If you like what you read, consider checking out his website for more. Better yet, buy his book!
~ J.W.
I Self-Published a #1 Amazon Best Seller, but It Was Dangerous. Don't Try This at Home . . .
by Gruff Davies
In November 2010, I held the launch party
for my debut science fiction novel, The
Looking Glass Club. About six weeks
after launch, the book became an Amazon best seller. In fact, it reached #1 on Amazon
UK's genre best seller lists (Science Fiction > Mysteries and Crime). The CTO of Amazon
actually tweeted that he'd started reading it! I was beyond ecstatic as you
can imagine. You'd be forgiven for
thinking I'm now a card-carrying member of the self-publishing movement, but
I'm not. This is my account of just how
tough the whole process was and how close it came to being an absolute disaster. In retrospect, it was a rash and dangerous
choice that could have destroyed my writing career. Hopefully, this story will help you decide
whether trade publishing or self-publishing is the right route for you, and if
you do decide to self-publish, maybe you can glean from my experiences what to
do and what not to do to give your book—and your career—its best chance.
Firstly, let me say up-front: I have a
respectable strike rate with agents. I'd
already approached what I considered to be the top UK literary agency (for SF) with one of my science fiction stories early in my writing career and they loved
it and asked me for more. Years later
when I'd finished writing a mature draft of The Looking Glass Club they loved
that too, calling it 'a corker'—at first anyway. Recently, I submitted a sample of my second
novel—again to just one agent—and received extremely positive feedback. I've only ever contacted six agents in total,
and achieved a 1 in 3 strike rate, with two 'bullseyes' on first subs. So why on Earth would I choose to
self-publish in the first place?
Beware of the Hype
Well, partly, I was taken in by a lot of
hype about how easy it was to do. By all
the success stories. And it's true. Partly.
It is easy. But publishing a book is not the same as marketing a book and making it a
success. And if you self-publish, this is an enormously difficult thing to do, and it's getting harder, not
easier.
I realise now I was extremely naive about
the work involved in publishing a book in today's market. Understand that getting an agent interested
in your novel is really just the first step in a long process. It can take years of work and rewrites after
you finish writing what you thought was the 'final' draft to get it on the
shelf. Publishers receive enormous amounts of submissions, and use
agents as a quality filter. Some
publishers only accept submissions
from agents. Agents therefore receive
enormous amounts of submissions too.
They read a huge number of books per week each. One I met claimed to
read ten novels a week. That's two novels every day in a five day week! They are not reading your work the way a
reader would, for pleasure. They're not
reading your work to 'get it' they way you intended it when you wrote it. Agents
live on the commission they earn from books. They skim read.
They
read to reject. They have to, to get through their workload. And they have a glut of
choice of talented writers.
They're looking for commercially viable
prospects that will feed and clothe them and make them money in an increasingly
difficult market. Even if they've expressed initial interest in a book, if you
are not willing to mould that book (and indeed yourself) into something that
they think will fly commercially, they will rapidly lose interest. It can be a bit like X factor for books but without the dramatic music and fireworks.
I didn't understand any of this. It was my first book. I had a vision for it that I didn't want to
let go of. I was attached to it being my book, my way. I made major revisions to the book twice over
about 18 months based on their feedback but I didn't rewrite it the way one of the agents
wanted. He'd basically asked for a
complete rewrite and a simplification that I felt totally compromised the
integrity of the book. In the end, it
became clear the relationship was going cold and, frustrated and exhausted by
five drafts over six years, I finally snapped and decided, what the hell, I'll
publish myself. I didn't use any of the
existing services for authors though, like Lulu. They seemed expensive and low
quality. I wanted to be totally
professional—I wanted to publish as if I'd published it traditionally. I was just making my own a shortcut. I took advice from a friend who was very
senior at Bloomsbury, hired an editor, set up my own micro-publisher and tried as much as possible to mimic the process of trade publishing to ensure the
same quality. Paying an editor was a
great decision. But trying to mimic
trade publishing marketing was a big mistake, and I almost totally messed up
the marketing side. It could have ended
my career instead of boosting it. I was
lucky.
Very, very lucky.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Publishing
When I started out writing around 1999, I
was warned that new novels sell fewer than 2,000 copies on average. Around 2005 I was told that a quarter of a
million books were now published per year - a figure that staggered me. In 2010 more
than three million books were reported
published. Average annual sales for U.S.
non-fiction books are now fewer than 250
copies. I believe it's now about 400 for
novels. It's hard to get reliable
data though. That two-thousand-sales-for-a-debut
figure is now considered to be well above average. Averages are, of course, drastically affected
by the explosion of new self-published books, but, the uncomfortable truth is:
the more books there are published, the more competition there is in the market
and the lower sales will be overall per book.
In this new global world, you're competing with every other English language writer in the world. There's no escaping this fact. It affects you as an author whichever route
you take. And to make matters worse, people
are reading less and spending more time online.
It's not all bad news. The industry still
generates billions in sales, but the
best-selling books dominate those sales completely. In the few graphs of (questionable) data that
I've managed to hunt down, even when you plot the volume of sales against sales
rank on a logarithmic scale, the relationship is still one of exponential decay. It's a
double exponent. If that's just
maths gobbledegook to you, all you need to know is: if you're not in the top 1%
you won't sell enough copies to cover your marketing costs. Let me paint this another way: the Fifty Shades trilogy accounted for 1 in
every 20 book sales in 2012.
Statistically speaking, most books lose
money. Publishers are very open about
the fact they expect to lose money on new authors' first books. I can tell you first hand this is true
because I did. Fortunately, I had
prepared myself for this and viewed it as an investment in my career and a risk
I was willing to take. The
Looking Glass Club was not merely in the top 100 books on Kindle in Amazon in
the genre lists, it was #1 (I took a screenshot that day), how could it lose money?
I hadn't any idea how hard it was to
promote and market a book before I tried it.
Naively, I figured, hey, I'm an experienced
entrepreneur, how hard can it be? I've
been on BBC Tomorrow's World (twice), Bill Gates presented one of my inventions
at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2003.
If I can get his attention, surely I can get anyone's; it's a great read.
A unique story and there's even a competition relating to the theme*; I'm well-connected thanks to my education
and social circles; I could pull some strings, ask for some favours... You get the idea. I completely bought my own hype. And I misled myself almost catastrophically
as a result.
Promoting a new book isn't like promoting a
new business, product or invention. All new novels are competing for the
same marketing space. All new products
are differentiable in their marketing promise. All new novels are conceptually the
same: they promise to entertain you while you read them. You're competing for attention with every other novel published - now perhaps
millions per year. Agents and publishers know this instinctively
because they do this day-in, day-out. I
didn't throw a huge amount of money at marketing my book, certainly not enough,
but I did ask favours of people: three wonderfully generous friends in PR in
the UK and US agreed to help. The
reaction from press editor they contact on my behalf was almost unanimous: practically no-one in the major press wanted to
know about it. It sounded too
complicated (a self-published SF book about physics and philosophy in this TV
era where TOWIE, X Factor and Britain's Got
Talent reigns?). Journalists are
busy trying to save their own careers from the tectonic shifts of the
technology era where profits from paper sales are dwindling to nothing and few in
publishing appear to have successfully worked out how to monetize the web.
Getting Reviews is Almost Impossible
After many weeks of zero press responses to
read requests (baffled apologies from my PR friends who are all very successful
at promoting other things), I began to panic.
I started to realise no journalist was even going to waste time turning
the first page of a long, complex novel by an unknown author. Why would they risk the time? I'm not Stephen Fry or Jordan. I had three
people on the case, and zero results. I
woke up in a cold sweat one morning realising the whole project could
tank. Then I remembered an old friend
from University wrote for New Scientist.
Could he help? I emailed him: No,
he'd already left to become a doctor, a more reliable career than journalism. Fortunately for me, he offered to pass my
details on to another journalist for the magazine, who, solely trusting the relationship, agreed to read my book.
After months of graft, one journalist had agreed to read my book. And it was via a personal contact of mine.
Realising I was going to have to take massive
evasive action to avoid a total disaster, I started to contact my own network in
earnest with thinly disguised pleas for help. Various people at my alma mater, Imperial College,
fortunately, were delighted to help - especially since the novel is partly set
there. In the end, I even hosted the
launch party at Imperial. I'm eternally
grateful to them.
Meanwhile weeks past and nothing from New
Scientist. I almost panicked as the
launch date approached. I was
committed. I recontacted some people
that some of my PR friends had and tried again.
Fortunately, another PR hit: a book had gone missing and I was asked to
repost it in time for a Science Fiction special. The editor emailed me a week or two later to
tell me it he'd found it such an exciting read he actually switched off X factor to finish it. A hint of sunshine in the gloom. He ran a whole page on me and the book, but this
was relatively small circulation magazine.
It was great PR but this wasn't going to turn into sales.
Then out of the blue, I heard back from New
Scientist. She was only half way through
the book but the journalist not only loved it, she thought New Scientist readers
would too. Especially the puzzle aspect. This call came five weeks after sending the
book off (during most of which time I was panicking). To my inexpressible relief she told me she
was wanted to set up an interview and planned to write up a
review of The Looking Glass Club in New Scientist's Christmas Special. New Scientist has a global circulation of
about 130,000 readers - many of whom are the just sort of people I knew would
love the book. I was overjoyed, but
mostly I was relieved.
Luck, Luck, Luck
As a result, shortly after Christmas 2010, The
Looking Glass Club went soaring up the best seller charts to reach the #1 spot on
Amazon UK's sub-genre category: Science Fiction > Mysteries and Crime. My credibility as a writer was salvaged. Had I not pulled out all the stops and achieved
a glowing review in a major publication like this, my book and career would have completely bombed. The web is full of people who will tell you
that the stigma of self-publishing is changing (and I believe it is, slowly)
but if my experience is anything to go by, don't think for one minute that you
will find it easy, if at all possible
to get reviews in anything with a decent circulation. Editors and journalists are bombarded with
book review requests from trade press as well as people self-publishing. They simply don't have the time to check if
your self-published book is any good. Requests from trade press are simply a
safer bet: they've been through at least
three experienced human quality filters that they respect: an agent, an
editor and a publisher. If you
self-published, you are very unlikely to get reviewed by a major
publication. You need to factor this
into your marketing. You need to do it
differently.
So, I'd managed the highly-sought-after
Amazon #1 ranking (on a sub-genre
list mind you, not a major genre or their overall list, these are in turn orders
of magnitude harder to get ranked on), now what? I hadn't a clue. I had no idea how to profit from this result
and turn it into more PR and more sales.
I floundered. I had nothing left
in my PR sleeves apart mini-competitions which generated piddling results by
comparison. Two weeks later, I lost the
#1 position and I never regained it.
Sales during that time accounted for the vast majority of the sales of
the book to date.
The following year, with Christmas approaching, I thought I should
employ a PR company specialising in books to run a six week campaign to promote
the book again. To be fair to them, they
advised against the timing and suggested a post-Christmas campaign would be
less likely to get lost in the noise. I
made the mistake of ignoring that advice.
Thousands of pounds later the result were: one radio interview on barely
known European station. Again, by using
my own contacts, I managed to get a second higher profile interview myself.
Now, I know The Looking Glass Club is niche,
but it is (apparently) a bloody good read if you happen to be my target market (it
gets consistently high star ratings and excellent reviews on Amazon and Good
Reads). I'm no celebrity, but I am quite
well-connected. The problem wasn't with
any of this. As an experienced
entrepreneur I thought I understood business and marketing, and that was my
mistake.
The problem was—is—the unique nature of
the marketing landscape for novels.
Pushing Boulders Uphill
Remember tragic Sisyphus, pushing his
boulder uphill for all eternity? Well, for authors that hill is has the shape
of the double exponent decay curve I mentioned before. It gets steeper as a double exponent as you
try to push your sales up and your rank down.
If I hadn't managed to get that review in the New Scientist Christmas
Special, my book would have sold minuscule volumes.
And, even during the period where The
Looking Glass Club was ranked as a #1 Amazon Best Seller, I'd set pricing as
low as possible to make the book attractive - I was barely making a margin on
each sale. My books were all print-on-demand
which is cripplingly expensive. Kindle
sales made slightly more but not enough to compensate. I didn't have the time (or knowledge, or
money) to do a guerrilla web-marketing campaign (I'm doing more of that now and
it seems to be a far better option for both publishing routes).
So do I regret self-publishing? Oddly, no.
I still think it was the right choice for me at the time. After six years of pain, I was done with the
book. I needed it out there. I needed to know there was a market for my
writing. I needed a confidence boost:
you don't really know if you can write until you have book sales and fans
writing in with wonderful praise. And you don't learn how to handle negative
criticism until people scorn your work publicly either. Yes, so far, I've lost money self-publishing
The Looking Glass Club but sales pick up for all books when authors publish subsequent
novels. It'll pick up again. What I
gained was self-confidence, very public praise for my work, credibility as
writer, proof there was market for my voice, and a brief but fantastic #1
ranking. But more than that I gained an
education about the reality of book publishing.
I've mentally put my losses down as the "course
fees" for that education. I hope
this blog post will save you paying the price I did for those lessons. The good news is: self-publishing can be a
platform to help you on the route to being trade published if your book does well. 16
of the top 100 books on Kindle for 2012 were self-published, of which only 5
remain self-published. That figure is
encouraging but do keep in mind the vast number of Kindle titles self-published
that year.
I'm happy to be wrong, but the data support
me in this: there aren't many options if you want to be a self-publishing
success story:
- Be very famous already (or have a large following somehow)
- Write dozens and dozens of fun, easy-read, cheap novels very quickly
- Write well, have connections and money, and work damn hard on marketing, or
- Just be very, very, very lucky.
Whatever you do, set your expectations for
the long haul. Believe in yourself - if
you don't others won't. Don't rush the
process. Don't "end game"—enjoy
the writing process itself, because if you're going to be a writer,
statistically speaking you're probably not going to make much money from it, if
any at all. You may even lose money so
treat it like a hobby that you'd spend money on. If you write for the love of writing, the
other rewards are plentiful.
And if you work very, very hard at it. You might just be lucky enough to get into
that top 1%.
Good luck!
Gruff
Gruff Davies is an inventor, entrepreneur, and novelist and the author of the Looking
Glass Club. He's currently writing a second novel,
Supernova. A keen linguist, he’s also
the co-founder and CEO of Bitesized Languages, Kwiziq and French-test.com. He invented the Exertris Gaming Exercise Bike
featured on BBC Tomorrow's World and presented by Bill Gates at the Consumer
Electronic Show in 2003.
I like the honesty in this post. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThe whole experience sounds frightening. Since I am none of those four things, I think I'll stick with where I am at for now.
ReplyDeleteThis post is very educational Gruff. I hope you're having a great time J.W.
ReplyDeleteSome of the scariest things I fear about self-publishing are listed here... which I'm still choosing to do, call me crazy. 0.o It's hard explaining to my family that I'm choosing a profession which will require significant (in terms of my dayjob income) investment per book, but for which I don't expect to see a profit for 5-10 years. Thanks for your realistic perspective, and good luck.
ReplyDeleteCross your fingers for me, too, and if you're looking to read a contemporary fantasy with a tone-deaf woman whose only tool to rescue everyone she loves is the inborn music magic she's long considered "useless," keep an eye out for Into the Tides this winter!
I found the article amusing and I feel for you. But let me suggest a thing or two that may have escaped consideration.
ReplyDeleteOne thing to bear in mind is that success hasn't actually become harder; that's an illusion. Sure, best-sellers dominate the market, but when has that not been the case? The "average" sales have dropped, but that's due to a flood of books on the market, not to sales actually declining. Remember that in the old days, most of those books would never have been published at all.
You say that you have lost money on your book, even though it was a sub-genre best-seller; what that tells me is that you spent too much money on it, and apparently most of that was spent on promotion. You say that you didn't spend enough on promoting the book. I say you spent too much. Here's why:
Your book (especially a fiction book) will be a success if and only if your readers promote it. A reader telling friends or announcing on social media that a book is wonderful is worth an infinite amount of the author blowing his own horn. This will happen if a) you have a minimum number of readers to start with and b) your book is wonderful enough to motivate those readers to promote it.
What that means is that the only promotion you need to do is enough to achieve a) above. You need a few "seed" readers, people who will give the book a chance and whom the book itself can persuade to promote it thereafter. Once that has happened, you don't need to promote it anymore. Either your readers will do that task, or else the book isn't good enough to achieve success no matter what you do.
If you are an unknown, your book has to be extraordinary in order to achieve breakout success. If you are not unknown, then your book only has to be good, not extraordinary. That means that once you have published an extraordinary book to achieve breakout, you will no longer be an unknown and any subsequent (or previous) effort needs only to be good.
That's the real road to success in self-publishing if you're starting from scratch.
Really interesting. I think I'd be half decent at helping on the marketing side as a published writer, but I've always thought I'd be lost trying to do it myself... and I feel even more certain having read this.
ReplyDeleteIt does sound an interesting book though.
thanks for the great post. I am fairly new to the game, but me experience with reviews has been much in line with yours. What *has* been good is offering review copies to reviewers who are active on GoodReads and social media. They are therefore people who just read a lot, and getting a free book (that is good) makes their day, and are inclined to tell others to buy it.
ReplyDeleteBroadening out to lots of small markets has helped a lot as well, and doesn't take a lot of legwork, and no monetary investment: http://deanfortythree.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/please-review-my-book/
I have had a lot of success reaching out to readers who are active on GoodReads, Amazon, and social media, sending them a digital copy of the book. They are usually overjoyed to get it, and then when they like it, are much more likely to tell others.
ReplyDeleteAlso, reaching out to smaller market blogs has worked. As a self-published author, they are more likely to read it, review it and then (like yourself) when they find it's professionally edited, designed, etc, they will give an even more favorable review. I journaled my process here: http://deanfortythree.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/please-review-my-book/