Last weekend (was that just three days ago?) I had a free book giveaway on Amazon for my time travel thriller, TimeSplash (that’s it in the left-hand column if you want to pick up a copy). As my previous post says, it was an exciting moment. A book that had spent almost two years in relative obscurity, was being grabbed up by thousands of people. In fact, in the course of two days, over 19,000 people downloaded the book. In the “Free in the Kindle Store” listings, it shot to #1 in Science Fiction, #1 in Techno-thrillers and #13 overall.

It was a wild and dizzying ride. If you’re not a struggling writer, you may not be able to imagine what it means to have so many people wanting your book all at once. Remember that moment when you first realised that the girl or guy you had fallen in love with actually loved you back? It was sort of like that but without the hope of a happy ever after. That’s because, after the free offer period, my book was going back into the “Paid in the Kindle Store” listings and all those nice high rankings would evaporate in an instant. So I steeled myself for the come down, the plunge back down to the dark and obscure depths to which it had slowing been sinking. (I don’t know how far down the Amazon Kindle ranks go. I’ve noticed books with ranks as low as 800, 000. It must be very cold and still at those depths, with soul crushing pressures.)

And then something peculiar happened. TimeSplash fell alright, but it didn’t fall very far (down to about #1000 overall) and then it started drifting back to the surface. Within a day, it had regained its #1 spot in Techno-thrillers – but this time in the “paid” ranks, of course, and was at #60-something in Science Fiction. The next day, I woke to find it at #11 in Science fiction and went to bed last night with it at #5, where it seems to have come to rest. It was still there when I woke up this morning, only now my overall rank has drifted up above #200 – the highest it has ever been.

Since the upward movement seems to have slowed, I imagine it won’t be long before the downward drift starts in earnest. Which is sad, but it was fun while it lasted – and I sold a truckload of books and actually made some real money out of writing for a change. I also managed to loan a few books through the Kindle library – which will translate to further earnings, although I have no way of calculating how much. And I got a handful of very good Amazon reviews out of it. (Well, three excellent ones, one that compared TimeSplash very favourably to Stephen King’s 11.22.63 and scared me to death,  and one in which the reader said she liked it but then went on about all the many ways she had been confused by it all. With which one can only sympathise.)

Also, I think I’ve learned a few things about how this all works.

1. Because Amazon lists the Paid and Free books side-by-side in its “Top 100″ pages, anyone looking at the best-selling books in, say, Sci-Fi, will see the most downloaded free books too. I can only assume that this is the mechanism by which the giveaway led to my book being noticed and then bought by so many people.

2. Equivalent ranks in the free and paid lists are by no means equivalent in terms of the numbers of books you have to shift to achieve them. To get a particular rank in the free lists, it seems you need to give away as many as 30 times more books than you need to sell for the same rank in the paid lists.

3. There is a vast difference between the UK and the USA when it comes to free book grabs. The Americans seem very keen on free books. They are well organised too. There are blogs and websites that track when free books appear on Amazon and spread the word to their subscribers. My guess is that there must be tens of thousands of such subscribers at the very least, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Thus, of the 19,000 I gave away last weekend, fewer than 2% of them went to the UK and Europe. As a consequence of this (and point 1) almost all the subsequent sales have been to the USA. The book just never made it onto Europe’s radar. All I can say to this is, God bless America!

4. Whatever the drawbacks of Amazon’s KDP Select programme (and their insistence on exclusivity is the biggest) it definitely worked with this particular book. As it happens, another book of mine went into the scheme and had a free book period last week with a very different outcome. The uptake was in hundreds not thousands and the after-sale bounce did not happen. Since the gaveaway, I have sold 2 copies of that book. Which just means there are all kinds of variables at play – timing, type of book, pricing, cover, blurb, etc. – and I’d need a lot more data before I could tell you definitely to go for KDP Select. All I can say is that it worked for me once, and didn’t work for me once.

5. Having scaled these dizzying heights for the first time ever, it has given me a new insight into the volume of sales being achieved by the big names in my genre. Wile I expect to climb up and fall back down fairly quickly, there are some who are up there selling hundreds of books every single day for months, years, even decades. It is a very humbling thought and puts one’s success into perspective.

And, as a footnote to all that, I add that in the time it took to write this post, the book climbed a little farther in the ranks. It just moved to #4 in Science Fiction, bumping Orson Scott Card’s brilliant Ender’s Game into fifth position. (Sorry, Orson. I didn’t mean it. I’m not worthy.)

A profound change has come upon me. No, it’s not the male menopause, although I’m long overdue for a red sports car and a dab of Rogaine. No, this change is based on the realisation that from this week onward, whatever I’m doing, wherever I am, I will never be without a book to read.

What happened to me is this: I bought a smartphone.

I got the phone about a week ago. It took me a few days to footle around with it, setting settings and playing with its various bells and whistles. Then, while I was in a vet’s waiting room, waiting, I downloaded the Kindle app and fired it up. If you don’t know how the Kindle works, let me explain. There is a central repository “in the cloud” where books that you buy from Amazon are held – they call it the Archive. You can download books from your archive into your device and then read them. You can also download books from other sources into your device, but they don’t end up in the archive. So, when I looked at my new Kindle app, there was every book I had ever bought from Amazon, just waiting for me. I picked “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Kurt Vonnegut – something my wife had bought recently, meaning to re-read, and I started re-reading it myself.

The display on my new phone is small (about 10 cm – that’s 4 inches in old money) but the text is clear and steady and I was quite pleased with the readability. The touch screen makes turning the page simple – a single touch with the finger (or thumb) to left or right turns the page that way (you can “swipe” to turn pages too if you’re feeling flamboyant). After ten minutes or so, the vet called us in and I popped the phone in my pocket and thought nothing more about it.

Until today.

I was in a coffee shop. I ordered my usual large cappuccino to go and settled in for the usual fifteen minute wait. To while away the time, I took out my new phone – and remembered I had a book I was reading. So I clicked through to the app and carried on with it. The coffee came. I put the phone away. A couple of hours later, I was waiting again – this time while my wife went to the library (oh, irony). So I whipped out my phone and started reading again.

And that’s when it struck me. I carry my phone with me whenever I go out. Even as I write, it is within hand’s reach of me. And now my phone is an ereader, connected to the largest online bookshop in the world. I will never, ever, have to spend another idle moment without a book to read. Old favourites, new adventures, are just a couple of clicks away. A collection far larger than my local library’s is there in my pocket whenever I want to dip into it.

I find this idea profoundly moving. It is a quantum leap improvement in my quality of life. I still can’t get my head around how significant this is.

I’ve been reading ebooks for years. I have a Kindle which is in constant use around the house, or in hotels on overnight trips. I’ve had a smartphone for years too – just not one with a large enough screen to make reading feasible. But, somehow, the combination of big screen phone and Kindle app has given me access to a capability far more significant than the sum of its parts.

Just for the record, I still prefer reading on the Kindle to on the phone (a Samsung Galaxy S, by the way, running Android). The Kindle was literally made for reading books. When I have them side by side, I will always pick up the Kindle. However, the awesomeness of having a not-quite-Kindle there in my pocket, wherever I go, has changed everything. I no longer go to where the books are, or where my ereader is; now the books come to me.

Well, it was a long and strange journey, but my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, is now available as an audio book – thanks to my newest publisher, Iambik Audiobooks. So, as we speak, TimeSplash is on sale as a self-published ebook and as a commercially published audio book, and it is in production at eMergent Publishing to appear soon in a print edition. Talk about a hybrid publishing model! Iambik has the audiobook rights, eMergent (almost, almost) has the print rights, and I have the ebook rights. (And, if a big-budget film producer would like to make my day, I have not yet disposed of the film or merchandising rights. So drop me a line, OK?)

But let’s talk about that audio book for a minute. I first published TimeSplash as an ebook with a publisher called Lyrical Press. Which is how my friend Emma Newman got to read a copy. She and I had become pals via our blogs. She was agonising over whether to self-publish her novel ‘Twenty Years Later” at the time and I was just agonising. Emma started podcasting her novel, reading it one chapter at a time and putting it up on her blog. She had a surprising reaction. Not only did people like her book (which was not surprising at all) they loved the way she read it. I mean, really loved it. These podcasts changed Emma’s life in all kinds of ways. Firstly, she built a large following, and, when she started Twittering, that grew even larger. Then she signed a three book publishing deal for “Twenty Years Later” and two sequels (so no more agonising – she’d made it!) . Then she started looking for work as a voice artist, recording other people’s books – and has been finding it.

As a side venture, Emma started recording my novel, TimeSplash, suggesting that she jointly self-publish it with me. I was flattered and very keen on the idea, so we worked on it for several months. Which is to say, Emma worked, I simply listened to the chapters as they emerged and said, “Wow! Cool!” and so on. By the time it was over, Emma had made contact with a publisher who wanted her to read some of his books. She let him hear some of TimeSplash and he wanted that too. This was an outfit called Big Bad Media, based in Denmark. Not long after I signed contracts with them for a print and audiobook edition of TimeSplash, they went out of business. It was a bit of a shambles and looking like a complete flop until eMergent Publishing (based just up the road in Brisbane, of all places) said they were interested in the print rights that BBM had forfeited (yay, eMergent!).

And that was an outcome I was reasonably happy with. The downside was that all Emma’s work on TimeSplash might go to waste. And that would have been a terrible thing. Her reading of the book has a strange effect on the story, you see. When I read it – when most people read it from the text – it seems as if there are two protagonists, Jay and Sandra. This young man and woman are caught up in the events of the story and whirled along. They sort of fall in love as they hunt down the timesplashers and fight their personal demons. But, when I wrote it, it was mostly about Sandra and her terrible struggle against fear and her crushed self-esteem. And the miracle was, when you hear it read by a woman, by Emma, suddenly it’s clear as day that this is Sandra’s story above all else. So I really wanted Emma’s telling of this tale to survive.

That’s why, when she made contact with Iambik Audiobooks as part of her ongoing rise to stardom as a voice artist, and she sold them the idea of publishing TimeSplash, I was over the moon. That was almost exactly five months ago and my head is still reeling from the surprise and delight of it all. The path from the first idea for the story (in May 2008) to this day, with the audio book sitting on the shelf at Iambik, has been long and tortuous and filled with kind and talented people like Emma who have pushed and promoted TimeSplash with incredible generosity (and ultimate success!)

What can I say but “Thank you”, to Lyrical Press, to Greg McQueen at BBM, to Jodi Cleghorn and Paul Anderson at eMergent, and to Gesine Kernchen and the team at Iambik, and, especially, to Emma Newman, for keeping this sometimes sputtering flame alive for so long? I could not have done it without you.

And that's my very talented daughter's artwork on the front!

Before I go on, let me just squee* for a moment. The second edition of my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, is out today (on Smashwords - out tomorrow on Amazon), It has had a bit of an overhaul, too: new cover, slight re-edit, and two new ISBNs. That’s it, on the left of this post. The blue one. Feel free to stroke and pet it.

The audiobook and print editions are out soon too (from proper publishers) but the ebook (2nd edition) belongs to me. I’m also squeeing because I successfully steered the MS through the increasingly rigorous requirements of Smashwords and Amazon to end up with a book in both the major ebook markets of our time: The Amazon Kindle Store and The Rest.

Pricing was interesting. This was the first time I got to set the price for TimeSplash. Before now, my publisher had set the price at $5.50. Now the responsibility is mine and I had to think long and hard about it. In theory, the cheaper an ebook is, the more you will sell – but the less you will make on each sale. But that is only if you believe ebooks are price sensitive. I know that Joe Konrath says they are (and has evidence to back that up) but my own experience is that there is an area, somewhere under $10 where it really doesn’t make much difference. Free is very different, and I have discovered that you can shift ten times as many books in a week as you can in a year if you’re giving them away, but let’s not go mad. I have a starving Airedale to feed. So I decided to peg my book to the price of a cup of coffee at my favourite coffee shop – which is $4.50 for a large cappuccino – which is what I always order. That seems to me to be about the right price/value point for a full-length novel in ebook format.

And, finally, to the point about geographies. I’ve never used Amazon to sell ebooks before and I had heard they take 30% of the sale price of a book, leaving 70% to the author. This isn’t actually true. They take 30% in some countries (eight or ten, maybe) but in the rest, they take 65%, leaving just 35% for the author. As it happens, one of the countries outside their 30% zone is Australia – where I live, and where I might expect to make the most sales**. Does anyone have any idea why this is? The whole formula for determining price on Amazon is so baroque you would need a lawyer to help you understand it, but it’s easy to see that they’re trying to fix the market so that they don’t get undercut. Yet this different royalties in different geographies thing has me totally confused. What is that all about?

And your take-home messages? Self-publishing is possible but all publishing is weird. And you can buy TimeSplash at Smashwords for exactly the price of a cup of coffee.

——————-

Update 21-8-11: TimeSplash has finally appeared on Amazon too. 

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*Squee v. The rare emission of joyous noises by authors, who may have waited many years to make them.

**In fact, I make most sales in the US and the UK, and almost none in Australia. Possibly because Australians don’t like science fiction (as an Australian publisher said recently) and they don’t like ebooks (talk about late adopters!)

Happy New Year everybody!

First off, thanks to everyone who took advantage of my publisher’s Holiday Special and snagged a cheap copy of TimeSplash. Astute shoppers will notice that the offer has now closed. Personally, I’d like to keep the price that low all year round but it’s not up to me. Instead, I hope you’ll find it is still good value at the price the publisher sets. You’ll still find it discounted on sites like Amazon, and Fictionwise – just not quite so much.

New Year’s Resolutions

I’d like to tell you about my resolutions, but I didn’t make any. I never do. I have enough plans and goals to keep any anal retentive happy, I just don’t set them at the turn of the year. My Big Push for the year is to get an agent. Hopefully, I’ll achieve this before all the book shops (and then all the publishers) go out of business, otherwise my exciting new agent won’t have anyone left to sell my books to. In a way, it would be nice if all the book shops (and publishers) stopped yelling at the tide to go back and just quietly turned up their toes. At least then the market would be nice and simple again. We’d all be self-publishing because there would be no other way to get a book out.

It’s nice that the agents I’m approaching tell me I write very well and so on, but it would be nicer if they didn’t also say things like “but I’m getting out of the fiction market before I starve,” or “but I can only take on one new client per decade now and their books have to give me an orgasm whenever I touch the title page.” When the book shops have all gone broke, and the publishers have all gone broke, the agents will have to get jobs as freelance editors or book publicists for all the self-publishing authors who are also going broke.

Work In Progress

Meanwhile, I keep on tapping at the old keyboard. My current WIP is tentatively called Mindrider and is based on one of my short stories of the same name. It’s dark. The protagonist is an alien parasite who lives in people’s brains and it’s sometimes just a tiny bit difficult to make him a sympathetic character. But I like a challenge. It’s all written in first person from the parasite’s POV too. Another challenge. I’m enjoying it so much, I can easily see me doing a whole series based on these characters. I’m 50,000 words into it, with maybe another 40,000 to go. Then I can get back to the space opera this book interrupted – about a 10,000-year-old robot who is helping humanity fight off an alien invasion. You know what? Being a writer is like being a kid in a toy shop. There are so many wonderful things to play with, you don’t know what to pick up next. There are a couple of anthologies I’d like to do stories for too (actually, four) but I’m so much into novel-writing these days that I write very few short stories.

2010 In Review

Not shabby at all.

Concluding Remarks

By for now. I’m looking forward to chatting with you all in 2011. So don’t be shy now, and don’t be a stranger. There’s plenty of space in the comments section below for everybody. I hope you all have a good and successful year too.

Graham.

What does a novelist need from a publisher? The question might sound a bit daft but, when publishing your own writing is so easy and so cheap, and finding a publisher is so hard, a writer really needs a good answer to this question. A related question is, what does a novelist need from an agent? Again, finding an agent is a lot of work and there is no guarantee of success, so the sensible writer really should be asking whether it is worth it. I want to tackle each in turn, looking at the services each provides and the costs and benefits of each compared to self-publishing. So, today, let’s look at what it takes to do it yourself.

Going It Alone

First, to establish some kind of baseline, let’s say you are interested in having your novels appear in print, in English, in all the main markets (US, UK, Canada, Australia) and you’d also like an ebook edition, available globally from all the major online retailers, and, in the future maybe, an audiobook edition (on disc and by download)  and sales in translation in various other countries.

You need professional editing. I’m sorry, you do. I don’t care how good you think you are. Try it just once and you will be convinced. You could pay for this outright or do a royalty deal with an editor. Let’s say it costs you US$1500 to get the editing done. (You can probably get it done for much less if you shop around.) You will also need cover art. This is much cheaper and you can probably get a good job done for US$100 or so. If professional graphic designers are too expensive, find a starving student. There really is no way to avoid these costs so, if you’re self-publishing, you must just suck it up.

After that, setting up and publishing an ebook is essentially free, and very easy. If you use a service like Smashwords (and are happy to say they are your publisher) you can even get a free ISBN.  They take 15% off the top of every sale but handle all the ecommerce side, don’t ask for any rights, and are non-exclusive. They have distribution deals with many large players so global distribution in mutiple formats is covered.

For print, you would probably go print-on-demand (POD) and there are many services that will let you do this with no set-up costs. Print books (unlike ebooks) don’t just format themselves. You will need to design the book – choose the fonts, the layout, the size, and so on. Book design is a skill that some people believe is essential to create a high-quality printed book. I absolutely agree. However, most books you read could have been put together by anyone with a copy of Word and a couple of hours to spare. My advice, unless you have an artistic bent and a good eye for aesthetics, find a book you like the look of  and copy it’s style. It’s an area where an amateur with decent word-processing skills can get results that are quite acceptable. The POD company will effectively sell you each copy for the cost of production plus a profit margin. You can then add your own margin and resell the book (through Amazon, say.) Some are affilliated to retail sites. You will probably want an ISBN (which enables listing in catalogues) and the cost of these very much depends on where you live. Some countries issue them for free, some charge you a small fortune. Are they worth it? If you want to try to sell through (physical) bookshops, and many of the big online outlets, then yes. If you’re only selling through your own website, then no. If they’re free or cheap where you live, get one.

So far, you’ve spent less than US$2,000 and your book is on sale in print and electronically around the world. Is anyone buying it? Almost certainly not. Figures (which are a couple of years old now) show that the average self-published print book sells 150 copies. That includes the enthusiasts who do print runs of thousands of books which then fill up their garage forever (still counts as ssales as far as the printers are concerned), and the few, the very few, successes who sell a thousand or two thousand copies. Sales in double-digits are quite normal. If you’re selling at a $5 markup on the printer’s price, you are probably going to spend four times more on production than you recover in sales.

So you need to think about promotion. You need to print at least 50 copies of the book to give away free to reviewers (another unavoidable cost which just pushed your outlay up past US$2,500.) If you’re lucky, you’ll get a handful of reviews out of this. Most of the reviewers you want – the big newspapers, the literary magazines, the genre magazines, the big websites and blogs – will not even look at a self-published book. So you’re left with the small-fry, and your social networking buddies. Work damned hard, do the blog tours and the blog interviews and the Twitter and Facebook promotions, pester your local book shops to hold a book signing or two, run a launch party, send out press releases, and so on and so on, and you might make a few thousand people aware of your book. Maybe one per cent of those people will buy a copy. If your book is really, really good, this is where it has a chance to take off, because now you have done all the promotion you can, and it’s down to other people to mention your book to their friends, write about it on their blogs, and generally spread the word. If it’s anything less than excellent, this is the point where your book flops. You spent $2,500, you sold 150 copies, you lost nearly $2,000, and spent every spare minute you had for the best part of six months on publishing and promoting it.

Better luck next time.

In a future post I will come back to the questions of what a novelist needs from a publisher and an agent.

Over the past year or so, wisdom has been accumulating in the blogsphere about who should self-publish, what they should self-publish, and when. The advice seems to amount to this:

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it was commercially published once but is now out of print, or it’s new but your agent can’t sell it) AND
• It is good (which you can tell because it was once commercially published, or your agent has been trying to sell it) AND
• It has been professionally edited (this is harder to judge, but if you paid someone who works as an editor and you both agonised over the text for weeks or months, getting it to the point where the editor was satisfied, you’re probably OK) AND
• It has a good cover, designed by a professional AND
• You are willing to spend hundreds of hours promoting it, or thousands of dollars paying a professional to promote it THEN
• You should self-publish.

OR

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it would only be interesting to your immediate family) AND
• The quality doesn’t matter (because your immediate family will only be looking at the pictures anyway) AND
• You don’t care at all if only five people ever see it THEN
• You should self-publish.

Nevertheless, with self-publishing being so easy these days, and ebook publishing not necessarily having any up-front costs (except cover design) it is very tempting to give it a go.

Strangely, the temptation is probably higher for published authors than for not-yet-published ones. Published authors have already had (on average) ten years of being rejected by agents and publishers. They have already felt the frustration of having the publisher, agent, and retailer between them take 90% of the sale price of each book. They have already felt the strain of running themselves ragged to promote a book when no-one else in the food chain seems to care. They have already gnashed their teeth over their lack of control over the pricing, positioning and presentation of what used to be their own property, the product upon which their whole future depends.

Yet commercial publication is still the best option for the new writer. (Joe Konrath may be demonstrating that, for established writers, or writers with a huge ‘platform’, it no longer is.) If it all goes well, it is by far the best – and easiest – way to make sales and establish a reputation. If it all goes well.

And this is all by way of a preamble to the announcement that I have just self-published a small collection of short stories. Some of them have already been published in magazines, some have not. What links them is that they are all set in the same ‘world’ and all belong to the unfolding story of a group of transhumans who inhabit a virtual world called Placid Point.

The collection is called “Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity” and is available in all popular ebook formats from Smashwords (over the next few weeks, it will also be available through Amazon, B&N, the iBookstore, and other major retailers.) I’ve set the price at $1.99, which I hope you’ll agree is reasonable. I don’t actually intend to sell bucketloads of this collection (unlike my debut novel, TimeSplash, which I do want to sell lots of) but I want these stories out there because they are in the same world as the novel I have just finished writing (The Credulity Nexus) and, if that is ever published, it would be nice to be able to point readers to a book of related short stories.

Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity - A collection of short stories by Graham Storrs