Tag Archives: self-publishing

Wait Until You Hear THIS! The Taleist Self-Publishing Survey

24 May

Well today’s the day: after sitting on my copy of the Taleist Self-Publishing Survey for the best part of a week, I can finally share some of the juiciest bits with you and we can all get on with the business of discussing them. Hooray!

The Taleist Self-Publishing Survey, if you don’t know, was conducted in February by Steven Lewis (of Taleist) and Dave Cornford, and asked more than 1,000 self-publishers (including me!) 61 questions related to their self-publishing experience. With such a sizable pool of respondents, this is the first time we can really get an accurate snapshot of what the self-publishing world is looking like in 2012—something that’s extremely difficult to do when most of us are inside our little self-pubbed bubbles, clueless as to how well (or not) our peers are doing, and why they’re doing so well if they are. As Steven and Dave say:

We designed the survey to answer what we saw as some of the most common questions self-publishers have. “How am I doing?” is probably the biggest of  these questions, but it’s not been an easy one to answer, as there is little information available about average sales and earnings. The majority of the information out there is about the outliers, whose success is inspiring, but as we can now confirm, bears scant resemblance to the experience of most authors. Our aim was to give authors outside the Kindle Million Club some data against which to benchmark themselves. 

You can read the survey results yourself by buying a copy, but here are some findings that I’ve personally found intriguing.

Who is self-publishing?

From the outside, I bet it seems that hordes of people are suddenly dropping everything to sit down and write something longer than an e-mail for the first time in their lives, in the hope that by uploading it to KDP on Monday morning, they’ll be upgrading their car by Friday afternoon. When I first self-published two years ago, there was definitely a large sub-section of the self-publishing world dedicated to doing just this—and for people like myself who had dreamed of nothing but publication their entire lives, we died a little bit inside every time we heard of another Get Rich Quick Self-Publisher who couldn’t name the last book they’d read. But as time’s gone by, I’ve been encountering fewer and fewer of these types of self-publishers—and the results of the Taleist survey suggest that the majority of self-publishers are serious about their writing. 40% of respondents said they’d been writing seriously for more than 10 years, while 60% said they’d been at it for more than 5 years. Only 1 in 10 said they’d been writing seriously for less than a year.

Is self-publishing what comes after rejection?

Here’s what’s interesting though: respondents who’d had their work rejected by traditional publishing and then opted to self-publish it were among the lowest earners. Conclusion: if traditional publishing said it was bad (as opposed to not good enough, no market, bad timing, etc.), it probably was, and self-publishing it didn’t make it any better. But here’s where it gets a tad confusing: self-publishers who went straight to publication without submitting their work to traditional publishers earned 2.5 times more than those who submitted it and got rejected. What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure. Maybe those self-publishers had been published before, or had got other feedback that led them to believe—to know—that their books were good. But surely there’s a few in there that would’ve been rejected had they been submitted, so does that mean that ignorance is bliss? (Please, say it ain’t so.) Or maybe it reflects what happens with the majority of a self-published author’s books. For example, I submitted Mousetrapped all over town, but I knew I was self-publishing Backpacked before I even started writing it. Now I have work that I intend to submit, and work I know I’ll self-publish. They’re not the same thing.

Rejection isn’t all bad though. 32% of the “Top Earners” (the respondents who said they could live off their royalties) tried and failed to get a traditional publishing deal before self-publishing, but now make a living from selling their work.

Click here for more Taleist Self-Publishing Survey videos.

Does spending money make money?

In a word, yes. This was the most interesting part of the survey results for me–and of course it’s confirmation of what I’ve been saying all along, which is that every self-publisher needs to hire professional help, especially in areas such as cover design and copyediting/proofreading. But now here is proof that in doing so, you not only help the self-publishing side as a whole, but you actually help yourself as well, because you’ll sell more books and so earn more money from them. Respondents who hired help for things like story-editing, copyediting and proofreading earned on average 13% more than those who didn’t. Hiring a professional cover designer earned them on average 18% more. But not all paid-for services equalled a significant crease in earnings. Self-publishers who hired professional e-book formatters (i.e. those who return a completed e-book in .mobi or .epub format, not a MS Word document) only saw average earnings of 1% more. This is great news for me, because hiring someone else to build my e-books–as opposed to fixing the MS Word documents myself and then uploading them to get automatically converted by KDP and Smashwords—is something I’ve so far refused to do.

The message seems to be getting through about the importance of cover design, with 41% of respondents paying for help in that area. (A shocking 49% did it themselves.) But proofreading—the bare minimum a book should get before publication—isn’t faring so well, with only 29% of self-publishers hiring someone to do it. What’s also interesting is that generally-speaking, more self-publishers were willing to pay for professional help on their next book, even if they hadn’t done so on their last. Maybe acidic Amazon customer reviews has something to do with that…?

How much money are self-publishers spending? To get their books to market, respondents said they had spent, on average, $685 on direct costs (which seems a bit low to me; I’d say you’d want a budget of $1,000, minimum). But 54% of authors had already recouped their costs and if sales continued at their present rate, 68% could be expected to be “in the black” within 12 months of publication.

How much money are they making? The average respondent said they were earning around $10,000 a year from self-publishing.

What are the most successful self-publishers doing differently?

Of 1,007 responses to the Taleist self-publishing survey, 97 self-publishers said they could live off their earnings. These became the survey’s “Top Earners” and the insights we have into what they do differently are utterly fascinating. I’ve picked two practical things they do that we can do too: spend more time writing, and make more of an effort to actively seek reviews.

This is the result that stopped me in my tracks: the average Top Earner spent 69% more time writing than the average author outside of the Top Earners group—2,047 words per day as opposed to 1,557 words. Now you might argue that (i) they can do that, because they’re already living off their earnings and (ii) with Top Earners generally having multiple titles, maybe they’re just cranking them out. But it ain’t so: Top Earners aren’t just writing more, they’re spending more time doing it. They write on average a third more words than their non-Top Earning counterparts, but they also spend an average of 24% more time on those words. 

What makes their books sell better than everyone else’s? Reviews, it seems. Top Earners had almost four times as many reviews for their most recent book than authors outside of the group, and those books were earning those Top Earners six times as much revenue—and these books had only been on the market for an average of six short months. (Jealous? Me too!) But it gets even better for the Top Earners as time goes on. Read this bit very carefully: for those who reported the figures for their second most recent book, the Top Earners still had about the same amount of reviews—about four times as many—but the revenue gap rose to fourteen times the income of other author’s second most recent books, which had been on the market for about 14 months.

The most effective single tactic, however, was the least used: submitting to popular reviewers on Amazon. Authors who used this strategy received 25% more reviews than average, and more importantly, 32% more revenue for their latest release. Clearly this is a successful strategy, but I’m not sure how I’d go about implementing it. How do you contact Amazon Top Reviewers? Wouldn’t cold-emailing them be considered spamming? What do you think?

Finally, the Top Earners group spent more time writing than they did marketing, and those in the group who spent the least time marketing were making the most money. This might be a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, as surely if you’re already selling oodles of books, you don’t need to spend as much time marketing. But overall, out of all respondents, those who spent the most time marketing earned the least. So clearly, spending more time writing better books is a fair better use of your time than trying to sell them.

The survey’s subtitle says it all: not a gold rush. The majority of self-publishers have been dreaming of publication long before the Kindle was a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’ eye, and don’t view this as a get-rich-quick scheme. The self-publishers who do best spend most of their time writing, and invest money in their self-published books. Seeking out Top Reviewers on Amazon is the most effective strategy for increasing your sales, but it’s the least popular method used by self-publishers. (If you’re an Amazon Top Reviewer, I’d recommend you brace yourself for an onslaught of new review requests over the next few days…) And it’s better, apparently, to skip submitting to agents and editors altogether—but if someone says no, you should listen to them.

All in all, a fascinating insight into the world of self-published authors—and that’s just a handful of findings I chose to highlight here. You can purchase the full survey in e-book. Visit Taleist for more information.

NB: Kindly spare me your thoughts on how all three members of your writing group loving your work is a greater achievement to you than earning money from your work. The only success this kind of survey can measure is financial.

How To Sell Self-Published Books: Read This First

5 May

I’ve christened May the How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated, but before we get into the nuts and bolts of marketing and promoting your book, we need to have a little tough love session first.

At my most recent workshop I started off by saying to the participants that my aim for the day was to send them home with everything I wished I’d known before I started self-publishing, or in other words everything I had to learn on the job because when I started self-publishing, I didn’t have a clue. And yet clueless and all that I was, I was operating with a huge advantage: realism. Because I’d spent a good decade of my young life poring over every How To Format a Manuscript for Submission To Within an Inch of Its Life Because, Yeah, That’s What’s Going to Be the Deciding Factor (Not!) and 500 Pages About Submitting to Agents Even Though You Haven’t Written a Word type books, I knew way more than I’d ever need to about the way the traditional publishing world works, and so I knew that as a self-publisher, I wouldn’t be sitting at the top table. I mightn’t even be in the same room. But that was fine by me. I still recognized what an amazing opportunity digital self-publishing provided, and I was excited about getting to avail of it. And because I knew the score, I could manage my expectations. (Truth be told, I didn’t have any.) Ultimately when success came, it was a welcome bonus. So before we get into the practicalities of selling your self-published book, let’s have cold blast of reality, shall we?

1. By Default, No One Cares About Your Book

Just because you wrote a book does not mean people are going to want to read it. Sounds suspiciously like common sense, but as I’ve said before, common sense isn’t as common as you might think.

Think of all the books you hear about on a daily basis. Think of all the books you see when you walk into a bookstore, or through the book isles of supermarkets. Think of all the books that pop into your line of vision while you’re on Amazon. Do you buy them all? Are you even interested in them all? Or are you like me—and, I’d suspect, most book-buyers—buying and ultimately reading just the very cream of the crop, the top 0.5% or less of the books we know about, just the ones that get us interested in them and wanting to read them, i.e. just the ones we care about?

At least once a day I receive an e-mail from an author I don’t know saying “I’ve wrote a book. Will you review it?” If this author knew that every Friday Oprah’s Book Club sends me an e-mail recommending several books—books that, this being Oprah’s Book Club, are hugely publicized, high advance, this-is-gonna-be-big traditionally published books—and that, on average, I make a note of maybe two of them and ultimately buy maybe one of them for every five or six e-mails I get, do you think they’d do anything differently?

It is very hard to get people to care enough about your book that they go and buy it. It’s the hardest part. And before you can even do that, you have to get them interested in it, and before that you have to let them know that it exists. But embracing this will help you achieve this, because you’ll know what lengths to go to in order to make it happen. I blogged a little bit more about this in How (Not?) To Get Your Book Reviewed.

2. Your Book is a Product—and It Had Better Work

We’ve seen time and time again that the self-publishers who enjoy consistent success are those who treat self-publishing like a business they’ve started up. They act like entrepreneurs, and make like their book is their first product—which it is. Your book is a product. While you were writing it you could be all writer-like, hanging out in hipster cafés with your soy milk lattes and your well-creased Moleskine, but now that the book is going to be out in the world, for sale with a price-tag on it, the romance must drop away and the book must meet standards and be a viable product. When it comes to books, we’re talking about a professional polish and it having appeal. I talked about appeal in Why It Doesn’t Matter Whether or Not Your Book is Good, so let’s focus on the professional polish bit here.

Self-publishers against enlisting the services of a professional editor and/or proofreader seem to be against it because it’s expensive and/or because they don’t understand what editing means. The “I can’t afford it” thing drives me completely cuckoo because if you can’t afford to spend some money on your product, you shouldn’t be self-publishing it. If you’re not prepared to invest, why should I be expected to buy? And buy a sub-standard product at that. Which brings me onto my next point: not understanding what editing is.

Generally we can divide editing into three stages: structural (think re-writing), copyediting (think language) and proofreading (think errors). (If there’s any editors hanging around these parts, feel free to correct me on that, or elaborate.) I can understand why self-publishers would skip the structural bit, because it’s the most expensive and going back to the business analogy, you wouldn’t buy Egyptian cotton tablecloths for a fast food joint, because you’d never make the money back off a $1.99 burger. But you would have tables, right? And chairs for sitting around them? Of course you would, because that’s what’s expected. That’s a minimum standard. When we go into restaurants, we expect there to be somewhere to sit. And when we buy a book, we expect it to be error-free. (Or at least almost error-free. I’m still searching for a way to make perfection happen right out of the blocks.) We expect the language to be correct. We expect clarity and consistency. And that’s what a copyedit and a proofread does: it brings your book up to the minimum industry standard.

Every time I mention this, I get comments and e-mails saying things like, “But if a reader likes the story, they’ll overlook misspellings, etc.” I’m just going to say this once, okay? ONLY IF THE READER IS YOUR MUM. Take an hour to read a few Amazon Customer Reviews and then see if you still feel the same way.

3. Social Media is About Connection

I am evidence that social media does sell books, but only if you don’t use it to sell books. This is something I’ll be blogging loads more about this month, but for now I’ll just say this: you can’t use Twitter, Facebook, etc. to blatantly sell your book, because no one will buy it. Being subjected to the hard sell is not why anyone is using those platforms. We’re there for one or more of the following reasons: connection, entertainment and valuable information. Where does you saying “My book is on Amazon now: just $4.99!” or “My book is out now. Buy it!” fit into those? Obviously it doesn’t. (And no, it’s not valuable information!) I have a little giggle to myself every time I meet someone with a business who mutters, “I really have to get on Facebook” or “We really should start tweeting” as if social media is California during the Gold Rush and all you’ve to do is show up and start digging and—hey presto!—you’re a millionaire. News flash: starting a Facebook page does not equal sales.

Worse than the shameless self-promoter is the person who has no interest in blogging, tweeting or using Facebook but reluctantly comes to the table to flog their wares anyway. If you don’t genuinely enjoy connecting and sharing with other people online, what are you doing there?

A presence online takes time to build, and it isn’t suitable for people who don’t really want to be there or who don’t have an instinct for how it all works. So if you’re planning to self-publish a book and your marketing plan is to tweet a link to its Amazon listing once an hour 24/7/365, you’ve failed before you’ve even begun.

4. You Can’t Sell New Concepts with Old Ways

In my experience if your book is only for sale online, you should only be promoting it online. Time and time again I see self-publishers with money to burn hiring publicists who draft press releases for them and then send them round to all the usual suspects—newspapers, radio shows, magazines, etc. This is totally pointless, especially in the beginning, unless your book has a specific local interest or something. If you want to spend money, you’d be far better off doing it on a Goodreads ad or a Kindle Nation sponsorship, i.e. a place where readers gather online. You need to let go of any existing ideas you may have about selling books (especially if you’ve been traditionally published in the past) and haul them—and yourself—into this brave new digital world.

In February 2011 a series of events meant that in the space of a week or so, I was featured in The Sunday Times and appeared on several national radio shows, including the second most listened to show in the country with an average of 400,000 listeners. As far as I could tell, it led to no bump in sales. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that when I read about a book in a newspaper, chances are I’ll later walk into a bookstore, see the book on the shelf and think, Oh, yeah. That’s that book I read about. I must get that. But when you read about a self-published/only for sale online book in the newspaper, there’s no chance encounter later to remind you of it. And since apparently you have to be reminded of something three times before you’ll take action and buy it, it never translates into sales.

John Locke famously spent a fortune on “real world” advertising all to no avail, but became the first self-published author to sell a million Kindle books when he started focusing online instead. Traditional methods for selling books just don’t work when those books aren’t being sold traditionally.

(Note: I’m not saying say no to print and radio interviews. Say yes! They’re great fun and will make you feel like a proper published author. And your relatives might even believe you now when you say you’re selling loads of books online. Just don’t pursue them as a means to advertising a book, because they’re not effective when the book isn’t widely available in stores.)

5. You Are Not The Next Amanda Hocking

In all probability you’re not, anyway. And I’m not talking about becoming the first household name success story of this modern e-book self-publishing era—I’m talking about having to do little other than upload your e-books to achieve stellar sales. As in, chances are you’re going to have to do a lot more than that to shift any copies at all.

Let me explain. As in all walks of life, some people get really lucky at this self-publishing e-books thing. They upload their e-book and sell thousands of copies the first week, without ever having blogged or advertised. They massively outsell self-publishers who have been at it for years, and they do it almost instantly. So we should copy them, right? We should find out what they’re doing and do it ourselves. Wouldn’t that make sense?

No, it wouldn’t. Because they’re the outliers. They’re the extremes. You’d be better off focusing on the people in the middle, the ones who never meet the bleak abyss of failure or the dizzying heights of success, but instead consistently sell and can tell you what they did to achieve it. As I’ve always said, it’s better to hear from me, a moderate seller who can say I did x, y and z to sell my books and you can do it too, then a mega-seller who isn’t quite sure how they managed to sell a hundred thousand books.

Think of it this way: You meet a newly published author who is now sitting atop the bestseller lists with a debut novel that scored her a top agent and a six-figure deal. A movie adaptation is in the works. She’s rich, successful and she has achieved a lifelong dream. How did you do it? you want to know. She says that she was interviewing for a position as her agent’s assistant when they got talking about a recent news story, and she said “I bet the girlfriend did it. Wouldn’t it make a great story if she did?” The agent instantly got dollar signs in his eyes, told her to forget about being a PA and instead go home and write a one-page synopsis, which she did, and seven days later she had her six-figure deal. Now, knowing this, what would you do about your own published writer dreams? Would you continue to polish your novel, write a synopsis, craft a query letter and politely submit to suitable agents and editors, or would you start scanning the jobs listing for admin openings at literary agencies and publishing houses?

(I sincerely hope it would be the former!)

Your model for success shouldn’t be an extreme, because chances are you’re not going to be one. Millions of authors have self-published but only a relative handful had found success comes easily. Instead, get ready to work really hard.

And read all my upcoming posts, of course…!

L-R: the gorgeous spa-style bathroom of the St. Regis San Francisco, which I loved, and the dirty deathtrap of a “shower” in our room at the [cough, cough] “Hotel” San Francisco in San Pedro, Guatemala. Which I did NOT.

I’m testing KDP again with Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America. It’s the story of me (loves Starbucks, boutique hotels and inactivity) going backpacking in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama (climbing active volcanos, sleeping on planks of wood, cockroaches, etc.) and it’s FREE between now and Wednesday 9th May for Kindle. So please, feel FREE (see what I did there?) to download it for yourself, or let your anti-backpacking friends with e-reading devices know that they are also FREE to download it for FREE from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. For FREE.

(FREE!)

See you on Monday!

[UPDATE May 5th: Woo-hoo: Freshly Pressed! Not quite sure how it happened but thanks Word Press—and hello to everyone who came here because of it. *waves* Do say hello below.]

May is How To Sell Self-Publish Books Month on Catherine, Caffeinated. Find out more about here, or read all related posts by paying a visit to the category page. Get every new post direct to you inbox by subscribing to this blog (see the sidebar or footer for the sign-up box).

Self-Publishing Stories on Writing.ie: Lauren Clark

4 Apr

Every Wednesday between now and when I run out of stories (!), I’ll be using Self-Printed, my blog on Writing.ie, to showcase the experiences of some self-publishers I’ve encountered along the way on my own adventures in self-printing. Other people’s stories are a great way to find out what you should—and more importantly, shouldn’t— be doing, and maybe will even inspire you with some ideas on how to promote your own self-published book. That’s the plan, anyway.

The first self-publishing story is that of Lauren Clark, who self-published Stay Tuned (which has a brilliant cover, while we’re on the subject. Clever, eye-catching and highly suitable.) Click here to read it.

If you’d like to submit your own self-publishing story, read this post for details.

Edit Where Edit’s Due: A Guest Post by Stephanie of Saltwater Publishing

3 Apr

Today we have a guest post by Stephanie Boner of Dublin-based Saltwater Publishing, about one of the most crucial aspects of publishing a book, be it traditional or self-publishing: editing. Here, she’ll explain the differences between things like copyediting and proofreading, what happens to a book when it’s being prepared for publication at a publishing house and allays a fear that I often hear self-publishers express—no, an editor isn’t going to correct or change your book, but work with you to make it a better version of itself. So, without further ado, here’s Stephanie: 

No matter what changes the advances in technology and printing may bring to the publishing industry, it is the quality of a book’s writing that will always be paramount. A well-written book does not just leap from the mind of the author onto the page; it needs to be sculpted, honed and nurtured.

With the rise in popularity of self-publishing, the role of the traditional publisher is viewed as being increasingly unnecessary. While this in itself may not be such a bad thing, one does not want to throw one’s baby out with the bath water. In other words, while the growing culture of self-publishing has allowed the author new autonomy and control, the necessity of having a good editor is as important today as it ever was.

Of course, the editor does not claim to be more skilled a writer than the author; the most accomplished writers in the world need editors, after all. An editor, however, provides an author with two things. Firstly, as all writers know, writing, especially fiction, is an all-consuming activity. The old hackneyed cliché of the novel being the writer’s baby is an effective one, in that, like a parent, it is difficult to criticise or assess something with which you are so emotionally intimate. An editor approaches a manuscript with fresh eyes, without preconceptions and with the all-important benefit of distance. With their experience and skills, they use this distance to analyse a piece of writing in a way that is simply not possible for the loving parent. They know what works and what doesn’t. They offer ways out of the labyrinth when the writer is facing a dead end. This kind of analysis is not a luxury. It is the essential bridge between the ideas of the author and the demands and expectations of a reader.

Secondly, professional editors are essentially giant nerds. The glee they get from spotting a hyphen that should be an en-dash, or from being asked to explain what an Oxford comma is, might seem a tad pathetic, but they have the necessary skills for assuring the baby doesn’t leave the house with food on his face. So while an author may miss a comma or two, worrying about the nuances and subtleties of plot development and character, the editor can be relied on to wield her trusty red pen and set the world to rights.

When a book is published through the traditional channels, the manuscript is put through a number of processes before it is deemed worthy of the printer’s ink and every self-published work is worthy of exactly the same rigorous process. In the current market, where the number of self-published books is exploding and all traditional publishing houses are turning towards digital publishing, an author must do everything they can to take on the competition.

This process varies dramatically from publishing house to publishing house but generally speaking, once the contract has been signed, the manuscript is designated an editor. This editor reads and assesses the work and gives it a structural edit. This is done either in consultation or in conjunction with the author. There is usually a list of suggestions sent back to the author, advising him to move around some sections, to develop a character, to deal with issues of consistency and so on. Very significant changes may be suggested at this stage or it may be that author and editor are, from the outset, very much on the same page, so to speak.

Once the overall structure and form has been agreed on, the manuscript is copy-edited. This is a much narrower process, focusing on the detail of each line and paragraph of text. At this stage, the editor looks at issues such as tone, syntax, and continuity. They consider the consistency of the speech patterns of the characters, the logic of the sequence of events, anachronisms, repetition and the like. Once this is complete, the author is handed back their new and improved baby to ensure that they are happy with its development and if not, revisions are made.

Finally, in most cases, a new editor comes on board to proofread the copy. This takes place after the text has been formatted for print or eBook. It is a finicky and fastidious exercise, where one is consumed with such geeky issues as word breaks, leading and kerning. Of course, all spelling and grammar is checked again to ensure it is just so. Before the manuscript is sent off to press or uploaded into the ether of the internet, it is given one final going over before we say our tearful farewells and the baby takes its first steps into the big, bad world.

For writers who intend to self-publish, their work is put at an immediate disadvantage if it is not subject to the same process and brought to trade standard. While everyone knows someone who’s good at spotting spelling mistakes and who is willing to throw their eye over something for you in exchange for a pint, it is not quite the same thing. Allowing a manuscript to be assessed and polished by experienced and professional editors, using the tried and tested processes that have stood the test of time in the publishing industry, truly makes the work shine.

Essentially, an editor would not be doing the job they do if they didn’t love books. This love translates into a desire to see books fulfill their potential and therefore editor and author share a common goal. To produce the best book possible, it is imperative that the author and editor enjoy a positive and open relationship. Another hackneyed cliché we hear bandied about is that of the editor taking a sharp scalpel to a manuscript. But in reality this is not at all what we do. We tend to take a much less ruthless and more collaborative approach to a book. It is, after all, the author’s baby.

Established in 2010 by Publishing Directors Stephanie Boner and Maeve Convery, Saltwater is an independent publishing and editorial services company based in Dublin. Along with our trade publications, we specialise in editing and proofreading for authors who intend to self-publish. Feel free to contact us at info@saltwater.ie or at (01) 2449488.

This is an “Ethical” Way to Sell Your E-book? I Disagree [UPDATED]

27 Mar

***Last updated Saturday 31st March 2012 2pm GMT***

Yesterday evening I received an e-mail to info[at]catherineryanhoward.com from a person I didn’t know. I’m always suspicious when this happens because if a stranger is trying to get in contact with me, clearly the Contact page on this very site is the way to go. But if you want to send me a message from your e-mail account, that’s not going to work, so you either trawl the internet looking for mentions of my e-mail address or you put “info” in front of my domain and hope for the best. The suspicion arises because of the answer to the question why must you send me a message from your e-mail account? It’s usually because you want to send me an attachment and/or include me in a mass mailing. Both of those say “I’m selling things!” which, when you do it in an e-mail to a person you’ve never communicated with before, is called spam.

So I was suspicious before I even opened the message. Then I read it.

“Subject: Loved your book

Just checked out your book on Smashwords, Catherine and you’re so so talented. Do you have any suggestions for a budding writer like me? What has worked and what hasn’t? Tried FB, Twitter, even book marks. I just don’t want to waste my time on things that don’t work. I just read a couple EXCELLENT books on it. One was recommended by my friend called “Effortless Marketing”:http://amzn.to/EFFORTLESS I got it cause Mark Coker the Smashwords guy endorsed it and cause it’s free for the next 24 hours anyway. And it was surprisingly really, really good. Do you have any other books you’d recommend?”

(That text was copied and pasted from the e-mail; all mistakes sender’s own.)

I clicked on the link, and ended up on a listing for an e-book called Effortless Marketing: How I Sold Thousands of E-books, Landed an Agent and a Book Deal in Just 10 Minutes a Day Using Message Boards by someone called Jeff Rivera.

Now maybe I’ve been reading too many crime novels recently, but nothing about this sat right with me. First of all, the message was sent to my e-mail address instead of via my Contact page. That alone suggested spam, or at least something suspicious. Then there was the subject line—”loved your book”—even though the message seemed to imply that the sender hadn’t read it, but merely “checked [it] out” on Smashwords. (And if they had read it, they’d know I generally don’t do anything to promote my books that a traditionally published author wouldn’t do AND I don’t believe in selling books to other self-published authors, and therefore I avoid message boards.) Then there was the total focus on selling books as opposed to creating them, the odd mention of book marks (?!) and the late-night infomercial line “I just don’t want to waste my time on things that don’t work.” (I can just see that guy from Amazing Discoveries in his terrible wooly sweater, consoling the actor playing the part of a frustrated audience member. “Well, now you don’t have to!”)

But it was the completely out of the blue book recommendation—complete with link!—that really set alarms ringing, especially since it just so happened that it was free to download for Kindle that very day. There were the capital letters (“EXCELLENT”), the forced casualness (“that Smashwords guy”) and the odd timeline—free for 24 hours, but the sender has already found it, downloaded it, read it and wrote to me to recommend it? Somebody’s been a busy bee, eh?

The sender’s name was Mogoli Angelberg. When I googled it there were only about five results returned and none of them were very illuminating. The top one, however, was this (click for larger image):

A profile page for Mogoli on something called The Gatekeeper’s Post, of which Jeff Rivera—author of Effortless Marketing— is both founder and editor in chief.

So.

This was my reply, in its entirety:

“What hasn’t worked is spamming people with e-mails in which I pretend (badly) to be seeking information when what I’m obviously doing is trying to get people to download the book my “friend” recommended. –Catherine”

The truth is, I often get e-mails of this type. I must look stupid or something. Regular blog readers will know that this is the first time I’ve called anyone out about it (although rest assured each one I receive does get filed in the “Don’t Do This” notes section of the new edition of Self-Printed). But this one was so blatant and presumed me to be so stupid that I just had to say something.

Right up top on the book’s Amazon listing is an endorsement from Smashwords founder, Mark Coker, that reads:

“Jeff Rivera provides honest, ethical advice for how authors can leverage message boards to attract readership and build platforms.”

I’m guessing there’s no mention of spam-disguised-as-praise-and-queries e-mail in Effortless Marketing; I’m certain Mr. Coker wouldn’t have endorsed it if there was. Perhaps Mr. Rivera is unaware of this e-mail campaign. But if he isn’t, he should be. And he should make sure that it’s stopped.

Because the very last thing this effort could be called is ethical.

What do you think? And have you ever received anything like this?

UPDATE #1 | 27.03.12: As I suspected, I’m not the only person to receive this e-mail. See Ashley’s comment below.

UPDATE #2 | 27.03.12: Julie Cohen has also received this e-mail. It seems to be coming from Smashwords—i.e. the people behind it are trawling through Smashwords looking for authors to send it to, presuming they’re self-published and interested in selling more books. Considering how many authors are on Smashwords and that only a few hours after posting this, at least 3 people who also received it have read this post, I think that points to potentially hundreds of recipients.

UPDATE #3 | 28.03.12. Oh boy. It’s now 10.30 a.m. GMT on Wednesday 28th March, or about twenty-four hours since I first posted this. In that time, between comments, tweets and e-mails, 19 other people have told me they’ve received this exact same “Loved your book” message. Considering that this group consists of people who received it and either knew me or took the time to Google the sender’s name, found me and were motivated to leave a comment, I think that points to a huge number of potential recipients. More than one recipient found the message in their Spam folder, which also points to a mass mailing.

I also received a very interesting message from a self-publisher who prefers to remain anonymous for personal reasons. (I know this self-publisher, believe he has no reason to lie and therefore am trusting that this is the truth. However I must of course concede that this did not happen to me; I’m merely repeating it.) Several weeks ago this self-publisher—let’s call him Bob—received a message from Jeff Rivera, the author of Effortless Marketing, entitled “Loved your book!”—the same title, of course, as our spammy message.

The message began with praise, just like the spam message does, but then went on to invite Bob to read an interview Rivera had done with a big-name author who had turned to self-publishing. Bob didn’t reply. Later Bob received another, similar message from Rivera. He didn’t reply to that either. A week after that, Rivera sends him another message saying (I’m paraphrasing): “Hey, I think I deleted your most recent message. Can you re-send?” Suspecting that Rivera is “just trying to sell” him something, yet again, Bob doesn’t reply.

Sending messages into the abyss doesn’t, apparently, deter Rivera, who sends Bob another message shortly thereafter. This one promises Bob a “top secret” list of agents and editors who are foaming at the mouth looking for self-published success stories (um, obviously I’m also paraphrasing there, but you get the idea)—in exchange for a review of his book. Needless to say, Bob didn’t respond to this either. But his curiosity was piqued, so he downloaded Effortless Marketing, which was free for Kindle at the time.

Now I have a personal rule about not revealing the content of books like this, but suffice to say that his “effortless marketing” method has a lot in common with the spammy messages we’ve all been receiving, according to Bob (it just moves it to a message board/private message setting), and among other terrifying advice, suggests using Fiverr.com to find an editor. I was also pointed in the direction of a thread on Kindle Boards where Rivera, back in August 2011, told his fellow authors that if they had had self-published success, he could help them get a traditional deal. In it he says “Ask Joe Konrath or Karen McQuestion if you have any questions” [about his or his offer's legitimacy]. What does that mean?! Presumably he wants you to think that Konrath and McQuestion, two of the world’s most successful and most visible self-published authors, will vouch for him. But that’s not what that line says.

Let me be clear here: this is not intended in any way to be an exposé, or an attack. I really don’t care what this guy is up to, whether or not his book is good or if this “Mogoli Angelberg” even exists. I think people should make their own buying decisions, I couldn’t give a crap either way, and, anyway, this isn’t that kind of blog. But as soon as I read that message, I knew something was wrong with it. I knew something wasn’t right. After Googling, I was positive something wasn’t. And because e-mail happens behind the scenes and spamming operations like this can go unnoticed, I decided not to let it go. I decided to blog about it. And I think that’s my right, considering that I was a recipient of the e-mail.

Regular readers of this blog will know what my stance is on selling books. This isn’t a game. This is a wonderful opportunity for writers who previously had no hope other than the magic “yes” from an agent or an editor. Now we have the world at our feet—or at our keyboards, anyway. We should never abuse it. (See my infamous guest post on Taleist, Why Self-Publishers Need to Start Minding Their Manners, for more info on that.) We should be honest, and work hard to find readers and convince them, through transparent methods, to buy our books. Organic growth is the only growth that works, the only growth that matters. Yes, you might manage to sell 100,000 or even 1,000,000 books by some form of Jedi mind trick, but what then? What happens when people read your crappy book? What happens when you release your next one? The only way to sell books is to write good ones, and then let people know—in a way that’s acceptable to everyone—that they exist.

It drives me ten kinds of cuckoo when people try to sell books by any other method, but the red mist descends when they try to sell them that way to me.

UPDATE #4 | 28.03.12

UPDATE #5 | 28.03.12 I’ve been informed that the Amazon.com listing for Effortless *cough cough* Marketing has received 3 one-star reviews from people who have received the same message, word-for-word—and I know this because I went to read the reviews, and two of them have the message pasted in. I read it about five minutes ago, and just now when I went back to copy and paste the URL, there was a new 5* star to add to the 20-odd 5* reviews already on it. This is amazing, considering the book was published six days ago, on March 22. What’s his secret? Apart from the spam, none of us are privy to what lengths exactly Mr. Rivera has gone to to promote this book, but I think we can all agree on one thing: he’s sure making a huge effort.

UPDATE #6 | 28.03.12 This saga now has its own thread on Kindle Boards! I would URGE anyone following this story and/or concerned about this issue to read through the posts on this thread. [*waves to everyone on that Kindle Boards thread*]

UPDATE #7 | 28.03.12 Jeff Rivera has posted an update on his site in which he responds to the “Mogoli Angelberg” spam debacle. I don’t want to keep dragging this on and on, but I’m afraid I have to take some issue with Mr. Rivera’s explanations.

He seems slighted that we, the recipients of the spam messages, didn’t immediately contact him about them and instead complained about them publicly – on blogs, Twitter, Amazon, etc. Of course, if something like this was happening in my name and I was unaware, I would wonder why, when I found out, that someone didn’t tell me sooner so I could have done something about it. I totally get that. But it was only by sharing that we’d received this weird message that it became clear it was not a one-off, but a spammy mass mailing.

Secondly, if you look at the Twitter screenshot above, when someone did approach him about it yesterday, his answer was “I’m not sure what you mean.” Yes, if he wasn’t sending the e-mails, he wouldn’t have known what the tweeter meant. But the tweeter specifically mentioned the name Mogoli Angelberg. If he is known to Mr. Rivera, as he statement claims, wouldn’t that have raised alarm bells with him then?

Moreover, in his statement Mr. Rivera says he found out about this because he saw the spam-related negative reviews on his Amazon listing. Such reviews on Amazon.com are all dated March 27th, yesterday. As you can see in the screenshot above, the tweet was sent to Mr. Rivera on March 26th, the day before that.

The endorsement from Smashwords founder Mark Coker has also been removed from the Amazon.com listing.

Finally, I was sent a link to this statement via e-mail. But when I went to Mr. Rivera’s home page, I could find no trace of it. I had to go back to the e-mail and copy and paste the link just to re-locate it.

(On a personal note, yes, I’m a girl. Yes, I’m relatively young. Yes, my blog is pink. But I’m not stupid.)

UPDATE #8 | 28.03.12  Jeff Rivera has also taken the time to comment on this post, below.

(The Final!) UPDATE #9 | 29.03.12 So, this turned into something, didn’t it? Wow. I hope you made enough coffee to get all the way down to this bit. The thing is, I’m so glad I posted about this and helped, in a little way, to expose shady practices of people who prey on my fellow writers and self-publishers, but Catherine, Caffeinated isn’t supposed to be an episode of 60 Minutes. Therefore, this will be my last word on the matter, although of course please feel free to comment, move onto Kindle Boards where this has got VERY interesting indeed, and spread this around so we can alert as many people as possible to this kind of crap.

Jeff Rivera posted a statement on his blog and has left comments below, but his explanation is that an employee of his sent these messages. He’s fired him, he apologizes, end of. But he completely ignores all the other things about his practices that have come to light during this and seemingly has no intention of addressing them.

For instance:

  • If you believe that Mogoli Angelberg exists, I have a time machine disguised as a remote control that I want to sell to you. He’s been on the internet since 1997, apparently, but has fewer Google search results than my stapler. The Kindle Board thread also has screenshots that, to me, look like evidence that Rivera and Angelberg are the same person. One is a posting on a message board where, signed in as Mogoli Angelberg, Jeff posts and signs his own name. If Mogoli was an employee working on Jeff’s behalf, wouldn’t it be the other way around?
  • The same thread highlights an e-mail Rivera sent offering a list of agents and editors supposedly looking for self-published authors IN EXCHANGE for a review of his book. Effortless Marketing, published on the 22nd of this month, already has more than 30 5* star reviews.
  • Some very clever person on the Kindle Boards thread has been examining how many times the link in the spam e-mail has been clicked. It points to a spam operation on a massive scale. Even if Rivera is telling the truth, (i) how could such a huge undertaking have been conceived of and executed without his knowledge? and (ii) why would anybody but the author be motivated to do such a thing? My conclusion is that it couldn’t have been and no one would.

So that’s it. I hope your cup of coffee lasted this far. I’m off to make another, and tomorrow this blog will return to its normal fare. If you have anything you’d like to add, I’d suggest you pay a visit to the Kindle Board thread listed above, or comment below. Tootles for now.

(This Time It’s Really the Final) UPDATE | 31.03.12 I really was done with this whole thing, but Jeff Rivera has pulled his book and posted another statement, and since (i) people are still coming here to read this post and I want those people to have all the information and (ii) the statement itself needs addressing, I’m afraid I posting another update…

You can read the statement in full here, but here are some highlights:

  • “I wanted to personally thank the thousands of writers who downloaded my eBook, Effortless Marketing this week and the over 34 four and five star reviews I received.” This week, potentially thousands of writers were spammed about Jeff’s book, and we know that he contacts people offering them things in exchange for reviews.
  • “And I want to thank those who helped make it the #1 Marketing Book on Kindle.” It was free.
  • “I also received interest from a traditional publisher about the book as well and what’s funny is that I didn’t approach that publisher at all. They approached me!” You’re right, that is funny.
  • “Unfortunately, due to the campaign of bizarre false accusations about me supposedly spamming people about the eBook even when I explained what happened, I’ve decided to pull it off the market for now.” I presume by “bizarre false accusations” he is referring to the majority of people not falling for his explanation that “Mogoli Angelberg” is an employee of his who conceived and executed this entire spamming operation without his knowledge, despite Mogoli having no independent internet presence or any online proof that he has ever existed at all, and e-mails from Jeff and Mogoli coming from the same source and being worded the same way. His explanation doesn’t explain anything, and he hasn’t even attempted to explain—or even address— why he approached writers offering lists of agents in exchange for reviews, or why he does things like advertising a query writing service that charges $450 upfront, and then another $450 when you get ten responses, which Jeff guarantees (see below). It is bizarre.

  • “I pray that those who went out of their way to do so will not experience that type of negativity in their own lives.” You don’t need to, because I would never do something as stupid as this. And if he’s referring to me, I didn’t go out of my way to do anything. I received a suspicious e-mail that insulted my intelligence, and when Googling the information in that e-mail led me to believe that someone was conducting themselves in a manner that brings down all self-publishers, I decided to post about it to see if anyone else had got the same thing.
No, Really. This Time I Swear… Someone just sent me a link to a rather relevant “daily inspiration” post from Jeff’s blog, in which the image below appears. I know, it looks like it must have been doctored or interfered with since this whole spam saga began, but it’s not at all. This is actually on his blog. I’ve taken a screenshot in case it disappears.

Cropped screenshot of http://www.jeffrivera.com/index.php/daily-inspiration/581-positive-message-balls.html

The phrase “You said it, not me” comes to mind…

If you received a “Loved your book” message from the complimentary Mr. Angelberg, please let us know in the comments below.

Why You Need Some “Self” in Your Self-Publishing

22 Mar

As you know, my least favorite self-publishing related word is gatekeepers. But did you know that my least favorite self-publishing related combination of two words is Big Six? Or that my least favorite self-publishing related combination of three words is one-stop shop (as in “Look at our shiny website! We are a one-stop shop for all your self-publishing needs!’)?

Well, you do now, and one-stop shops are what I’m going to talk (read: rant) about today.

I think I'm just going to put random coffee pics in all my posts from now on. SO much easier than looking for book pics...

The typical one-stop self-publishing shop goes something like this. You, via the magic of a shiny website, find a self-publishing service called—let’s just say—ProperlyPublished.com. (Is that a real domain? I’d better check!). They promise to publish your book for you, as in produce a crop of glossy print copies, sell said glossy copies on their website and make your book available to bookstores. They will take care of the whole shebang: editing, typesetting, design, printing and ISBNs. All you have to do is submit your manuscript, then sit back and relax. Oh, and pay them the equivalent of a few mortgage payments. But then you can sit back and relax, and perhaps look forward to the “10 FREE copies!” of your book they’ve generously included in their offer.

Sounds great, right? Of course it does. Especially if you’re not a techie, or don’t have the time/coffee reserves to do this kind of thing yourself.

And maybe it would be great for you, but I doubt it.

I don’t think you need someone else doing everything for you, and I especially don’t think you need someone else project-managing the publication of your book. I’m positive you don’t need to be paying someone else to self-publish you. (And how, pray tell, is it self-publishing if there’s no “self” involved?) Self-publishers have never before had so many tools, advice and information—free tools, advice and information—at their fingertips, and yet new one-stop shops are popping up all the time.

I don’t think you should be tempted by them. I would go so far as to say you should avoid them, because using a service like this will, generally, have you paying through the nose for sub-standard work. Instead, you should project-manage the publication of your own book, finding and enlisting professional partners (editors, cover designers) as needed.

Let’s start with the paying through the nose bit. I don’t want to name any names, but I picked one popular one-stop shop self-publishing company (which I think is a fair example of how things look across the board) and compared it to using CreateSpace (in the way I do) to produce a standard length paperback.

The One-Stop Shop
  • Publishing package: $1,900

This includes interior design (i.e. typesetting), cover design based on template, up to 4 electronic proofs and 1 bound proof copy, 100 copies of the finished book. Your book will be listed for sale on the service’s website and “made available” to bookstores and to you, for ordering stock. The ISBN will be supplied (owned by the service) and copies of the book will be filed with relevant national libraries*. Your book will probably be available on Amazon.com, but there’s no guarantee. No mention of other retailers.

  • Cover designed from scratch: Add $450
  • Ordering personal stock: $6 per book

Total cost to publish paperback with original cover and get 200 copies**for yourself: $2,950

Using a POD Service (e.g. CreateSpace)
  • Publishing package: N/A
  • Pre-publication costs: We have to find an editor ourselves, so let’s say this will cost us $1,500
  • Cover designed from scratch: Let’s give a generous budget to the cover design we’ve sourced ourselves, so $400
  • IBSN: Free
  • Proof Copy: The cost of one book, so $3.50
  • Expanded Distribution: $25 (You’re on Amazon.com—that’s a given—but this will get you on other sites too)

Total cost to publish paperback with original cover and get 200 copies for yourself: $2,628

So at the moment there’s only about $300 in it, which is a pocket of loose change in the scheme of self-publishing things. But let’s use my own self-publishing costs, for Mousetrapped, instead of a theoretical budget. (Mousetrapped was a 232-page paperback measuring 5.5 x 8.5 that I published with CreateSpace and got an original cover for, which was copyedited but not structurally edited or proofread by a professional.)

  • Copyediting: $1,000
  • Cover design: $200
  • ISBN: Free
  • Proof copy: $3.63
  • 200 copies: $726

Now our total is down to $1,929 and some change—and that’s my point. If you use a one-stop shop, there is no negotiating. You pay the total advertised, and that’s that. But if you do it yourself, if you become the project manager of your self-published book, you can shop around. You can invite bids. You could even barter. Maybe your cover designer will give you some money off if you agree to run an ad for him or her on your website or something. But there’s no scope for anything like that with the one-stop shop.

And what if you don’t want 200 copies? What if you don’t even need or want the 100 you’re supposedly getting “free”? (Which I just think, by the way, is the biggest joke ever. It’s like Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party at Magic Kingdom. You pay nearly $50 for a ticket that gets you into the park for a few hours, and they tell you you’re getting “free” hot chocolate and cookies. Um…?) Say you just want 25 copies. Well, use CreateSpace and you’ll end up paying just $1,293.

A bigger issue, for me personally, is what you’re paying for. You really don’t know. I’ve seen two books from the same one-stop shop in the last year or so, one paperback and one e-book. In the paperback there were no misspellings or typos that I could see, but it hadn’t been edited at all, at least not in any kind of professional way, and there were blank lines here and there for no reason and at least five or six sentences that stopped mid-page. The cover was about as good as a CreateSpace Cover Creator cover, and it looked so self-published it may as well have come with an alarm shouting just that. The e-book had misspellings and other typos, and again, was filled with formatting errors. The impression I was left with was that there was just no attention to detail, and I don’t see how there could be on a conveyer belt system where books are coming in and out all the time, and the customer base is mainly made up of people who are unsure about how a book should look.

These companies tend to work around templates. They’d have to, or their business wouldn’t work. If you are offering a service for x price, you aren’t making any money by sitting down with each and every author who comes your way, talking to them at length about what they want and then going away and spending hours and hours creating and then fine-tuning just that very thing. You wouldn’t be able to charge flat rates if you did, because every book is different. So in order to charge flat rates, you pre-design a bunch of book types, and then get your clients to fit into them somehow. Same goes for the cover. (I’m guessing this has something to do with why books produced by these companies always look self-published to me.) Now I don’t blame them or even admonish them for that—if I was in the same business, that’s exactly what I’d do. Otherwise you’d be a kind of bespoke book-producing boutique, and you’d have to charge astronomical prices. But I do admonish them for the hyperbole they fill their sales pitches with, crap about control and choice and “working together to realize your vision” and all that nonsense. They always talk about what your book “deserves”. It’s very easy for a writer who has just come round to the idea of self-publishing to get taken in.

CreateSpace offer a similar package, and although I’m recommend you go with them for your self-publishing adventures, I would never recommend that you avail of any of their services, for the same reason. I love, love, LOVE them—I love the books they make, how little they charge for them, their customer service, etc.—but I would never go to them for their editing, typesetting or design services. You just don’t know what you’re paying for. There’s no guarantee of quality. And from what I’ve seen, you’ll get a better result if you go looking for individuals to do the work yourself.

Above are two self-published covers. The one on the right (the horse) is a cover CreateSpace put on their website as an example of an “original illustration” cover. It costs from $949. The one on the left was done by Design for Writers (see this post) and although I don’t know how much it cost, I’m betting it wasn’t a third of what Mr. Horse did.

And what about when the book goes on sale? How much do you make then? Well, with the same one-stop shop used in the example above, you’d get around 70% on the profit (i.e. NOT on the list price) after a $2 “handling charge” is deducted. So let’s say your book was selling in a store for $14.95, and the bookstore was taking a 35% cut. I figure you’d be collecting a little over $5 from each sale. I don’t know how much you’d get from an Amazon sale. With CreateSpace, you get about $5 from an Amazon sale (using the example of Mousetrapped) and less from “expanded distribution” sales from other online retailers. So that’s little difference there between the two—but there is a big difference in the cost of the book to you. To buy a copy of my own book costs me $6 from the one-stop shop, but only $3.60-ish from CreateSpace. Many self-publishers go to companies like this because they want stock, but if that stock is twice as expensive as it would be from CreateSpace, why bother? I wouldn’t.

They say “We make self-publishing simple!” Self-publishing, if we’re talking about an e-book and a POD paperback which is what most self-publishers are talking about these days, is already simple. If you can’t do something yourself—editing, cover design, even formatting—you’ll get a far better deal by sourcing the people you need and paying them individually, than you’ll be handing over wads of cash to one company who claim to do it all. You’ll have much more control if you do it yourself. You’ll get, in my opinion, a better product. And you won’t end up with boxes of dusty books under the stairs, which is what this whole digital self-publishing thing is about avoiding in the first place.

In my opinion, your self-publishing needs to have some self in it. What do you think?

*Filing copies of your self-published books will national libraries is an exercise in ridiculousness.If your national library actually began receiving copies of every self-published book not only for sale in your country but available to buy from there too, they’d change their tune on their policies pretty quick, I’d imagine. Except they wouldn’t be able to reach their desks because they’d be piles and piles of POD-d books in their way. I’d never done it and you don’t need to either. **Paying only for 100, because 100 of them are free. Both examples exclude shipping costs. 

Mick Rooney at The Independent Publishing Magazine both reviews and ranks self-publishing companies, if you’re interested in learning more.

Why It Doesn’t Matter Whether or Not Your Book is Good

21 Mar

[Today's post should come with a warning: I'm not sure I've got my point across clearly. It's a very hard thing to explain. But hopefully you'll get what I mean, and take it in the spirit with which it was intended. Or else you'll think I'm saying something I'm not, and freak out. Either way, it's probably best to have coffee first. This one's a long 'un.]

In the last month or so I’ve done two self-publishing workshop thingys, one at Faber Academy in London and one for Inkwell Writers in Dublin, both of which required the building of a pink PowerPoint presentation that boiled—or at least, attempted to boil—everything I know about self-publishing down into two handy sessions, one for the caffeine-induced enthusiasm of the morning and one for the post-lunch slump of the afternoon. Doing this, I realized that (i) PowerPoint presentations take far more time to make than you could ever imagine and (ii) some of my views on self-publishing have significantly changed over the last year, including some views I harped on and on about in Self-Printed.

So between now and the sparkly new second edition of Self-Printed, coming sometime this summertime-ish (I refuse to be any more specific than that!), I’ll be blogging about these new ideas, starting today with this controversially headlined post about why I don’t think it matters whether or not the book you plan to self-publish is good.

(Yes, I did just say that. But please, kindly read the rest of this post before you start leaving ranty comments in the box below. Thanks.)

Once upon a time, I told would-be self-publishers that their books had to be good. Absolutely, positively and with no exceptions whatsoever. I didn’t want anyone self-publishing crap, or even just mediocre stuff.

Because first of all, what was the point? There was none. Just because you could didn’t mean that you should. (As Dr. Malcom tells Hammond in the Jurassic Park Visitors’ Center dining room, incidentally.) The point of books is not just that they were written. Besides, self-publishing is a business, with you as the entrepreneur and the book as your first product. Wouldn’t you make sure if instead of a book you were selling, say, lightbulbs, that those lightbulbs worked before you put them on the shelves? Wouldn’t you make sure that they were good? Of course you would, unless you were a chucking-money-down-the-toilet enthusiast with a black belt in shamelessness.

Maybe you weren’t interested in money, and instead you were in the midst of setting up a delightful picnic of rainbows and cupcakes on Unicorn Meadow, to which you’d invited all of your favorite writerly dreams. Dreams are lovely, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big believer in having them—but also that I’d never charge anyone €2.99 (or any amount) for the privilege of seeing mine come true, and not much else. That kind of thing is called vanity publishing for a reason.

And most important of all, you self-publishing crap might cost me sales. Do you know how hard it is to get someone to read a self-published book? We may have lost some perspective what with us being self-publishers ourselves, and being surrounded by blog posts, articles, tweets, etc. about self-published books doing well, but the answer is it’s extremely hard and, when it comes to the vast majority of constant readers in the world right now, practically impossible. I don’t have to explain to you why and, if I do, then you must be only half-way through your lunch back in Unicorn Meadow. But let’s say that one of us manages to break through, and get someone who never, ever, ever wanted to read a self-published book to read a self-published book, maybe even accidentally. If it’s a good book produced by a professional self-publisher that’s been through the standards of book production (editing, cover design, etc.), then our new convert might buy another one. Maybe mine. But what if it’s a terrible book that reads like a Google Translate malfunctioning, looks like a HTML sneeze and has a quote from the author’s mother on the cover in Comic Sans? Now this self-publishing toe-dipper has just confirmed what they thought about self-published books all along, and you can guarantee that they won’t be buying any more. Maybe the book they would’ve bought next would’ve been mine. If that HTML sneeze was yours, you’ve cost me a sale. You have indulged in some irresponsible self-publishing, and you’ve messed it up for more people than just yourself.

So for all these reasons, I told you that your book had to be good. Otherwise, there was no point in even researching things like promotion, because once your early readers left nothing but one-star reviews, your title would be dead in the Kindle water. To find out whether or not your book was good, I recommended either trying to get it traditionally published (for feedback; full manuscript requests would generally confirm that there was at least something there) or paying a manuscript assessment service to tell you both the good and bad news. Whatever you did, you had to do something. You had to make sure that your book was good.

We have go ba-ack… and find out what the whispers were about. And why those particular numbers were the important ones. And how you can time travel using water and sunlight. And why Walt was important. And what’s the deal with Christian Shepard. And why women couldn’t give birth on the island. And—

But this argument had holes bigger than the plot of Lost. (Still bitter about that? Two years later? Me?) It was easy to find exceptions to the rule.

Take for example The Bad Writing, Big Selling Club. Dan Brown is probably the name that pops up the most frequently. He isn’t a particularly good writer—and is, in fact, renowned for not being a very good writer at all—but yet he’s sold millions and millions of books. Thus the Bad Book Self-Publisher concludes that although their book isn’t very good, it is definitely better than Dan Brown’s, so it’s gonna sell. Or that it’s at least as good as it, so it has a chance. Or that Dan Brown is proof that it doesn’t matter what sort of crap is between the covers, people buy books no matter what. So, bad books sell.

Last October I relocated to Nice, France, for six weeks. I have thus far managed to resist the lure of a Kindle (ironic, I know) and had a 20kg luggage limit, so I relied on the tiny English language section of the local FNAC for reading material while I was there. Pickings were slim, to say the least. One week I picked up The Swarm by Frank Schatzing, translated into English from the German, partly because it sounded really interesting and partly because it was approximately the size of a brick and seemed as if it’d last me a while.

It was to good writing what the coffee you get served on airplanes is to Nespresso. There was so much badly handled exposition that “badly handedly exposition” would’ve made a good subtitle for the book. Nothing actually happened for at least fifty pages, and the science wasn’t so much interwoven as it was dumped in a steaming heap in the middle of each page. The characters had about as much depth as a puddle on the bathroom floor after someone’s had a shower, and for most of the book the reader had absolutely no clue what was going on. (And before you protest, these problems were all unrelated to the translation.) But I read it. I kept reading it. It was inexplicably riveting. And after a while, I even found myself enjoying it. Why? Because even though it wasn’t Shakespeare—or even Brown, or even correct English, half the time—it had something that kept me reading and ultimately gave me an enjoyable reading experience. So it did it matter that the book wasn’t, strictly speaking, good? No, because the book had something else, something that kept me turning the pages.

(And for the record, I loved The Da Vinci Code. I don’t make a habit of not liking things just because lots of people do, or because it’s “cool” to knock it.)

Coffee, and this was in Nice. Relevant, no?

So that was one plot hole in my Good Books theory—and then there was the reverse of that: the Great Writing, Not Selling Club. Every year we’re shocked to see how little some snooty-literary-award-nominated books have sold by the time the shortlists are revealed. I think it was 2011′s Booker that had some sales in the 800s. Yes, only eight hundred copies sold of a book experts agreed was one of the best books published by an Irish or British writer that year. (Of course they all did alright afterwards, but that’s not the point.) Recently I sat in on a talk by an editor at a major publisher of top quality literary fiction who said that the majority of her authors never earn out their (already small) advances, and that if it wasn’t for literary prize money, they’d have to shut up shop. So, good books don’t necessarily sell.

My point, 1,500 words later, is that whether or not your book is good is not what’s most important. What your book needs to have is appeal. Without appeal, your book won’t sell no matter how “good” it is. And with enough appeal, your book will sell even if you aren’t a great or even very good writer. Appeal is a terribly difficult thing to define, or at least it’s a terribly difficult thing for me to explain to you in words that make any sense. But in its most basic sense, if your book has appeal is has something that makes people want to read it. This may be useful information, an intriguing plot idea, or an author who already has a very large following for their writing elsewhere. It might just be a good product description or a snappy blurb. Or it might be something you can’t quite put your finger on, or quantify at all. But it’s the appeal that bridges the gap between someone finding out about your book, and that same someone buying it.

And before you self-publish, you have to make sure that you have it.

A well-written book does not equal appeal. It’s just not enough. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you don’t have to be the next Jonathan Franzen (thank fudge for that—I’d hate to hate Twitter) or Zadie Smith to win a readership and make a living as a writer.

Take Twilight, for example. Prior to reading it, I had zero interest in vampires. (Even now, my interest only extends as far as Eric Northman.) I never read YA, except for Harry Potter which arguably was in a genre all of its own. I only relented after hearing so much about the series, and by the time I got around to reading it all four books were already out. And I absolutely loved it. While I was reading it, it took over my life. Edward was suddenly occupying far too many of my thoughts for a fictional character. (Just as well he wasn’t technically a teenage boy.)  Then I lent it to my best friend, and it took over her life too. We both read all four books within a week just because we couldn’t stop; it was like the literary equivalent of crack cocaine. But why was it? It wasn’t particularly well-written, and it also, when you think about it, promotes the idea of giving everything up—college, your family, your life—for a guy, and doing it at the age of 18. Our previous shared read had been Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills, and we are certainly not the kind of girls up for giving up anything for anyone, least of all boys.

(As if. So, like, anyway…)

But we loved it. I’m guessing it was for the same reason that women the world over fell for the books: because they instantly transported us back to the heady days of being a teenage girl, and being a teenage girl in lurve. Life-altering, appetite-quenching, drowning in hormones love—except without the awkwardness, rejection, spots, etc. Thankfully. And that’s its appeal. It had nothing to do with vampires, and everything to do with the good bits of being a teenage girl. (It didn’t hurt, of course, that the adorable and devoted Edward Cullen was thrown in for good measure.) The way Meyer writes had very little to do with it outside of her ability to invoke memories of adolescence love; afterwards I picked up her only non-Twilight book, The Host, but only made it a third of the way through before I abandoned it. That one didn’t hold any appeal at all for me.

You might argue that if a book is written well, people will want to read it. Well, ask a literary fiction editor where their Rolls Royce and diamond shoes are for more information on that.

As I said this whole appeal thing is hard to make any clear points about (clearly!) but if I’m just confusing you, think of it this way. If you read blogs and/or are on Twitter, you are bombarded every single day with news about books. Books about to be published, books just published, books that have been out for months and books that have been out for years. Traditionally published books, self-published books, cult favorites and mega-sellers. Books, books, books. But do you run out and buy them all? Hardly. But every now and then I bet you Google the name of one of them to find out more, and a few clicks later you’re buying a copy with your credit card.

So what makes the difference? Why don’t you buy all the books? (Aside from the fact that we’re not millionaires.) Why don’t I buy all the books Oprah’s Book Club newsletter tells me about once a week? They must all be good, because Oprah says so, but it’s not just because I can’t afford it. It’s because whatever I glean from the blurb, the cover design and the information I have about the author, some of the books end up appealing to me and some of them don’t.

So what does all this mean? It means you may have a perfectly well-written book that isn’t selling, and that might be because despite your talent, no one wants to read the kind of book you’ve written. It would also explain why books that aren’t as good as yours are selling more, and why books that are brilliantly written aren’t selling at all. Your book doesn’t have widespread appeal, or at least doesn’t have any that’s on show. If it’s not on show, you have to find it. If you don’t know if it has any, find out. Pitch it to some readers and gauge their reactions. (Readers. NOT your mother, or even your friends.)  If it doesn’t, move on.

(This is all linked to something I’ve discovered about self-publishing—that, by default, nobody gives a rodent’s arse about your book—which I’ll be blogging about at a later date.)

Now of course, the aim of the game should be to self-publish a book that is both good and has appeal. That is the ideal. But I’m here to tell you that if you’ve only managed the good book part, your work is not yet done.

(Sorry!)

Does all that make sense? Or do I need to move to a stronger strength of coffee?

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