By guest blogger Lance Charnes...
Love's more comfortable the second
time you fall
Like a friendly home the second
time you call…
-- The Second Time Around, by Sammy Cahn & Jimmy Van Heusen
I recently launched my second published novel, the near-future thriller South, almost exactly a year after
my first (international thriller Doha 12). A year’s not all that long
– Miley Cyrus is still around, after all – but in the fast-moving independent
publishing world, time seems to move in dog years.
The first-time publishing experience is, frankly, not any
fun at all. There’s a lot of administration, signing contracts, researching
artists, editors, distributors, publishing platforms, beta readers, review
outlets, publicity outlets, and so on, and then dealing with your chosen ones.
You spend far more time on minutiae than on writing that second book. But how
does it work for the second and subsequent books? Here’s what didn’t change over that year; next post
will talk about what did change.
Things That Didn’t Change – and that’s Good
My support structure was already in place, which saved me
perhaps hundreds of hours this go-round.
·
I’d already set up my Kindle, Nook and Kobo
accounts, set up all the payment details, found Draft2Digital for dealing with
iTunes, finally finished signing contracts with Lightning Source, and figured out
how to work the CreateSpace system.
By now I know where the holes are, too, and I’ve plugged all the ones I can.
·
My author profile and photo was already set up
in Amazon Author Central in the various storefronts where that exists
(including a French translation for Amazon.fr!).
·
I already had my stash of ISBNs, and I already
had my account with the Copyright
Office, so I could polish off those issues in a single evening.
·
I already have a cover artist (Damonza) from Doha
12, his product is a known quantity, and I know how he works. I didn’t have
to worry about what I’d end up with for a cover – I knew it would be great.
Similarly, I’m already established on Goodreads and
Kindleboards and some of the other promotional websites. The Twitter feed’s
already there, the website and Facebook author page are already set up, and all
have some history behind them now.
The process for creating ePubs for Nook and Kobo is pretty
much the same as before. I used Calibre,
validated the results through the IDPF
ePub Validator (another discovery from last time), and uploaded direct. I
also already knew the rules for what I could link to from each of the channels
and had a system to create the different versions without fumbling it. I wish I
could say the same for Kindle, but… (see Why
Did That Have to Change? in the next post)
Things That (Unfortunately) Didn’t Change
The economics of POD still make it virtually impossible to
place printed copies in bookstores. I’ve had indie bookstores turn up their
noses at the 35-40% discount I offer through Lightning Source; they don’t want
to hear that I make less than a buck on each copy, and that if I set a 55%
discount, I’d have to price the book so they’d never be able to sell it.
The indie-pub platforms still have woefully inadequate sales
reporting. You’re lucky if you can figure out what country your book sold in;
forget sussing out which channel sold it (Kobo partner site reporting,
anyone?). You can’t even get the exact sale date on the ‘Zon. Trying to figure
out whether your promotions are working? Good luck.
Trying to sell a book is still an ugly, grinding slog,
especially if you’re trying to push non-Amazon sales. The promotional
infrastructure for Nook or Kobo is simply not there. Also, a great deal of the ‘Zon-centric
promotional machine is still geared to free books, even though Amazon has
tightened the noose on book-giveaway affiliates.
Getting reviews: ditto. Review sites big and small still
have multi-month backlogs, assuming they don’t go out of business before they
get to you. Only about 10% of readers (if you’re lucky) will post reviews. And
even if you get reviews, you might not be able to keep them (see Why Did That Have to Change? in the next
post).
You’d think that bookselling websites would be able to pick
up the pertinent data about your book from the distributor’s catalog (such as
Ingram) or its partner (such as Kobo). After all, we’ve been doing
database-to-database transfers for, oh, fifty years or so. But noooooo. The explosion of online
booksellers (see Things That Changed for
the Better, next post) has also led to an explosion of places that can lose
your cover image, mangle your book description, fail to link to your other
books, and otherwise cause you headaches. Some will fix the problems if you
ask; others won’t even return your emails.
Nook author support is still atrocious. The “help” operators
can’t do anything but follow very simple scripts, and the chat operators appear
to just cut you off when you ask too many questions. There’s no escalation and,
according to the phone and chat people, no supervisors. Say what you will about
the ‘Zon, but KDP will get back to you within a day and Author Central lets you
talk directly to people who seem to be able to fix things. If Nook customer
service is as bad as its author service, it’s no wonder the device is failing.
As this shows, stasis can be both good and bad. If only we
could choose which things will change, and which won’t! In the next post, I’ll
cover some areas that changed (for better or worse) in the past year. See you
soon.
Lance Charnes is an emergency manager and
former Air Force intelligence officer. His international thriller Doha 12 and near-future thriller South are both available in Kindle,
ePub and trade paperback editions around the world, in case you want to buy a
copy in Finland. He tweets (@lcharnes)
about scuba diving, shipwrecks, art crime and archaeology, among other things.
Great post! I've not heard of Draft2digital or Epub Validator, thank you. Amazon is conquering everything because of their great customer service. Especially B&N, but then they have 3x the number of employees and 10x the sales revenue.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to read the next installment!
Peace, Seeley
A change: the 'Zon has started offering reports that show sales on particular days. Now you can finally link a promotion to its sales impact.
ReplyDelete