Thanks for participating in #smutchat tonight! I hope you had fun learning about the self-publishing industry!
The giveaway tonight is How to Self-Publish for Under $100 by Cinquanta Cox-Smith.
Self-publishing can be expensive–pick and choose wisely!
Thanks for playing! Have a lovely evening!
Writers are notorious for giving their work away. “Sign up for my newsletter and receive a free book!” “My book is on Instafreebie!” “Every first book to all my series is permafree.” We hand out novellas and short stories like candy. We tweet poems. There is so much free content you could drown in words. Our Kindles are becoming black holes of free books downloaded in just a second, forever to rot in your device.
But this isn’t a post about too many books, or the quality of books, or another blog post on trad-pubbing vs. indie.
This post is about paying for services.
I was researching something a while back–I can’t remember what it was now. How to price a series, or how much to charge for something. I have no idea. But I came across an article that forever changed my way of thinking about giving my books away. I can’t refer to the author or the website because I can’t remember, but if I ever come across it again, I’ll link it up. See, the article was about . . . why writers are expected to give their work away, but no one else in a creative area is asked to do so.
Indie writers who research publishing are told from the get-go to hire out. Hire out your editing, hire out your cover design. Hire someone to format and convert your files. You can even hire someone to write your blurb for you. You want a professional looking and sounding book, don’t you? But what no one tells you that if you do, indeed, hire all that out, you’re spending thousands of dollars. Editors alone make a mint–and sometimes you need more than one. Developmental editing, line editing, proofreading. Sometimes you can find someone who does a mix of those, but that doesn’t make it cheaper. Anyway, so you hire out, do all the things you’re supposed to do. Then what do you do? You give your book away.
Why is it writers are expected to do this, but no one else? Cover designers don’t give their work away unless maybe they are part of a giveaway or something. Editors don’t edit for free unless they are donating their services for some odd reason. Even formatters want five bucks for setting up your margins and gutters in your Word document.
I understand the backlash of indies doing things themselves. I even told a friend not long ago that if I were a reader now I would be pissed off. In one of my Facebook groups, a woman posted a lovely looking book. The cover was amazing, she had a great blurb, and the premise of the story hooked me. So I went into the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon, and the first page was riddled with head hopping. We were in the heads of at least three different people on the first page. The author obviously didn’t have her book edited. Maybe beta read by friends who didn’t want to tell her the truth, but that didn’t help. It made me wonder how many unsuspecting readers have been burned by indie books. Does buying a book now really have to feel like looking for a new car? Is the salesman going to talk you into a stinker then pop the champagne when you drive off the lot?
I don’t pay to have anything done to my books. I edit myself; I do my own covers. And I don’t give my books away, either. I’ve never used the promotions available to me on KDP Select. I enter my books a couple giveaways here and there for my paperbacks, but nothing in my library is “permafree.” Not even .99. (Except my short novelette I would feel guilty charging more for.)
So indies are expected to “invest in their futures” as the industry likes to call it, but then we’re supposed to turn around and give our books away for free. How are we supposed to have any return on that investment?
What I’m proposing is that maybe “investing in our futures” would be a lot easier to choke down if we demanded top dollar for our work the way other creatives do. Maybe it would be easier to pay out the $300 for a cover, the $500 dollars for the editing and for the other odds and ends you need to make your book look good. Maybe we would be more apt to do that if we knew it wouldn’t take 10 years to recoup those losses.
I know it’s a Catch-22. You can’t sell books if they don’t look and sound good, but you can’t afford to hire out unless you’re making money. I’m in the same boat. I can’t afford to pay $1,000+ per book to publish it. Almost no one I know can. But I’m not saying I won’t when I can afford it.
Pricing your book sucks. You want it to be cheap enough to draw people in, but you want to make money, too. You deserve to make money on something you spent so much time on. Writing is hard work, and you won’t find anyone who will tell you it’s not. You deserve to get paid.
Stop giving your books way to people who join your newsletters. Stop posting your book on the Instafreebie site. Stop pricing your book at $0.00 on Smashwords and everywhere else. It’s not working anymore, anyway. There is too much free content. Would you rather have someone download your free book and never read it, or choose to spend the $4.99 on your e-book and actually read it and possibly review it? It’s a known fact that if someone spends money on something they put more value on it.
But it’s up to you to make your book valuable to your readers.
Trash is free; antiques are priceless.
Do you give your books away? Tell me what you think!
Sometimes it’s difficult to plan what you’re going to cook for dinner much less where you want your writing career to be in five years. But whether you are writing for fun and only plan to write one book a year, if that, or you are planning to write and publish maybe as many as ten books a year, (It can be done. But should it? That’s a different blog post.) a publishing plan can help.
Setting deadlines is a wonderful way, and sometimes a necessary way, to force yourself to write regularly. Talking about writing is easy. “If I write 1,000 words a day, I can write a book in three months.” That sounds like a piece of cake, but if it were, everyone would do it. When you are a writer, you are your own boss. No one is going to make you get to work. You need the willpower to do that yourself. So when you say you want to write 1,000 words a day, stick with it. But don’t set impossible goals for yourself—you’ll just feel rejected and depressed when you can’t meet them.
A publishing plan can help you with a marketing plan. Are you writing a series? How are you going to publish them? All at once? Three months in between? What websites will you use to promote your books? How will you find reviews? A deadline can help so you can plan to give ARCs to readers who will hopefully review it. Will you contact bloggers to organize a blog tour? All these choices will be made more easily if you have a publishing plan.
Do you want to add more to your writing resume? Maybe start some freelance work? Or maybe you would like to start an editing service? Maybe that requires taking some editing courses and taking on some pro bono work to gather testimonials of what a great job you would do. If you want to branch out and not sacrifice time for your own work, fitting in extras like these would be easier if you had a plan.
For me, I know what books I want to write for the next little while. I have a lot of ideas for plots that should keep me going for the next couple of years. I beta/edit for people and I’m always researching something about the publishing industry. Right now I’m waiting for a book I want to read about how to effectively use Facebook ads, and I just finished a book about using Amazon ads.
I build time into my schedule to blog, and every day I work a little on my writer’s platform.
I stumbled upon Kindle Scout, and I’m trying to work into my publishing schedule when I would want to enter the contest and what book I would write to try that with. I also haven’t completely ruled out querying.
I do know that now that I am a better writer (goodbye head hopping and garbage filler) I can write faster. I aim to publish about three books a year.
I like having a plan in place. It keeps me on track and accountable. It’s much too easy to waste time online and be waylaid by low productivity.
Maybe you feel you don’t need a publishing plan. That’s okay. Always write to have fun. I love writing, and a publishing plan isn’t to force me to write and make me feel guilty if I don’t, but it does allow me to look ahead to where my writing will bring me. Because I eventually want to quit my day job.
Where do you want your writing to bring you?
Where will you be in five years?
Let me know!
I was going to write a blog post on a very important question–when you are published by an Amazon imprint are you considered Traditionally Published? Because these imprints won’t take just anyone–you have to submit just like you would an agent or a publishing house. But is that the only difference between being published by an Amazon imprint or hitting publish on KDP?
That’s a great question but one we’re not going to explore here. I found something else during my research: Kindle Scout.
What is that, you ask? Good question because I didn’t know what it was either. Chris McMullen’s blog post about Amazon Imprints popped up when I was doing some research on imprints and I came upon another publishing option Amazon offers.
Kindle Scout is a book competition open to writers in qualifying countries. The book must be 50,000+ words and never been published anywhere before. It’s similar to self-publishing in that you have to submit your own cover, (I’m assuming you can hire someone) do your own editing (again maybe hire someone), blurb, and formatting. It is then vetted by Amazon staff and if it is chosen, it is entered into the competition.
What happens after that is up to you, as it’s called a competition for a reason. You’re supposed to drive all your friends, family, and fans to the Kindle Scout website where they are to vote for your book. After the nomination process, once again your book is vetted by Amazon staff. Which is a sneaky way of saying, even if your book received a million votes, Amazon Scout still may not choose it. I guess that’s a safety loophole for them.
If your book is chosen, Amazon will pay you a $1500.00 advance and 50% royalties after you earn out.
The whole process takes 45 days.
I summarized the whole process, so anyone who is considering this should look at their submission guidelines carefully.
Here are a couple other blog posts about it:
Jane Friedman had a guest blogger on her website who used it as a book launch. (If your book isn’t chosen Amazon gives your book back to you after the 45 day period is over and you do with it what you want.) I think that is a great idea, and her blog post is here. (Thanks to Gareth S. Young, you can find him here, for the heads up on that article.)
Another great blog article, courtesy of Gareth, is by Victoria Strauss, who is a Watch Dog contributor on Alli, (Alliance of Independent Authors) and she gave it a tentative stamp of approval, and you can read it here.
Overall, it doesn’t sound like a bad program. You can go on the website and browse the books that are entered and see for yourself what kind of competition you would have.
Good luck!
Vania Margene Rheault 