Let’s Get Visible: How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books

As you might have guessed by the new lick of paint, Let’s Get Visible is out! Grab your copy at:

Amazon | Apple | Barnes & Noble |

Kobo | Smashwords | $4.99

Here’s the blurb:

Take your sales to the next level! The author of the award-winning, bestselling Let’s Get Digital is back with an advanced guide for more experienced self-publishers.

There are over 1.5 million books in the Kindle Store, with thousands more added every day. How do you get yours noticed? Visibility isn’t a challenge that can be bested once – it requires continual work. But there are tools and strategies to do much of the heavy lifting for you.

In Let’s Get Visible: How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books, you’ll discover how to:

• Leverage Amazon’s famous recommendation engine to take advantage of the various opportunities it provides for exposure
• Position your books for discoverability on other sales venues
• Minimize the time you spend promoting so you have more time to spend writing
• Promote in a cost-effective way that actually works

By using these tips, you will get your book noticed. And getting noticed is the key to growing your sales.

The Author Exploitation Business

Writing is a glamorous occupation – at least from the outside. Popular depictions of our profession tend to leave out all the other stuff that comes with the territory: carpal tunnel syndrome, liver failure, penury, and madness.

Okay, okay, I jest. I love being a writer. Sharing stories with the world and getting paid for it is bloody brilliant. It’s a dream job, and like any profession with a horde of neophytes seeking to break in, there are plenty of sharks waiting to chew them to bits.

Publishing is a screwed up business. The often labyrinthine path to success makes it much easier for those with nefarious intentions to scam the unsuspecting. But it doesn’t help that so many organizations who claim to help writers, to respect them, to assist them along the path to publication are actually screwing them over.

Before the digital revolution made self-publishing viable on a wide scale, the dividing lines were easier to spot. Traditional publishers paid you if they wanted to buy the rights to your novel. Self-publishers were people who filled their garages with books and tried to hawk them at events. And vanity presses were the scammers, luring the unsuspecting with false promises and roundly condemned by self-publishers and traditional publishers alike.

Today it’s very different. The scammy vanity presses are owned by traditional publishers who are marketing them as the “easy” way to self-publish – when it’s nothing more than a horrifically expensive and terribly ineffective way to publish your work, guaranteed to kill your book’s chance of success stone dead, while emptying your bank account in the process.

Some of you might think: hey, it’s just business. Caveat emptor and all that. And don’t these people know how to use Google?

That’s easy to say from our position of experience. Do you remember how naive you were at the start? Do you remember just how badly you wanted to get published? Do you remember the crushing grind of the query-go-round?

I’m not surprised people get scammed. When you want something so badly, and you can’t seem to make progress towards that goal – no matter how hard you work – you start to go crazy. You get desperate.

And it’s much harder to tell the scammers from the legitimate organizations when they are owned by the same people.

Take Penguin-owned Author Solutions, one of the worst vanity presses out there. Here’s how they hoodwink inexperienced writers into using their horribly expensive service.

Lazy Literary Agents In Self-Publishing Money Grab via Argo Navis

I was at the London Book Fair last week – and I’ll be blogging about that soon – when the news broke that David Mamet is to self-publish his next book.

His reasons? ”Publishing is like Hollywood—nobody ever does the marketing they promise.”

While I think it’s great that someone as high-profile as David Mamet is self-publishing, I was very disappointed to find out the way he’s doing it.

Self-publishing is big business. By my estimates, self-publishers have captured 25% of the US ebook market. It can be lucrative on the individual author level too, with writers getting up to 70% royalties if they publish themselves.

The reason why those percentages are so high is that self-publishing allows you to bypass the traditional middlemen (agents, publishers, distributors) who each took their own slice of the pie before the author saw any money.

Literary agents in particular must be worried about what that means for their future, which explains their ludicrous reactions when someone like Barry Eisler states the above. However, a company called Argo Navis – a publisher-owned distributor – has come to their rescue, providing them with a way to re-insert themselves in the chain between self-publishing author and reader. And get their cut of course.

Mamet is represented by a major literary agency – ICM Partners – who are just one of many agencies to have signed a deal with Perseus Books-owned Argo Navis.

What Do Argo Navis Offer?

Essentially, Argo Navis are a distributor. They offer a portal through which authors’ work can be distributed to all the various retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo.

In exchange for this relatively trivial service, Argo Navis take a 30% cut. You read that right. After the retailer takes their standard cut (usually also 30%), Argo Navis take another 30% before passing on payments.

Obviously, this is massively overpriced compared to distributors like Smashwords or Draft2Digital, who only take 10%, and especially so when you compare the cost of going direct to retailers like Amazon (it’s free). But the problems with Argo Navis don’t end there.

Self-Publishing Grabs Huge Market Share From Traditional Publishers

Barnes & Noble re-launched PubIt! this week as Nook Press, a largely superficial makeover which failed to address some fundamental problems, like restricting access to US self-publishers only, and introduced new howler: updating existing titles causes the loss of all ranking, reviews, and momentum.

There were only two noteworthy things, to me, about this launch. First, the PubIt! brand had been closely associated with Barnes & Noble. This re-launch seems like an attempt to tie the Nook Press brand to their subsidiary Nook Media, probably in advance of a sale (Barnes & Noble already sold a stake to Microsoft, and a smaller slice to Pearson – Penguin’s parent company but maintain a controlling interest in Nook Media).

This re-launch is full of things that sound great in a corporate press release (innovative editing tools!) that most professional self-publishers won’t really care about, which makes me further suspect this is more about prospective purchasers.

Second, and this is what I want to focus on today, Barnes & Noble finally released some hard numbers regarding self-publishers. From their press release:

* PubIt! continues to attract 20% more independent authors every quarter.
* Titles from self-published authors continue to increase by 24% each quarter in the NOOK Store.
* Customer demand for great independent content continues to dramatically increase as 30% of NOOK customers purchase self-published content each month, representing 25% of NOOK Book sales every month.

That last point really caught me by surprise. Self-publishers have obviously grabbed a lot of market share on Amazon, but conventional wisdom was that (for a variety of reasons) they fare worse on other retailers. While I’m sure that’s still the case, it seems the phenomenon was overstated.

25% of Nook sales are self-published e-books. This is in reference to units sold not dollar amounts, but I’ll deal with that distinction in a bit. Nonetheless, that’s a crazy number! Aside from it being great to see how well self-publishers are doing, particularly on a venue that puts so many obstacles in their path, it also gives us an opportunity to look at the market as a whole.

In an interesting interview with Digital Book World last Friday, Kobo’s CEO Mike Serbinis revealed the following:

In some countries, our ebook units sold from Writing Life are on par with one of the big-six publishers. In one of our countries, self-published books [as a category] is beating the largest publishers.

Again, this is heartening. It’s amazing to me that self-publishers (as a whole) have grabbed a bigger piece of the market – in some countries – than the largest publishers. However, for the purposes of this piece, I’m more concerned with the American market – where Serbinis admitted Kobo’s market share was still in the “low single digits.”

The Kindle’s share of the US market is far larger – with most observers pegging it at between 60% and 65% (most of the rest is split between Apple and Barnes & Noble, with Google, Sony, and Kobo combined perhaps getting around 5%). But how much of that have self-publishers grabbed?

A List of Things Scott Turow Doesn’t Care About

Scott Turow woke up from his slumber recently to bark nonsense about Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads on the Authors Guild blog, before being thoroughly eviscerated in the comments.

Undeterred, Turow sought out the considerably larger platform of the New York Times’ Op-Ed pages on Monday to decry The Slow Death of the American Writer.

On reading the latter, my first thought was: if Scott Turow didn’t spend so much time hating Amazon and pretending self-publishing didn’t exist, maybe he wouldn’t be so depressed.

It’s easy to poke fun at Scott Turow’s views. A child could de-construct his arguments, while laughing at how a practicing lawyer is unable to grasp the definition of the word “monopoly.” If you want a proper debunking of his Op-Ed, Techdirt do a good job, but I think there’s no real point attempting to engage Turow on this issue. His hatred of Amazon and fear of change is completely clouding his logic.

What bothers me about Turow’s obsession with Amazon and his opposition to change is not his blatant disregard for the facts (or the definition of words), it’s that he allows this Luddism to become all-consuming, blinding him to the issues that really matter to writers.

Even if we granted Turow his brain-dead thesis, we still have time before Amazon becomes The Great Evil and exclusively powers its website with the tears of exploited writers.

But there’s a bunch of really awful stuff happening right now that Turow ignores, and has been ignoring, since his term as Authors Guild President began.

Price-fixing 

When rumors first broke that the Department of Justice was investigating collusion to fix prices between five of the six largest trade publishers in the US (Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette) and Apple, Scott Turow called for the investigation to be dropped.

He didn’t even want to find out if price-fixing was taking place. Turow, a practicing lawyer, didn’t want to know if federal law was being broken.

Why Amazon’s Purchase of Goodreads Is A Good Thing

The doom-mongers have been running wild on Twitter with the news that Amazon is to acquire Goodreads. Much of that nonsense is typical (hysterical) Amazon bashing, or reflexive defense of the status quo.

I’m not going to deal with the Chicken Little stuff. I have less and less patience with people who claim that Amazon has or is striving for some kind of evil monopoly that will subjugate authors and readers when all the evidence to date is that they will treat authors better than any publisher and provide readers with cheaper books, a bigger selection, and a better customer experience than any other retailer.

There are some more reasonable fears about what this purchase entails. I would like to deal with these in turn, then discuss how I think this acquisition will be beneficial to writers – particularly self-publishers. I respect the fact that this is a hot-button issue for many, and that reasonable people will disagree with my perspective.

I welcome any (respectful) discussion on these points, and I’m open to being convinced by the opposing side.

As I see it, some of the more reasonable fears about this purchase include:

1. Amazon will change Goodreads from being an independent home for readers to discuss the books they love

I can understand this fear – particularly if you are a Goodreads user, and spend a lot of time in the site. It’s not unreasonable to be worried about what happens next with a site that you love. I also understand the feeling of ownership that (rightly) develops in a community like Goodreads – especially one that has literally built the site into what it is today.

No-one has a crystal ball here, but all the indications are that Goodreads will retain its independence. That point was stressed in a blog post from Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler. He said that Amazon has pledged to support Goodreads in “continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture.”

Chandler went on to say this:

It’s important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site—the ability to track what you read, discover great books, discuss and share them with fellow book lovers, and connect directly with your favorite authors—and your reviews and ratings will remain here on Goodreads.

You might argue that’s typical merger/acquisition PR spin, but until there’s any evidence to the contrary, I think we have to take Otis Chandler at his word. After all, Goodreads would be nothing without its fantastic community of readers. Why would they mess with the very thing that makes Goodreads what it is?

If you are more worried about Amazon’s intentions, here’s Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti in a revealing interview with PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen:

Our mentality here is to first do no harm, and make sure that if we’re going to do integrations, users genuinely find it to be a big benefit.

Again, you might say talk is cheap, that actions speak louder than words. Well, let’s look at Amazon’s actions.

Publishers Behaving Badly, Part… I’ve Lost Count

There seems to be a view in certain self-congratulatory circles that publishers have finally got to grips with the digital revolution, that they have weathered the fiercest part of the storm, and that they are well-placed now not just to survive, but to thrive.

There are innumerable problems with that view, of course, but today I’d like to focus on one core truth of this brave new world that publishers have failed to grasp.

Namely, there are only two essential components to publishing in the digital era: the writer and the reader.

All of the old middlemen – agents, publishers, distributors, retailers – have to justify their cut, as the writer can now bypass them and go direct to readers. The only middlemen (IMO) currently making a compelling case for their cut are retailers. Self-publishers are more than happy to fork over 30% to Amazon to access their ever-expanding customer base.

Publishers seem determined to move in the opposite direction: making the proposition of publishing with them less attractive rather than more attractive, reducing advances, worsening contract terms, and treating writers as marks rather than partners – despite whatever guff accompanies the launch of their latest initiatives.

The recent actions of two of the largest trade publishers have drawn criticism from all across the writing community – not just self-publishers – and are thus not as easily dismissed as the rantings of a jaundiced indie zealot.

Let’s start with Random House; the rest can wait in line.

Digital-First Imprints Put Authors Last

By now, you have probably heard of the scandalous terms Random House offered authors via its new digital-first imprints - Hydra, Alibi, Flirt & Loveswept – before being forced to revise some of the terms in an embarrassing climb-down.

If you are already familiar with this part of the story, you can skip to Problems Still Remain below. For those who missed it, or want a quick refresher, here’s a recap.

The original terms offered by Random House were:

1. No advance.
2. Assignment of all rights and subsidiary rights for the lifetime of the copyright.
3. No meaningful reversion clause, meaning you’ll never get any of these rights back - even the ones they don’t use - unless Random House deign to return them.
4. A 50% net royalty rate. Which sounds okay until you realise that “net” doesn’t just mean what the publisher receives from the retailer, but that amount minus all the costs of publishing and promoting the book.