Déjà Vu Now Available in Paperback

Several months after begin­ning the pro­cess, my novel Déjà Vu is now avail­able in paper­back. It’s identical to the Kindle edi­tion (i.e. the second edi­tion). If you’re really keen on buy­ing a paper­back of the book, you’ll see a link to the paper­back on Déjà Vu’s Kindle page. Here is a dir­ect link.

Now, the paper­back costs £6.67 and the Kindle edi­tion costs 86p. I’d advise you to buy the Kindle edi­tion — and if you don’t have a Kindle, why not buy one? You’ll get access to free out-of-copyright books and a grow­ing mar­ket­place of con­tem­por­ary fiction.

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.

★ Is the Kindle Store 1000 Times Better Than Apple’s iBooks and Smashwords?

Probably not.

But the data for sales of my novel, Déjà Vu, which I’ve pub­lished on the Kindle, iBooks and Smashwords, point to a sales ratio of about 1000:1.

Kindle Sales

Déjà Vu unit sales per month, begin­ning in March, are: 320, 938, 915, 738, 844, 643 and 581.

Smashwords (this includes Barnes and Noble, and a bil­lion other ebook stores)

For the same period: 4.

iBooks

For the same period: 1.

Overall, then, the ratio of sales Kindle:other is 4979:5. Call it 1000:1. If Déjà Vu is rep­res­ent­at­ive of more gen­eral trends (it won’t be; but it’s in the ball­park, I expect), the Kindle store could be around 1000 times more suc­cess­ful than the other stores com­bined. Remember that the blurb, cover image and price are identical across stores.

What Leads to These Differences?

All of my mar­ket­ing — if you can call it that — has poin­ted people to the Kindle store.

Amazon has a lar­ger cus­tomer base to begin with, so cross-promotion will be more effect­ive. That is, when Déjà Vu is recom­men­ded to people who have a his­tory of buy­ing sim­ilar titles, there are more of those people around to see the recom­mend­a­tion. It could well be that many people see Déjà Vu on Amazon when they’re not look­ing for it; few see my book on Smashwords or iBooks.

Amazon has a mature chart-based shop­front. I don’t think Smashwords does this very well. And when I (rarely) look at iBooks, the charts seem to be full of odd books, and they are all writ­ten by Jeremy Clarkson. Nothing wrong with that; but it sug­gests a smal­ler num­ber of readers.

For the ver­sion of Déjà Vu sold on Amazon, I can con­trol the look and feel of the ebook pre­cisely. The ver­sion sold on Smashwords is pro­duced using a Word tem­plate and, frankly, it looks like a piece of crap. Blockquotes don’t work prop­erly; indent­a­tion is shot to hell. Likewise, the ver­sion for iBooks looks awful. Now, ebooks aren’t meant to look beau­ti­ful — but the cre­ator should be able to provide a well-designed doc­u­ment whose struc­ture melts away so that the reader can enjoy the story.

A Caveat

It’s worth not­ing that both iBooks and Smashwords are push­ing huge num­bers of books. Scott Pack recently repor­ted large sales num­bers for Confessions of a GP. And my friend Stephen J Sweeney has been selling his Battle for the Solar System books like gang­busters across many plat­forms. But Amazon has the lion’s share of this mar­ket for now.

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.

A Review of Déjà Vu

It’s over at BigAl’s Books and Pals.

Déjà Vu is a sci­ence fic­tion novel set in the fairly near future, and it intro­duces tech­no­logy that I can already see myself using and keep­ing in my pocket. I found the mech­an­ical won­ders a lot of fun, and I think the char­ac­ters are well-drawn, as one might expect from a psy­cho­lo­gist who writes nov­els. There were twists and turns, sur­prises and char­ac­ter shifts. On the whole, I found this a well-crafted, inter­est­ing tale of tech­no­logy and hot pursuit.

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.

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.

★ One Thing About Me

A couple of years back, I was faced with a group of twenty-five nervous fresh­ers in a first-year psy­cho­logy sem­inar. I broke the ice by play­ing the Three Things About Me game. This game — or, at least, the ver­sion I play — involves say­ing three things about your­self. Two things must be true and one must be false. The aim of the game is to make the lie so com­pel­ling that your part­ner can’t guess cor­rectly which of the three things is untrue.

When I explained the rules of the game to the ter­ri­fied stu­dents, I included ‘sci­ence fic­tion author’ as one thing; ‘half-marathon run­ner’ as another; ‘piano player’ as the third. Most of the stu­dents guessed cor­rectly that ‘piano player’ was the lie.

But, deep down, I felt that ‘sci­ence fic­tion author’ was a lie too. By that point, it had been sev­eral years since I’d pub­lished Déjà Vu. Was I still an author? Are you an author if you don’t have any­thing out there? Maybe it’s bet­ter to say ‘I wrote a book once’.

I wrote a book once called Déjà Vu. It came out in 2005. Seven weeks ago, I self-published it for the Amazon Kindle. I would have been happy with three cus­tom­ers. I have one thousand.

To put this in per­spect­ive, I’ve read via Bubblecow that

…if a novel sells 10,000 cop­ies in a year it is doing well. For a first time nov­el­ist, with little track record, a fig­ure of 2000 cop­ies per year is prob­ably closer to the truth.

By this met­ric, a ‘doing well’ novel sells 192 cop­ies per week. Déjà Vu has sold an aver­age of 142 cop­ies per week.

The Amazon Kindle self-publishing model means that authors have a great deal of free­dom in the set­ting of the price, as long as you don’t want to sell it for free. If you give a list price of $2.99 or over, you can get a 70% roy­alty option.

Think about that for a moment. A 70% roy­alty. That num­ber isn’t far off from the one most buy­ers assume is going towards the artist when they buy a book or CD. The real­ity, of course, is that roy­alty rates are closer to 10–15%.

The list price I’ve given is $0.99. For this, I get a 35% roy­alty. In Amazon’s roy­alty state­ments (which you receive, like clock­work, on the 15th of each month), they will use the ‘aver­age list price’ to cal­cu­late your total roy­alty. For Déjà Vu, this is £0.62. So 35% of this is 21.7 pence per copy sold.

Thus far, then, I’ve made £217 (ish).

I’m provid­ing these fig­ures in a spirit of open­ness, mostly because (i) I don’t care who knows what the sales are and (ii) they demon­strate that I — as a lone author, with no tra­di­tional pub­lisher — can make money on a book using the Kindle.

This second point interests me. I’ve never made money on a book before. Ever.

Let’s be hon­est: this is a very small amount of money. But this is just one book. An author with sev­eral and a bit of mar­ket­ing push would clearly make a lot more. I’ve sold only 10% of these cop­ies to the American Kindle store, which is by far the largest Kindle mar­ket. If an author could get noticed in that mar­ket, the fig­ures would prob­ably be much higher.

A final point: The rank­ings data show that sales for Déjà Vu have been fairly con­stant fol­low­ing an ini­tial increase about three days into the avail­ab­il­ity period. There’s no down­ward trend at the moment.

If you’re an actual or would-be Kindle author and would like the bene­fit of my vast, seven-week exper­i­ence, read on.

Things I did right

The cover is very good. I can say this immune from the charge of immod­esty because the pre­ced­ing cov­ers (all my own handi­work) were shit. The cover is prob­ably enti­cing people to look at the book. I’m sure that cov­ers in gen­eral mean a lot to people.

The price is right. It’s delib­er­ately low — at 70p, or 99c — because my goal is not to make money. I get plenty from my day job. A glance at the Scifi/Mystery and Crime as of lunch­time Friday 22nd April shows that it’s at #2. Four of the oth­ers in the top ten are priced less than £1.

Whatever the price range for an impulse buy is, Déjà Vu falls within it. This prob­ably helped the book to chart early. Once a book charts, it’s then in a place where people who just want to buy a book of a type — tech­no­thriller, sci­ence fic­tion, whatever — can go and buy it, cre­at­ing a vir­tu­ous circle. This might explain the dif­fer­ence in sales between the UK and the US. While plenty of people in the US seem to like the book (i.e. it hasn’t been inter­preted as paro­chial), the size of the US Kindle store means that Déjà Vu has never made it onto a chart. It would need con­sid­er­able ini­tial bounce to do so.

I’d strongly advise you to price your book as cheaply as pos­sible. Don’t think about mak­ing money, or at least don’t think about mak­ing very much. Think about get­ting read­ers. They’ll prob­ably remem­ber you when you put your next book out.

I’ve been lucky with mar­ket­ing. That is, the little I’ve done has had a big impact. My piece over at Scott Pack’s blog seemed par­tic­u­larly suc­cess­ful, judging by the com­ments. Ken Macleod is a sci­ence fic­tion author who has given me some much-needed ment­or­ing ever since I sent him a copy of Déjà Vu years ago. Generously, he used the wide read­er­ship of his blog to let read­ers know about the book.

One last thing I did right: Formatting. I’ve read sev­eral books by tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers on my Kindle and not one of them has been without major format­ting glitches and typos. It pays to get these details right. Déjà Vu’s aver­age user rat­ing in both the UK and US is 4.5 of 5 — I’d be will­ing to bet that one star of that is fit and fin­ish. As a self-published author, I can take the time to get this stuff right. Correct indent­ing and italicisa­tion means a lot more to me that it does to a guy in an office in a tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing house. There’s no excuse, either: the moment a typo is spot­ted, a cor­rec­ted ebook can be uploaded to Amazon and be avail­able in two or three work­ing days.

Things I should do bet­ter next time

I should have had my other books ready to pub­lish imme­di­ately. Reviewers have com­men­ted that they looked for the next book in the series but couldn’t find it. I guess you could call these lost sales, but I’m sure some of the people will still remem­ber enjoy­ing Déjà Vu when the sequel, Flashback, is released in a couple of weeks.

I’m unde­cided about the price for Flashback. One issue is that I’ve had to pay for a pro­fes­sional editor, and for the cover. (Déjà Vu was edited under its ori­ginal pub­lish­ing agree­ment, and I cre­ated the cover myself using an image I bought.) Yes, this is a dis­ad­vant­age of being a self-published author, but it’s costs like these that have led pub­lish­ers, in the past, to look at my work and say it’s not worth the bother.

I think it is worth the bother. But with these costs, I might increase the list price just enough so that I get the 70% roy­alty option. The price will be $2.99 or £1.70 — with luck, still within that ‘impulse buy’ band, but faster to pay off its greater expense.

‘Science fic­tion author’ — look­ing like less of a lie these days.

Thoughts on eBooks

Over the past week or so, I’ve being mak­ing rounds to vari­ous blogs. Over at Scott Pack’s place, I’ve been writ­ing about my exper­i­ences of pub­lish­ing Déjà Vu:

So I’m look­ing at this Amanda Hocking head­line. Flecks of tea are mov­ing down the screen of my laptop like the raw Matrix. The half-formed idea in my head — that I can make a book avail­able and I don’t need to have a pub­lisher — becomes about three-quarters formed. My audi­ence is going to be lim­ited to a few mil­lion Kindle cus­tom­ers, but that’s like say­ing my writ­ing is lim­ited by the alpha­bet; it’s enough, and nobody is going to tell me that only Random House can use the ‘Q’.

More of my epic wis­dom can be found over at Futurismic, where Paul Graham Raven has been ask­ing me ques­tions about the pub­lish­ing industry at large. I have no real basis for my appar­ent expert­ise in this area — which is, of course, part of the fun of interviews.

Various stat­ist­ics have been ban­died about show­ing that while growth in phys­ical book sales is slow­ing, growth in ebooks is accel­er­at­ing. As a per­son who owns a Kindle, it’s easy to see why. The buy­ing is imme­di­ate, cheap, and fric­tion­less; the device weighs less than my watch (so I have a heavy watch).

All good fun.