Indie Publishing - Part 5: Advice from a Successful Indie Author

Author Clayton Wood is one of my own inspirations for choosing to publish as an indie author - rather than going the route of pursuing a traditional, printed publishing house. When his first indie novel, Runic Awakening came out on Amazon in October 2016, he was in his own words, "flummoxed" by its success. It would be followed by three sequels, as well as a second fantasy-fiction series. Most of his books are offered in eBook, print, and audiobook editions.

Clayton Wood's latest installment, Runic Revolt came out in August 2018, the fourth installment in his "Runic" series. It was launched as both an eBook and in paperback.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GXZKWPS/

Like many other successful indie artists, Mr. Wood has his own website and blog (https://www.claytontaylorwood.com), Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/ClaytonTaylorWood), and Twitter account (https://twitter.com/claytontwood). All of these social media tools help to build a following and to market a new book - and are tools which any indie author should be availing themselves of.

Mr. Wood also promotes his work at a couple of annual book conventions, including the World Fantasy Conference, and Readercon (last held in Quincy, MA in July 2018). Book conventions can be an invaluable way to connect to your readership, and have fun at the same time. They also involve a certain travel expense, however, which not every aspiring author can necessarily cover.

When asked to provide advice for other, aspiring authors, Clayton Wood highlighted the following:

"I can offer a few observations from my experience as an indie author. The first - and most important - consideration if you want to sell books is to write books that lots of other people want to read. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to 'sell out,' but it does mean you have to consider your audience. A book about the intricacies of copper vs. PVC pipe fittings will have a smaller audience than a YA fantasy novel, which will have a smaller audience than a good romance novel. So don't expect to sell a lot of books if you're not appealing to a relatively broad audience. You can write the book you want to write, but that doesn't obligate others to read it! 

"The next consideration, after writing a book lots of other people will want to read, is to put out the highest-quality book you can. Edit it over and over again, or hire a professional editor. Get trusted people to read it and provide feedback. Then hire a professional to do the book cover. Book covers are the first impression of your book; if it looks amateurish, people will assume the book is amateurish. If it doesn't fit the genre, people won't recognize that your book is in the genre they like. Book covers that are really cool but not genre-specific won't attract readers as well. That's why all romance novel covers look pretty similar...readers see it and they know exactly what they'll be getting from it. 

"The next consideration is the book description. Your cover and title will make people click to learn more, and your description is your sales pitch. If it's bad, you won't sell books. If you're an indie author, you're not just an author. You're an advertiser, a salesman, and a publisher. You have to learn additional skills to sell your book. Throwing your book out there and hoping for the best is unlikely to work. 

"And expect to fail at first. Runic Awakening, the first book in the Runic series, sold 46 copies in the first month. Then it sold 700, then 1,000. After experimenting with ads, it started getting over a million Kindle Unlimited page views a month, with a profit of $6-7k per month. 

"That said, expect sales for each subsequent book in a series to be a fraction of the previous. There's about a 50% falloff in sales with each sequel, and that's not abnormal. Price the first book very competitively, and it'll serve as a sales funnel that will draw more readers into the series. I priced Runic Awakening at 99 cents, Runic Revelation at $2.99, and the third and fourth books at $4.99. 

"Finally, some books will do better than others. There's a great deal of luck involved in having a successful book launch. But the things you can control, you should control. Write great books that tons of people can enjoy, then use marketing to bring those readers to your books!"

Clayton Wood's road to success as an indie author provides an exceptional example for how to successfully carry out a book launch for both a new title, and for a continuing series.

Indie Publishing - Part 4: Book Launches Compared

For illustrative purposes, I have selected one or two sample books from different categories, from among the multiple titles that I had been tracking over the past several months, to provide a comparison for the effectiveness of different release strategies. Again, the categories that I chose to divide the books into were:

• Established, traditional authors, who publish through a print publishing house;
• Established, successful indie authors with four or more titles to their credit; and
• New indie authors who have been less successful at breaking into the market.

I have left off the names of the authors or novels, sampling Amazon sales rankings and reviewer statistics at the beginning of each month. The trends that are depicted should therefore provide an indicator as to which book marketing strategies can lead to a successful book launch, and which do not. All of the books in question fall into the "fantasy fiction" genre.

The first chart compares the Amazon ranking for each novel - as sampled at one-month intervals. Since the sample was taken on an arbitrary date, there will be some volatility in the values, from books that might have had just sold another copy on that particular day. The overall trends, however, are informative.

The scale on the vertical axis is logarithmic. The difference in success between the mainstream, traditional author - with the name recognition and resources of a traditional publishing house behind them - and the indie authors is therefore significant. Nonetheless, the two established indie authors depicted here have been consistently making sales, month after month, something that the two new and aspiring indie authors were struggling to replicate. "New Indie Author 2" actually had zero sales to report during this period. So why did some of these authors succeed, while others failed to reach their intended audience?

The differences between the successful book launches - whether from the established indie authors or the mainstream, traditional author - and the less successful book launches from the new and aspiring indie authors can be broken down to a few key elements:

• The successful authors all had a strong social media presence, with their own blog, newsletter or webpage, their own Facebook page, and sometimes an account on Twitter as well. This was true for both the successful indie authors, and the mainstream, traditional author with a publishing house to help back them up. In each instance, this presence was part of their strategy for successfully reaching their intended audience.
• The successful books all featured beautiful cover art work, that included images of the main character or protagonist. In contrast, "New Indie Author 1" had a beautiful cover - but featuring a landscape rather than a persona that readers might identify with. "New Indie Author 2" didn't even have that going for them, with a drab cover design that failed to connect with readers.
• The successful book launches all featured aggressive promotional efforts early in their book launch. This was in the form of lower (sometimes free) pricing to generate early reader interest or reviews, give-aways, and sponsored ads. Only after each title had established itself did the respective author or publisher increase their price or dial-back their advertising presence.
• The successful books were all also well written and edited. I could say the same for the samples I read from "New Indie Author 1" as well. A well-written book is a pre-requisite for sustained success as an author, but it does not guarantee it.

The other statistics that I tracked tell a similar story. Comparing the number of book reviews accumulated by each title, it is obvious that the mainstream author, with a traditional publishing house behind them, was able to collect reviews at an accelerated rate.

For me, the more surprising thing was that the "Established Indie Author 1" did not generate a consistently higher Amazon ranking than "Established Indie Author 2", despite collecting reviews at an accelerated rate. Apparently, there were other elements that played a role in achieving a successful book launch - although having more reviews obviously helps.

Finally, as many of us would have expected, there is no correlation between the average rating or "stars" awarded by reviewers, and the ranking of an individual book. Any book is going to appeal to some readers, and not others, even if it is exceptionally well-written. Taken in total, the quantity of reviews is more valuable than how many five-star reviews a book collects - and even that can be an incomplete indicator of market performance.

Many of these trends should not be surprising to anyone that has followed the indie market for fiction. The strategies for a successful book release have been cited by a number of authors over the years - and my own comparisons only reaffirm those trends. The one thing that was surprising to me, however, was the comparison between printed and eBook sales. As an author who has already published a book through a traditional publishing house in a very different genre, my past experience suggested that printed book sales should out-pace eBook sales by a considerable margin. I actually had customers who purchased the eBook version of my previous book, because they could access it instantly, who told me that they later went back to buy the hardcover version because they wanted the physical book for their personal library. Again, this was for a very specific, non-fiction audience.

It was therefore eye-opening for me to discover that in the fantasy-fiction genre, eBook rankings for the same book will typically be 10 to 100 times higher than the Amazon rankings for the printed edition. True, there are more paperback or hardcover books listed by Amazon than there are eBooks - but in my experience this translates into only a 2X or 3X difference between the two rankings, not one or two orders of magnitude difference. In other words, for this audience, even for an established author with a consistent following, the vast majority of online sales will be electronic, not printed.

It was this final revelation, in part, that convinced me to tackle my next publishing challenge as an indie author. For this genre, unless you're a "mega-star" of the publishing industry, eBook sales will predominate over printed book sales, throughout all online commerce.

Indie Publishing - Part 3: Measuring Success

When I began to scour the fantasy publishing market for examples that I might learn from as an independent author, I subdivided the ones that I came across into three primary categories:

• The established authors, who published through a traditional, print publishing house but who also made a significant number of sales through eBooks;
• The dedicated indie authors who have been successful in their genres, selling hundreds or even thousands of books; and
• The indie authors who have been unsuccessful - and who therefore carry with them a certain warning regarding things not to do.

The other tool that I had at my disposal, has been the emergence of Amazon as the world's leading online retailer for books - electronic or otherwise. Not only is Amazon the leading online retailer, providing a platform for indie and establishment authors alike, but they also provide a variety of tools that helps authors (and the public) to gauge which books and which medium is in fact selling.

The process that I adopted, was to select one or two books from each of the above three categories, which had recently been released, so that I could track what strategies were exercised (and which strategies worked best) for introducing a new book into the marketplace. For each title in question, I tracked the month-by-month pricing, ranking, number of reviews, and how many stars each book had earned (on average) from those reviews. I also reviewed my overall impression of each book, in terms of writing style, likely audience, and any online marketing tips that I could identify.

I will share some of my observations here, beginning with my next post.

Indie Publishing - Part 2: Not the Mega-Stars of Publishing

When I did my own market research into today's fantasy book sales, I needed to subdivide the market and writers into a number of convenient categories - to help assemble my own strategy for reaching out this market as a writer.

Most people can easily identify the "mega-stars" of any particular publishing genre: those bestselling authors that achieve success on a truly national or international scale. Invariably, such authors are represented by large, well financed, traditional publishing houses - which can bring many tools to bear in the marketing and promotion of these books. This also makes it difficult, however, as an author new to the genre, to necessarily utilize these authors as a role model to help identify the tools and formulae that could potentially lead to success.

While as authors, we can all admire such acclaimed writers such as J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins, most of us realize that we are not all destined to achieve that same level of stardom. Many of us would be more than satisfied with seeing our books selling thousands of copies rather than millions. For many of us, even hundreds of books sold would be a beginning.

Consider for example, the story of one the "mega-stars" of today's fantasy literature, Sarah J. Maas - who many will point out began her literary career publishing chapters from what eventually evolved into the "Throne of Glass" series online (on FictionPress.com). Despite these humble beginnings, however, it should also be remembered that Ms. Maas abandoned online publishing once she started looking for an agent for her work in 2008 (which was also the year that she graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York), eventually signed with an agent in 2009, and landed her first publishing contract with Bloomsbury in 2010. Her first novel would be subsequently published in print in 2012. Although her rise to success was truly meteoric, we cannot say that it was the story of an indie author that turned professional.

So for those of us who are independent authors that still desire to publish in this genre, albeit with slightly less ambitious goals in mind, we will have to look to those that are not quite in the same category as the "mega-stars" to help us understand where our opportunities and lessons to be learned might be.

Indie Publishing - Part 1: Why Indie?

As an author who has already published, somewhat successfully within a particular genre, it might be questioned as to why I chose to tackle my next project - as a writer of fantasy fiction - as an indie author.

I believe that part of the answer resides within the audience and market for my work. When I write technical or historically-based non-fiction, I am aware that I am writing for a relatively narrow audience. Reaching that audience is not easy, particularly when it's an audience that, for the most part, prefers to have books that they can see, hold and touch. There is an appeal to a paperback or hardcover volume that certain genres clearly prefer, and when I write for that genre I am aware that I need the help of a publishing house - one that can get my book on the shelves of book stores and market my book to that specific audience - to make the book successful.

When it came to writing fantasy fiction, on the other hand, I realized that as a minimum I would need to do my own research, and identify how best to market to this new, very different audience. My past success as an author, in a totally different genre, would likely be of minimal value were I to seek to market my work to a major publishing house. Unlike the technically-oriented audience I had written for in the past, I recognized that this audience was much broader and more diverse.

In my research into this segment of the publishing industry, I was therefore gratified to learn that electronic publishing has finally come of age. True, there are those who have tried and failed as indie authors, as is true for any genre of writing, but there are also indie authors who have excelled and made a mark for themselves within this segment of the publishing market. These were the authors who became my inspiration, and I began to follow their work, and attempt to identify what features separated a successful indie author from a less successful one.

I look forward to writing more on this subject next time.

Other Writing Influences: Dungeons & Dragons

In the vein of discussing my creative influences, there is probably one other source of inspiration that I should probably mention.

As I had previously acknowledged, there were a number of fantasy genre literature sources that influenced my writing over the years, some of them more recent than others. I have also been inspired by some of the incredible anime artists and story writers who have dared to believe that fantasy fiction could address serious, adult issues about life, and loss, and finding oneself.

To that list, I should also add that table-top role-playing game that so many of us from my generation will remember: Dungeons & Dragons.

In my youth, I was a Dungeon Master for a number of role playing adventures - an experience that taught me about how to develop a theme, characters and a plot with puzzles for my adventurers to solve. It was an experience that, as an adult, I have extended to my own children: who have likewise come to appreciate a realm of fantasy and magic that they can explore and make decisions under. Characters that have different personalities, virtues and vices. And interactions that sometimes don't go quite as expected.

Speaking from my own experience as a Dungeon Master, the game of D&D was always about story telling. It was about the characters - good and bad - the schemes hidden in the background, and coming together to laugh as the players stumbled through a web greater than themselves. That balance, between adventure and story building, still sticks with me as a writer to this day.

What are some of the memories that others might have from those stories that didn't have to be electronic to be entertaining? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

Light at the End: The Never-Ending Cycle of Edits

The editing process is always more involved, and requires more iterations to get right, than what we as writers would anticipate from the onset. In my instance, I began with four complete editing cycles - before I first handed a draft of the manuscript over to my beta reader (my middle daughter - the one who most appreciates the fantasy genre). Taking into account her initial recommendations and edits, I have since gone through another two edit cycles, and am now having her re-read the book from front-to-back for completeness. It's close to being complete - almost but not quite there.

In my instance, at the advice of my beta reader I had a number of sections that required that they be replaced or rewritten, as well as entire scenes that needed to be added. Along the way I've started to write chapters for Book 2 as well (which I always had a sense for - but hadn't set any of it down up until now).

Whoever thought that writing was easy has never attempted to write a cohesive book or novel of any kind. It's a lot of writing, re-writing, and writing again to get all of the pieces to fall into place.

Looking forward to releasing the first book in the series - hopefully at month's end.