Self-Publishing Goons: Yep, people buy it!

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Self-Publishing Goons: Yep, people buy it!

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Have other goons tried, or how do you feel about, using self-publishing not so much as a vehicle to make money but rather as a way of trying to build an audience to break into more traditional publishing?

That's sort of where I'm at, and I'd love to make some money selling work, but I don't want to go the route of writing 3-6 novels a year in order to build out a back catalog and spend a lot of time on marketing and promotion so people try the 1st novel of a series free than buy the others. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just not what I want to do.

Also is there a discord where you guys talk? I thought I saw one mentioned earlier in the thread but nothing in the op (which is rather old).

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 15:53

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:34

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

ketchup vs catsup posted:

Well, what do you want to do?

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I want to break into traditional publishing.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2019 18:20

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Lex Neville posted:

I know next to nothing of self-publishing and, outside of my home country, only slightly more about traditional publishing, but I'd suspect you're probably better off trying to get a short story or two published in an esteemed journal and then contacting agents - or skipping the former altogether - than you would be publishing your own works.

Again, don't take my word as gospel, but from what I know self-publishing isn't regarded very highly in more traditional circles.

This is a good suggestion and I was going to try to do that also.

n8r posted:

The one author I know that has been published Simon and Schuster has a publishing agent which seems to make a huge difference. The good agents only bring good work to the publishers so they learn to trust them. Good luck just landing an agent without some credentials. S&S did virtually no marketing for her last book despite having a long time strong selling book for them. You have to create your own audience. The only way to have an audience is to write. We always look at how much of a following an author has prior to publishing them. If you have no following you have to write something really amazing for us to want to deal with you (we are an indy non fiction pub).

This was more or less my take.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2019 15:38

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

KrunkMcGrunk posted:

Gaining an audience and making money self-pubbing (or any publishing route, I'd imagine) go hand-in-hand. If you want to self-pub your work and ignore the marketing half of the job you are entirely free to do so. However, without marketing you're unlikely to gain much of a following, which wouldn't make your work very attractive to a publishing house.

However, you can absolutely self-publish a single book a year, and still make a livable income. It's not easy, but it is possible--and you can't neglect marketing, even if it's something as simple as setting up an Amazon Advertising campaign, or FB ads, or BB ads.

If you are vehemently opposed to marketing work, I don't think self-pubbing is going to do you any good.

However, if you're serious about writing, you should absolutely look into agents accepting submissions of the kind of work you want to make.

I'm not opposed to marketing, I just want to limit my time in it to what's effective that kind of 80/20 thing, and I don't want to try and go the route of spamming out mediocre books. This is what I've read quite a few "succesful" self-publishing authors pretty much do.

I have started looking into agents accepting queries, I just thought if I spent maybe 50% of my time over the next 6 months trying out serializing on Reddit, self-publishing on kindle, blogging, submitting to flash sites and such I'd be in a much stronger place when my manuscript was finished.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 15:27

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

feedmyleg posted:

Can you not create an Author Central account until after you've hit publish on your first book? I'm trying to get everything prepped for launch and it keeps trying to get me to select a book I've written before I fill out my profile.

yeah i think the best you can do is upload is a rough draft and set it up as a pre-release. They won't let you make an author page until you have a book.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2019 04:12

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Remora posted:

Well, that's god-damned depressing.

And thankfully, we know that's reliable data from digitalbookworld.com. There's no way digitalbookworld.com has any interest in skewing the survey. digitalbookworld.com only cares about reliably surveying authors to analyze their income (wait how the gently caress did they identify "aspiring" authors).

I guess my point is, that chart is completely worthless garbage.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2019 06:22

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Grand Theft Autobot posted:

It says this:

46% traditionally published; 27% self-publish only; and 26% do both—meaning that slightly more than half of the respondents have done some self-publishing.

My original point wasn't that people don't make any money, they definitely do. I was responding to the comment that to make money you have to write 4-6 books a year, which seems true for basically everyone trying to write books for a living, whether they are trad published or self-published.

I don't know of too many traditional published authors who are authoring more than 1 book a year, aside from book factory guys like Patterson who are just writing a chapter in a book written by someone else.

I guess what is a book in this instance?

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 05:17

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

feedmyleg posted:

So, uh, apparently I'm really bad at marketing? This is my first book so I have no established authorial presence or mailing list, I've never been a part of any community that is book-related online, and I have no significant social media presence outside of my personal FB/Insta accounts�so those are the holes I'm starting out in.

I launched my book on the 18th and have had sold ~80 copies across Kindle and paperback. I'd say at least half of those are people I know, if not closer to 75%. I've been running small Facebook ad sets to hone in on my audience and I'm down to a $0.35 cost-per-click, which I understand to be quite good. The problem is that none of these seem to be converting to sales�I ramped up my Facebook ad-spend yesterday for Halloween week (my book is somewhat spooky) and spent $60 to get ~200 link clicks that resulted in... 2 sales. And even then, one of those was paperback, which I believe only show when they ship, not when they're bought, so let's call that 1 sale. I'm even getting a smattering of likes and comments on my Facebook ads and have converted a whopping 13 of those to page likes. Like... how did I get 8 likes on my ads last night but 1 sale?

I've got the thing on KU but I'm not seeing a single unit shipped there, despite running a couple of ads specifically calling out that it was on KU. I've got seven 5-star reviews, all from friends. I've changed my blurb a few times but have seen no uptick in sales associated. I ran a couple of ads on BookBub which had dismal 0.08% and 0.18% CTRs. I'm running a Bargain Booksy promotion this week. I know this isn't terribly outside of the norm, but it's very demoralizing. I figured I'd at least be able to get a few sales per day with a pretty low ad spend.

I thought I'd gotten a pretty good handle on my prime demographic, the "Cozy Mystery" reader. According to Facebook insights my clicks are mostly coming from liberal women in their 30s-60s so I've been trying to target them, but I'm just having such a hard time getting any traction at all. It makes me feel like I'm missing something extremely obvious. Can anyone take a look at my Amazon listing and tell me if anything obviously doesn't work there?

At this point I wonder if my book isn't just too niche? I know my next step is to get out there more and just feel skeezy plastering my book all over Facebook groups and messaging individuals on Tumblr and reaching out to blogs and figuring out how to convince people to get on a mailing list and whatever, but I was hoping to at least get a steady drip of sales from ads before then so I could focus my time and energy on it. But I've been putting ~4 hours a day into this since launch and seeing nothing come of it is pretty depressing.

Any advice at all would be appreciated.

I think the key to success via self-publishing on Amazon is to have a big back catalog. If you have like a series of 3 books and 1 book related to them, you give away the 1 book for free as a reader magnet, and people buy the other three after they read the other book.

I think a lot of kindle only readers who buy self-published ebooks are looking for an author with a catalog so they can safely immerse themselves in the story. You can also use the reader magnet to get people on your mailing list, or have a separate mailing list. All the people I see talking about making decent money have like 8+ books.

the other option is to be so good at writing people organically read your book then tell their friends about it. There's probably a middle ground but...

I think trying to make too much of a first book is a mistake. Though I'm definitely not an expert, this is just going by a few months of browsing a lot of "how to" kindle stuff and chatting in discord with various authors.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2019 15:14

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Sundae posted:

50K words is perfectly good, agreed on $2.99 pricing. Nobody has ever said, "I loved every minute of that, I just wish the experience was shorter." Never. About anything.

It was a fabulous book that also hit the shelves at the perfect time. You deserved every bit of that success.

I�ve absolutely read things where I was like �I loved half of this, wish they�d cut the bad parts�.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2020 02:33

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Ccs posted:

Hmm one of the "How to write blurbs" sites I checked said that if you don't have a pull quote from a major publication that compares you to similar books that are more famous, add it yourself. "It highlights Mark�s central marketing message: �If you like Jack Reacher, you�ll also like my John Milton books.� Just look at Mark�s cover designs, and you�ll see that this Reacher connection is no coincidence."

But maybe that's changed since the article was written.

I think it�s pretty common, trad book publishers do it all the time.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 22:08

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Ccs posted:

Yeah I did find one example on one of my favorite books, Marina and Sergey Dyanchenko's "The Scar'

"Plotted with the sureness of Robin Hobb and colored with the haunting and ominous imagination of Michael Moorcock, The Scar tells a story that cannot be forgotten."

Sadly I don't think those comparisons helped the book sell outstandingly well, as it was part of quartet and the other 3 were never translated.

I also don't think it helps there's another fantasy novel called The Scar.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 22:37

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:34

pseudanonymous: Aug 30, 2008; When you make the second entry and the debits and credits balance, and you blow them to hell.

Chris Pistols posted:

First time posting in this thread, hope I can get a few pointers!

My Dad has been writing for a few years and started off with (what I would call) a vanity publisher. He fell out of love with that and self-published on Amazon. He's asked me for help with the Kindle advertising side of things and I'm desperate to help him, but I know there will be pitfalls that need to be avoided.

I'm not an author and the closest I got to the publishing industry was working in Waterstones for a few years. Before I start researching Kindle advertising, are there any big things I need to be aware of? He recently mentioned a 'must buy piece of software' that would help with Kindle advertising and, rightly or wrongly, that rang alarm bells with me.

I know it's cheeky asking for support when it's not even my own book, but I trust this website of strangers over other websites of strangers. Grateful for any advice you can offer!

What does your dad actually want? Like does he want to make money writing self published books on Amazon? That generally requires writing 4-6 books per year minimum and building up a back catalog. Does he just want to be heard or feel like a writer? I would try to find out what he really wants before you invest a lot of time or money.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2021 19:41

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > Self-Publishing Goons: Yep, people buy it!