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I am back after a long (geez, over a year) absence with another one of my little stories. Free through Sunday: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B018RKHT2Q/ ==========  Ravensbane (not her real name) and Kim were inseparable in junior high, and high school, and well into what passes for their adult lives. Nothing makes them happier after a tough week at their lame jobs than hanging out together, particularly if they get to dress up. Sometime between costume parties and conventions, Kim finds a boyfriend and Rave feels cast aside. The fact that the boy in question is Rave's favorite cousin only complicates things. Now the two closest people in the world are confronting their very first serious rift. It'll take more than elaborate makeup to hide what's crept into their lives. Award-winning writer and filmmaker Adam Bertocci has been praised by Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The New Republic, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Back Stage, Broadway World, E!, Maxim, IGN, Wired, Film Threat and more. In this intimate short story, he explores two people growing up and (maybe) growing apart. ========== I have spent most of my writing time this year back with my first love, screenwriting. All little indie stuff, mind you, but I seem to have better luck there both creatively and financially. Nonetheless I am very glad for the rise of self-publishing, as I don't think that without it I would have been moved to try my hand at prose fiction. (That said, I feel like this piece in particular betrays that it came from a screenwriter at heart, it's very much a piece based in conversations.)
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Dec 2, 2015 19:52
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EngineerSean posted:You would blame Amazon Amazon determines the incentives so yeah I guess I would? It's a Tragedy of the Commons. If they gave us the freedom to price things as low as we want with no difference in royalty amount, it would be a race to the bottom. Or do you think authors would lock arms and march in solidarity, yelling "$2.99! $2.99!"?
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Dec 2, 2015 20:30
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They'd pay readers to read their books if they could.
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Dec 2, 2015 20:44
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Amazon determines the incentives so yeah I guess I would? It's a Tragedy of the Commons. If they gave us the freedom to price things as low as we want with no difference in royalty amount, it would be a race to the bottom. Or do you think authors would lock arms and march in solidarity, yelling "$2.99! $2.99!"? Do you think 2.99 is the ideal price point? Would you lose sales if the cutoff was 3.99? Would you gain sales if the cutoff was 1.99?
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Dec 2, 2015 23:50
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EngineerSean posted:Do you think 2.99 is the ideal price point? I won't pretend to know if Amazon is set on that price because of research, stubbornness or guesswork. I don't think there's anything ideal about it (aside from it ending in .99). quote:Would you lose sales if the cutoff was 3.99? My intuition is that my number of sales would remain the same or go up. It would take 9 sales at 99c to equal one at $3.99, so there would be less competition at the 99c price point. I believe 1.99 and 2.99 would be as popular as 1.99 is right now (not at all). quote:Would you gain sales if the cutoff was 1.99? There would probably be more competition at 99c, as it would only take 4 sales to match the revenue of the soft price floor. So I guess I'd lose sales and revenue.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:21
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quote:(What do you think would happen if the price floor for 70% was $3.99?) I'm supposed to believe that if you charged more money, you would get a higher level of sales? Absolute revenue, sure, if you feel that everyone who bought at $2.99 would also buy at $3.99, but that's not going to happen. You're going to have to walk me through it because that's gotta be some eleven-dimensional chess. Your other point is pretty funny too. If someone is selling at 99c now, why would the price floor moving up change their pricing decisions at all? Price floor moving down, sure. If you told someone that their book would get 35% at 99c or 70% of $1.00, there would absolutely be less competition at 99c, but the price floor moving up doesn't change that calculus at all. Additionally, you correctly point out that $2.99 would become another dead zone, but you somehow assume that everyone at $2.99 currently would naturally move up to $3.99. People who believe that they can barely get away with charging $2.99 would have more incentive to drop to 99c rather than try to swing up to the $3.99 league, putting even more books at 99c. quote:(What do you think would happen if the price floor for 70% was $1.99?) On the other hand, if the floor were dropped to $1.99, some people who currently sell at 99c would take the leap up to $1.99 as they feel that they can move greater than one quarter the product that they used to.
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Dec 3, 2015 01:23
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I think the idea here is that if $0.99 paid 70%, every other author would move there, requiring you to also do it in order to remain competitive to their prices otherwise people will just buy from other people instead of you, all without necessarily changing the actual amount of sales that happen in total. Whether that's fallacious reasoning or not is another matter, of course.
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Dec 3, 2015 03:36
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Shima Honnou posted:I think the idea here is that if $0.99 paid 70%, every other author would move there, requiring you to also do it in order to remain competitive to their prices otherwise people will just buy from other people instead of you, all without necessarily changing the actual amount of sales that happen in total. This already happens though. You already have to price at $0.99 for the main earning period of your book's life. $2.99 is more often what you price at after the book has used up its max earning potential already and will never hit a high ranking again. You can choose to leave it at $0.99 and let it slowly drop rank, or you leave it at $2.99 so when people read your new hot book (which is $0.99 or on free promo) and they want more, they are willing to splurge $2.99 to buy through your back catalog. The risk of having the whole back catalog at $0.99 is that the lower price point no longer gives you a rank high enough for good KU income, and then you just give all your income to Amazon on the sales that do happen. Chances are people who are going through back catalog will be more likely to eat the $2.99 cost. If Amazon gave us 70% for $0.99, you would definitely see a lot more stuff at $0.99, and the $2.99 back catalog strategy would probably be less effective, but you'd be making enough money on the $0.99 sales that it would likely result in more money overall for you anyway. In the romance top 20 right now, I see one single book at $2.99. Everything that seems self-pub is $0.99, and traditional published stuff is all more expensive. Maybe if you become a huge loving name you can just price at $2.99 on launch and still hit top 100, but if you're scraping to make a name for yourself and make your first dents into like top 500, it's basically $0.99 or bust right now.
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Dec 3, 2015 04:07
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Ahh. I'm still running on from back when I used to write, when 99c was the garbage tier that nobody bought and 2.99 was the desired price. In that case, carry on and raise the royalties.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:35
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EngineerSean posted:I'm supposed to believe that if you charged more money, you would get a higher level of sales? Absolute revenue, sure, if you feel that everyone who bought at $2.99 would also buy at $3.99, but that's not going to happen. You're going to have to walk me through it because that's gotta be some eleven-dimensional chess. I don't think there's anything strange about it. Our customers value our work in relation to all their other options. If the two price points become 3.99 and .99, no one will become indignant about having to pay 3.99 for the newest crime thriller or romance novel or whatever. It's because that's the new market price, supported by Amazon's royalty incentives. quote:Your other point is pretty funny too. If someone is selling at 99c now, why would the price floor moving up change their pricing decisions at all? Because as the revenue ratio grows (9:1 if we're talking 3.99 vs .99), more authors will move up to the new soft floor because that's the new market norm. Authors are (probably) going to act in ways that (they think) get them the most money. If they think that they can get more than 1.0 sales at 3.99 for every 9 sales at .99, they'll price accordingly. quote:Additionally, you correctly point out that $2.99 would become another dead zone, but you somehow assume that everyone at $2.99 currently would naturally move up to $3.99. People who believe that they can barely get away with charging $2.99 would have more incentive to drop to 99c rather than try to swing up to the $3.99 league, putting even more books at 99c. Ahh, there's the crux of it. Why is that $2.99 price point important? Because it's what the market has settled at. Why? Because it's the lowest price you can get full royalties for. There wouldn't be a "swing up" to 3.99: it would be the new normal. quote:On the other hand, if the floor were dropped to $1.99, some people who currently sell at 99c would take the leap up to $1.99 as they feel that they can move greater than one quarter the product that they used to. Fundamentally, I don't think we have significant numbers of customers who would pay 1.99 (as your hypothetical market norm) but who won't pay 2.99 (as the current market norm). As such, your hypothetical authors should switch to 2.99 now: waiting for 1.99 does nothing for them. I think consumers evaluate all their choices and then decide. I believe that once they decide to buy a type of product, consumers care more about deviation from the norm than actual cost (within reason).
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Dec 3, 2015 15:23
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angel opportunity posted:If Amazon gave us 70% for $0.99, you would definitely see a lot more stuff at $0.99, and the $2.99 back catalog strategy would probably be less effective, but you'd be making enough money on the $0.99 sales that it would likely result in more money overall for you anyway. Here's how I see the slippery slope playing out in my mind: Amazon sets .99 to 70% royalty. Everyone who priced at 2.99 drops their prices to .99. I know I would. There's no longer any comparative price advantage with higher priced works. Kindle Unlimited becomes unpalatable because everything costs a buck, and the program dries up. So now we're all earning $0.70 a sale for our books. Great outcome for consumers, terrible for authors. You can take this further and surmise that Amazon could then allow you to price your book at $0.50 for 30% royalty. You know exactly what would happen then.
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Dec 3, 2015 15:39
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This is pretty much the scenario described by any game theory simulation on price-setting that runs serial games. The problem is that any given player (individually) has a great deal to gain by "betraying" other players and dropping their price point to undercut them all and get the most sales. In subsequent games, other players will follow that lead. In the end, the only way to reset the game is for enough players to leave. That way the supply dries up and the surviving players can push their prices up without killing demand.
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Dec 3, 2015 15:44
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You haven't really been paying attention if you don't think your sales would at least triple if you dropped prices to 99c and played the game correctly, but then what do I know? Most of the "I want my books priced higher" bullshit is just ego talking, there should be only one number that matters.
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Dec 4, 2015 01:10
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EngineerSean posted:You haven't really been paying attention if you don't think your sales would at least triple if you dropped prices to 99c and played the game correctly, but then what do I know? Then I'm not paying attention or playing the game correctly, because I don't sell 18x more units @ .99 than 2.99. I'd be thrilled if I sold just 6x as many, because then the revenue would be the same and the rank would be better, leading to more KENPC.
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Dec 4, 2015 02:25
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Is there an easy way to figure out what the more popular genres are? I know paranormal romance is a perennial, but I'd like to mix it up a bit.
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Dec 4, 2015 03:01
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Then I'm not paying attention or playing the game correctly, because I don't sell 18x more units @ .99 than 2.99. I'd be thrilled if I sold just 6x as many, because then the revenue would be the same and the rank would be better, leading to more KENPC. sales not revenue, why would current royalty rates matter when we're arguing about a new price floor? am I getting trolled? there's of course a calculus in making books $2.99 now, because you don't sell six times as many books generally. edit: I say "your sales would at least triple if you dropped prices to 99c and played the game correctly" and you say "well I don't sell 18x more", yeah I'm definitely getting trolled EngineerSean fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Dec 4, 2015 |
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Dec 4, 2015 14:30
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vseslav.botkin posted:Is there an easy way to figure out what the more popular genres are? I know paranormal romance is a perennial, but I'd like to mix it up a bit. You can either do the Author Earnings reports (broad, granular overview), or you can pull the Top 100 overall / each genre you'd consider and see where they fall. I'd recommend weighting heavily toward the middle to lower end of the Top 100 in each genre rather than the Top 5 or so, because you can always have oddballs skewing anything at the top. You want to see the average performance of well-selling books that AREN'T being pushed hard by Amazon or by outside forces (movies, huge-name authors, etc).
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Dec 4, 2015 16:52
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EngineerSean posted:sales not revenue, why would current royalty rates matter when we're arguing about a new price floor? am I getting trolled? there's of course a calculus in making books $2.99 now, because you don't sell six times as many books generally. Ahh, I see the miscommunication now. I thought you meant if I, under the current system, dropped my prices to 99c. Hence my 18x comment. Sorry about that. Well, if 70% royalty on 99c books ever comes to pass, I hope you're right and I'm wrong.
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Dec 5, 2015 01:51
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I think we're more likely to see 35% return to $2.99 first.
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Dec 5, 2015 02:49
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Well, there's also this from good old blighty: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/11/traditional-publishing-fair-sustainable-society-of-authors?CMP=share_btn_fb quote:Traditional publishing is 'no longer fair or sustainable', says Society of Authors
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Dec 5, 2015 10:11
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Still reading the thread (on p38), but am increasingly motivated to turn my fanfic into a serial  Getting lots of ideas from posters here.
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Dec 6, 2015 15:59
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LowellDND posted:Still reading the thread (on p38), but am increasingly motivated to turn my fanfic into a serial Just make the guy a billionaire instead of a vampire and be ready to cash comically large checks.
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Dec 6, 2015 17:39
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LowellDND posted:Still reading the thread (on p38), but am increasingly motivated to turn my fanfic into a serial I thought serials didn't sell anymore and you have to do 50k-word romance (and do it really, really well) if you want to make even a couple thousand per month?
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Dec 6, 2015 17:55
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fruit loop posted:I thought serials didn't sell anymore and you have to do 50k-word romance (and do it really, really well) if you want to make even a couple thousand per month? "even"
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Dec 6, 2015 18:41
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Well, yes. You pay higher taxes due to being self-employed. You'd be better off selling used cars and writing in your spare time if you want to "be a writer". At least that way, you'd make more money and be able to write what you love instead of what sells.
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Dec 6, 2015 18:55
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fruit loop posted:I thought serials didn't sell anymore and you have to do 50k-word romance (and do it really, really well) if you want to make even a couple thousand per month? Novels definitely do better, but there's nothing wrong with kicking around a few serials first. If nothing else, it will unveil the mystical world of ~self publishing~. It's way better to make the newbie mistakes on a 10k short or serial than on an 80k novel. How much money you're going to earn, well, that's going to depend on a lot of things. I can say that I earn a couple thousand a month and have never written anything longer than 16k words. I'd be earning much more if I just sat down and wrote a longer work, but it's haaaaard.
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Dec 6, 2015 21:12
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fruit loop posted:Well, yes. You pay higher taxes due to being self-employed. You'd be better off selling used cars and writing in your spare time if you want to "be a writer". At least that way, you'd make more money and be able to write what you love instead of what sells. I hate this logic. Why can't you write what sells and also write what you want? Also, writing 50k words a month isn't hard. It takes effort but anyone can do it. I'd rather write romance 9-5 than do pretty much any other job I could get right now. Then I can write what I want after 5pm. Anyone can do that if they treat it like a job and put in the work.
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Dec 6, 2015 21:43
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Or, you could find ways to write what you like into a salable format so that you get the best of both worlds!  Edit: [ASK] Me about my race-relations + US poverty billionaire romance!  (Please don't ask me)
Sundae fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 22:40
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There's a lot of perspectives being represented in this argument here. One is that "it's ridiculous to say a few thousand extra per month isn't a lot." I think this viewpoint comes from people who haven't yet tried this. They are seeing it as this low effort thing you just throw together in your spare time, and getting a few thousand extra per month from that sounds pretty loving good. Once you try it though, the reality sets in that it's basically a part-time job on top of your day job. An extra $2,000/month is pretty nice and can make a big difference, but if it's meaning you have to work two more hours per day after you get home from work, then it's likely not your ultimate goal. I don't think anyone who has put time into this is happy to only be making $2,000/month. The biggest appeal of this whole thing for me is that improving my skill at this means I get more money. At my day job, it's completely irrelevant how good I am at my job. I will simply never get more money there. The salary is locked in and the guy in the office next to me who is garbage at his job makes exactly as much as I do. In self-pub, people who slap together poo poo and half-rear end it make less than I do. People who have an established brand and have been at it consistently longer than I have make money than I do. The biggest lovely thing is that Amazon can gently caress you over, but even with the Amazon threat, the ceiling of money you can make is really loving high. You can release a novel and have it bomb, and then you get to figure out what you did wrong and improve on it for the next release. This is a thing I can just jump into and work really hard at, and doing that will actually increase how much I earn from it. It's really easy to motivate yourself to work harder at something when you see near immediate benefits from it. As far as "work hard and treat it as a day job, then write whatever you want after 5pm," this could 100% work, but I think most people who have day jobs don't want to take that level of risk. For me personally, I want to make enough from this in my spare time that it becomes like 200% clear that I can make more money if I quit my job. Just before KU 2.0, I was gearing up to quit my job. My income from erotica was skyrocketing, and it looked like it wasn't going to stop. If KU 2.0 had rolled out 3-4 months later, I would have just quit my job right as it hit. I then would have had full-time to flounder around and figure out that going wide with erotica actually sucks and doesn't work. I probably would have had 3-4x more erotica released and thrown it into the garbage can of going wide. I probably would have--in the end--made more than I do at my day job once I figured out how much money I could make off erotica bundles, but that would have been a few months later. I finally have bitten the bullet and switched to romance, but starting from nothing on a fresh pen name means pretty low income per novella. If I were working FULL TIME at pumping out romance novellas, I'm sure I could do AT LEAST three per month instead of one per month. I'm pretty sure that in the current Amazon climate, this would make me more money than my day job, but I'm still not quitting. It's scary to quit when I can make my guaranteed (albeit low) salary at my stable job. Hopefully I'll hit a level of success in the extra time I self-pub that it will eventually become a no-brainer to just quit my day job, but I'm not there yet.
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Dec 6, 2015 23:31
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angel opportunity posted:Just before KU 2.0, I was gearing up to quit my job. My income from erotica was skyrocketing, and it looked like it wasn't going to stop. If KU 2.0 had rolled out 3-4 months later, I would have just quit my job right as it hit. I then would have had full-time to flounder around and figure out that going wide with erotica actually sucks and doesn't work. I probably would have had 3-4x more erotica released and thrown it into the garbage can of going wide. I probably would have--in the end--made more than I do at my day job once I figured out how much money I could make off erotica bundles, but that would have been a few months later. This is the same conundrum I've been stuck in. I'm always just a few steps behind the curve in writing (every time I release something major, Amazon changes their algos, payouts, etc etc like the day before it), while having a nice enough pair of golden handcuffs at the EDJ to make it scary to give it up. For comparison's sake, I'm going to bring in just short of $100,000 in book royalties this year. This is still less than my day job's paycheck, though, so it still represents a hazard to income/insurance/retirement to quit and keep writing, especially when KU 1.0/2.0 so completely disengages income from price tag. That's the worst part of KU to me -- the fact that our income is whatever Amazon says it is, not whatever our royalty rate and price tag say it should be. I can't plan based on that, and I sure as hell am not going to risk self-employment in a field where a single year of unemployment = probably unemployable forever when one capricious distributor (Amazon) holds all the cards with respect to my other income source. So for now, I will valiantly struggle to keep my productivity up in writing while hating myself at a day job for 40 hours a week. FUN!
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Dec 7, 2015 00:27
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Just make the guy a billionaire instead of a vampire and be ready to cash comically large checks. She is a space-billionaire, so Im ahead there! fruit loop posted:I thought serials didn't sell anymore and you have to do 50k-word romance (and do it really, really well) if you want to make even a couple thousand per month? More precisely, I have ~375k words in TG, and am ramping up to get to 500k (mil scifi). My understanding is that packaging it in 20k serials would be the most optimal, but I am open to advice Im a disabled vet and rent is no issue, any sales would be beer money/student loans or whatever.
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Dec 7, 2015 02:41
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LowellDND posted:More precisely, I have ~375k words in TG, and am ramping up to get to 500k (mil scifi). My understanding is that packaging it in 20k serials would be the most optimal, but I am open to advice Yo, I do milscifi and I'm not aware of any serials that are rocking it. Look at the top milscifi guys and no one is doing 10k serials. Everyone is doing 70k-100k per novel series. Not saying you won't sell well, but you may discover more impact with a traditional length story.
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Dec 7, 2015 02:54
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Also keep in mind it's very important to have a good cover. Do you want to have to buy a good cover for every 20k words?
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Dec 7, 2015 02:56
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Sundae posted:For comparison's sake, I'm going to bring in just short of $100,000 in book royalties this year. This is still less than my day job's paycheck, though, so it still represents a hazard to income/insurance/retirement to quit and keep writing, especially when KU 1.0/2.0 so completely disengages income from price tag. I mean fair enough if you do have a lifestyle that requires that kind of upkeep, but I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that a self pub income isn't enough to quit your day job in general.
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Dec 7, 2015 09:45
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I think a lot of that depends on whether you have kids or not. I'm quite happy on my entry level day job income of 55K AUD a year, but I'd be hosed if I had even one mouth to feed, let alone two or three.
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Dec 7, 2015 10:03
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Nigh-total noob here, posting for the first time. I recently got laid off and have decided I never, EVER want to grind out paychecks as a faceless cog behind a desk again. Luckily, I got a great severance that effectively gave me about 6-7 months pay, so if I were stupid enough I wouldn't have to worry about finding another "real" job until then. I want to write, I like to write. I would LOVE to get paid to write. I like to write weird, funny, Twilight Zone-ish what-if sci-fi and have a couple of short stories that are finished. (One won second place in an SA short story contest years ago.) I haven't written much else aside from ideas - but I have all day every day open to write now. I guess I'm asking for advice on launching a writing career from scratch, then, is what this boils down to. I do like weird sci-fi but I'm totally down with writing other genres if that's where the money is. I have no problem doing research for that, either; if there's some formula for writing, say, romance novels (which seems to be the money maker), I'm down with learning that and cranking out content. I mean, I know there's no Magic Formula For Immediate Success, but I've written in some capacity in nearly all of my jobs in the corporate world so I (think I) at least have the discipline to actually get words on paper (or the screen). First up, should I bother to put my short stories up on Kindle for sale? Or should I focus more on researching a genre first?
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Dec 7, 2015 11:38
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LowellDND posted:She is a space-billionaire, so Im ahead there! Unfortunately due to Obama's hyperinflation, that's now only worth pennies. quote:More precisely, I have ~375k words in TG, and am ramping up to get to 500k (mil scifi). My understanding is that packaging it in 20k serials would be the most optimal, but I am open to advice If you had a smaller number I might tell you to divide it up in 20k installments, but at 400k+ I simply think you'd be better off going the novelization route. Probably not a single novel but maybe four or five? I know every genre is different, but think about Asimov's Foundation (which is not military scifi but you've probably read it anyway). It was originally released as a series of eight novellas, then as three novels, and now the most common format is for them to bundle all three novels together. I can't imagine reading them in the serialized form that they were originally published in, even if every novella neatly wrapped up at the end. And that's only eight, and critically acclaimed. I can't imagine taking a chance on Part 1 of a twenty part series from an unknown author.
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Dec 7, 2015 13:02
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Lazlow posted:
You're very likely going to gently caress up on your first attempts. In some ways it's best to just get that out of the way, because I rarely see anyone read an assimilate all the information out there, then do it correctly on their first go. MAYBE you can be the exception? I'm going to make a really long-rear end post detailing how I launched a new pen name. The book I launched peaked at around 1,200 paid ranking and made ~$1,000 in its first month. This isn't particularly amazing, but a lot of the advice I give below includes stuff I learned from this first release (e.g. hiring a proofreader being totally worth it). http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/158566011#3 <-- Go here, skipping the top 40 because there are more anomalies in there. 1) Find a genre where there are a number of books in the top 200 or so. The most obvious one is "bad boy" type romance stories. Often navy seals, MMA fighters, etc. Read two or three novels in this genre. Note how many pages they are, what kind of POV stuff they do (does it alternate chapters with POV between hero and heroine? Is it first-person or third-person? Is it just from one single POV?) Once you have made your choice, think about a general idea for your story. Ask someone who knows what they are doing if this is viable. If they tell you it's not, listen to them and drop your idea. Don't fight it, or you won't make money. 2) Don't try to put your unique spin on it, and don't cherry pick what you think is successful about these and graft it onto your own unique idea. Try to write a good and compelling story that fits within the tropes and beats of the genre you've selected. The further you stray outside of that, the more likely your novel is to bomb. You have a lot of room for creativity and fun within the confines of what is successful, but don't gently caress with the archetype unless you want to make less money. 3) Do AT LEAST a basic outline before you start writing, and try to copy what works as best you can while telling your own story. I've found through trial and error that much more than a basic outline is optimal for me. There's always an argument between "planning" and "pantsing" a novel, but I feel in romance in particular you don't really have time to do multiple drafts. Your ultimate goal is to get at least one novel out every month, and doing an outline ahead of time, and then throwing down your story is all you really have time for. A weaker outline may result in a story that doesn't quite hit the mark, but you're better off to just clean it up as is, release it, and move onto a new story. If you spend four months re-drafting a single novel, you're going to make MUCH less money. You probably do need some "magic" or really good storytelling to be wildly successful, but even if the very first story that you write on a brand new pen name doesn't quite hit the marks--as long as it hits the beats of the genre (and as long as the genre is a romance one) properly--can likely make you ~$1,000 in its release month. Provided you do everything else correctly. 4) When you are finished, do one editing pass. Don't re-write the draft, just do an editing pass. If you spend several hours you can likely do this in one sitting in one day. It will take a long time, but knocking it out as fast as you can is best. Doing a long editing session is less draining than a long writing session. 5) Hire a proofreader. I know this sounds extreme, but you will miss typos and weird poo poo in your draft, and reviewers love to dock two stars for even a few typos. Getting a nice rating will make you more than the $50-$100 the proofreader will cost you. 6) Buy a cover. Unless you come from a design background and are sure you're good at this, just buy a cover. There are so many people selling romance covers, and you can get a really nice one for around $50. Focus on writing rather than tweaking your own covers. The cover--along with the blurb--is probably the single most important thing for getting people to actually buy or borrow your book. Don't make all your writing become a total waste by throwing it behind a garbage cover. 7) Create a mailing list. Use a site like mailchimp to make a signup link for the mailing list. Make the signup form require NOTHING but the person's email. Don't ask for their name or anything else. Keep in mind people are likely clicking this link from kindles and other devices where it's a pain to fill in multiple fields. Make it as easy as possible to sign up. I put in an attention-grabbing image (abs) above the link that has the word "FREE BOOKS" on it. Your mailing list blasts will inform about free promos, so it's not misleading to do this. Put the mailing list sign-up in the front AND back of your book. This sounds like a lot of work but isn't, and it's the best monetary return you'll get for the least work. 8) Get advance reviewers. This is generally pretty hard, but you can use Sundae's service to get a good amount of advance reviewers for very little work. I think he's going to be charging for it soon, but it will be worth the price when he does. If you don't do this, you'll have to trawl Goodreads and do a lot of legwork to send ARCs to a bunch of people. Use https://www.instafreebie.com to host your advance review copy. It lets people choose their own format to download, and then the email they get tells them how to put it on their Kindle etc. Keep in mind that sending out 20 ARCs will not result in 20 reviews. You'll be lucky if half of the people follow through, but you'll want to email the whole ARC list when the book is out to remind them to leave their review. This step will seem very tempting to skip because it sounds like a daunting amount of work, and you'll be afraid of bad reviews. Realize that most books that do reasonably well come out and immediately have 20+ 4-5 star reviews. That is what you are competing with. If your book comes out on a brand-new pen name with zero reviews, you're going to get left in the dust. Even with 50 reviews and a 4.5 star average, your book can still have a middling performance, but if you don't have the reviews on release, you're much more likely to fail. As for bad reviews...if you hit the beats of the genre more or less and tell a competent story, you'll get mostly 4 and 5 star reviews. If you have a bunch of typos and skipped an editor, you'll get some shittier reviews. If you stray from the beats of the genre and try to be a unique snowflake, you'll get reviews like, "this was just wierd i didnt like it it wasnt a bad boy romance like im used to why didnt he even have tats also his name wasnt very sexy and i think it was really dumb that she cheated on him that is not right !!!" Readers are expecting certain things, and if you present a certain package for the genre, but deliver something else, you'll get pissed off readers. 9) Write your blurb before you send out the ARCs. The blurb needs to be really good and read like other blurbs in your genre. Spend the time between your ARCs going out and official release to refine your blurb and make it as good as possible. This is probably the most important thing, and also the easiest thing to half-rear end and kill the success of your novel. 10) This will be open to debate, but I just launched a new romance pen name and feel it's the way to go. Put the book in Kindle Unlimited, and set it free as soon as it comes out. Submit the book for publishing on Wednesday, it will go live Thursday, and as soon as it goes live, set it to be free on Friday and Saturday. On the weekend before this, pay for some cheap ads. I'm trailing and erroring this, but places that run romance ads often have really steep requirements (this is one reason you want the ARC reviews in ASAP). The other issue is that these sites will not allow you to submit an ad until the book is already live. Many ad sites just have very little effect and are not worth the money. What I've found works fairly well is simply book BKnights on Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/psymon_h/pro...87-2b2c79f2833e) and booking an ExciteSpice Friday Feature (http://excitespice.com/friday-feature/). BKnights is like $10, and the Friday Feature is $15. Excitespice is meant for erotica, but they'll take a romance novel with sex scenes in it. It says it's highly selective, but if your blurb and cover are good, they will always take you. This strategy got my last book to #43 peak in the free store, which gives a lot of exposure. Expect several thousands downloads from doing this, especially if your ARC reviews start coming in. Once your book peaks at its free rank, kill the free promo. Just monitor the rank, and you'll see it go up and up, slow, and eventually it will start dropping. This is the time to kill it. Try to kill it around a "peak time" like ~8pm EST. Don't kill it at 3am. As soon as you kill the free promo, it will become paid nearly instantly, but will still linger on the free charts for a while after. The free promo also serves to gain you a bunch of mailing list sign-ups. I managed to get around 150 mailing list signups on a brand-new pen name by doing this. 11) Once you have around 20 reviews, try to submit to bargainbooksy.com and myromancereads.com. Bargainbooksy resulted--for me--in about 80 sales on the day the ad ran, and a huge rank boost. The issue is that they are usually booked nearly a month in advance, so the ad will not run when you really would want it to (on release). It's still worth it though. Myromancereads will likely reject you on a new pen name. Wait until you have 30+ reviews with at least a 4-star average to submit to them. When it comes time for your second book, assuming the first one didn't get poo poo reviews, they will probably take you. There are a lot of other paid ad sites, but few of them do much. Justkindlebooks will charge you $35 for an ad, but you see no real bump from it. It's easy to start spending a lot of money on ads for minimal returns. Focus on your mailing list and building up a brand for now. Usually after your book goes paid, it will get a paid rank within 12 hours or so. The first paid rank you see will likely be much higher than your peak rank. Don't give this initial number too much thought or worry. The morning after your paid rank appears, you'll have a more reasonable idea what to expect from your book, as the rank will have hit the ballpark of where it will peak. It's up to your goals to decide what a "good rank" is. Rank will seem pretty meaningless to you at first, and you'll be mostly concerned about the money you see coming in. Try to learn what ranks mean though, as you'll soon be able to predict income based on rank and vice versa. 12) The initial 30 days is the main earning portion of a book. It will continue to earn money long after, but don't expect it to ever make more than it did in the first 30 days. Amazon's ranking algorithms are harsher for older books. 13) Rinse and repeat. Your second release will have a mailing list with hopefully over 100 people available to you. People who bother to sign up for mailing lists often have KU, and even if they get your book free, you'll still get KU revenue from them. Put the cover image and blurb for your first book into your second book with a link. And go back and put the blurb/cover/link to the second book into the first book. Your second release will have a better chance of the good paid ad places accepting you as well, since you now have a track record.
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Dec 7, 2015 15:32
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Bobby Deluxe posted:See, I don't know about you guys, but i'm not that ambitious, nor do I have expensive tastes. The average income of the people around me who are happy seems to be $38k / £25k a year, and that's a lot higher than the income of any lit student working a garage shift / mcjob. So hearing of people making $100k / £66k and thinking it's not enough is kind of crazy to me. Two things: #1 - "You can have $100K+ a year, retirement accounts and health insurance, or you can have less money, no benefits and the chance that Amazon will take your career away forever next year. Which do you pick?" It's a bad decision to switch unless the potential upside is bigger than the risk. Whether I can make do or not doesn't make it a sound decision, especially in light of #2 (E/N coming up)... #2 - Within five years, I expect to either inherit a pair of heavily indebted, financially irresponsible boomer in-laws or their children when they die. They're in their early 70s and somehow managed to adopt four children under the age of 13, including a two-year-old girl. They're very caring individuals and love the kids to death, but they're too old to be doing that. My wife (one of their nine total children) and I are the only people in the extended family with the means to take care of the kids once the parents kick the bucket, so we're basically bracing ourselves for the likely upcoming guardianship of at least one of them. I'd love to just tell them to gently caress off when they 'retire' and have no income on nearly a million in mortgage and Parent PLUS debts, but the only ones that really hurts are the children, so I have to take it into consideration when planning my own career aspirations. Hell, my wife and I have to take it into consideration for everything. If they die at age 78, we inherit a daughter/sister-in-law who is only 10 years old and two 14-year-old boys (not counting the one who would be older than 18 but still in college). We can't even have our own kids because we have to plan to take care of other people's kids.  So yeah -- long story short, $100K isn't going to go very far once other people's poo poo starts hitting our fan. Sundae fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Dec 7, 2015 |
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Dec 7, 2015 16:03
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angel opportunity posted:As far as "work hard and treat it as a day job, then write whatever you want after 5pm," this could 100% work, but I think most people who have day jobs don't want to take that level of risk. For me personally, I want to make enough from this in my spare time that it becomes like 200% clear that I can make more money if I quit my job. I agree with this, and also what Sundae said. I don't really advocate quitting dayjobs. Hell, I haven't quit my dayjob, and I'm not sure I'm going to. I guess what I'm saying to the invisible straw man is, it isn't THAT much of a time commitment to write like 2k words a day. An hour or two? Then you're done and you can write what you like. Or, write what you like on weekends, and only write your smut during the week. It's definitely a lot of effort, but what else is there to do? Maybe I'm downplaying the effort a little bit, being a little too glib. But I do think it's possible to have it all. Sundae posted:Two things: As Redtonic is currently saying in the IRC channel, (so hey guys come hangout in IRC and talk about this poo poo with us) different people have different income needs, and while 100k may be amazing for one person just may not be enough for another. But like, if you're a single person living in a relatively inexpensive area, you can absolutely hustle for enough cash to live relatively comfortably writing romance or something else you're good at. Especially if you're a young person. It's not easy and won't happen instantly but it's possible. Different stroke, different folks, and all that. That brings up issues of risk and future career development (ie, if I quit and do this full time and fail, what are my job options?? I have a nice, fat gap on my resume, with only "Smut Extraordinaire" written in comic sans italic pink, but who wants to hire the Smut Lord?) but I don't know, there's risk in any career, especially in anything self employed. We bitch and moan about Amazon and yeah Amazon is poo poo but every industry has their ups and downs. Risk management is the name of the game.
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Dec 7, 2015 16:37
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