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Why I won’t be selling my novel for $495

March 19, 2011 in Reflections | 8 comments

Limited edition potato

‘Worth more than my novel?’
Answers are not required in ‘Comments’

A year ago, as I was getting ready to publish my first novel, I set myself a target. If I was going to be a real writer, then I had to be able to make a proper living through writing. So how have I done so far?

In English English: ‘Not quite as well as I might have done.”

In any other language: “Total wipeout”.

Smashwords: Sold – 121. Earnings – $65.35
Amazon – US: Sold – 33. Earnings – $29.66
Amazon – UK: Sold – 3. Earnings – £0.78

So that’s 157 copies and around $96 earned for the year. Call me cautious, but somehow I don’t think I’ll be able to give up the day job just yet. I’ll need to do better: about 500 times better. Excluding taxation.

So one solution could be to increase the price by a factor of 500. ‘That will be $495, sir. Thank you.’ You know, I have a funny feeling that might just work. I could make it a limited edition, probably grab a few headlines for the most expensive book in the world, and I bet I’d get a few takers.

But that’s not what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave the price exactly where it has been for most of the year – $0.99 or £0.74 (+VAT). The price of a large potato.

Is that what my novel’s worth? I guess it depends how hungry you are. A potato’s certainly more nutritious. It fills a spot. Even if 157 people seem to have opted for my book instead.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The vast majority of my Smashwords ‘sales’ have come when I’ve offered a free copy as part of a promotion – there were 70 just last week during Read An Ebook Week. So these readers probably didn’t have to sacrifice their daily potato. And I suspect that some – maybe most – will be book-hoarders, accumulating books just in case they need them some rainy day. They’ll probably never read mine.

This is why there’s huge debate about what an ebook price ought to be. My Facebook friend and fellow-Brit-lit-author, Ali M Cooper, fulminated recently against price-cutting:

My UK kindle sales continue to drop as the market is flooded by under £1 ‘bargains’ as authors try to undercut each other … My personal guideline is that if I don’t think a full length novel is worth the price of a pint of beer then I shouldn’t be publishing it.

Several other writers agreed with Ali that price-cutting writers should take account of the ‘long-term perceived value of books’ and encouraged a firm stand on pricing. Selling at a low price implied a lack of confidence in your own book, they said.

But then there was another point of view expressed by Carolyn McCray, founder of the Indie Book Collective, in a post this week on understanding the Amazon book-page. You need to get at least 5 – 10 reviews, she said, and fill the ‘Customers-Who-Bought-This-Item-Also-Bought‘ bar. Her advice is:

Price your book at 99 cents (the lowest allowed by Amazon) and drive as much traffic as you can during your ‘soft’ launch window. Once you have the bar filled you can re-price your book.

There’s my problem. My amazon.com page has fantastic reviews – but only three of them. And the books other people bought with mine? A book on Lebanese cuisine, three books on quantum physics and .. oh yes, this is bound to bring the customers flooding in – The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t allow me to re-design my ‘associated books’ bar. I’ll just have to wait until some future customer chooses better bedfellows.

And as for my UK Amazon page. No reviews. No book-links. Nada.

So you see, I’ve got a way to go to establish any kind of credibility. Pricing is just one way I can persuade people to take a peek, maybe download the sample.

Free is probably not the best way – not for novels anyway, although there may be a case for free short stories to introduce people to your work.

But working at the price of least resistance does seem sensible, at least until my reputation begins to grow outside my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. Perhaps that time will come with The Lebanese Troubles. Perhaps it will be the next novel. Or the third.

If it was just about pricing it would be easy. Unfortunately, it isn’t. A year on, I’m still learning about how to position and present my book, and this week I’ve been busy updating my promotional pages, and even the book content. You may have noticed changes in this blog too – all designed to make it easier for the potential reader to say ‘Yes’, and inspired largely by Carolyn McCray’s article.

There’s another important requirement. Hard work. Talking to your friends and supporters constantly, not necessarily beating your author-drum all the time, but just communicating. Let me return to Ali Cooper. I don’t know how she’d describe her last 12 months, but I’d call it a success.

Ali published her first novel, The Girl on the Swing around 12 months ago, at about the same time as me. It’s a beautifully-controlled, tightly written psycho-drama, the sort of novel I enjoy reading (especially since it follows in the Hardy/Fowles tradition of featuring Lyme Regis). But since Ali’s book is entirely devoid of vampires, cops and wizards … and is not priced at less than a dollar … it’s pretty unlikely to knock Amanda Hocking or J.A.Konrath from their perch at the top of the indie popularity list.

Carefully, steadily, Ali has nurtured her readership, maintaining the writer contacts she built while developing the novel, making new friends (like me) through the various Kindle boards, maintaining a daily presence through Facebook. In all of this, Ali has been much more consistent than me, and now her hard work is really beginning to pay off. Just look at the reviews she’s accumulated. From results she’s mentioned publicly over the past couple of months, I should think that she has a very real chance of achieving my target, self-sufficiency through writing, as she releases her next novel, Cave, at Easter. And from a potato’s-eye view, that’s inspiring!

Useful links:
Ali Cooper: The Girl on a Swing, Amazon US – Amazon UK

Carolyn McCray: Best Practices For Amazon Ebook Sales

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New cover design for The Lebanese Troubles

March 15, 2011 in News | 4 comments


The Dog River – Nahr Al Kalb

Our little rubber boat swirled and twisted in the boiling, ice-cold water. Circling above us dizzily, the thick green pines and the mountain peaks, here and there flashes of snow gleaming in the spring sun. The Dog River – Nahr al Kalb. Somewhere up here last year, they said, a father had hacked his daughter to death because she’d run off with her lover. Now that same blind fury was sweeping us down from the primitive heart of Lebanon, down towards its narrow rich Mediterranean plain.


Well I’ve finally gone ahead and done it. Changed the cover design for The Lebanese Troubles. And this is it. I’ve left the original cover over on the right for you to make comparisons.

Why not until now? Two reasons. First, I absolutely love Tom Young’s painting which I used on the original cover. When I first saw ‘Twenty Years’, it seemed almost to have been painted for TLT, perfectly reflecting the mood at the end of the book, even if it shows a scene that never actually happens.

But what I’ve learned in the past year is that artistry and appropriacy is not enough for a good front cover, especially for ebooks. The reader normally only sees a thumbnail sketch of the cover; nevertheless the impression it creates will very often determine whether the purchase is made or not.

My problem was that the original cover was bleak, and it seems that readers don’t buy bleak. Worse, it gives the impression that the whole book is about war. Today’s readers want blood and guts, that’s true, but only when the perpetrator is a vampire. Reading for many is a form of escapism: they want to suspend their disbelief, not be confronted with grim realities.

I haven’t managed to slip a vampire into the story yet. But if you’ve read the book, you’ll know that there’s a good deal of humor and energy, and that was not reflected in my cover.

The second problem was that I couldn’t find a good alternative. But today I found it – the picture I’ve used – license free, in that great resource, Wikimedia Commons. A little bit of work to do with the titles, using the free design tool, Paint (here’s a tutorial on how to create your own book cover), and we were good to go.

Several readers told me they thought the book would sell better with pictures of Monique and Claire on the front cover. As you can see, I didn’t. I thought long and hard about it, but in the end decided that I just didn’t have the skill, the time or the money to do it well. I’ll consider that again in the next iteration.

Another thing I didn’t do was to change the title of the book, despite frequent criticisms. Again I thought about it: “Sinners in Paradise” perhaps; or “The Land of Nod”. My favorite was “East of Eden” … but that’s been done before. What about “An Apprentice Hero”? In the end I rejected them all. The things is that I’ve spent months building brand recognition and getting “The Lebanese Troubles” to the top of the Google listings. If I change the title now, all that good work will be lost … and I’ll immediately invalidate those oh-so-important reviews. And besides, TLT is really quite a subtle title, exploding into a new meaning towards the end of the book.

Back to the cover design, and you’ll see a new Rapscallion logo at the bottom left. Thanks here to my good friend from TNBW, Greta Stone, who kindly developed four alternative designs for me, all with a spiky humorous touch. At thumbnail size, we’ll hardly see the logo, bur at full size I think it works, don’t you agree?

Let’s hear your views on the changes. Will the new cover make customers more likely to stop and look again than previously? How does it work for you? And in the coming days, I’ll let you know whether it really does make a difference to sales.



Please note that TLT will not be available at Amazon for a few days while their version is updating. But Smashwords has already made the changes, and the book is available there as normal – just follow the link in the sidebar.

I posted yesterday a longish sample from TLT, describing the mood in Beirut on the first day of the civil war. It seemed particularly appropriate as Bahrain seems to be headed in the same direction. How I wish people would learn to accommodate and celebrate their differences instead of using guns to enforce a point of view. Anyway, if you’d like to read the sample, you can either click here, or use the ‘Sample’ tab at the top of the page.

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A Writer’s Objectives

March 5, 2010 in planning | 12 comments

 

In my first post I mentioned that my objective was not simply to see my name in print. What I want is:

To be a full-time creative writer engaging enough readers and generating enough income to support myself and my family.

In business, that would be called a mission statement.

I’ve chosen the words carefully. ‘A creative writer‘. That rules out taking on writing and research assignments for others. Plenty of writers do supplement their income like this, but it’s not for me: I know I’d lose focus and there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day for my creative work. That’s always been the problem – finding enough time to do the writing that really matters to me.

‘Engaging readers‘ is different from ‘winning fans’. We saw in the previous post that Josh Woodward has used the web to attract huge numbers of fans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he has huge sales. In the age of viral marketing, all of us are signing up, subscribing, following – it’s a fad. How many times this year have you signed up for a site? How many do you continue to follow? How often have you parted with money?

Engagement is converting brand recognition into brand loyalty. More important than the number of fans is the number of people who come back and read again, the amount of time they spend reading. And ultimately whether they’re willing to put their hand in their pocket for the work I sell. As Gary Stein explains in a recent post, the most effective interactive marketers are ‘forcefully evolving their engagement strategies away from a simple number of who-has-the-most-fans to something that actually has some value: what-do-my-fans-get-me?’

There’s much more to say about engagement; in my next post I’ll explain how I propose to build it, and how I’m going to measure it. But now I need to expand on my mission statement. It’s still too vague. The stated objective is to generate income to support my family. How much income – and in what timeframe? Without real numbers, there’s no way to evaluate success or, later, to judge whether the strategy needs adjustment.

What I’m doing here is to apply to myself the same rules I’ve been using in my professional career for the past few years. As a business consultant, I’ve helped businesses and individuals to define their objectives and then manage achievement. The golden rule is always to set up measurable targets. When individuals say they want a career-change, I ask them to write their resumé – as they want it to look in three years time. Then together we work out a route-map to get there, with clear milestones.

I’m not giving myself the luxury of a three-year plan. I know myself too well. When I dive into a project, I find it very difficult to focus on anything else – I’m not a multi-tasker. So if I’m going to get serious about writing, I need writing to support me within one year. Support – what does that mean in real money? Well let’s not get over-ambitious or write in too many luxuries. In fact, let’s depersonalize it, by setting as a target the equivalent of the UK minimum wage for a 40-hour week. That’s around $18,000 per year. Of course I’m not going to start earning right away. But by March 2011, I need to be earning a net income from writing averaging at least $1,500 per month.

If I was stacking shelves in a supermarket it would be a breeze. For a writer it’s not so easy. But by setting my objectives, I’m already sensing the shape of the plan.

  1. At this stage in my career I won’t be looking for an agent or a publisher. Even if by some stroke of good fortune I was signed up quickly, it would take months before a book appeared on the shelves. Any advance for an unknown first-time novelist would be relatively small – certainly lower than $18,000. Assuming I earned a 10% royalty on a $14.99 book, I’d have to be selling 1500 books a month to meet my target. That very rarely happens – not at the beginning of a career.

  2. E-publishing looks a better bet than self-publishing or print-on-demand. It’s faster – and I need to get started as soon as possible – less expensive, less risky, easier to distribute, and while a novel would be priced lower (typically around the $4.99 mark – anyone like to research this?), the royalty would be 70% or greater. This would leave me with only around 425 books to sell per month to reach my target.

  3. But even this sales target is high. There will need to be other sources of creative-writing income. So what might they be?

(Now it’s time for you to put your thinking caps on: let’s have some left-field thinking – can we learn anything from musicians, artists, business, politicians … did you hear today that Tony Blair is getting a £4.5 million advance from Harper Collins for his forthcoming autobiography?)

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