Category: Publishing

The Business of Pre-Orders

I see it all the time on social media and in writer forums — independent publishers who put up a book for pre-order before the first draft is finished, and I cannot understand why.  Missing a pre-order deadline is a good way to get retailers annoyed and revoke pre-order privileges.  Yet miss the deadlines they do. 

Life interferes, and the next thing you realize, in a panic, that the dreaded upload date is here, and the editor is still working on that magnum opus.  Or three-quarters of the way through the first draft, you realize the story isn’t working.  Or better yet, you upload a placeholder manuscript with the retailer and then miss the deadline.  The nasty buggers lock your account and in three days, hundreds of fans will find a rough draft of the book on their eReaders instead of the finished product.  Might as well change pen names and genres after that sort of blunder.  Once you recover from the heart attack.

Yeah.  There are so many ways to screw yourself with pre-orders.  I didn’t even try until last fall, so there are only two releases with pre-orders to my name, but both went smoothly, and I have hundreds of satisfied fans.  However, not messing things up takes a certain amount of discipline. 

Sure, we see pre-orders for traditionally published books on retailer sites five or six months before they go live.  Perhaps even longer.  I have news for you.  When the traditional publishers put up a pre-order, that book is already in their hands.  The author has long since done his or her thing because the time between shot to bang, as we say in the army, can be up to twenty-four months in the traditional publishing world.

Yes, we independents aren’t tied to a traditional release schedule drafted up two years in advance.  Our shot to bang from the first word on the page to a finished product is a matter of, well, whatever the author can manage.  In my case, it’s four months on average, a fraction of the traditional world’s timeline.  But that doesn’t absolve us of proper planning.  We independents need to adopt a similar but shorter-fused regime when dealing with pre-orders.  Herewith is the Curmudgeon’s prescription for a sane independent publisher.

First, don’t put up a pre-order until the book is in your editor’s hands and you’re sure he or she won’t recommend a major rewrite.  Second, figure out when it’s coming back from your editor and approximately how long it’ll take for the final revision and proofing.  Then double that time.  If, for example, you expect to have a finished product in three weeks, set the pre-order release date to six weeks out.  When you have a finished product, you can always move the release date up.  Somewhat.  Better to move it up than delay.  Just note that the largest retailer, Amazon, won’t allow you to move it any closer than three days out.  This means if you’re ready on March 15th, the actual release date won’t be before March 19th (the day you’re ready plus three.)  Use the Amazon timeline as your lodestar if you sell there and elsewhere, for obvious reasons.  And if those reasons aren’t obvious, do go back to basics and study the ebook market.

What about uploading a dummy file ahead of time?  Never.  Don’t do it.  Amazon, Kobo, and Google Play allow you to put up a pre-order without a book file.  I just upload the cover, description, and metadata.  The only book file that ever gets uploaded is the final one — no chances of making a mistake.  The number of panicked writers on the internet who suddenly realize a placeholder file is going out instead of the final because they can’t read a calendar to save their lives is pathetically high.

What about retailers who won’t let you post a pre-order without a book file or force you to upload the final file more than three days before the release date?  Simple.  No pre-order through those retailers.  I inform my fans via my blog and social media that it’s not universally available.

Finally, using pre-orders as a marketing tool is a good thing.  Using pre-orders as an accountability tool that forces you to work toward a given publication date is a bad thing.  Life gets in the way, motivation goes down (resulting in crappy work), and burnout is a real issue.  Why increase your risk for no tangible gain.

Are pre-orders a useful thing?  Yes, but mostly if you already have an established fan base and you don’t run it for too long.  My two stabs at pre-orders — three weeks each — were successful, though not stellar, yet both books saw solid sales for an independent publisher.  Will I keep doing them?  Probably. But always in a disciplined manner.

On the Business of Impatience

The desire for instant success is an all too common human foible.  Along with the need for validation, as I discussed in my previous blog post, it’s a manifestation of the untamed writerly ego.  And leaving your ego to run wild never ends well.  Disappointment is merely one of the more benign outcomes you will experience.

We’ve all seen previously unknown authors suddenly burst upon the scene with a lucrative contract from one of the Big Five publishing houses, their book high on the various bestseller lists, nominated for major awards and movie rights being optioned.  Why them and not me, you might ask while envy eats at you from the inside like acid.  Of course, that burning sensation could simply be the lousy curry you had for supper.  Who knows?  To quote the lyrics of a song from my favorite band, we all seek “fame, fortune, and everything that goes with it.”  Yes, even I would be tickled pink if I were to suddenly find fame.  But the chances of that are on par with my getting a hole in one playing golf, considering I haven’t hit a single ball during the last few golfing seasons to begin with.

We independent authors are, realistically (except for a tiny minority,) mid-listers, not New York Times bestsellers.  We’re not the ones who’ll be credited as executive producers when HBO or Netflix makes a miniseries based on our work because our books will never be brought to the screen, big or small.  And that’s okay.  However, it does mean leashing the ego as we contemplate a realistic writing career.

What do I mean by realistic?  First of all, the vast majority of us independents will never become household names, appear on Oprah or find our books on the shelves of the nearest Chapters-Indigo (or whatever your country’s largest bricks and mortar bookstore chain is.)  That’s just a fact of life.  The vast majority of us will also likely never make big bucks.  And the vast majority of us will not become rising stars on the independent literary scene either.  Of course if your motto is “ars gratia artis” then you don’t care.  But most of us are in this not just for art’s sake but to build a career.

Yes, some independent authors find their audience with the first book they publish and never look back.  But most won’t find that audience until they’ve published several books.  Sadly, some will never find it.  What does this tell us?  One of my favorite expressions when it comes to independent publishing is that this is a marathon, not a sprint.  It takes persistence and sustained effort to gain traction.  If your first book has disappointing sales, and it’s not due to quality, cover and blurb issues, don’t get angry.  Don’t flail about for magical solutions.  Don’t enter pay-to-play contest.  Don’t sign up with vanity publishers.  Don’t give it away for free right off the bat.  And please don’t become a self-promotion whore — there’s nothing sadder than authors spamming social media with variations on ‘buy my book.’ 

On second thought, there is something sadder: ‘buy my award-winning book’  when it’s clearly a pay-to-play award they bought for big bucks.

So what’s my prescription for lack of instant success syndrome?  Write the next book.  And the one after that.  Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that many, perhaps even most authors only gain traction after they’ve published several quality books, especially when those books are part of a series.

This is where the virtue of patience comes into play.  Impatience can easily damage your brand, and there’s no recovery from that.  Impatient authors looking for that quick success often imperil their careers before they even take off by making bad choices.  The internet forgets nothing.  That author spamming social media with ‘buy my most excellent book’ risks tarnishing his or her brand before ever gaining traction.  Or paying for dodgy services with money they’ll never recoup.  Or maybe an impatient author will try to gin up productivity and get a series out in record time by skimping on quality in the hopes of gaining traction.  I’ve seen plenty of variations on the theme of impatient authors self-destructing since I first entered this business.  And once your name is mud, you might as well walk away from it and start over under a new name.

But shouldn’t marketing get that first book off the ground?  It might.  But I’m probably not the right guy to discuss that subject, since I don’t spend much time and money on marketing.  However, my sense of the indie universe is that the more books you’ve published, the better your marketing efforts will work because readers will see you as a serious player with skin in the game rather than a dilettante.  If you’re asking readers to invest their time and money into reading your work, making it clear you’re not a one-hit wonder helps.  For what it’s worth, I’ve noticed that my sales take off every time I publish a new book and my Amazon sales graph looks remarkably like it does when I get that rare unicorn of all marketing blessings, a BookBub feature.

So what’s the bottom line?  If you enter into this business with low expectations, you might be pleasantly surprised.  If you enter it intending to become the next big thing with your first book, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed if not devastated.  Persistence is key.  There’s an author group I belong to which preaches precisely that: build your catalog and eventually, you’ll build your audience.  And guess what?  It works.  As a wise Jedi Master once said, “Patience you must have.”  A successful independent publishing business isn’t built on a single breakout novel.  Leave the pursuit of breakout novels to the traditional publishers — that’s what their business model increasingly depends upon.  For us independents, the business model is a strong catalog developed over the course of several years.  And that catalog must be supported by a professional brand. 

For the record, I didn’t have a clue about this business back in 2014 when I basically tossed two novels into the mysterious Kindle Direct Publishing universe within two weeks of each other.  I’d written them twenty years before and never found an agent, let alone a publisher.  Each eventually spawned a multi-book series, one of which gave rise to three spinoff series.  Those two novels didn’t generate stellar sales at first, at least by my current standards, but since I wasn’t yet serious about writing as a career back then, I wasn’t worried.  I didn’t do much marketing, let alone spam social media with pleas to buy my books.  I simply went on to write their sequels.  It took those sequels and their sequels before my audience grew to the point where I gained traction as a publisher.  Marketing helped, but nothing succeeds like hard work and persistence married to patience.

If you’re not willing or able to put in the necessary hard work over the course of several years, then perhaps you don’t have the right abilities or mindset to develop a successful independent publishing business built for the long term, and that’s okay. We all have different capabilities and aspirations, but we should all learn to restrain our egos and ensure our expectations match our efforts.