“Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.”
—A.A. MILNE
Let’s talk honesty.
The publishing world is far different from when I started, back when I had wild dreams to be a multipublished, full-time, successful author.
This was before the indie revolution, when there was a strict set of rules that any wannabe writer had to follow. There were multiple gatekeepers who kept an author away from the golden gates. You needed an agent to get a manuscript in front of a solid publisher, but it was difficult to get one if you didn’t have experience or a foot in the door. Thus the majority of manuscripts were sifted into the slush pile—your best opportunity to be “discovered.”
If you didn’t have an agent, you’d submit the manuscript to a publishing house, and an editorial assistant would pick through the slush pile in pursuit of hidden treasure.
If that didn’t work, you tried to write articles for magazines in order to have some nice credits in your query letter that might tempt someone to pick up the first page of your submission. Or you entered contests where the prize was an editorial or agent reading.
And if that didn’t work, well, you kept repeating the same efforts because there were no other options. Usually this included having at least four or five completed manuscripts hidden under the bed since they’d been rejected. You couldn’t sell a book with just a proposal if you didn’t have a great agent, and even then most publishers wanted to see the entire manuscript before deciding whether or not to buy it.
Today? Opportunities are everywhere. The landscape of writing is full of freedom and possibilities, and there is no ceiling. No real gatekeepers. Writers can now finish their manuscript, fire up the computer, and sell their book the next day.
Pretty amazing, right? Finally, the only real gatekeepers are the reader—we’ve been able to strip away the middleman. This indie revolution galvanized the industry and baffled and confused publishers, agents, and delighted readers in all capacities. It meant more choices and usually, lower prices.
Let’s quickly discuss some important terms used in the industry for clarification purposes. The term indie refers to authors who have no separate publisher involved. There is no middleman except for the distributor. Many use the word indie and self-published interchangeably, since the lines have become a bit more blurred in the past few years.
The term hybrid author refers to an indie author who also chooses to publish in the traditional market—such as Simon & Schuster, Avon, Hatchette, etc.
I consider myself extremely lucky to have experienced both worlds because I appreciate and value the good and bad each of them offers. Knowing both worlds has also helped me adapt and embrace the idea that nothing in publishing stays the same.
This is a great lesson. In life, the only things we can count on are death, taxes, and change. This means you won’t get bored, and you’ll always have room for growth. The writers and publishers that feared the digital era and refused to change to keep up with readers suffered a loss.
The indie market is the best thing to happen to the industry for a variety of reasons. First, writers have a straight shot to the reader and let her dictate what she likes to read. I had a manuscript rejected because it took place in a vineyard and that setting didn’t sell. My editor wanted me to change the setting to a horse-breeding farm and change my hero to a cowboy. No thanks. I let her reject the book because her suggestions changed my story, and it wasn’t the story I wanted to write. On another project, I was told dancers made terrible heroines, and no one would buy it.
The growth of self-publishing brought about the explosion in erotica, BDSM, and new adult fiction. In the past, we never would have had a chance to read those stories because the gatekeepers held them back, wagging their fingers at authors and telling them those genres were just not profitable.
Prices became more reasonable for readers: e-books were five dollars or less. The explosion of reading grew to epic proportions, and suddenly people were excited about books again. And you know what genre led the pack?
Romance.
Damn, I’m so proud of this genre. There are so many brave, gutsy women—and men—who took a huge risk and changed the game for the better. I have met lifelong friends who started by self-publishing and became millionaires by busting their asses and learning to be their own CEOs. They mastered marketing, publishing, promotion, and writing all on their own. They made mistakes, started over, and did it again. They never stopped pushing, and the industry is blessed to have such people at its foundation.
Now, let’s get back to one of the things I mentioned about the traditional publishing blueprint. Since there were strict gatekeepers, and odds were that your first or even second manuscript wouldn’t be accepted, writers were forced to keep writing new material and resubmitting.
Personally, I had five full-length books under my bed by the time I was published. I had also written hundreds of essays, and three full-length young adult novels. That’s a lot of writing. And it was fair to say, as in any trade, the more you do the better you get. There’s a learning curve to writing, like every other career. With each book, my prose grew stronger and leaner, my descriptions fresher, and my dialogue sharper. My voice became stamped with my trademark humor and sexual tension. I learned to write titillating sex scenes. Basically, I developed my craft by writing book after book after book. I had no choice. There were gatekeepers.
Today there is no one to tell you the memoir you lovingly wrote for six months and now published is awful. Readers can be enticed by a ninety-nine-cent steal, open up the book, and be overwhelmed with grammatical errors, misspellings, and bad prose. Like the revolution it was, we overthrew the rulers and, in pure abandoned joy, loudly proclaimed that we didn’t need them anymore. “We got this! You can’t tell us this sucks anymore—we’re bringing it to the people!”
And we did. Oh, we did. I cannot tell you how many bad books I came upon, slapped together with misfit scenes, awful sentence structure, and painful dialogue. That dollar or two I threw away pissed me off. When I used to spend my hard-earned money on a book, I’d be mad if I didn’t like it, but I never felt cheated. It was rare that a book was poorly edited, lack story quality, and boast a horrible cover all at once. I may not like the writer’s voice, or the way the story unfolded, but I never felt the publisher packaged a piece of crap and tried to trick me into buying it. Publishers were strict gatekeepers. They wanted their money back.
But that’s how I’ve felt about many self-published books, especially in the beginning of the indie revolution.
Every industry experiences great highs and shattering lows. The real estate market showered riches on many for years, until the bubble burst and people became bankrupt. The publishing industry has experienced the same rapid growth and decline over the past five years. We have been involved in a revolution, and after the initial celebratory party and surge of riches, balance needs to eventually be restored.
Many writers who claimed success for one book without writing a second have now gone back to their day jobs. People who thought of self-publishing as a get rich quick scheme have now moved on to other endeavors. The market exploded with growth and became glutted. We are now in the process of slowly weeding out the bad from the good, or at least, the career author from the hobbyist.
The flood of self-published works brought wealth to numerous authors, freedom for readers, and diversity in the marketplace. There was a bitter competition between self-published and traditional authors. Many times, it got ugly. The separation between “them” and “us” forced many to claim which side was better, these feuds playing out in online forums and conferences. At signings, separations between self-published authors and traditional outraged both the traditionally published and the self-published. Authors demanded equal treatment, but the industry still reeled at the sudden removal of rules and gatekeepers.
With time, the gap between “us” and “them” has lessened, and I believe the line between self-published and traditional has since blurred. There is acceptance of all formats, and many authors seek the path of true indie writers in an effort to experience the best of both worlds. Traditional publishers used to have a lock on printed titles, but now many self-published authors have brokered deals with distributors and are seeing their once digital-only books in physical form.
But with every revolution, fallout occurs. The market is now glutted. Bookstores, forced to sell other things just to stay afloat, have shrinking shelf space; the future of Barnes & Noble is unknown; and endless digital books are being published on a daily basis. For authors, discoverability has become the main obstacle. The advances traditional publishing houses offer have shrunk. Once healthy, profitable sales for all authors have lessened to a trickle. Many authors who quit their day jobs to write full-time have had to return to those jobs.
Yes, there are still many exceptions. I know a healthy percentage of authors who remain in the game, cultivating large readerships and publishing steadily. These are the career authors who stuck out the ebb and flow of the industry. Not only did they find a way to survive in a changing market, they thrived by consistently delivering quality books and growing their audience. They published multiple series and used the reader-author relationship to push ahead.
Yet, the market is still overcrowded and in desperate need of balance. Readers are overwhelmed with endless free and ninety-nine-cent books, the Kindle Unlimited program, and BookBub deals. Many are snatched up and never read. Many are downloaded, and after a few pages, discarded with disappointment.
To be successful in indie publishing, authors must focus on quality of content.
In short, we need to become our own gatekeepers.
How do we guard the gate with dignity while enjoying the total freedom to write and publish anything we’d like?
Work with a team.
Traditionally published authors are forced to work with a team on their book. I have enjoyed working with Simon & Schuster for a variety of reasons. First, my editor is top rate. Working with her is a growing experience: She’s taught me more than anyone else I’ve encountered in my career. She pushes me and doesn’t allow me to become lazy. She’s ruthless. Sometimes she’s even mean, but when she loves something I know it’s perfect. Or at least, as perfect as I can get it.
I have also self-published, working with the partnership of Cool Gus, as I mentioned previously.
One difference I noticed with my self-publishers is the editing. I’m used to being beaten and bloody working with my traditional editor—in a very good way. I’m a perfectionist with revisions, because once that book is in print, I can’t change it. With my self-publishers, I can pull the book down, update, add new content, revise the cover if it’s not selling, or tweak it in any way. And I can do this at any time. Self-publishing offers a flexibility that I love, but I have to be careful not to get sloppy. It’s easy to think the revisions to your first draft are good enough. When I’m slammed with other projects and tasks, I sometimes find my work isn’t the best and I need a strong editor to challenge me.
It’s important to know what type of writer you are and identify your weak spots. Consistent writing is key. There are many editors you can hire to tear your book apart and put it back together again. I know an author who self-published a book and hired three separate editors to look at it for different issues and places of weakness.
That book hit The New York Times best-seller list. She must have done something right.
This is a key advantage to working with a solid team.
Indie authors need to know content editing is different from copyediting. My self-publications are very clean, in terms of prose—the writing goes through several rounds. But in terms of content, I am the boss. And I haven’t been able to find an editor that matches my Simon & Schuster editor. If I’m concerned the quality of work isn’t up to par with my traditionally published books, I tell Cool Gus I want the book to go one more round of content editing with another editor, just to be sure.
The exception in this story is the amount of years I’ve been writing. I’ve put in my hours of practice books. There are still some manuscripts hanging out that I’d love to dust off one day and rewrite, because the concept was fun. But my concern with self-publishing is that with the gates wide open, readers get a stream of so-called writers whose content and product quality is poor. They glut the market with low-priced books, not concerned about whether the books are good quality because it’s just a fun hobby and they already have a “real” job. This affects the readers and the publishing business as a whole.
Imagine my frustration when I went to a cocktail party, and someone asked me what I did. I told them I was a writer. The man laughed, nodded his head, and said, “Wonderful, I’m a writer, too. Well, I’m not published yet, but I’m going to write this short book about my life in corporate finance and the sharks out there, and publish it on Amazon. Should take me the weekend. It’s fun, right?”
I wanted to die. Or punch him in the face. Fun? You think writing is fun, you idiot?
“You are not a writer!” I wanted to scream. “You didn’t even write the book yet!”
What enraged me most about the conversation was not his bragging about writing a book—I was terrified he’d publish it. I had a feeling it wouldn’t go through editing, and maybe readers would actually buy it, and once again, I’d stumble on another article in The New York Times about self-published writers’ ineptitude at writing decent books, and the poor readers who succumb to the ninety-nine-cent scam.
We need to be our own gatekeepers. I’m not talking about this idiot finance guy. I’m talking about people who bought this book and are looking at writing for the long-term—to write, not make a million dollars or get on a reality television show. We need to hold ourselves accountable for learning the craft.
Why is this important? First off, if you publish one bad book, you may not get another chance. If you have the raw talent, you might be forgiven enough that a reader tries your second one. But do you really want to give them another sloppy book and hope they give you a shot at a third?
I’ve had a few beginning authors contact me regarding their first book. Sometimes I’ve taken the time to look at new work from an author in an effort to give back to the industry. I know how appreciative I was when I was desperate for feedback from experienced authors. Many of the books I read were not ready for publication. The writing was weak. There was too much telling and no showing. There was sloppy POV and the characters were flat.
My critiques were gentle, as I pointed out a few specific items they could work on, but I always referred them to a combination of craft books, RWA or writer organizations, or small critique groups. I made sure to give plenty of suggestions, because the quality of writing was the main problem.
Most of them went on to self-publish the book anyway.
Because they could.
Because there are no gatekeepers.
It’s frustrating for me to watch my beloved career become belittled. Just because you write a book doesn’t mean you need to publish a book. The best thing for a new writer to do is complete at least two books in a row, then go back to the original one and see what can be improved.
If you’ve grown at all, you’ll realize what a mistake it would have been to publish the first book.
Once you decide to self-publish, you must look at it as a business if you want to succeed. Businesses require an investment of funds in order for you to obtain necessary supplies or services to ready your product. Your book is your product. You must take into consideration all the elements that make up your product: cover, blurbs, content editing, copyediting, formatting, uploading, marketing, and public relations—to name a few. Just because you decide to self-publish your book, does not mean you can overlook any of these elements.
Invest in your book. Hire a cover designer. Learn the marketplace so you can make smart decisions on where to publish your book. Make sure your blurb and title showcase your book and offer a hook.
If you are a new writer, I highly recommend hiring content and copy editors to make sure the work shines. In addition, you will need a strong foundation of social networking in place. Research your marketing budget and make smart choices.
You must be a gatekeeper, and hiring a smart team to help is the key.
Cultivate a reputation for quality. It’s so much more important than quantity, no matter what you’ve read about the necessity of publishing three to four books a year to get your writing out there. One amazing, mind-blowing book per year is okay if that’s what you’re capable of. Look at Susan Elizabeth Phillips. She’s honest and admits she cannot write fast. It’s not who she is. I don’t care if the woman requires three years between books, I will buy them when they release. It may be much harder in this new digital climate to break out with just one book per year, but it’s not impossible.
Now, an author who’s just starting out may publish just the first book, but have the second and third already written. This way, she guarantees higher quality since she’s completed additional books, plus her publishing schedule can be aggressive.
Life has no guarantees, and neither does writing. Just because your previous three books made The New York Times best-seller list, there are no guarantees you’ll hit it again. Ever.
There is no security in writing. Contracts offer security only for a limited amount of time and a specified number of books. There are no advances in the indie market. When you publish your book, you figure out how much you’re going to make that month. To reverse your gloom, you should remember that you might make more in a month than you ever would on a 25 percent royalty rate.
There is another nugget of gold within indie publishing that every author adores: the power of the backlist. Backlist is everything. Traditional publishers mainly focus on new releases. They gear up with marketing and PR plans, schedule phone conferences, ask the author to flood social media and develop ads and create blog tours that cram your newsfeed, etc. Then, one month later, it’s all gone. Your publisher seems to lose interest, as if the most powerful sales have passed on and they need to focus their efforts elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that’s business. I think it’s bad business, but with the number of new releases they juggle each month, they don’t have the manpower necessary to consistently sell your backlist.
But you can.
Especially with indie publishing. No book is ever dead. My first novel, Heart of Steel, which I retitled Executive Seduction, has had nine lives. It was published, died, republished, died, and self-published to a healthy cycle of growth and sales depending on how I focus my attention on it. A BookBub ad skyrocketed that sucker to the top 100 in iBooks and Amazon. Twice. And I’m not the only author who focuses on promoting my backlist. I see many popular authors such as Bella Andre, Melissa Foster, Ruth Cardello, Melody Anne, and Kathleen Brooks all continuously using the sales for their backlist books to grab readers’ attention to their ongoing series.
Indie authors should take advantage of the opportunity to discount their books; creating special sales and discounts on books are the key to selling the backlist. They’ll also help sell new releases in a series.
There are many services available that advertise free and discounted books to readers. Authors discount their books and pay a fee to sites, and in return, authors get access to numerous readers via an e-mail where readers can buy the books. Some important sites include BookBub, Book Gorilla, Digital Book Today, The Fussy Librarian, ENT (E-Reader News Today), and The Choosy Bookworm. Costs vary depending on the promotion. You should gather a working list of the best places that offer this type of service and consistently try new ones. At the time of this writing, BookBub is the king. I’ve seen many authors hit best-seller lists and skyrocket a backlist title onto the charts using BookBub. But it’s competitive because there are limited booking slots. Authors have to fill out a form and BookBub will let them know if they have been approved, and the date they have been assigned for the sale. I’ve known authors who have applied for a slot numerous times without approval, so I’d advise to keep trying if you are initially rejected. Many new services have launched, though, and the landscape is ripe for competition. As a businessperson, you need to stay on top of the marketplace and stay abreast of developments in terms of discounting your backlist.
Another popular way to spike backlist sales is to offer new material in a series that will spur readers to buy the first book. For example, offer a new story and discount the first book in the series. Or make the first book free. Win-win. Readers get the opportunity to read two stories, and you have a chance to grab more readers.
If you don’t have the time in your schedule to release a new book, try to offer something unique to readers. For instance, I write short stories featuring all my characters from my series and release them around Valentine’s Day. I then batch them up periodically and put them in my newsletter for readers to enjoy. Or I write a novella with secondary characters from my series. These strategies keep readers happy, offer new material, and give me an opportunity to sell my backlist.
The magic formula is simple.
There is no magic formula.
There is only a lot of hard work writing great stories, trying new things, using social media to get in front of the readers, surrounding yourself with a solid team, networking, being open to new opportunities, and doing your best to stay sane and happy.
Mostly I’m happy because I get to write, but I’m definitely not sane anymore!
Who cares? Sane people are boring; they don’t have the courage to run naked into the street, screaming for everyone to stop what they are doing and read something they have just written because it may just be the most important thing in the world.
Writers do.
Writers get to leave this world in a streak of glory. Whether we hit a list or not, whether we write ten books or one, whether we are successful or not (according to society or our own standards), at least we had the guts to try to figure things out.
Let’s just do our best to offer our best. In our pursuit of perfect branding, social media wit, and heft advertising, let’s not forget the one element that is key to all success.
Craft.
Go read a craft book. One on your keeper shelf, or a brand-spanking-new one that teaches you something you need to work on or remember. Commit to this career and to learning craft all the time. Simply put, craft is essential if you want to be a long-term, successful author.