Come on, Amazon is cool.

December 20, 2011

“I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.” – Kent Brockman

In this, my love letter to Amazon, I’m going to point out a few brilliant things they are doing. This is a big deal for me, because their brilliance has a direct impact on my life as a writer.

One: They are giving Kindles away.

Not exactly, but they are selling Kindles at a loss. I got mine last Christmas (thanks, Mom!) when the price fell to $139, which I assumed was a promotional price. Wrong – they’re now $79 (sorry, Mom!). Hard to say what they spent on Kindle R&D, but the overlords at Amazon know that the ereader isn’t the moneymaker… the ebooks are. So they are moving Kindles out the door at a rate of over a million units a week. They want as many ereaders out there as possible.

And since my work so far is exclusively digital, so do I.

Two: The uploading model.

Think of all the ways Amazon could have botched this. They could have charged $200 per novel upload, or offered twelve percent royalties, or both. Instead, uploading is FREE and the author royalty is up to 70%. Authors don’t even sign a rights contract, because Amazon doesn’t ask for any rights to the manuscript.

Instead, all authors lose is “first electronic rights” by virtue of making their work available to the public online. A big question used to be: “Can a writer still score a deal with a traditional print publisher for a novel self-pubbed on the Kindle?” The answer is now YES.

Amazon leaves an unprecedented amount of decision-making to the writer: cover, jacket copy (aka product description), price (with some nudging via royalty percentage to keep it between three and twelve bucks), tagging (which is what passes nowadays for genre), and marketing.

Ah, marketing. Amazon lets the authors tear their own hair out about how to market their books, because Amazon knows that a book’s greatest advocate is its author.

And yet…

Three: The Browsing Revolution.

The Amazon sales pages, with their lists, tags, and rows of “also-boughts” are outstanding at bringing similar books to within a click or two of each other. Right there on my sales page for Outrageous Fortunes are novels by Harry Turtledove and Peter Pauzé. If I market my tail off to drive traffic to my Amazon page, some of those potential readers click over and buy books by Turtledove and Pauzé.

Well, darn. But I’ve learned to love it, because it works both ways. My work is on the sales pages of plenty of other books, and promotions by their authors help me. This interconnectedness helps get readers to the books they will obsess about, and that way, everybody sells more books. (Are you reading this, Barnes & Noble?)

Four: In 2011, my beautiful little Creative Writing MFA program, NILA, just received a $15,000 grant from Amazon. Is there an ulterior motive? Sure, Amazon wants their 30% of book sales, and perhaps better-educated writers will sell more books (and there’s this little thing called PR). In the meantime, they are funding higher education.

Now, Amazon has taken some heat from different folks lately. I try to keep up with that stuff, and while Amazon is hard on publishers and booksellers (whose inefficiencies make them soft targets), its strategies consistently revolve around treating writers and readers with respect.

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PS: There’s mad hullabaloo about Amazon’s new KDP Select program (and what it means for Smashwords, among others). I haven’t signed up… yet. Still collecting data. More later.

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Posted by Steve White

6 Things I Learned as an Indie Author

September 18, 2011

This spring, I decided I’d seen enough of the writing on the wall, and uploaded a novel to the Amazon Kindle. It has done fairly well, selling about a hundred per month with no marketing. That doesn’t cover my rent, but it’s a hell of a lot more than my Netflix subscription, so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned about the process:

1. It’s easier than it looks.

2. Despite #1, hard work and attention to detail pay off in spades and allow you to outrun the competition.

3. Cruise the Kindle Top 100. Notice everything (covers, product descriptions, author bios, reviews, the “Click to Look Inside” feature, etc). Imitate.

4. You will obsessively track your sales. Resistance is futile. Go ahead, though. Knowing your book’s display page like the back of your hand and clicking through your “also-boughts” will help you to notice everything (see #3).

5. Kindle readers live in a different world than the Big Six publishers. They feel that remarkable storytelling is more important than lyrical wordsmithing, and they’ll forgive occasional typos but not a bland tale.

6. There are three kinds of writers. First, there are those who won’t epublish because the see ebooks as pathetic, since the lack of professional gatekeepers (agents, editors, publishers) means the ebook market is a slushy vanity-press free-for-all. Second, there are those who won’t epublish because they find all those readers intimidating, and want their work vetted by a pro before it is cast to the lions. They aren’t sure if their writing is worthy enough. Third, there are writers like me, who fall somewhere in the middle and are willing to give epublishing a try.

7. (Bonus!) By far the greatest discovery of the epublishing world: If you lower prices by a factor of five, readers buy five times as many books. Writers now have access to an insatiable audience. There are almost a million ebooks available on the Kindle, but that is nowhere near enough. The readers are waiting for more.

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Posted by Steve White

Traditional Agents and Publishers: a 3-Point Update.

August 25, 2011

I just got back from the Northwest Institute for Literary Arts MFA residency on Whidbey Island, here in Washington State, where creative writing grad students got to hear from a few literary agents and publishers, who told us what’s going on in the publishing world.

Three quick observations:

1. Traditional agents and publishers continue to offer fewer services (editing, promotion, distribution) and smaller advances to authors. They don’t quite acknowledge how much trouble they are in, and the reforms they will need to make to remain profitable are not yet on the table.

2. Traditional agents and publishers are still concerned about an author’s platform (e.g. “How many Facebook friends do you have? How many Twitter followers? Are you on LinkedIn?”).

I’m a bit of a weirdo in that I don’t see platform as very important. It’s a better strategy, as always, to write a remarkable book, because it’s easier for readers to find you than ever before. If your book is remarkable, your platform will generate itself.

(For an idea of what I mean by remarkable, see Seth Godin’s talk on it. It’s for marketers, but it applies to everybody, including writers.)

3. A couple of interesting changes in the language. First, “agents and publishers” are now called “traditional agents and publishers” to distinguish them from the indie or electronic world of publishing.

Second, rather than acknowledge that “self-published” no longer deserves the lame vanity stigma that it acquired years ago, they’ve embraced the phrase “independent publishing” or “indie publishing” and even “indie author” (a phrase I enjoy to no end). The phrase “self-published” has slipped further, and is becoming obsolete among agents and publishers.

So if you’ve published your earlier work electronically and are pitching your latest novel to an agent:

BAD: “I self-published my first novel.”

GOOD: “I’m already an experienced indie author.”

No more cold stares from agents and publishers on this topic. They have seen the success of ebooks and have reached the stage of grudging respect. And that, at least, is great news.

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Now a side note: I’m happy to announce that Novel Dog has been accepted to Alltop. Thanks to author Yi Shun Lai for suggesting it!

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Posted by Steve White

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