Real world sales numbers, part 4

It's time for my twice-yearly update on self-publishing sales numbers by those of us who don't shoot into the stratosphere of popularity! Last time, the lingering questions were how will my novella with Dreamspinner impact sales and how will finishing my fantasy series impact sales?

The final part (#6) of Disciple went on sale in March, quickly followed by the Omnibus which collects the whole thing into one nice doorstop. I ordered a paperback copy of that just to have it on my shelf. :)

Hawks & Rams went on sale December 31, 2014, and I have gotten two royalty reports from Dreamspinner since then.

Let's see how the sales graphs are looking:

Sales by title, per month

Total sales, per month

• Date range: October 2012 - April 2015. 
• H&R sales are reported quarterly, so to avoid a huge spike I divided them evenly over the three months of the quarter.

Last time I posted, I had just had an October of zero sales. As you can see, they've bounced back well. The trend (red line in the bottom graph) is definitely upwards. March was my best sales month ever. H&R's sales have definitely made a difference so far.

One question I had as a self-publisher was how a small press would compare to my own efforts.

Sales by retailer

As you can see, despite the big spike in Amazon sales when I dropped both Disciple, Part VI and the Omnibus, Dreamspinner has been an excellent sales channel. 

So am I making a living yet? Well, let me put it this way: in 2013, I earned about $207 from my book sales. In 2014, I earned about $305. 50% higher! 

Is that awful? Well, in 2012, half of self-publishers were earning less than $500 a year. It's hard to say what that number is these days -- there's a lot of sketchy information about self-publishing out there. 

I don't mean for this to be discouraging if you're thinking about self-publishing. I'm just trying to show you that when we say it's hard, slow, and difficult, we aren't kidding. How would my numbers be different if I published four books a year? Ten? (I can't write that fast, it's not physically possible. But some people do.) What if I was writing in a hotter category than epic/gritty fantasy?

Who knows. Your self-publishing story will be different, I know that for certain.

Got questions? Feel free to ask.

Becoming a crossover author

Back in May, my novella Hawks & Rams was accepted for publication at Dreamspinner Press. Up to now, I've been a self-publisher so naturally I wondered how different the process would be with a publisher.

My novella is coming out December 31st (check it out!)... And here's the story so far:

Editing

The process was strikingly similar to going through multiple rounds of beta feedback. To be honest, I was expecting more conversation and some sort of comment on the changes I made, the new bits that I wrote. In general I agree with "no news is good news" but the process did leave me a bit uncertain about the final story. 

Blurb

I had to explain my story to the blurb department and they wrote based on that. Guess I should have known they weren't going to actually read it? Either way, they sent it to me for feedback and it was pretty good.

Cover

I had to explain my story to the cover artist. This, I can understand more why they might not read the book. I gave a couple rounds of feedback and I'm happy with the result. 

Strangest thing

I realized this a couple weeks ago and double-checked my correspondence with Dreamspinner... Aside from some generic compliments they gave me, I have no idea why they wanted to publish Hawks & Rams. I assume somebody enjoyed the story, liked the characters, found the sex steamy or something, but I have no direct evidence of that. 

I suppose I could ask, of course, but that seems odd as well. 

So overall, working with a small press publisher been similar to self publishing but I haven't had to pay anybody. There's the release and promotions yet to come, though. Stay tuned!

Real world sales numbers, part 3

It's been six months again, so let's update how self-publishing sales numbers look for people who aren't hugely successful. (May's update here)

Click to enlarge

• Definitions: "units sold" includes both ebooks and paperbacks, across all sales channels (except Storybundle), for a given month. The graph starts at October 2012, when I released Disciple, Part I. Since Oct. '12, I have sold about 245 books in total. (Damn, it's been two years already!)
• The spike in sales of Part II and Part III was a result of briefly getting Amazon to give Part I away for free and buying an ad promotion. Part I has been free for several months now, which is why it isn't registering sales anymore.
• The Half-Omnibus is not free but it hasn't been selling either, which is disappointing. The only overhead that went into it was its ISBN, but it hasn't even paid for that.
• Yeah, this October I had no sales. Ouch, it's been a while since I got a flat zero. 

As you can see, my graph is getting more and more complicated as I add more volumes. It's turning into a tangle of lines bouncing around, and it's getting hard to see the general trend. So here is a simpler graph: 

This is all my sales, by month, with an added linear regression so that I can see there is, in fact, a mild upward trend. Which is nice.

Am I making a living? Not yet. I have paid for all of the production costs (about $1500 per book) through a combination of Kickstarter campaigns (for two books), sales through regular channels, and my graphic design freelance work. So far, my business income has covered my business expenses. I'm grateful for that because I live on a snug budget, but no, it isn't putting money in my pocket yet.

To ask the same question as last time: am I thrilled? Well... it's still encouraging. I'll admit that I'm starting to feel the wear after six volumes. The Disciple series is almost finished. Then I'll be facing the question of: what to publish next? I've got other books in the hopper -- are they ready? This also hasn't been a productive year for me, so will I run short at some point?

Look for my next sales update in May, when there will be a new factor in play: Dreamspinner Press is publishing a novella of mine in December. What will those sales look like? Will there be any carryover to Disciple? Stay tuned...

Real world sales numbers, Part 2

This is a follow up post to the sales numbers I talked about in November. It's been about six months so let's see how things have been going for my Disciple series.

Does not include Storybundle sales. Does include both ebooks & paperbacks, across all sales channels

• Definitions: "units sold" includes both ebooks and paperbacks, across all sales channels (except Storybundle), for a given month. Starts with October 2012, when I released Disciple, Part I. Since Oct. '12, I have sold about 195 books in total. 
• In the last six months, I've added two new titles to the series: Disciple, Part IV, and the Half-Omnibus which collects the first three parts. 
• The spike in sales of Part II and Part III was a result of briefly getting Amazon to give Part I away for free. They quit before the end of January 2014.
• To ask the same question again, am I thrilled? Well, the spike was exciting and getting the royalty check for that was nice. Sales have been creeping back down, but they do that. I'm going to keep moving and get Disciple, Part V out later this year.

After a conversation I had where a self-publisher expressed concern about working with Amazon because of its 500-pound-gorilla-ness, I put this graph together from my data:

That is books sold, per week, broken out by sales channel. Start date is September 1, 2013 (when Part III was released). If you don't want to play with Amazon because they're getting too big for their britches or whatever -- you certainly can, but you're missing out.

As you can also see, Smashwords hasn't exactly been worth the trouble even though they do distribute me to several other outlets like Sony and Diesel. Draft2Digital hasn't exactly wowed me either -- they're slow and I don't like how their sales reports are organized. Then again, I haven't had enough sales to really look at...

I hope these graphs help my fellow self-publishers by giving them something to compare their own sales numbers to. There are plenty of stories out there focusing on the writers who've made it big in self-publishing, and those of us who are slogging along in the trenches don't get much attention. It's no mystery why: these numbers are not exciting. The income I'm getting from this is not a livable wage -- heck, it's an open question whether I can afford to produce Part V off this income.

Care to share some of your numbers?

Indie life: fishing for readers

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

Strategies
Back in my very first Indie Life post I offered some thoughts on ebook pricing. Firstly, holy crap I've been doing Indie Life for almost a year now -- and I just found out this is the last Indie Life (more on that later). Secondly, I want to talk about why I made Disciple, Part I available for free. Thirdly, a look at the impact it's had.

First one's free
I was going to call the strategy a "loss leader" but the addiction model is more accurate. It's long been attributed to drug dealers, but I ran into this strategy the first time I walked into a Krispy Kreme shop. After watching that mesmerizing machine and following donuts on their journey through the proofer, the fryer, and the frosting, one of the smiling employees picked up a fresh, hot donut and handed it to me.

Oil. Sugar. Warm as a fresh kill. Every predatory button in my hindbrain got mashed and I was hooked. That was no accident, on Krispy Kreme's part. Hats off to their strategy. (I can only eat them fresh off the machine, though.)

Getting back to Disciple, my purpose in giving away Part I for free is to hook readers. Yes, anybody could download a 20% sample for free when it was selling for 99 cents, but giving them the whole novella gets the hook in deeper. Instead of stopping at a random point in the middle, they reach the open-ended question at the end and the cover of Part II is right there to click on.

Addiction needs reinforcement
What if I'd made Part I free when I first published it? Sure, that probably would have gotten me more downloads, but the readers would not have had something to buy when they got to that open-ended question at the end. They would've had to wait, and that means they could easily have forgotten all about me by the time Part II came out.

Crunchy numbers
Disciple, Part I became free on Amazon somewhere around December 30th. Total free downloads for January, at Amazon, was 1,424. Here's my updated sales chart (its previous incarnation):

Impact? Yes. And Part IV comes out March 1st -- not that far off. Hopefully, readers will remember. Some of them have joined my newsletter list to get a reminder. I put a link to that at the end of each book, too.

Amazon reset Part I to 99 cents at the end of January. I'm working on fixing that. 

Last Indie Life week

I got an email yesterday informing me that Indelibles is pulling the plug and inviting everyone to join the Insecure Writer's Group... which is all well and good, but insecurity is not a topic that particularly interests me. I want to keep talking about the realities of self-publishing, so I think I will. Does anyone want to join me?

Disciple, Part I is FREE at Nook • Smashwords • more!

(Kindle/MOBI format is free at Smashwords)

Disciple Half-Omnibus collection on sale at all major retailers!

Or enter the giveaway!

Indie Life: Self-publisher's housekeeping

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

So I did it. I self-published my novellas -- three of them and counting. There might have been a few bugs in the formatting, but I've fixed those and uploaded clean copies. They'll be available forever on Amazon's virtual bookshelves. I'm starting to prep for my next publication, number four.

Thank goodness I don't have to worry about those first three anymore. Right? Well...

My "Other Books By..." page
As I publish more books, it's in my best interests to update this. It's the cheapest form of advertising I can get! Besides that, the number one reason that a reader buys a book (any book) is because they liked the author's other work.

Next book link
Disciple is a series, so when readers get to the end of one part, the first thing I want them to know is that the next part is on sale. The cover's right after the last paragraph, with a link to my sales page.

Where does the link go? To my sales page, because online retailers don't want books to contain links to their competitors. That's fair enough, but I don't want to create a separate ebook for every single retailer. So let the readers choose.

At the end of Part III is a note about when Part IV will be published. I'll have to update that with a cover and link when that's available. There's also a link to sign up for my newsletter.

FREE at Amazon
& Smashwords

Promoting previous books
Even though I'll be promoting Disciple, Part IV soon, it's in my best interests to keep promoting Part I. It's the gateway into the series, after all. But even if all my books were one-shots, promoting one can lead to carry-over sales when new readers like one book and want to buy more that I've written.

Updating links to my blog/webpage
I do, of course, have a link to my book blog in the back of all my books. There are reader goodies and nice, big maps (I write fantasy) there. If any of that should change, I'll need to update it in all my ebooks.

Housekeeping
These updates take a little time and then I have to re-upload them to all my sales channels... but anything that makes it a little easier for readers to find me is worth it.

What sorts of maintenance have you been doing on your self-pubbed titles?

Indie life: Fell down the rabbit hole? Or crawled?

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

I posted sales numbers last month, so this time I'll talk about more abstract things...

Maybe this falls under "being a moody writer," but I go through phases. Sometimes I wake up wanting to engage the world, to see all that it has to offer, to suck the marrow from life (as Thoreau said...) and sometimes the world is just getting in my freaking way. It's just distracting me from the scenes I need to write and the notes I need to get down.

Sometimes once I manage to get the real world out of the way, my story's world is nowhere to be found.

That illusion of standing beside your characters and writing down what they do can get so fragile. It's especially frustrating when I know I've been deeper in the narrative dream than I am now. Writing Disciple was a breeze, in comparison to my current WIP. Feels like this story's fighting me, wandering off at the least provocation, fading like a dream that made me get out of bed and put my shoes on.

We all fear writer's block. Staring at an electronic sheet of paper with our minds as blank as it is. There are many supposed treatments and cures for writer's block, but I think it comes down to a much older bit of advice:

Know thyself
What gets your brain burbling? What inspires you? Is inspiration even how you power your writing? We all come into the writing world with preconceived notions about how writers (or artists in general) work. Those notions are based on movies, stories, biographies -- but the truth is, art is different for every artist.

You have to find your own way. To do that, you'll have to experiment and explore. Curiosity is a writer's best friend, IMO (and nosiness is a close cousin, lol.) Try new approaches, rearrange your schedule, meet new people. I once spoke briefly to a painter and he said something I've since realized was true: the universe will give you what you need for your art. (more thoughts on that) It may not arrive gift-wrapped, though. Go looking for it.

Some days, you don't fall down the rabbit hole. You have to jump. Or even crawl in on your hands and knees, scuffing your knees and elbows all the way.

And on a related note:

Be patient with yourself
This all takes a lot more time than it seems like it ought to. Ideas need time to develop and solidify, like a butterfly's wings after emerging from the chrysalis. Sometimes an idea will spring from your forehead full-grown like Athena, but more often ideas arrive in a lumpy mass that needs shaping and trimming.

That isn't something you hear professional artists talk about much, but in my experience it's the way ideas usually arrive. What the pros are good at is quickly shaping the raw ideas into a workable form. They can do it on the fly, in just the space between their brain and their hand (paint brush, mouth, feet, whatever their art requires.)

For the rest of us, a stream of misshapen ideas pouring through your head like, dare I say it, diarrhea, can feel a lot like failure. Like you're not producing anything worthwhile. Wasting time, paper, and effort you could be investing in other things.

Cut yourself some slack. And write down all those messy, newly-hatched ideas. Spend your dedicated writing time studying them like random puzzle pieces you found on the sidewalk and see if they fit together, if they're from different puzzles, or if they fit into another puzzle you're already working on.

It's work. There's nothing easy about art. But keep at it.

These are things I've been needing to remind myself of, lately. How about you?

Indie Life: Sales numbers for ordinary folks

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

Real-world sales numbers
We've all read self-publishing success stories. I just published my book and sold a thousand the first week! I'm #1 in my category at Amazon! 

These stories happen. They get talked about a lot because they're unusual. Predatory companies selling overpriced packages of services to "help" self-publishers like to trot out stories like these.

Meanwhile, we mere mortals are looking at very different sales numbers. We say generic things like: I'm thrilled with my sales! They're getting better all the time! Much more realistic. But what are these thrilling numbers?

Behold, the sales numbers for Disciple, Part I, II and III from October 2012 through October 2013.* Am I thrilled? I'm incredibly awful at hyperbole, so let's be realistic. Thrilled, no. Grateful, yes, very much so. Encouraged to continue, yes.

There are some interesting things in it, I think. You can see the impact of new releases on sales of all the Parts. You can see that it took five months for sales to reach zero the first time, and six months the second time. In general, my sales are increasing. It's a gradual trend but it's there.

Did these numbers surprise you? These are the sales of someone who doesn't have much presence in social media. Someone with very little advertising money to burn, but who keeps plugging away at self-publishing. Disciple is a gritty fantasy with blood and guts... and romance, too. There's a niche out there for Disciple, it's just a matter of finding it. I have plans for the remaining three parts of Disciple and I have more irons in the fire as well.

So I'm going to keep going. Tune in next year for an update. :) Well, maybe six months.

*Does not include Storybundle sales of Part I in December of 2012. That was about 1,800 copies but apparently not many of those folks have come back for more.

Cover & blurb for Disciple, Part I • Part II • Part III

Indie Life: Keep writing

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

Moving on 
I don't know about you, but I had Disciple kicking around in my head for years and years before I had it fully figured out and my writing chops were on the level that it needed. I've only self-published the first three parts, so far, but all six have been written. For me, the story is finished.

And to be honest, we were all happy to be done -- the characters and I. But now they're taking a well-deserved break and I'm at loose ends.

Starting over from scratch 
When you had years to nibble at the world-building and character development, it didn't feel so big. You can eat an elephant, after all, if you do it one bite at a time. You had time to learn your characters' life histories, explore all the nooks and crannies of the world, and even develop all the second-tier characters.

But now you've got a few books on Amazon and you know how important backlist is when you're a self-publisher. You don't have five or ten years to write the next one.

That elephant starts looking kinda big.

Recycling
Have you ever groused about how an author's characters are all essentially the same? Ever got tired of every story involving New Orleans somehow? How some writers keep going back to the same characters in the same universe and never let them have a "happily ever after"? (How many times can the same person save the universe, anyway?)

You can do that, of course. And if you love telling a certain kind of story -- traditional romances, for example -- there's no reason you shouldn't and there's even a gigantic market for it.

Personally, I think it's interesting to see patterns in your own writing. Lately, I've been reacquainting myself with one of my science fiction characters and realizing how much he has in common with one of Disciple's characters. They're the same MBTI type, if you've read my posts on that, but they are quite different in their execution.

But I don't want to tell the same thing over and over, with the same or only slightly different characters. I want to challenge myself. I have a writing bucket list. Do you?

Write everything down
You should already be doing this, actually. I use Scrivener (it rocks, buy it) and I have a file called the Brainstorm Zone where I write down all the scraps of ideas that seem substantial enough to work with -- a paragraph or two, at least. When I'm starting from scratch, I go over all those notes and see if anything might fit. Or, might fit after a little mashing up and re-tooling. You never know.

Never throw stuff away
I have dozens of trunked novels and novellas. Many of them have been lost to obsolete file formats and exist only as a tractor-feed, fanfold printout (I kid you not.) They are never going to be seen by anybody in their current state because they're clumsy, poorly written, and sloppy... but there are little interesting bits in there.

Don't throw your crummy old stuff away. Nobody will know you took a half-baked idea, finished baking it and added a few new gadgets.

Don't cut corners
I've built worlds from scratch, and I'll do it again. Just because I need to keep producing, as a self-publisher, does not mean that I should lower my standards or let things slide as "good enough." I am the only person holding me responsible for the quality of my work.

My readers deserve the best I can do. They're hard-won and priceless.

Have you started eating a new elephant recently?

Indie Life: No guarantee of success, but...

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

Common question #43
Another question that often turns up when writers are looking at self-publishing: can I make a living at this? how long does it take to start making money?

From what I've seen, after almost a year of doing this, the answer involves a few factors

• do you have a supportive family? Do they read your genre?
• do you have friends online and/or IRL who read your genre?
• how effective is your advertising?
• do you have a backlist? (more than one publication?)
• what genre are you writing in?
• oh, and is your story any good?

Can you earn money by self-publishing? Yes. Will you earn back the money you invested in editing, cover art, etc.? Maybe. Will you do that and be able to pay your phone bill/rent/etc. with your earnings? That's a bigger maybe. Will you be able to quit your day job? ... well... uncertain shrug...

Will you earn money hand over fist like E.L. James or Hugh Howey? That's pretty much a no. Though it does happen, the statistical outliers are the ones that get touted as proof that self-publishing is the land of milk and honey. (Needless to say, it's not.)

Got supportive family and friends?
More importantly, socially active family and friends. Word of mouth is the best, but hardest to get, advertising. The support you get here really is priceless.

Got effective advertising?
Do your homework when picking an advertising venue or promotional service. Check the Promotional section at Preditors & Editors. Check the Bewares forum at Absolute Write. Information about promotional companies is spottier than for freelance editors, agents, or predatory book "publishers" but it is out there.

If you're considering buying a spot on book recommendation sites, look for the ones with acceptance standards and high traffic. BookBub, for example, has been reported to get good ROI, but they have minimum review/star ratings requirements and limited acceptance rates. I don't even qualify to apply to BookBub yet.

Backlist and genre
Having several published titles implies that you write well enough to keep publishing, that you're going to keep writing, and it offers readers a block of material to dive into. We all know how fun it is to devour a series of novels by an author you just realized you like.

Some genres do seem to work better for self-publishers. The big example is erotica, both straight and gay. Romance moves a lot of self-pub... but romance moves a lot of titles anyway. Urban fantasy seems to still be going strong, as do YA and the new NA designation.

Quality writing
Speaks for itself, and this is a whole 'nother blog post that I'm not going to write today. I'll also skip the part where I rant about how well crap sells (because crap does sell, and everyone needs to get over it.)

Be ready for the long haul
That's what self-publishing is. Don't expect big sales numbers. Stop checking your Amazon ranking and keep writing. If you can earn more money selling widgets, do that too.

I'm involved in the self-publishing community over at Absolute Write and of the people who regularly post their monthly sales, I'm consistently at the bottom. Yes, it's discouraging. Yes, I'm envious. Yes, I notice that people who post numbers like mine tend to disappear.

...but I haven't disappeared. Stop the violins. Let's get back to work.

Yes, Disciple, Part III is on sale now! 

Official announcement here. Sample here.

More samples? Part I • Part II

The gritty fantasy romance will continue...
Part IV (of VI) to follow in 2014.

Indie Life: Quality control

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

Editors, line editors, and proofreaders
Do I need to hire an editor? It's a common question. Sticker shock is a contributing factor -- trust me, I don't have that kind of money burning a hole in my pocket either.

I know my grammar isn't perfect. Typos sneak through. I live on a budget, but I scrape together the money and hire an editor/line editor and a proofreader for each part of Disciple. Why?

How many chances do you get to make a first impression?

Consider the truth behind the accusations leveled at self-published books: poorly written, badly punctuated, terrible grammar. I've looked at plenty of book samples and chucked them for those reasons. Those writers won't get a second chance to make a first impression.

People treat me in proportion to how I present myself, I've found. There's a huge backstory about being shy vs. projecting confidence there, but I'll skip it for now. Short version is: I present myself as a professional artist so that I will be treated as such. That requires maintaining a standard of quality for everything attached to my name. Maybe I come across as a hard-ass when it comes to standards, but I'm the only one who can make me stick to those quality standards.

So how do you maintain high standards on a limited budget? Good beta readers and choosing your freelance editor carefully.

Beta readers
I'm sure we all agree about the importance of beta readers and the revision process. What makes a good beta for a given author is as unique and personal a question as "what's a good writing process?" -- IMO, it falls under the same trusting-the-universe umbrella as where I get my story ideas in the first place.

How do you know beta feedback is good? Because it feels like a hammer hitting a nail right on the head. You know that their suggestions will make the story better, even if it's a difficult thing that requires murdering some darlings.

How do you know if it will make the story better? That's part of the learning-to-write process. Keep reading well-written stories to see how it's done (and poorly written stories to see how it's not done) and keep writing so you get the hang of how you're going to do it.

When is a story ready for a professional editor?
That's something each writer has to gauge by how their betas' feedback changes over the course of drafting their novel. By which I mean fresh betas reading later revisions, compared to what other betas said about earlier drafts. I wrote a post about that, and how I decided I was ready to publish Disciple over at Unicorn Bell, last year.

Choosing an editor
Choose with care. Read books they've edited, or books they've written if they write, and critique them as you would any writer you're studying. Check their references.

If they offer a sample edit, take advantage of that -- especially if you're looking for a line editor. It's on you to know grammar's rules and how to bend them, but do their edits make sense? Are they making your story clearer while maintaining your style and voice?

In short: work with somebody whose work you respect. For me, that's Debra Doyle.

Is it worth the money? 
Yes. What you're buying is objectivity and experience. As hard as I can be on my own writing, deep down I still love it. As insightful as my beta readers are, we're all at a similar experience level, writing-wise. IMO, if I want to maintain a high quality standard in my self-published stories, I need to find the money for my freelance editor.

Indie Life: cover art

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

This month, an offshoot of my thinking about how the larger sexism and racism controversies in SF/F can trickle down to even little self-publishers like me. Have you seen Jim Hines' spoofs of the silly poses women are put into, on book covers? How about the "girly" versions of famous (male) authors' covers?

I follow Lousy Book Covers -- though not too closely, it's depressing -- and also some "beautiful book covers" Tumblr feeds... it should come as no surprise which one has the most traffic.

I've been a graphic designer for 15 years or so, and I know enough about advertising to say that there are reasons why marketers package books the way they do. I've seen enough data to agree that even while we object about the gratuitous sex, violence, etc., we still buy it. It's a deep and complicated problem with plenty to unpack from it... and that's too big a topic for here and now. I want to think about what goes into a book cover. As a self-publisher, I try to take all of these things into account when giving my cover artist instructions.

The primary purpose of a book cover is to give the viewer an idea of what to expect from the contents. Among the things the cover tells the viewer are:

My book's cover:
Fantasy, non-Earth, monsters,
dark/grim/gritty, adventure/travel,
girl looking tough.
What do you see?

Genre
There's a stock of images associated with every genre, whether it's spaceships, aliens, and electronics for science fiction, or dragons, swords and castles for fantasy. The vocabulary's large, and there's overlap to some degree, but it's easy to classify a book by its cover.

Sub-genre
Those stock images can be very specific (a cybernetically enhanced person), or combinations of them can indicate a specific sub-genre (vampire plus teenaged girl). Also, the cover can indicate any unexpected overlaps with other genres. If you've got steampunk with dragons, or a spy thriller with supernatural elements, the cover art is a good place to alert readers to that.

Mood
Darkness? Humor? Idealism? There's an equally large stock of associated imagery with all of these things. Lighting and color palette can convey this, too, independent of the images.

Major themes
With the rise of ebooks and the need for covers to look good as thumbnail images, there's been an increasing abstraction in the artwork -- simplifying it down to a single image, maybe two -- which can be powerful. But it can also be vague. It's perfectly valid for a fantasy novel to have just a sword for its cover art. But that doesn't tell the reader much, unless it's a very distinctive sword.

What do I mean by "major themes"? All of those cheesy romance covers of a woman languishing on Fabio's shoulder do convey the theme very efficiently: ROMANCE. A World War II novel with Mustangs dogfighting on the cover: ACTION. It's in how the genre-related elements of the cover are interacting.

Interesting details
The cover is a chance to intrigue readers with unexpected combinations or fun details. Bear in mind, though, that a viewer knows absolutely nothing about the story inside, so only the most general things can be conveyed here. If your characters have a cool gadget, its presence on the cover will be entirely as a cool gadget. Its magical powers or time-travelling capabilities aren't easily explained. Which means it had better be pretty darn cool, to be on the cover. Tread with care.

Characters
What quintessential aspect of your character can you tell the reader, in the book cover? That he's tough? That she's frightened? If there are people in your cover art, this is not optional -- the viewer will see personality in them. Choose carefully.

Symbolic vocabulary
How do you know what elements communicate what? To some degree, you already do; we've all been drenched in advertising symbolism all our lives. We all love books here, as well, so we have plenty of chances to study their covers.

And to some degree, you've worked on this vocabulary as part of mastering the craft of writing. Yes, we use words but what we convey to the reader are images. You've hooked your readers and drawn them into your story by way of powerful images.

How have you translated those into cover art?

Indie life: lessons in self-promoting

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

Self-promotion
It's not easy. I've been self-publishing since November 2012 and I've learned this much, so far:

Blog tours
Now that I've done several of them -- one through a paid service, the rest on my own -- I have to say that their effectiveness is questionable. I've only had one or two sales that I'm fairly certain were because of my blog touring.

Neither were because of the paid service, either. I am very skeptical of those. The one I used posted my interviews on public-reporting sites that generate metric tons of mediocre journalism daily -- sure, big name news agencies occasionally glean something from there, and sure there's a tiny chance somebody would stumble across me. But, seriously?

I am a member of both the Magic Appreciation Tour and the Blog Tour Exchange. Through them, I get contacts to blogs of people with similar interests to mine. The exposure is good, and meeting fellow writers is even better.

Review sites and book bloggers
Many of them will not accept self-published books. Those that do are often overwhelmed and put up a "Not accepting submissions" note.

If you find one that's accepting self-published books, read the submission guidelines carefully and follow them just as you would when submitting to an agent or editor. Use your query letter or back cover blurb (which you have lovingly polished through many revisions and beta feedback, right?) in your submission email.

I've found a few indexes of reviewers and book bloggers, which might be helpful:

• Book Blogger Directory
• @Work In Progress
• Step By Step Self-Publishing

New Releases
It's true: your new book release is excellent promotion for the rest of your books. I saw a little sales bump when I released Disciple, Part II. Soon I'll be making announcements about Part III.

So when I heard the idea of a multi-writer crossover anthology over at the Magic Appreciation Tour, I jumped on the chance. Fifteen of us sent our main characters to a besieged fantasy city to defend the last remnants of humanity. I'd say they were kicking ass and taking names, but who cares about the names.

The Battle of Ebulon is now available at Smashwords for FREE! I sent Kate (from Disciple) to help however she could.

Fifty thousand orcs at the city gate and they sent us a f***ing handmaid...?! You know she showed them what for. No spoilers -- go read it. There's a sample of my story over at my book blog.

Google Hangout tonight!
Yup, I'm still going to do it regardless of whether anybody shows up. 10 - 11:30 pm, Eastern (US), open to anybody to talk about anything writing-related. My webcam will be on, but don't feel like you have to turn yours on. We can just chat in the sidebar if you prefer. I will practice reading aloud from Disciple, since everyone talks about enjoying author readings and I have never done one. (I'm too chicken.)

Where?
It'll be a public hangout, and if I'm not in your circles on Google+ you can find the hangout on my profile page.

Indie life: Being your own continuity editor

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month!

Last month, I talked about pricing. This month, another self-publishing challenge: not just editing yourself, but being your own continuity editor.

Editing for the storytelling elements is difficult enough -- tightening up the narrative, keeping the action moving -- but there's all the little details too. Making sure the names of the seven moons in the sky are consistent. Remembering that the scene in Part III gets talked about in Part V, and changing one means changing the other. Realizing that one of the characters isn't a knight, halfway through the series, and needing to edit that out -- and it changes how he's treated, in certain situations. Making sure the black-bay horses stay black-bay and the yellow dress that gets ripped up in the laundry room scene isn't worn again later.

Do people notice these things? I do. Not all of the details, but different readers will catch different things, and even momentary confusion is not a writer's friend. Getting caught with continuity errors will make you look amateurish, too, so self-publishers need to ask themselves: do you want to be seen as a professional writer, or just a hobbyist?

Levels of continuity
Continuity is another recursive detail, like plot -- it appears, in equal complexity, at every level of the story. I need to keep track of details changing within each paragraph (the easy side), each scene, each chapter, each book in the series, and throughout all six parts of Disciple (the tougher side.)

Keep your distance
The first thing I need for continuity editing is a certain mental distance from the story. I need to not be sucked into that internal movie, not emotionally invested -- I need to track these details objectively. I find this is easier to do on paper, with a red pen, than while editing on-screen.

Mental distance is an important part of editing in general, of course. The ability to step back from my own emotional investment in the story, to evaluate its structure and execution, is very important. Personally, I think this includes stepping back from opinions like "this is a shitty first draft" as well as from "this part came out so awesome!!1!"

While it's true that a first draft is allowed to be as shitty as it needs to be, just to get it on paper, I don't believe that anything on paper is so shitty that it can't be fixed. I also don't know how seriously other writers use that phrase, but personally, I don't insult my writing. And I don't doubt my ability to fix things; it's just a question of how drastic the surgery will be. There's a good reason I've talked about using a chainsaw to edit my stuff. :)

To-do lists
I keep TO FIX lists for each draft, in each Scrivener file. Many of the things listed are continuity details, accumulated as I wrote other parts, or as realized the implications of one scene would impact another (or needed setting-up, in an earlier scene.) Some of them can be done with search and replace, like the note "Wall Street = Wallside Street" or "Search&destroy -- "firing" archers." Some need more thought, like "Drop mention of Kleelinde, or explain."

How do you keep track of continuity details?

Indie Life, here on the frontier

Since I'm living the self-publishing life, I joined the once-a-month Indie Life group. It's held on the second Wednesday of the month (since the first belongs to Mr. Cavanaugh) and it's all about being an indie author.

So, for my first Indie Life post, my stats.

• Self-published my first book, Disciple, Part I, in November, 2012.
• Disciple, Part II, followed April 1, 2013.
• Next up: Disciple, Part III. I haven't set a release date yet.

I want to put down a few thoughts about pricing. Initially, I was asking 4.99 for Disciple, Part I. A few got sold at that price.

Then Part I was featured in Storybundle.com's December offering and I moved a heck of a lot more -- at about 75 cents apiece.

I dropped its price down to 1.99 for Valentine's day, then briefly to 99 cents for the Equinox sale and Tolkein Reading Day. Currently, Part I is 1.99 and it has sold a bit (since Part II was released, which may be why.)

Pricing a self-published book is an interesting thing. You've got one side of your brain arguing that a lower price will be more attractive to customers. Another side of your brain is hoping to get a paycheck at some point. Your dark side is arguing that nobody's going to want to pay money for this and you should just give it away -- maybe they'll pay for the next one.

I had a friend, in high school, who took the advice of a fellow artist and added a zero to the asking price of his watercolor paintings. My friend was just another young painter producing nice stuff and asking $20 or so for them. Bump that up to $200 and... people started paying more attention to his work.

99 cents, nowadays, is a risky price for a book -- any book, from what I've heard. It's a good sale price, for a limited time, but as a standard price it implies the book's not worth much. And while it can be argued that 99 cents makes it an impulse buy, I don't know if books follow the same rules as those cheap little trinkets clustered around a store's cash register. If a book's sample isn't up to my par, I'm not downloading it at any price.

On the other hand, major publishing houses can slap a $12 price tag on an ebook and what are you going to do about it?

What's a good book worth? Trick question: it's priceless. I've settled on 1.99 for Part I and 4.99 for Part II -- economical, but not cheap. What have your experiences with self-pricing been?