now sell their books in the Brazilian market. I think Brazil will eventually become one of the world's largest ebook markets.

An author in Costa Rica can upload a book to Smashwords today, and within several days that book can be for sale not just in their local market of Costa Rica, but to Spanish-reading audiences throughout Central and South America, Mexico, the United States, Canada, and around the world.

These publishing and distribution tools are free and available to every writer. All a Smashwords author needs is a finished manuscript, access to the Internet, a word processor, and the desire the reach readers.

Imagine the new voices that now have the freedom and ability to instantly reach a global audience with their words. Think how the world is forever transformed for the better because it's now possible for every writer to publish globally.

Writers, not publishers, now decide when their finished manuscript is ready to reach readers, and readers have the freedom to decide what books are worth reading.

We're still in the very early days of the ebook revolution. As a writer or publisher, your best days are ahead of you. Go forth and publish!

To learn how simple it is to publish and distribute ebooks to the Apple iBookstore and other major retailers with Smashwords, visit our Apple ebook distribution page or our page How to Publish and Distribute Ebooks with Smashwords.

New York Times Bestselling Author Lyla Sinclair Shares Secrets to Writing Successful Erotica

noreply@blogger.com (David Weir) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:55:00 +0000

Early in August, indie author Lyla Sinclair hit the New York Times Bestseller List with her erotic novella Training Tessa. In an interview with David Weir, Sinclair shares her insights into the pragmatic techniques for success as an independent, self-publishing author, writing under a pseudonym. She talks about the challenges and opportunities faced by female erotica writers, why women (and men too) read erotica, how 50 Shades of Grey has helped erotica come out of the closet to mainstream acceptance, and how she's building her writing career.

David Weir: How did you start writing erotic romance and erotica?

Lyla Sinclair: I was a single mom who needed more income. After I complained about my problems selling my outside-the-box romantic comedy novels, the man I later married (known on my blog as the Nude Spanish Guitarist) asked a ridiculous question. He said, “Why don’t you just write what’s selling?” I was appalled at first. I was an “artiste,” after all -- I wrote from inspiration. That overly logical techie didn’t understand my delicate artistic soul!

However, my straight-A daughter had no college fund. Was it possible I could nudge at least some of my inspiration in a more lucrative direction? I studied the sub-genres of romance, then erotica. Paranormal was huge, but I just don’t “get” paranormal. The only thing in demand that I could conjure up an idea for was erotic romance. Unfortunately (I thought), I only felt inspired to write it in a first-person, chick lit voice with bits of humor, instead of the elaborate, flowing, serious styles I had read in erotic romance. And I was pretty sure the sex wasn’t hot enough in my stories, either. I sent a couple of submissions out and was picked up quickly by Ellora’s Cave. Surprise!

DW: What groups or networks helped along the way?

LS: Nearly everything I know about fiction writing and publishing can be traced back to Romance Writers of America, one of the largest writers’ organizations. As a newbie, I attended RWA craft workshops and realized that, even though I had a journalism degree, fiction writing required a completely new skill set. I’m also a member of a local chapter of RWA in my city. Members hold meetings and post links online which get passed from one group to the next. Entering RWA writing contests is how I first found out that some people enjoyed my stories, and I learned where my strengths and weaknesses were. Friends from my writers’ group are now my best critics, saving me from all kinds of embarrassment. I also found my Training Tessa editor Jennifer Bray-Weber through RWA connections. There are all kinds of online and in person writers’ groups out there. I wouldn’t recommend publishing (fiction, especially) to anyone who hasn’t joined a writer posse.

DW: When did you discover self-publishing, including Smashwords, and how did you proceed with that?

LS: In 2010, members of my local writers’ organization began posting links about self-publishing to our Yahoo group. After reading a number of blogs by J.A. Konrath, Dean Wesley Smith, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, I was intrigued. I’d always been marketing-oriented, entrepreneurial, and a control freak. Self-publishing seemed perfect for me. To try out the process, I used a story I’d had sitting on my hard-drive that was too short for Ellora’s Cave. Much to my surprise, it sold copies on Amazon before I even announced it on Facebook, and sales kept rising. I quickly wrote two more short stories to go with it in a series. These three shorts shot up to first, second and third on the Amazon erotica best-seller list and stayed there for several weeks. I was hooked. Meanwhile, I uploaded to Barnes and Noble, then I heard about another site called Smashwords that some of the bloggers were using, so I published there too. I was clueless. I didn’t even know Smashwords sent my books to other retailers. I was the first in my writers’ group to try this, so I’ve just been learning by doing.

DW: How have sales of your books trended over time, and what do you think provoked your big breakthrough with Training Tessa?

LS: Typically, when I publish a new story, sales increase for my backlist titles as well, even the more expensive Ellora’s Cave books. If I go a long time without publishing a new title, sales gradually decrease. My first indie story was published in the first quarter of 2011. I continued publishing short stories, than a novella, as fast as I could. So, 2011 was the year I began making a living as a writer, even though I’d written fiction seriously since 2003 and was first published in 2009.

I think Training Tessa was the perfect storm that happened at a lucky time. “Perfect storm” does not mean perfect story. My definition of the perfect storm in self-publishing is when you write a good story in a popular genre, create a cover that communicates the story effectively to potential readers, and write a description that is interesting and clear.

DW: What impact has the massive success of 50 Shades of Grey had on the erotica genre overall?

LS: This is where the luck comes in. I didn’t realize what a huge impact 50 Shades of Grey had on BDSM erotica and the erotica genre as a whole until Training Tessa came out. This is a genre that’s been around forever, but it’s suddenly out of the closet in a big way. Previously, a handful of women would send me discreet Facebook messages telling me they enjoyed my books. Now, they’re posting proudly on my Facebook pages, supplying their email addresses for my notification list, and sending me emails that say, “I lovvvvvvvved Training Tessa!!! When is Controlling Krysta coming out?” The embarrassment factor seems to be disappearing.

DW: Do you think female writers are treated differently than men when it comes to authoring sexual content?

LS: Well, authors tell me it’s different in some other countries, but in the U.S., we still have a lot of contradictions when it comes to sexual content. It seems that men can write stories with explicit or even brutal sex and it isn’t a big deal. People don’t generally seem to assume the author has done everything in his book. (I don’t know a lot of male authors, so take this with a grain of salt.) However, my female romance writer friends have been chastised and insulted because of the love scenes in their books. Friend’s husbands—who probably only read the sexy parts—snicker and joke as if they believe the author is writing down her personal experiences. Neighbors inform the author that they “don’t read those trashy novels,” and journalists have poked fun at the genre for years, with silly puns and childish innuendo. I’ve never seen this kind of disrespect heaped on the more male-dominated genres.

When you go a step further from romance into erotic romance, the situation gets even dicier for female writers, since most of us are moms. It has always been taken for granted that men had sexual fantasies—the cheerleader, the librarian, the hot teacher, etc. Women were supposed to pretend they didn’t think about such things, but it turns out they have common fantasies too. Like male fantasies, these usually have nothing to do with their real lives. They’re an escape, just like any other fiction. I think the stigma of reading erotica is starting to lift, so hopefully the same will happen for those writing it. Regardless, there’s never been a better time in history to be a female writer, just check the best-seller lists.

DW: You’ve experimented with various pricing models—can you share some of what you’ve learned along the way?

LS: My advice would be “listen to me, but don’t really listen to anybody” when it comes to pricing. You do need to study the pricing of other books in the top 100 of your genre before you consider your price. Different genres can have different price points. Also, brand new authors can’t expect people to risk $12.99 on their ebook. And as tempting as it may be, you can’t price your book by how hard it was to write. If so, each of my books would cost at least a hundred dollars, since erotica is the hardest writing I’ve ever done, barring none. Some authors advise you not to devalue your work and remind you that you can make just as much money selling fewer copies of your book at a higher price. This is true. However, it dawned on me that, even if the profit on a particular book is exactly the same at the end of the quarter, when I sell fewer copies I’m finding fewer new readers, therefore fewer fans will auto-buy my backlist and my subsequent books. I could be hurting myself in the long run if my prices are too high. When I put my novella Training Tessa on sale for $0.99 (originally $2.99) to see if it could sell better, sales of that story went through the roof, then sales of all my backlist surged drastically.

On the other hand, a friend of mine went against my advice and raised the price on a story that wasn’t selling well and sales increased a bit. (That’s where the “don’t listen to anybody” comes in.) To be successful in self-publishing, an author needs to stay away from the “sheep” mentality and become her own shepherd. I research everything I can, run my own tests, then decide what’s best for me. All my marketing and sales efforts are a work in progress. I never think I know it all. What’s best today is not necessarily what will be best tomorrow. Since publishing intersected with technology, the publishing industry has been changing fast. I’m stretching out and remaining agile.

DW: Many people say the quality of a book’s cover is critical in ebooks—what is your take on this?

LS: I can see why covers are one of the most frustrating, confusing problems indies have to deal with. The advice that’s generally given is so vague: “Make sure you have a professional, attractive cover.” This causes authors to focus on getting a graphic designer and leaving it to that “professional.” However, the graphic artist cannot be the decider because he doesn’t necessarily know anything about your book or genre. He may give you the most artistic book cover, or the prettiest, or the edgiest, even though that may not be what you need.

I think it’s important to remember why people read fiction. They read in order to escape and feel things they may not get to feel in their real lives. Therefore, the most important characteristic of a cover is that it invokes—in the potential reader—the same emotion he or she will feel while reading the book. In other words, the cover for a horror story should creep you out. A suspense novel cover should make you nervous. An erotic cover should turn you on.

If the cover image, the title, and the font don’t convey the right emotion, there’s little chance readers will click to the description or excerpt. No matter how cool the cover is, it isn’t serving its purpose. Of course, there are exceptions to any rule, but I’d never assume that my story was fabulous enough to defy the odds. In fact, I’ve become so practical, I planned the cover for Training Tessa and commissioned the photo before I actually wrote down the story.

DW: What has been your experience with social media, i.e. Facebook, your website, etc. on building your audience?

LS: Although today is very different, when I was first contracted by Ellora’s Cave, it seemed that the only free promotion I could do that might make a difference was on Facebook. I painstakingly friended women by finding them in a romance or erotica group and sending each one a note telling her why I was requesting a friendship. If she accepted, I put a nice comment on her wall that related to her info page or pictures. (I always found something genuine to say. I don’t believe in fake compliments.)

When it was time for my first book to come out, I started writing entertaining blog posts with irresistible titles and linking them on my Facebook page. This got me lots of hits to my blog, where readers also found my book cover and links to my book. Some of these Facebook friends became my core readership who bought all my Ellora’s Cave books and interacted with me about them.

A couple of years later, when I announced my first self-published story on Facebook, two of them posted that they’d already bought it. If I were starting out as a new author today, my primary focus would be on making the most of what the retail sites offer—author pages, tagging, Listmania, putting key search words in my title for the search engines to pick up, etc., then I’d deal with Facebook and Twitter next.

However, it’s very important to me to be able to contact my core readership. The best tool I have is that little check box on my website’s contact page that allows readers to sign up for book notifications. Habitual readers read lots of authors, and as much as they may love me when they finish the book, by the time the next is out, I may have slipped their minds. Being able to tell my readers when my next book releases means that a group of people will buy my book within a few hours or days of each other, which pushes my rankings up, which, in turn, causes me to appear in more locations on retail sites.

After my very first story was published (in an Ellora’s Cave anthology), I only had a few readers on my notification list. But each book got me a few more. Training Tessa has been a bonanza, and I now have hundreds of people who will be notified of my next release. A reader who goes to the trouble of finding my website, clicks to my contact page, then entrusts me with her email address is as good as gold. These are the people I’m writing for. That being said, my readers rarely hear from me. I use the list for its intended purpose and do not send unnecessary messages or share it with anyone.

DW: Are all of your readers women or do you hear from male readers as well?

LS: As far as I know, most of my readers are women. However, women are by nature more communicative, so there may be more men than I realize. Occasionally men “fan” my Facebook page without comment. Perhaps they just want to know when the next book is coming out without giving up their email addresses.

DW: Can you share with us your views on the pluses and minuses of blogging for authors?

LS: I think you must have heard I have a controversial opinion on blogging, David. Initially, I was stressed by all the advice about how I needed to blog frequently and regularly in order to be a successful author. While I have blogged to try to gain a readership, I see problems with frequent blogging. “Forced” blogging is a terrible time suck and can result in very boring posts. When I first started wrestling with the blogging issue, I asked authors on two Yahoo groups if any of them had seen evidence that blogging increased sales. No one had. Several felt sure it didn’t help them at all. But I knew I could write entertaining blogs that got me lots of hits to my site, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to discount blogging completely.

Finally, I decided to use the “movie star” approach to blogging. Notice how movie stars disappear from talk shows for months, then pop up when they have movies coming out? That’s what I try to do. I think it’s interesting to note, though, that I was too sick to blog around the Training Tessa release, except for an announcement that it was out, but it made the bestseller lists. And when I think about it, I’ve often heard complaints from readers that fiction authors aren’t publishing their next books fast enough. I’ve never heard a reader complain that his favorite fiction author isn’t blogging enough.

DW: Back to your bestseller, Training Tessa, can you speculate about some of the specific fantasy elements that may account for how well it is resonating with readers?

LS: Every genre has its peculiarities. I think with erotic romance and erotica, the most popular titles are often those that play into a common fantasy. For erotica aimed at women, the fantasy is an alpha male-type, who might also happen to be a millionaire or a shape-shifter, or something else interesting. With Training Tessa, I think I hit on three fantasies at once. Apparently, a lot of people have boss/office fantasies, plus the two male characters in Training Tessa and the upcoming Controlling Krysta are rich cowboy types. I guess rich-cowboy-boss may be an erotic romance triple threat. (Before you boys start rolling your eyes, I would argue that these fantasy men are no more ridiculous that the boob-ilicious cheerleader, librarian, or hot secretary fantasies guys are famous for.)

DW: Many indie authors get discouraged when their first book doesn't sell. Do you have advice for them?

LS: It is nearly impossible to be an overnight success as an author. Even when it seems that way, if you dig deeper, you find out the author has been working toward her goals for years. One book will not create a career for you any more than one year at a job will. Honestly, if a writer publishes one book, doesn’t sell much and gives up, I’m not sure he wants it badly enough. I was born a writer, and I would rather write limericks on bathroom walls for a living, if that were my only writing option, than not write. It took me about six years and the writing and rewriting of numerous works in three genres to become a self-supporting fiction author. I have traditionally published friends who had to start over several times in new genres with new names when their books didn’t sell. One thing is true, whether publishing traditionally or indie. A writer needs to be prepared to create multiple stories in order to build a following, then many more to sustain a career as a professional author.

DW: So what’s next for you?

LS: I find that having more than one type of project going at once keeps writer’s block away because if I draw a blank on one project, I can move to the next. That’s why I’m currently working on a non-fiction book for writers about indie publishing as well as Controlling Krysta, the sequel to Training Tessa, plus my romances I write under another name.

DW: Thank you!

Smashwords distributes nine Lyla Sinclair titles to the following retailers:

Apple iBookstore
Barnes & Noble
Blio.com
Diesel eBook Store
Ebook Eros (Operated by Diesel)
Kobo
Smashwords
Sony

Smashwords Acquires 100,000 New ISBNs

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Coker) — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:42:00 +0000

Smashwords this week acquired 100,000 new ISBNs from Bowker to accommodate strong growth in the Smashwords catalog.

We provide these ISBNs to our authors, publishers and literary agents for FREE, as an exclusive benefit for those who utilize Smashwords ebook distribution services.

ISBNs are unique digital identifiers, and they're required for authors who want to distribute to the Apple iBookstore, Sony, Kobo and others. We buy them so you don't have to.

To learn more about ISBNs, visit the Smashwords ISBN FAQ where you'll find links to other ISBN resources. Smashwords authors and publishers will find additional ISBN information at their ISBN Manager page.

How Rachel Higginson Overcame Rejection From Traditional Publishing to Achieve Indie Ebook Success

noreply@blogger.com (David Weir) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 07:36:00 +0000

Independent author Rachel Higginson lives in Nebraska with her husband and four young children. A year ago, she was an unknown, unpublished writer with a growing pile of rejection slips from literary agents. Undeterred, she decided to self publish in early 2011.

Over the past three quarters at Smashwords, her sales have broken out, growing 25-fold with thousands of copies sold each month. Rachel spoke with David Weir about her journey from unknown writer to someone making a good living while achieving her lifelong goal of becoming a successful writer.

She has published four Young Adult novels in her Star-Crossed Series at Smashwords, and -- as is usually the case with self-published ebook authors -- her sales were slow at first. But Rachel never gave up and eventually found the keys to connecting with readers. Once she did, she's never looked back.

David Weir: Can you tell us a bit about your background? Did you always want to be a writer?

Rachel Higginson: I have always wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember. I think my mom still has a copy of a play I wrote in fourth grade as a sequel to Alice in Wonderland that I made all the neighborhood kids act out in the middle of the street! During high school, I was positive I would pursue journalism and had great pipe dreams of traveling the world. I pictured myself wearing khakis and colorful scarves as a war correspondent covering Pulitzer Prize worthy pieces! However, when it was time to choose a college, I decided it was better to stay close to home. My dad had the first signs of a cancer that would eventually take his life, and so I stayed near family and picked a college that dropped their journalism program the same year I started school. During college I temporarily gave up on my writing dream, but was still able to travel the world by participating in a six month study abroad/internship program in Europe and spending a summer helping with the 2005 Tsunami relief in Sri Lanka. By the time I graduated, I had a BA in Intercultural studies, I had gotten married and my father had passed away. Dreams of writing were very, very far away.

DW: And when did you write your first book?

RH: I wrote my first book in 2007, so just a year after I graduated college. This book still doesn’t have a title and will hopefully, for everyone else’s sake, never be published! But I started writing it and kept writing it as a way to heal over the trauma of the year before. My husband Zach and I were married my senior year of college, and were very young at the time. My dad passed away just four short months after he walked me down the aisle. And a month after I received my college diploma I found out I was pregnant! By the time we had our firstborn I think I was a bit traumatized. I was at the very least emotionally depressed. I started writing a novel as part experiment just to see if I could do it, and part healing process to find myself again through everything I had been through. And that is exactly what happened. Through writing I was able to heal and remember who I was and what I wanted out of life. Writing also became something I couldn’t live without, something that healed me on a daily basis, that made me healthy and whole. And from all of that I started writing the Star-Crossed Series.

DW: You wrote the first of your four novels in the Star-Crossed Series, Reckless Magic, in 2009 -- did you try the traditional publishing route and, if so, what happened?

RH: I definitely tried the traditional publishing route then. At that time I wasn’t aware of the possibilities through ebook self-publishing. I looked at the traditional publishing industry as my only option and researched the life out of how to get published. I couldn’t even tell you how many query letters I sent to agents or how many times I edited Reckless Magic so that it would be a better version of itself to present to agents. Although, it didn’t really matter how many times I tweaked that first chapter, no agent ever asked to see even the first few pages. Out of the hundreds of rejection letters I received, I began to give up on the idea that I would ever be published. It was definitely a hard couple of years struggling with rejection. On one side I had this manuscript that I believed in with all of my being, and a love for writing that had dug down deep and began to define part of who I was. And on the other side I had letter after letter telling me that I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn't writing anything the industry or public would find worth reading and that my dream would not be coming true. I think even to this day I am affected by the dichotomy of those emotions.

DW: When and how did you discover the self-publishing option?

RH: Self-publishing was first presented to me in the fall and winter of 2010 by my husband. Kindle was really making itself known at that time, and as an avid reader I had been very interested in just owning an eReader. But Zach started reading and looking into authors who were being self-published through Kindle and asked me if I would ever consider going that route with Reckless Magic. At first I think I laughed at him; I was convinced self-publishing was just another form of failure. To me, if I didn’t have an agent and publishing house behind me then I could never be successful. But then, in February of 2011 I received my very own Kindle for my birthday and instantly fell in love with the whole e-reading process! I discovered self-published authors, with their discounted prices and started reading their work. It didn’t take me long to realize there was definitely something to this Indie way of publishing. Zach had been persistently encouraging me to look into it for myself and go that route and after seeing the success of indie stars like Amanda Hocking, I couldn’t find valid reasons to put it off any longer. As soon as I published on Kindle, my eyes were opened to the eReader world and I published to Smashwords just days later.

DW: So once you had Reckless Magic up on Amazon and Smashwords, how were your early sales?

RH: I published Reckless Magic in March 2011 and didn’t really know what to expect. Even though self-publishing had worked great for other Indie authors, I knew I had a long, hard road ahead of me. In those first six months of Reckless Magic being live on Kindle and Smashwords I sold about fifty books total. I doubted myself constantly, feeling like more of a failure every day. I was working hard to finish the second book in the series, but self-publishing, at times, became just another form of the rejection I had experienced for two years while trying to get traditionally published. At the same time though, every time I sold a book was a small victory over those fears. And with the support of my family, especially my husband and mom, rejection turned to hope for a career to come, and for a successful future, even if doubts and insecurity nagged at me daily. At one point, I remember asking Zach what he would think of me if I never sold any more books than what I had. He changed my whole way of thinking by reminding me that it didn’t matter if I sold one book or one million books, I was doing what I loved and I was publishing manuscripts that I really believed in and that was what was most important.

DW: The second of the series, Hopeless Magic, came out in August, and then you made a strategic decision the following month -- can you tell us about that and what happened as a result?

RH: During the time Reckless Magic was alone on the market, Zach and I looked at a lot of different models for publicity and marketing. One model that really caught our attention was pricing the first book of a series lower than the subsequent books. This seemed especially appealing to me, knowing I was completely unknown and people were already taking a chance by downloading my book. So when Hopeless Magic came out in August, we made the decision to offer Reckless Magic, as the first book in the series, for free. The price change took about a month to make its way to every retailer, but when it finally happened on September 15th, it changed everything for me. I had been in the habit of checking my sales on a daily basis, cheering for every sale, especially when there were days in between them. I would even call Zach at work, every time I sold a book, just to let him in on my excitement. But September 15th, after dinner I happened to check my sales and I had gone from a month total of 2 downloads to 357 downloads. I immediately screamed at Zach to come look at what I was looking at and tell me what was wrong with the computer! We were both convinced my sales were a computer error, until we saw that Reckless Magic was now being offered for free. In the first week of the price change, I saw over 30,000 downloads of Reckless Magic. We were blown away.

DW: Now you've achieved success, how has that affected the way you approach writing and your life overall?

RH: This is a great question, because it is an issue I am working on daily to define. I am a writer who is blessed enough to make a living by my work, so I have to find a way to make writing a priority in my life. At the same time, I am also a stay at home mom of four beautiful children all under the age of five and they would very much like to keep all of my attention to themselves! Together with my husband, we have made an active effort to give me the time I need to write. Of course, I say that and realize the four hours of writing I had planned to do today were dwindled down to half of that, and in thirty minute spaces of time I snuck in here and there, instead of the big block of time I had planned…. But, we’ll figure it out! What we are learning though is that success takes hard work and sweat and tears at every single level. At the very beginning of this journey, I was convinced I would never work harder than I did to get Reckless Magic out there and selling, but now I can laugh at that. If anything, I am sacrificing more of my time to write. This career will, thankfully, always take hard work and sacrifice and that is just fine by me. As long as I am putting everything I have into it though, and putting out the best work I have in me I will consider myself successful.

DW: Can you share with us some of the makeup of Eden Matthews, the lead character in your series?

RH: What I really wanted with Eden was a strong female teenage heroine. From the very beginning of writing the series, I knew it would be this long, dramatic love story and I was terrified that Eden would get swept up in that and lose who I wanted her to be. So I purposefully set out to make her set in her convictions, which I think translated more stubborn than anything. I also wanted a very genuine and authentic heroine, someone that was really relatable but also imperfect. She makes mistakes, she gets tripped up in her own pride and hard-headedness, but she also loves deeply and means the best. Writing for me is very personal; I said earlier how I use it to heal or stay healthy. Because of that, I couldn’t help but write pieces of myself into Eden’s character. She is definitely a version of myself that at times can be hard to admit since I’ve put her out there for the world to see. But because I put so much honesty and authenticity into her, I would like to believe that she came out as I imagined her: flawed and at times completely oblivious, but also strong, sincere and absolutely authentic.

DW: You've said Eden encounters a world "more make-believe than reality" -- how important is fantasy in the Young Adult Fiction genre?

RH: For me, fantasy is the driving force behind everything I write. Fiction has the rare power to inspire and motivate every kind of person and I find my most motivating factors in the thread of a fantastic beyond-reality storyline. There is something about a hero or heroine facing unrealistic odds and overcoming them that is so absolutely inspiring and life-changing. I can name countless books along the course of my life that have helped shape and develop me into who I am today. But those moments of solid self-reflection that turn into actual action are the result of only the most challenging fictional scenarios. And I don’t think that Young Adults will ever outgrow the pure enjoyment of reading about a peer facing unrealistic odds or adversaries and coming out on top.

DW: Now that the series is finished, what are you writing?

RH: I am working on the first book in a new series that I have dreamt about writing since before Reckless Magic was even daydreamed. The title of the book is called Starbright and I hope to have it out in the early part of September. Starbright is another young adult book set in Nebraska, but this one follows a young Star living on Earth to protect our planet from a great evil. It’s more of an epic good vs. evil story line, but something I am really, really excited to share.

DW: Do you envision sticking with Young Adult Fiction or exploring other genres?

RH: Ah! Great question!! Right now, in my immediate plans I have only Young Adult in the mix. And since my immediate plans include the next three series I want to write, including a few spin-offs of The Star-Crossed Series I should probably say, yes I absolutely plan on sticking with Young Adult Fiction. However, after that it’s hard to say. I don’t have a different genre story in my head right now, but all it takes is that one special thought, or daydream for something to blossom into a full blown story line and then I could be off writing who-knows-what!

DW: Do you have a sense of your core audience and if so who are they?

RH: I write Young Adult Fiction, so you might expect me to say teenagers, ages 13-18. That is the age group I had in mind anyway when I wrote the series. But in reality my core audience are women just like me, who fell in love with the genre just like I did! And I love it! I love connecting with my fans, going through the same struggles of motherhood I am or balancing work and home life and feeling like both are dangerously tipping the scales. As far as audiences go I have one of the best and most supportive and I am really blessed by each and every one of my fans.

DW: What is your writing process -- do you set aside a certain amount of time every day to write?

RH: Every day I set aside a certain amount of time to write. And then every day that amount of time gets divided by three and mixed in with grocery shopping, making dinner and taxiing kids around from some activity to the other. But through all that time being the mom instead of the writer I am a perpetual daydreamer, plotting and planning the next chapter, or conversation or third of the book. Then, when I can finally get to my computer I’m ready to use the little time I have to the fullest.

DW: Do you work with an editor and if so how did you find her?

RH: I do work with an editor now. I definitely didn’t start out that way, and I am still in the process of going back through my first series and cleaning it all up. But I’ve learned a lot along the way and my editor is so extremely valuable to my entire process now. Plus she just makes me sound so much smarter! I have kind of stumbled through this whole process of learning how to self-publish, so when I decided it was time to hire an editor I went about it the easiest way I knew how. I found an indie author that I really respected and enjoyed and that continually put out great works and I emailed her editor! I went to her asking for advice on how to find an editor, but thankfully she was willing to work with me and excited about the series I already had out and the one I’m working on now.

DW: Your story of persistence and overcoming rejection is sure to inspire others -- what advice do you have for others who have not yet achieved success in the indie publishing business?

RH: I just want to encourage every Indie writer. I’ve talked a lot about how I faced rejection and feelings of failure throughout this whole experience, and I wish I could say that at some point those feelings go away, but I am convinced they only get worse! As writers, our work is so impossibly personal and emotional that a negative review by a reader can feel like the deepest cut. That definitely doesn’t change no matter how many books you’ve sold or positive reviews you’ve received. My advice is to push through it all, face it head on and stay true to your work. The most important thing is to write something that makes all of rejection and emotional trauma worth it. If you’re writing something you believe in, something you are passionate about and something you are just down right in love with then you will find success. And I would also say, play around with how you approach marketing. There are countless success stories in this industry and we’ve all taken different paths to get here. If what you’re doing now isn’t working for you, try something different and keep trying and working until something does work for you.

DW: Thank you and good luck!

Smashwords distributes Rachel Higginson to the following retailers:

Apple iBookstore
Barnes & Noble
Blio.com
Diesel
Kobo
Smashwords
Sony

Author Joseph Lallo on the Keys to His SciFi and Epic Fantasy Success

noreply@blogger.com (David Weir) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:36:00 +0000

Indie author Joseph Lallo writes Epic Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like many successful self-published authors at Smashwords, his sales started off slow. He joined Smashwords in February, 2010, and for the entire year sold only four copies for earnings of about $15.00. Undeterred, he continued writing, made incremental improvements to his books, and experimented with pricing. In 2011, his sales started to pick up, and then in early 2012 he experienced a breakout. In his most recent quarter, he earned $15,600, led by strong US sales at Barnes & Noble, followed by solid international growth at the Apple iBookstore.

Lallo has experimented with different ways to help readers discover his work, including following many of the best practices we recommend at Smashwords. David Weir interviewed him recently to discover the journey that led to his success.

David Weir: Where do your stories come from? Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Joseph Lallo: I suppose my brain has been wired for storytelling from a very young age. When I was little, every year the family would go camping for a whole month in Vermont. We literally slept in a barn, so to get us to go to bed my Mom would tell us stories, which she generally made up as she went along. Sometimes she'd ask us to give her things she should include in the story.

When I got a little older I'd play video games on the old NES. One of them, Dragon Warrior, was popular enough with me and one of my friends that we would act out little adventures in the setting. That's where the seeds of what would be The Book of Deacon Trilogy were planted.

As for whether I've always wanted to be a writer? I didn't really aspire to it at first. Writing down the big, sprawling story that I'd started to knit together was more or less just something to do when I was bored at school. I didn't really expect it to go anywhere. In fact, after initially being open about writing the story, I started to feel ashamed that I'd been at it for so long and became very secretive about it. Even my brothers didn't know I'd never actually stopped writing.

DW: Can you take us through the evolution of The Book of Deacon, and how your friends helped you along the way?

JL: Well, as I said, it started as a sort of verbal fan fiction for a video game. Eventually we lost interest in the game and moved on to other things, but the ideas continued to kick around in my head. I'd daydream, ditching the parts that I thought were silly and adding things I thought would be cool. I was pretty good in school, so up until my late college years there wasn't really a lot of challenge in class. I carried around a spiral notebook and wrote down whatever happened next. It went on like that for years, and then I finally reached a conclusion of sorts. By this time, it filled something on the order of a dozen spiral notebooks and was probably half a million words. (I've still got those books, I took a picture not too long ago.)

After that, the handful of friends I'd let in on the secret that I was still writing a book became my sounding board. One guy in particular, Sean, was and is one of my best friends and lost quite a few hours of sleep thanks to me rambling about plot points while we were roommates in college. Once I'd finished writing the story down in longhand, they convinced me to type it. When it became clear that it was taking forever, they convinced me to learn to touch-type. Then came the proofreading, and the rigid assurance that it wasn't as terrible as I thought it was. Most importantly, though, they were the ones who said, break it up into three chunks. I wrote up a query letter and sent it to a few dozen literary agents. About half of them came back as rejections, mostly form letters, and the rest never even got replies. I was willing to call it a failure, but my friends prodded me into trying out self-publishing.

DW: How did you discover the independent, self-publishing model?

JL: I think it was my friend Cary who linked me to Amazon's self-publishing platform, what is now KDP. The Kindle had taken root by then, so I knew I wanted to be on there, but I always knew that it was a bad idea to put all of your eggs in one basket. I wanted to see if there was an easy way to get on a lot of different platforms, and a quick search turned up some forums that recommended Smashwords to handle the non-Amazon stuff. Smashwords has probably been the most help in both improving my business and literary skill, since their more stringent formatting requirements and the transparency on the business side really taught me a lot.

DW: As with most successful authors, your sales started off slow but then ramped over time. Tell us what that period was like and the steps you took to improve sales?

JL: I think in the first year (2010) I made $15, and I immediately reinvested $10 for a premium ISBN... I'm still not sure why I did that. I started my book at $9.99 and sold one copy. Somehow I got it into my head that the lack of interest was due to the fact that it was 150,000 words, so I whipped up a shorter story, Jade, and put that out. Still nothing. Around the time I released the second book in the trilogy, I dropped Book 1 to $4.99, then $2.99. Nothing seemed to make much of a difference, but I'd already written written a whole trilogy, so I figured I'd at least stick with it until the third book was published. I sent out requests for blogs to do reviews, and even got accepted to one or two, one of which hasn't gotten around to reviewing my first book yet. That first year and a half wasn't exactly a confidence builder.

DW: You've said there were two key changes you made that turned things around -- what were they?

JL: The first one, and probably the most important one, was actually inspired by an article I read here on the Smashwords blog. In a writeup about fellow indie author Brian S. Pratt (click here to read the Brian S. Pratt interview), it was established that he'd had a breakthrough when he made the first book of his series free. I figured, hey, I have a series, and I'm already making no money on the first one. After The Great Convergence, the second book in the trilogy came out, I made The Book of Deacon free. Slowly people started to try it out, and the sequel started get some nibbles, too. Once I started to see positive reviews, I hurried up and got the final book in the trilogy out. Then, on May 17th 2011, after refusing to make my book free for a few weeks, Amazon finally price-matched it to zero. It got picked up on some free book blogs, and things exploded. I think 18,000 people downloaded it that first month, and weirdly, sales spiked on the other platforms at the same time. I guess Nook users read the Kindle lists too.

The sales bonanza didn't last long, but by the time it had calmed down to a slow boil it earned me just shy of $3,000. I decided that I might as well spend that money back on the books, since the money was essentially a windfall. I tracked down an artist, Nick Deligaris, who had caught my eye with his magnificent fantasy art, and commissioned all new covers for the trilogy. I figured that would be the end of it, but within days of updating the covers my sales tripled. People do indeed judge a book by its cover, it seems. Sales have stayed pretty strong since, with the odd dip or spike to spice things up.

DW: It may surprise some readers who are not familiar with your work that the main character in your trilogy is female -- Myranda Celeste -- was that a conscious choice on your part?

JL: Yes and no. Way back when I was first toying with story ideas, I'd come up with this phenomenally cliche story about five descendants of great warriors, four of whom were male. Eventually, I realized it was silly to write about descendants without at least thinking up who it was that they descended from, so I spent some time thinking about that. Since the descendants were mostly male, I decided the ancestors should be mostly female. Myranda was the most interesting, so she became the star, and since I was older and wiser when I dreamed her story up, I decided it was the better choice to start writing. I wish I had a grand, artistic reason for you, but mostly I did it to balance things out.

DW: What sense do you have of your audience and their demographics? Any surprises there?

JL: I don't know of any way to get reliable data like that on actual sales, but when it comes to feedback from readers (and the distribution of likes on the Facebook Fan Page), my fans are overwhelmingly female. I've heard from quite a few guys, but when it comes to emails and comments, women probably outnumber the men three-to-one. Not only that, but women of all ages; everyone from a preteen who sent me fan art to a woman in her seventies who was practically my pen pal for a while. It continues to amaze me that I could have found so strong a following with the opposite sex.

DW: How do you interact with readers, using social media?

JL: I try to make myself available to fans in any way they would like. I started with Twitter (@jrlallo), and quickly after my friend Sean set me up with a dedicated web page, www.bookofdeacon.com, and an email address. A reader suggested that I set up a Facebook Fan Page, so I did that, and I've tried to get an author account on all relevant sites, including Amazon, GoodReads, Shelfari, and others. Since then fans have inspired me to set up a fan art page, a forum, and a wiki, with varying levels of success. I still try to reply to every email, every tweet, and every comment on my site. I used to comment on customer reviews of my books, but I ended up having to cut down on that for a few reasons.

DW: Do you work with an editor, and if so, how did you find one?

JL: Heh, one of the main reasons I had to quit commenting on my reviews was the psychologically torturous frequency of comments every six months, finding dozens of errors each time. My friends each read the books twice, finding dozens of errors. And fans continued to complain about hundreds of remaining errors despite the revisions. After the new covers, I decided I'd reinvest as much money from the books as I could, and it was clear that finding an editor was a priority. I did some searches for freelance editor who could be trusted. My searches led me to someone named Anna Genoese, who has been a pleasure to work with. I've also had some fans offer to edit for me, but I've noticed that interest starts decline once the enormity of the task becomes apparent. (For the most part, anyway. There's at least one fan who has stuck with it.)

DW: I understand you have a Bulgarian connection -- care to tell us about that?

JL: Ah yes, the Bulgarian Deal. (Every time I say that my brother tells me it sounds like I'm in a Guy Ritchie movie.) Earlier this year, I got a letter from someone from a Bulgarian toy distributor, MBG Toys. He'd apparently read my story and really enjoyed it, and was interested in translation rights for a small publishing label that was associated, MBG Books. I did a lot of research, because my brain would not allow me to accept that such a request could be legit. No red flags popped up, so I decided to take a chance. I contacted a lawyer to get a translation rights contract made up, and took the plunge. Evidently it is almost ready for market. I've gotten some praise from the translator, and I've been sent a copy of the cover. Incidentally, it turns out my middle initial, R, translates to P in the Cyrillic alphabet. Wacky.

DW: And you also have some news about your sci-fi stories, is that right?

JL: Indeed I do. A few months ago I submitted the first of them to a website in development called StoryBundle.com. The idea behind the site is that they would gather submissions from indie authors, choose the cream of the crop, and bundle them together. For a limited time, readers would be able to pick up the bundle for whatever price they choose. I'm proud to say I made it into the inaugural bundle, called The Big Bang Bundle. My book Bypass Gemini is in the main bundle, and if you pay enough, the sequel Unstable Prototypes is a bonus. The bundle is set to run from August 8th to August 28th, I believe.

DW: What is different about writing sci-fi from writing epic fantasy? Do you, as an author, have a preference?

JL: Science Fiction and Fantasy are actually alike in a number of ways. In both cases you're building worlds, either by enhancing reality or inventing entirely new concepts. The main difference to me is that fantasy uses magic and sci-fi uses science, which for all intents and purposes is just magic with numbers to back it up. I once heard it put that Science Fiction is Fantasy but dignified and literary. My dip into sci-fi is more focused on spaceships, explosions, and exploding spaceships. That said, I can't really say that I prefer one over the other. Sci-fi is fun to write, and I've got an engineering background, so I'm pretty good at bluffing with technology. I'm sure my professors would be thrilled to know that I've been using my Master's Degree in Computer Engineering to add realism to a story in which a mad scientist shoots dog doo with a laser. I've had a lot of fun writing both fantasy and science fiction, though.

DW: Will you continue writing in both genres?

JL: I definitely plan to alternate. At the time I started writing the science fiction, the trilogy hadn't really gotten much interest, so I suppose there was a chance I would have stuck with sci-fi if it had caught on first, but now I've got a small legion of fantasy fans who would come after me with torches and pitchforks if I didn't give them a few more books in the Deacon series.

DW: Your current sci-fi series, which isn't named yet, consists of two books so far -- how many books do you envision in this series?

JL: I didn't have an endpoint in mind for that one. The Book of Deacon was a trilogy because initially it was one massive book. (Note: As published the trilogy runs close to 450,000 words in length.) For the science fiction, I wanted to focus on books that were more self-contained. There's a little bit of a sequel hook at the end of each one but for the most part I wanted to avoid things like cliffhangers. For now, the sci-fi is open-ended, with at least two more books plotted out.

DW: Now that you are gaining so much success, are you considering quitting your day job?

JL: I'm not planning on quitting my job, but it is getting really hard to avoid thinking about it. At some point my brain went from saying, "I can't quit my job to" to saying, "I certainly can't quit my job before this project is done." For now, writing remains a very attractive and very enjoyable Plan B, which at the moment is out-earning Plan A by a fairly wide margin..

DW: What advice do you have for others who may wish to try and emulate your success as an independent author?

JL: Be patient, listen to your fans, and be willing invest back into your books. It takes a tremendous amount of work and more than a little luck to get things rolling, but once it happens, it is absolutely worth the effort.

DW: Thank you Joseph!

Smashwords distributes Joseph Lallo to the following retailers:

Apple iBookstore
Barnes & Noble
Blio
Kobo
Sony
Smashwords

Smashwords Author JD Nixon Breaks out with Mystery & Detective Series

noreply@blogger.com (David Weir) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 21:49:00 +0000

Indie ebook author JD Nixon is the pseudonym used by the author of two series of novels written from her home in the "deep north" of Queensland, Australia. Although classified as detective/mysteries, Nixon's books defy simple categorization because they combine a large number of genres -- in her own words they are "mystery-comedy-drama-action-adventure-romances with a racy twist and a strong dose of relationships, all while taken on a roller coaster of emotions."

Her sales are taking off. In the month of July, JD Nixon sold over 9,700 copies at just one Smashwords retailer - Barnes & Noble. Smashwords also distributes her to Amazon, the Apple iBookstore, Diesel, Sony and Kobo.

Nixon spoke with David Weir the other day to share some of her writing and publishing secrets -- though not her real identity!

David Weir: You started writing indie ebooks in 2009. Did you have any previous experience with traditional publishing?

JD Nixon: Apart from co-authoring a non-fiction book released by a major university publisher, the closest I’ve come to traditional publishing is submitting a children’s book to two publishers. One didn’t respond and an editor for the other sent me a lovely personal letter advising me my book wasn’t “edgy” enough for them, but that she just loved my very tongue-in-cheek covering letter. It made me realise that children’s books weren’t for me, but I still might dig it up one day, dust it off and publish it for free. I thought it was a good read (and so did my child)!!

DW: Was there any moment of epiphany, when you just realized it was time to start writing adult fiction?

JDN: In 2009, I started reading a best-selling book that everyone had raved about, but I found it quite uninspiring and put it aside halfway through. I decided then that I was bored of reading other people’s stories – I wanted to write my own. So I did. And because I’d already ruled out children’s books, I naturally started writing adult fiction.

DW: Can you tell us just a bit about the characters in your Heller series and how you created them?

JDN: The Heller books have a huge cast of characters, some permanent, some transient. My main character, Tilly Chalmers, is a generous, warm, loving, fairly inept young woman who stumbles into a job in a security and surveillance firm run by Heller. Everything she does turns his carefully controlled, business-focused and rather emotionless and promiscuous life upside down. She also has a big impact on Heller’s ‘family’, a group of stray people Heller has gathered around himself, when she moves in with them. Tilly is forever getting herself into scrapes and then getting herself out of them again, sometimes with a little help from Heller and his team of men. And of course, a security and surveillance firm, full of huge handsome men and one trouble-making woman, is a pot of gold when it comes to plot developments!

I enjoy exploring the dynamics of this situation – of how the characters learn about themselves and teach each other. My characters are quite flawed and imperfect and that’s the way I love them! Although Heller is physically beautiful, he has a darkness in his soul, a ruthless streak and a shady past, all of which makes Tilly uncomfortable. And she finds a real strength inside herself without losing her vulnerability and openness. I like to think my characters are quite complex in nature and that they grow throughout the series. Nothing turns me off a book faster than a ‘perfect’ character or a character that never seems to reflect and learn from what has happened to him/her. No thanks!

DW: So you wrote several books in that series before publishing the first one in 2011?

JDN: Yes. I wrote almost five books in a row in that series before setting it aside to start my other series, the Little Town books.

DW: How did you find Smashwords and how easy or hard was it for you to self-publish here?

JDN: I was reading an article in an online newspaper about the demise of Borders and Angus and Robertson books chains here in Australia and in the comment section someone mentioned that he’d used Smashwords to self-publish. He also mentioned that he’d since sold more books through SW than he ever could have hoped for with a traditional publishing deal in Australia. I’d been complaining to my hubby about why couldn’t someone start a business where people could put up their books for the public to judge, so obviously I was thrilled to discover SW!! I really wish I could remember the name of that commenter – I’d like to thank him personally.

Publishing with SW is relatively easy if you carefully follow the Style Guide, but I must admit I still have a nervous flutter in my stomach every time I press the ‘publish’ button in case I’ve done something horribly wrong. But the only error I’ve had so far was when I accidentally put up a cover in the wrong file type and that was easily fixed.

DW: Do you remember your first reviews and interactions with fans and how that felt at the time?

JDN: Do I ever! My first review was a five-star review at Smashwords for “Heller” and I can honestly say, I was a little teary about that. (I was also probably teary over my first one-star review, but I seemed to have fortuitously blocked that from my memory!). I still remember my first reader email too and the thrill it gave me.

When you begin indie publishing, it feels as if you’ve sent your ‘baby’ off into a void, so good reviews and reader contact are very reassuring and maybe even validating.

But I must say that one of the most difficult lessons for me to learn is that not everyone will, or can, enjoy my books. Readers bring an enormous amount of personal background to a book and I’m no different when I pick up a new book. We all filter books through our own past experiences. A reader may dislike a particular aspect of a book because of their own background. There’s no way for an author to anticipate that kind of reaction and no way that an author should. I guess I’m saying that you can’t write to please everyone and bad reviews are just part of the territory.

DW: Along the way, you've launched a second series, Little Town. Can you describe the characters in the series?

JDN: The Little Town books (Blood Ties and Blood Sport – Blood Feud soon) revolve around the adventures of Senior Constable Tess Fuller and her partner, Sergeant Finn Maguire, a police team working in a small and isolated rural mountain town overrun by the beautiful and lawless Bycraft family. Tess has a lot of history with the Bycrafts, having grown up in the town with them. There’s a long-standing feud between the two families, which doesn’t stop her from dating one of them, causing even more tension between them all. She’s a bit of a renegade cop, balanced by the arrival of Finn in town, as he’s a by-the-books kind of officer. There are lots of other characters in these books, including one of my favourites, Fiona, the unbelievably crude and foul-mouthed senior officer of the district headquarters to which Tess and Finn report.

After writing so many Heller books, I decided I wanted to write something more serious in nature. I tried with the Little Town series, but I still came up with comedy-drama. I’m not sure I can write anything else!

DW: When we chatted on the phone, you said you caught a bit of flak for the ending in the first title in Blood Ties; can you explain?

JDN: I thought I’d made it obvious in Blood Ties that it was the first of a series, so a number of long-running storylines weren’t resolved, although the ones specific to that book were. Some readers were really annoyed to be left (as they thought) high and dry at the end of the book. I’ve just replaced the covers with wonderful new ones that clearly state the book is number 1 in the series. But I’ve also copped some flak in my books for the bad language, the violence and the sex scenes. I’ve started wondering if books should come with warnings?

DW: You're generally classified in the detective/mystery genre, but how do you view your writing in terms of genres?

JDN: Detective/mystery books are my favourite genre of all. My personal reading is mostly in this genre, with small forays into horror. However, my own books cross genres so they aren’t traditional mysteries or police procedurals – there are no “body in a locked room” type of puzzles in my books. I think my books are mystery-comedy-drama-action-adventure-romances with a racy twist and a strong dose of relationships, all while taken on a roller coaster of emotions. I don’t know if a genre has been invented for them yet, but there’s something for everyone in my books!!

I do think indie pubbing allows more cross-genre authors to have their work read, though it’s still not easy to categorise.

DW: Do you market your books in any conventional way, or only via social media (Facebook, blog, website)?

JDN: I’m not a big self-promoter, but that’s probably just my personality type. I really only use my own platforms (Facebook, my blog and my website and occasionally Twitter) to self-promote. For a long time I was blogging to nobody but the overseas spammers and had only a handful of friends on Facebook, but things are now really picking up across the board.

DW: You're known for answering every email or comment from readers -- how has this helped your books to sell?

JDN: It amazes me when a reader tells me I’m the first author who has ever answered an email! I think that if someone has taken the time to tell me that they loved my books, I should acknowledge that. It also builds goodwill with readers and that’s a valuable asset, because loyal readers will go into bat for me, particularly in recommending my books to others. I know that from experience.

DW: I understand your sales have really taken off this year; do you have any explanation for why this is, beyond the obvious high quality of the writing?

JDN: Perhaps a lot of people received ereaders for gifts and found my books while trawling through the free ebooks? Perhaps readers are recommending my books to their family and friends and I’m starting to see a snowballing effect from that? I wish I knew for sure!!

DW: What can you tell us about your audience, in terms of demographics, geography, age, gender? Any surprises here?

JDN: Lots of surprises! I’ve been incredibly (and pleasantly) surprised by the number of male readers I have – I never expected that. They probably slightly favour the Little Town books more than the Heller series, and perhaps vice versa for my female readers. But there are equally those who love both series.

Another surprise is the age span of my readers. I’ve had emails from people in their early-teens right up to their eighties. I’m very happy to have written books that appeal to so many demographics.

The bulk of my readers are in the US, which was also a surprise as I wasn’t sure if my sense of humour would translate. I do have Aussie readers but it’s a small market so far. And of course I would love to hit it big in my own country, but I have a lot of fun chatting with my international pals.

Another minor thing I’ve noted is cross-genre readers. I’ve had a few readers tell me they’ve never normally read in my genre, but were attracted by the free books and wanted to read more of my books after reading those. Now, that’s also an honour – especially with the sci-fi readers!

DW: You write under a pseudonym; have any of your friends and family found out about your writing success yet?

JDN: Not really. I put up “Heller” and “Blood Ties” before I even told my husband! I had two main reasons for using a pseudonym: the first reason is my “real” job – it can be incredibly sensitive at times, impacting on people’s lives, and I didn’t want my writing to interfere with that; the second reason is purely egotistical – I wanted to be able to cut and run without embarrassing myself if my books were a complete flop. I might get around to telling more people one day, but it doesn’t really bother me if my family and friends don’t know. My husband is dying to tell people though!

DW: What are some of the keys to success for indie ebooks, in your experience -- concrete things like pricing, distribution, marketing, promotion, design, etc.?

JDN: I’m no good at concrete things! But having a series where the first book is offered for free seems to work for me. As an unknown writer, I thought it only fair to offer readers a good sample of my writing style (ie a whole book) and hopefully get them hooked with my characters and storylines.

After reading Mark’s stats on pricing, I recently bumped up the prices of my non-free books from $1.99 to $2.99. I certainly don’t think that’s an unreasonable amount to ask for books that are all over 100,000 words long.

As for distribution, the more places you offer your books the better. That’s why I love Smashwords. As a non-US author, it really makes it so much easier for me to access big ebook retailers and SW compiling stats and payments is also useful to me.

But really, the most important thing is to have good stories with characters and plots that engage your readers. A good story should always find its own audience, no matter how big or small.

DW: So what's in the pipeline going forward?

JDN: Writing, writing and more writing!!! Life has been so disruptive for me for the past few months and my writing progress has been horribly slow, but I’m still hoping to have a book out in each series by the end of the year.

DW: For those would-be authors who haven't yet tried to write an indie book, what's your advice?

JDN: Have lots of self-belief and don’t wait for someone to give you the green light. You now have the ability to reach readers directly through indie publishing, so there’s never been a better time to give it a try. You finally have control of your writing career so take advantage!

DW: Thank you!

Smashwords distributes JD Nixon to the following retailers:

Amazon
Apple iBookstore
Barnes & Noble
Diesel eBook Store
Kobo
Smashwords
Sony