Thirsty for Bytes?

It’s not easy being an inde­pend­ent author. By inde­pend­ent, I don’t mean ‘attached to an inde­pend­ent pub­lish­ing house’. I mean hir­ing a proofreader, editor, cover designer, and not being invited to pub­lish­ing shindigs. M’colleague Matt F Curran doesn’t think it’s easy either. He is the brains behind Thirst Editions, a new, vir­tual pub­lish­ing out­fit under whose aus­pices Matt, Aliya Whiteley, Roger Morris, Frances Garrod, and Tim Stretton will be put­ting out a title or two. These authors are not all inde­pend­ent by the above defin­i­tion, but they’ve all had work passed over on the grounds of mass mar­ket appeal rather than qual­ity — and with ebooks and the long tail, qual­ity can now count.

There is no ‘i’ in team. There are, how­ever, three in ‘Thirst Editions’.

I think you know what I mean.

If you don’t, take a look at this post, where Matt out­lines the ethos behind Thirst Editions.

Monday, 23rd April is launch day. My novel Proper Job will be re-published as a Thirst Editions book (reserving Writer As A Stranger for the Saskia Brandt books) at the crazy price of 77p, along with Tim’s Dragonchaser and Aliya’s Mean Mode Median. These last two are also cheap-as-chips.

What are you wait­ing for? We’d appre­ci­ate your support.

★ Signed by Kneerim & Williams

Well, spin my nipple nuts and send me to Alaska if it’s been almost two weeks since I signed with the Kneerim & Williams lit­er­ary agency. What? Me? A lit­er­ary agent? With my repu­ta­tion for going-it-alonery?

But I am two-and-twenty, gentle reader.

What happened was: Just prior to Christmas, I found myself cor­res­pond­ing with a UK pub­lisher about Déjà Vu. He loved the book, which was hur­ray. But he thought that there was no mar­ket left in the UK, which was boo.

Like the Spanish, I decided to approach the New World.

Given that life is short, I con­tac­ted rather more lit­er­ary agen­cies than I should have; within a few hours I had received one or two offers of rep­res­ent­a­tion and sev­eral more requests for the manu­scripts of Déjà Vu, Flashback and The Amber Rooms.

By the end of the week, I had taken two phone calls — one with each of the agen­cies I wanted most — and was won over by Katherine Flynn and Ike Williams.

So it’s with Kneerim & Williams that I’ll be rest­ing my hat. Katherine will be get­ting back to me with edit­or­ial notes on Déjà Vu quite soon, and we’ll take it from there.

Terribly.

Terribly exicted.

★ The New Statesman on Déjà Vu Sales

A heads-up from Ben Johncock tells me that no less than Nicholas Clee has been writ­ing in the New Statesman about the trans­ition from tan­gible to elec­tronic books. (I’ve been strug­gling to find an offi­cial link to the piece; here’s an unofficial-looking one.)

It’s fair to say that Nicholas Clee is tra­di­tional in his perspective.

Ebooks are des­troy­ing this eco­nomic model. …Will 99P become the optimum price for an ebook? If so, who is going to make any money out of pub­lish­ing or writ­ing books for such a market?

I agree with the first point here. The ebook is a dis­rupt­ive entity. But any­body who has been around since the early 1990s has seen, in the music industry, an example of elec­tronic mer­chand­ise des­troy­ing an eco­nomic model based on the phys­ical. Perhaps ‘des­troyed’ is the wrong term to use in this con­text. The mar­ket is still there. But how much growth does the CD mar­ket have? How much in the hard­back market?

The second point speaks to a fun­da­mental issue of busi­ness. One should not ask ‘How are all the employ­ees of the leg­acy pub­lish­ing industry — from recep­tion­ists to the CEO — going to main­tain their income?’ because this leads to the prob­lem that afflicts all pub­lish­ers: they decide as a group, impli­citly or expli­citly, to act as a car­tel. Prices are kept high. This cre­ates situ­ations where the elec­tronic ver­sion of a book costs the same as or more than the tan­gible. Try explain­ing this to a con­sumer. It’s hard. ‘We need these prices because of the way our busi­ness was set up’ makes for poor advert­ising copy.

Now for the part that men­tions your humble correspondent:

As for the fin­an­cial implic­a­tions — on the Me and My Big Mouth blog, the nov­el­ist Ian Hocking … has con­fided his sales fig­ures and rev­en­ues from self-publishing ebooks with Amazon. Two of them have sold more than 8,000 cop­ies. This is a fig­ure that many con­ven­tion­ally pub­lished nov­el­ists would envy. But Hocking’s profit to date is only just over £300 (his rev­enue is just over £2,000).

Had Hocking chosen a con­ven­tional pub­lisher, he might well have sold fewer cop­ies, but he would have earned more, thanks to the publisher’s advance.

Yes, my profit is just over £300, but this fig­ure is essen­tially mean­ing­less (the rev­enue is more inform­at­ive) as a proxy for suc­cess. First, I’ve ploughed vir­tu­ally all the money from the first book into the second, and so on. ‘Profit’, then, in this con­text, rep­res­ents the amount that I’ve decided not to spend. I might have adjus­ted that up or down arbit­rar­ily. Second, my sci­ence fic­tion nov­els con­tinue to sell in greater num­ber each month, and unless I can find other book-related expendit­ure, this ‘profit’ fig­ure will rise sharply. Overall, I believe it was more sens­ible for me (as a writer nobody has heard of) to price low and sell in quant­ity than opt for the pre­ferred option of a leg­acy pub­lisher, which, per­haps, is to price high and sell few.

The ques­tion of the pub­lisher advance is an inter­est­ing one. It would cer­tainly be in my short term interest to land a large advance, which I may not earn out. But, if I may say, the industry-wide beha­viour of dol­ing out these advances is one of the reas­ons the busi­ness model is unsupportable.

To return to this ques­tion: Is 99p too cheap for a book? I really don’t know. If you’re employed by a busi­ness that requires the new Ken Follett book to be £16 or more, you’ll prob­ably think it’s too cheap and con­sider me an upstart who is under­cut­ting you. If you’re an indi­vidual, cre­at­ive per­son who is put­ting out a product and is in con­trol of the con­sumer exper­i­ence, you will think care­fully about the impact that your price will have on the per­cep­tion of the product. I think 99p for Déjà Vu rep­res­ents good value. After all, you can get it from a lib­rary for free, and that doesn’t lessen its worth. Neither does pick­ing up a second-hand copy from the church bazar.

Last word from Mr Clee, which requires no com­ment bey­ond a brief nod to its past tense:

An industry that paid unre­cov­er­able advances for books, and then pub­lished them in formats that the pub­lic thought too expens­ive, had its eccentricities.

Guest Blogging Part II: Ebook Sales Data

In the thrill­ing sequel to yesterday’s blog post over at Scott Pack’s blog, I’m back with some data about sales and income.

★ Ebook Q & A

M’colleague Matt F W Curran recently sent me some ques­tions about my adven­tures in the ebook trade. I thought my answers might be use­ful to oth­ers, so I’ve pos­ted them here.

Did you e-publish via an e-publisher?

No, I decided that it would be best to con­trol the pro­cess myself. One of the more frus­trat­ing parts of being an author is being unable to cor­rect typos in the final book, blurb, and so on. Amazon makes this trivial. My research prior to going it alone also demon­strated that many ebooks pub­lished on an author’s behalf were hor­rendously format­ted, pre­sum­ably because the job was given lower pri­or­ity and fewer resources than the more pres­ti­gi­ous print edition.

If so, what is their com­mis­sion and would you do it again?

I’ve left this ques­tion in because I did, a few months back, use the online ser­vice Smashwords. This ser­vice takes your book (format­ted in Word — alarm bells ringing yet?) and spits it out to mul­tiple online retail­ers, includ­ing Barnes and Noble. I used this because it was the only way I could get my book onto iBooks. Smashwords wanted the doc­u­mented format­ted accord­ing to some unusual con­ven­tions. I hired a nice American lady to do this for me. She trades under the name MediaWorx. I paid her $45 and she did a flaw­less job. Ultimately, it was for noth­ing, because Smashwords uses a gen­eric tool to con­vert your Word doc­u­ment into dif­fer­ent ver­sions for the online ser­vices, and the out­put is embar­rass­ingly cruddy. Fortunately, I’ve only sold about 4 cop­ies via Smashwords. The vast major­ity of my sales have been through Amazon.

If you didn’t e-publish via an e-publisher and did it wholly alone, has it been easy?

I’ll inter­pret that ‘easy’ as a rel­at­ive term. Yes, it was very easy. When I was pub­lished by a small press, I had to do all my own mar­ket­ing. I had to wait months for roy­alty cheques that never came; had no clue where review cop­ies had been sent; had to put up with a dodgy cover; had all kinds of issues with dis­tri­bu­tion; had to turn up in per­son and make myself a nuis­ance on a shop-by-shop basis to get word out.

And do you think there are any bene­fits to being pub­lished via an inde­pend­ent e-publisher regard­less of the sac­ri­fice in terms of profits? In other words would it add rel­ev­ance or legit­im­acy to your work to be seen to be pub­lished inde­pend­ently rather than self-published?

My first response is a mis­in­ter­pret­a­tion of your ques­tion, which I’ve left in. The ques­tion I thought I read was: “Are there advant­ages to being tra­di­tion­ally published?”

The simple answer is “Yes”. I grew up in an era where writers still used type­writers and my dreams of suc­cess (that is, selling a book to some­body) were all wrapped up in weighty, paper manu­scripts, lunch meet­ings with agents, and see­ing myself on the shelf of a book­shop. I still want that and I can’t help it. The desire, how­ever, is irra­tional. I’m immeas­ur­ably bet­ter off now.

And now for the answer to your actual question:

There could cer­tainly be bene­fits in terms of time-saving, but I think all the tools you need for a good book are at your dis­posal. Hire your own editor. I can sug­gest Clare Christian or Olivia Wood. Hire a cover designer, such as Emma Barnes. The trick­ier bit is the lay­out of your book, but you can prob­ably hire someone to do that too. I’m not whether it’s a good use of money to hire a middle man (the ‘pub­lisher’ again) to do this for you.

How much do cover-designs cost?

I’ve got three cov­ers. The first, Deja Vu, was a stock photo from iStockPhoto.com, which I bought for about £50 and worked into my own design. Flashback was designed pro­fes­sion­ally by Emma Barnes for £699.13 (though I’ve since star­ted using another design based on an iStock­Photo vec­tor, which works bet­ter as a thumb­nail; I’ll use the Barnes design for a paper­back). The cover for my romantic com­edy Proper Job is a com­bin­a­tion of two vec­tor graph­ics, totalling about £80, which I put together in my own design.

Are you mak­ing enough money for it to be a financially-worthwhile endeav­our (of course, simply being read is worth­while any­way, but for the extra effort and time put it to get it out there — was it worthwhile?).

In a word, yes. My cur­rent income from the books since March is £2,072.11 and $222. Outgoings are £1,268.40. Profit about £800 before tax. That’s not huge, but the ini­tial costs are all fixed.

How did you come to the price point of the two books? I note that Flashback changed to a cheaper price — did that help?

I wanted the books to be free. (I’m lucky enough to have a full time job as an aca­demic, so I was pre­pared to pay for the cov­ers and edit­ing myself.) Since that wasn’t straight­for­ward, I made them as cheap as pos­sible. This took a little nerve, I must admit, par­tic­u­larly when I saw the ini­tial sales take off, but it’s import­ant to remem­ber that I’m in a pos­i­tion where nobody knows who I am. I want as many people to read my books as pos­sible. Meanwhile, I’ll be mak­ing a brand of my name if I’m any good. There is room for increas­ing the price later on, but for now it’s as well to remem­ber that the mar­ket is not demand­ing my books at all. They’re buy­ing them on a ‘Why not?’ basis. If I increased the price sig­ni­fic­antly (say, into the 70% roy­alty rate, which needs a sale price of £1.70, I think), it’s very likely that I would flat­ten my sales.

Secondly, I’m in it for the long haul.

As for the price of Flashback, I did increase that briefly to £1.70. That was, in ret­ro­spect, prob­ably an irra­tional move motiv­ated by the price of its cover. I wasn’t sure at the time that the sales pro­file of Deja Vu would remain the same. Turns out it did. When Flashback earned back the cost of its cover, I dropped its price. The sales cor­rel­ated very closely with price.

The Digital Peninsula

Lee over at the Digital Peninsula writes:

No, not that Hocking. I’m talk­ing about Ian Hocking. He’s a science-fiction writer, when he’s not a psy­cho­logy lec­turer. He nearly gave it all up.

It’s true. I nearly did.

[the] industry now needs to under­stand they’re not just com­pet­ing with each other, but with every author, pub­lished or not.

If you’re look­ing for an art­icle that links to and sum­mar­ises some of my more import­ant (i.e. use­ful) posts over the past few months, this is a good place to start.

Brass Tacks on Déjà Vu and Flashback

Did I men­tion that I’ve been gate-crashing Scott Pack’s blog with some stats on my how well my books are selling?

Your friend and mine, Scott, left me a mes­sage at our usual dead drop — behind the third cer­vical ver­tebra of the dip­lodocus in the foyer of the Natural History Museum. In some­what breath­less prose, he asked that I fur­nish read­ers with the latest epis­ode in my ebook adven­ture before they actu­ally explode with curiosity.

I didn’t?

Say no more: it’s over here.

In Which iBooks Are Like Buses

A couple of months back I tried to pub­lish Déjà Vu for iBooks via Lulu. It didn’t work so I gave up in dis­gust. Then I tried to pub­lish it with Smashwords. It didn’t work there, either, so I gave up in disgust.

All the more per­plex­ing for me, then, that there are now two edi­tions of Déjà Vu avail­able for iBooks. One pub­lished by Lulu, of course, and one pub­lished by Smashwords — bien sur.

It’s twice the fun! And both are 45p rather than the Kindle price of 70p.

If you’re going to buy a copy, please get the Lulu one. I was able to manu­ally con­trol its format­ting, so it looks as I inten­ded it to look. The Smashwords one is the product of an auto­mated format­ter, and looks rubbish.

★ Flashback

It’s been five years com­ing, but my novel Flashback, sequel to Déjà Vu, is now avail­able in the Kindle store. The price is £2.13 in the UK and some­thing approx­im­at­ing that in the US. To be hon­est, this is a little more expens­ive than I inten­ded. I was — and still am — aim­ing for some­thing closer to £1.80 or £1.70 and it is prob­ably mup­petry on my part that the price has come out higher. If I can fig­ure it out, the price will prob­ably drop a few pence over the com­ing week.

There are many people to thank. Beta read­ers, those who helped me with research into air crash invest­ig­a­tion and aero­naut­ics, my editor Clare Christian and cover designer Emma Barnes of Snowbooks all get major, major props.

I’ve settled on the fol­low­ing blurb (thanks for your com­ments, Ed!):

A fifty-year-old mys­tery is about to be solved.

Summer, 1947: Airliner ‘Star Dust’ radios a suc­cess­ful trans-Andean flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, and sig­nals its inten­tion to land. Four minutes prior to touch­down, it sends the let­ter sequence ‘S-T-E-N-D-E-C’, then silence. Star Dust van­ishes along with all pas­sen­gers and crew.

Winter, 2003: German Freedom Flight DFU323 crashes in the Bavarian National Forest. The only clue to its fate is the co-pilot’s final trans­mis­sion, shouted against the roar of fail­ing engines: ‘Stendec! Stendec!’

The enig­mas of DFU323 and Star Dust will lead back to a start­ling con­spir­acy that reaches fifty years into the past – and one hun­dred years into the future.

How do I feel? I feel fine.

Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series)

Déjà Vu Spreads

I’ve spent the last few days pre­par­ing Déjà Vu for pub­lic­a­tion on Smashwords. This com­pany provides elec­tronic ver­sions of books. Whereas Amazon only sup­ports the Kindle (fair enough), Smashwords is a one-size fits all solu­tion. Whatever your ebook reader, you’re likely to find a format that works.

Here is Déjà Vu’s Smashwords page.

This might be my only chance to get Déjà Vu onto the iPad. Lulu, the com­pany I’d prefer to use, is mov­ing slowly on their iBooks integ­ra­tion. They’re not reply­ing to my emails, either. Let’s hope Smashwords works.