Scalzi talks about self-publishing, so I do as well -- Jules

Scalzi has a good post up about going with a publisher versus self-publishing. One of the things he addresses is the idea that self-publishing is good because you get to keep 100% of the money. As he explains in very clear fashion, this is simply not true. There are costs involved in putting out a professional product and getting it sold to the public at large, and if you're the publisher, you'll be paying them.

This is a conversation I get to have every so often. I'm epublished, and a lot of people think that epublishing must have very low costs because you don't have to pay to print, store and ship physical copies. Thus, the suggestion goes, I should self-publish and get 100% of the cover price instead of 35%.

Well, no. Because the cost of creating and handling the physical item is a relatively small fraction of the cost of bringing that book to market. Good cover art costs money. Good editing costs money. These and other things are necessary if you want people to look at the first book, and then to buy more books. Running a commercial website costs money as well.

And then there's something that you can't measure in cold hard cash, but that is vitally important -- reputation. My publisher has a good reputation in its own little niche. Readers know that they can try a new author, and have a decent chance of getting a book they'll enjoy. A book that has had someone other than the author's friends look at it and say, "Yes, this is competently written," and then work on it with the author to make it even better. That's why I can put out my next book through them and reasonably expect it to sell a thousand or so copies over the course of the initial two year contract, without having to spend large amounts of my own time and money trying to get people to look at the book.

A thousand copies doesn't sound much by the standards of the mass market paperback market, but it is still well above the average sales for a self-published book (around 75-150 copies for print books from the major POD vanity presses, by their own publicly stated figures on titles and total copies). Maybe I could do better than average, especially as I have an established fanbase now. But really, I'd rather take my 35% on 1000 copies and let my publisher do the hard work of publishing it. I've *done* my stint at being a publisher, back in my zine days, and while I got a lot of enjoyment out of it I'd rather spend my time writing. If I feel the urge to scratch that itch again, it'll be on a project that doesn't fit the commercial needs of my publisher.

[I wrote this and posted it to my personal blog on LiveJournal a month back. Alas, when I tried to post it here, I discovered that Blogger had gone from making me try several times before deigning to upload my posts, to refusing to talk to me at all. Hence lateness. Sorry.]

My book was a number 1 bestseller on Amazon! (and why it doesn't mean anything real) -- Jules

My book was a number 1 bestseller on Amazon earlier this week. Yes, really, it was. But before you rush to congratulate me, I'm not posting this to fish for compliments. This is a lesson in how an author could honestly tell you that they're an Amazon bestseller, on sales numbers that wouldn't pay enough royalties to buy a cup of tea on British Rail.

As it happens, this particular book has done reasonably but not outstandingly well by small press standards, and has sold nearly 1300 copies if you look at the combined ebook and print figures. But it's been out for some years, and is now well down the long tail when it comes to copies shifted each month. In fact, it hadn't sold any copies at all on Amazon UK for over a month before this particular sales bonanza. Want to guess how many copies it had to sell to push it to #1 on a bestseller list?

Two.

That's right, two copies sold put my book at #1 on an Amazon bestseller list. On two such lists, in fact, and #4 on another. And that's the key to how this works. Amazon doesn't just have one bestseller list. It has lots of them. It has the books bestseller list, but it also has a bestseller list for each of the many, many categories it puts books into. So the book was #1 on

Any Category > Books > Fiction > Gay > Lesbian > Erotica > Gay

and #1 on
Any Category > Books > Fiction > Gay & Lesbian > Fiction General > Gay

and #4 on
Any Category > Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature

Amazon's ranking is based in part on both how many copies the book has sold recently, and how fast it sold them. So if a book sells two copies within an hour, that can push it well up the rankings on the chart for a sub-category where even the top sellers don't sell that many copies a day. It may even get to #1. It won't stay there for very long, of course (mine stayed there for about ten hours, helped by a third copy selling a couple of hours later), unless it keeps on selling copies. But the author or publisher will be able to say that it was a #1 seller on Amazon.

The other thing feeding into this is that there are multiple Amazons, and some of them have very slow sales compared with the US one. The UK one sells books briskly enough, but nowhere near the volume of Amazon US, so it takes fewer sales to achieve chart-topping status on Amazon UK.

I didn't game this at all. What happened was that I was talking to friends on irc, and one of them said that it was time they read something of mine. I gave the url to the page on my website with the blurb and links to free sample chapters, and someone else said, "I like the look of that, I'm buying it." I checked the book's page on Amazon a little later, and in fact two of them had bought it. I know this because the book happens to be low on stock at the moment, so the page had the thing with "only X copies in stock, more on order". I have a morbid fascination with how Amazon rankings fluctuate with time, so I checked later to see when the sales fed through into the ranking (it usually takes about an hour), and was surprised to find that book's page now reporting that it was on three of the bestseller charts, as detailed above.

Now, this was pure accident -- I didn't encourage anyone to buy the book, and the only deliberate aspect of this was that I knew that someone had just bought a book, so I looked at the chart at the right time to catch a very short-term blip in ranking. Imagine how easy it is for someone to deliberately manipulate the system. In fact, people do. There are groups dedicated to helping to push each others' books to #1 on some Amazon chart for publicity purposes. A lot of the time it's possible for the dedicated to do this on even the "all books" chart. If they time it for a day when overall sales on Amazon are slow, and are well co-ordinated, it may not cost an awful lot in terms of money spent on books.

Remember this the next time you see someone pushing a vanity publishing scheme with the proud boast that they had a #1 bestseller on Amazon. Ask the questions, "Which Amazon chart, and how long was it there for?" Because the answers may reveal the sad truth that "Amazon bestseller" isn't always equivalent to "big sales". If someone can say that the book has consistently stayed in the top 25 books out of hundreds for weeks on end, that's a *lot* more indicative of true interest in the book than a brief dash to #1 from the bottom depths of the chart.

If you want to self-publish an ebook...

If you want to self-publish your ebook, don't jump on the first offer that comes along. Do your research into self-publishing, just as you would with conventional publishing, because the packages on offer vary widely in quality and cost, and you could find yourself with a self-publishing outfit that is poor value for money, or an outright scam. If you're paying an upfront fee and/or more than 20% of an ebook's cover price to a storefront site, you could do better.

Several erotic romance epublishers have gone under in the last few months, and you can expect a flurry of new publishers setting up to provide a home for the authors who've suddenly found themselves without a publisher. There have also been the usual suggestions that authors will be much better off if they self-publish, and at least one new self-publishing outfit set up in the wake of the recent bankruptcies and closures. Self-publishing does look tempting for some, but take your time and look into what self-publishing entails and what a reasonable fee is.

I haven't got time this morning to do a full-on article about this, but there's one url you should look at as an absolute bare minimum of research before signing up with a self-publishing outfit, and that's Lulu's terms and conditions for digital media:
http://www.lulu.com/help/index.php?fSymbol=download_faq

Lulu have a track record of five years, so there's a good chance they're going to stay in business. There is no set-up fee. They charge 20% of the cover price for ebooks downloaded from their website, giving you 80% (with a minimum fee of 19c, although they'll waive that if you give away the books for free). If you wish you can also make the book available in print or as an ebook on CD, although those options will cost more because of the physical production costs. There is no set-up charge for the print and CD options. That price includes a storefront hosted on their website, and they handle all the details of collecting payment. They don't take any rights to your material, and there is no minimum contract length.

If the self-publishing outfit you're considering isn't offering you a pricing deal as good as Lulu's, ask yourself what else they're offering to make up for it. If the answer is "making me feel warm and fuzzy and part of a family" -- how much money are you willing to pay for that feeling?

Self-Published Romance and POD People

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you all to another of my online endeavours. Pod People is a blog and website I began to discuss and review self-published books. The bulk of the hard stuff was then taken over by the incomparable Dawno who accepts submissions and keeps track of the reviewers and reviews. Leaving me to update (or more commmonly, neglect) the website.

I mention this because POD people recently re-opened to submissions. We currently have only three romance reviews and none for erotica. However I know we have reviewers interested in romance and I am sure many would be interested in erotica if that was a genre we listed. So if you have self-published in these areas please consider submitting a book--we take only electronic copies (unless otherwise arranged). This is not because our reviewers have anything against paperbacks--but to save the authors the costs of the review copy and postage.

Now, I would admit to being somewhat bemused at the whole notion of self-publishing in these genres given the availability of many small and large presses open to romance and/or erotica submissions--but I am sure my attitude reflects my general ignorance of the issues and benefits of self-publishing. I began this site because some self-published books are excellent and deserve wider recognition. I am not involved in self-publishing and know very little about it. I am neither a cheerleader, nor nay-sayer, on this issue--just an interested by-stander with a love of books and a basic understanding of html.

So, what do you think the advantages of self-publishing romance or erotic are or might be? Or the pitfalls? Do you have a self-published book to recommend?