I’ve talked before about platform and how it’s about building your visibility and getting your name out there. I believe for an author or ANY type of entertainment person, a lot of what you are selling is “you” and your personality. In order to raise your visibility and build your platform you have to have what is known in business as a USP, which is your unique selling proposition. What makes you and what you’re selling different from others.
Some people really hate the idea of having to be a “personality” or having to be a “performer” to get book sales, but that idea doesn’t bother me. And that’s mainly cause I have a monopoly on being me. Just like you have a monopoly on being you. When someone likes “you” as a person, they “may” become curious about what you’re writing and check it out.
I find my readers come from several different pools… romance readers and of course specifically paranormal romance readers, fanfic fans (peeps who read and liked fanfic I used to write in the buffyverse and followed me over to my original fic), and people who’ve been drawn to me based on the indie author thing. I *think* it comes off pretty well that I am passionate about being indie. I think because of feeling a passion for self-publishing and a pride in it and what I’m working to create, it comes off MUCH differently than it would if I were ashamed of it or resented traditionally published authors, or etc.
Yeah I would love to do something crazy amazing eventually through sales and such, but whatever I do, I want to do it “as an indie.” That part is really important to me. As a result of this being a part of my USP, I’ve attracted many readers to me who are not typical paranormal romance readers. I’ve probably got a much bigger male readership (percentage-wise) than a lot of romance authors do, which I find kind of interesting. Several men have reviewed KEPT on Amazon and it’s always really interesting to step outside that traditional “romance as female-dominated genre” and get that perspective.
There was a time when I really would have jumped if an agent contacted me. There was a time I would have jumped if a publisher did. I don’t believe those things are true any longer (and in fact KNOW the first one isn’t), because being indie is part of my USP. I found the second I got an email from someone interested in representing me, that I really “didn’t” want that because I didn’t want to give up being indie. I have my fingers in too many indie pies, and it’s too much a part of my overall USP. (I promise I’ll stop typing USP now. Just one more time. USP. Okay, done now. Probably.)
There was also a time I was afraid to be loud and proud about being an indie author. That has changed. There is already a growing rumbling of the idea of indie authorship as something that is “cool.” I find that many people are very very supportive of what I’m doing here and want to see if indie authors can become what indie musicians and indie filmmakers are. It seems they WANT to see that happen. And I want to see that happen too.
So contrary to the belief and viewpoint that most readers won’t trust a self-published book, many readers truly ARE open to it. And if they are able to sort through and find enough good indies, that attitude will spread. Now I embrace being indie and don’t really care who the hell knows it. Because if someone doesn’t like it, oh well. I’m more focused on finding those who do. And I’ll take readers in just about any demographic they come in.
So we all know the story of the tortoise and the hare and who won that race, but what about the tortoise and the snail? Someone once tried to sell me on homeopathy. For those who aren’t aware, homeopathy is one of those words that is VERY misused. People who don’t know what it means thinks homeopathic medicine is “another word for” all natural medicine. But it isn’t.
Homeopathy isn’t real. It’s just a placebo. Every controlled scientific study that has ever been done has shown it to be no more effective than a placebo. (And sometimes a placebo is effective. It’s just not medicine.) Homeopathy is basically “magic water.” They take this substance, dilute it a bunch of times through this really weird ritualistic method, and by the time they’re done not a SINGLE molecule of whatever substance they started out with is even IN there. The homeopathic belief is that the LESS of the substance that is in there, the more potent it is.
They try to compare it to a vaccine but that just doesn’t fly because there is a point of diminishing returns. With a vaccine you have to have the most you can take without harming the patient, to allow their immune system to produce necessary antibodies. Less for the sake of less is insane. So anyway I had someone try to get me to take homeopathy once, but following the homeopathic logic I decided that taking NONE must be the MOST potent medicine of all. So I didn’t take any and boy do I feel GREAT!
So anyway, there really was kind of almost a point to that tangent… maybe. And the point is this… slow and steady wins the race, we’ve always been told that, but how slow is too slow? When do you get to the point where you’re twiddling your thumbs and barely moving forward and pretending it’s progress?
Sometimes I feel like the snail. My productivity could and should be higher but I guess sometimes I feel overwhelmed. If the ONLY thing I was doing was self-publishing, that would be one thing. But I’m also building a few other revenue streams on the side. One of them currently, the content mill writing, is one of those things that isn’t passive income. I gotta show up to make money. Then I still have to work on my website, and work on my fiction. I’ll love it when I build up enough steam that the fiction is the only thing I HAVE to do every day. It’ll give me a much-needed break.
So I’m not even the tortoise right now. Right now I’m the snail. And it’s due to the overwhelm factor and just SO much crap to get done and not having an effective way to prioritize it. All of it is equally important. The fiction has to get done because I have readers waiting on it (which I very much appreciate mind you. I’m certainly not bitching about having a fans, that’s awesome). The content mill writing has to get done because until I get other passive income streams built, that’s where my funding is coming from. And the website stuff has to get done because it will become hopefully a decent passive revenue stream eventually after the bulk of the work is done (it’s just such a big project), and I know it will take a few years before the fiction picks up some steam and I start building a decent backlist.
Once I’ve “got” some other passive revenue streams built up and can drop the content mill writing, I can focus mainly on the self-publishing stuff. Because I have stuff under another name I need to get published too but for now that’s all on the back burner until I get my paranormal romance building enough steam.
But once I hit “critical mass” with a few of these things it’ll be okay. It’s just that for the past year and a half I’ve felt like SUCH a snail. And it may be another couple of years before I’m totally out of the snail zone. It could be likened to someone with chronic fatigue syndrome starting an exercise program. Easy to get overwhelmed.
So anyway… yeah.
I’ve noticed lately that I’m getting a lot of followers who have like 20,000 followers and they are following 22,000 people. When I see this I know that most likely you are using some kind of “follower-adding device/program/system/whatever.”
I pretty much never follow these people back. Why not? Because I know you don’t give a shit about me, my thoughts, my wants, or my needs. All you care about is big numbers. How do I know that? Because NO ONE is following, as in ACTUALLY following and reading the twitter feeds of 22,000 people. I mean get real.
Hell most people can’t follow MY Twitter feed, I tweet so much. I fill up people’s phones during my peek tweety-conversational time. So here is the thing… when you get a magic 30,000 Twitter followers through some tweet adder program, ALL it does is make you look cooler. And the ONLY way it actually makes you look cooler is if you unfollow at least 50% or more of the people so it doesn’t look like you’re just using the “Twitter system.”
All these big follower counts do for you when they aren’t grown organically from meaningful interaction is make you “look” cool. (Well maybe it could be debated how “meaningful” interaction with 140 character limits truly is, but still.) If you’re selling something: Books, video games, some kind of internet marketing system (like anyone needs another one of those for $500, please), those followers don’t represent potential customers because they aren’t ACTUALLY following you. Not 90% of them anyway.
There is a serious law of diminishing returns when everybody signs up for the trendy new “get 50,000 followers quick” scheme. I swear this is more annoying than email chain letters. Why are people such lemmings? How many people do you think anyone can REALLY follow in a day? People divide their Twitter lists into people they actually interact with and just about everybody else they never even see.
The people who believe these insta-follower plans will “work” at anything but inflating their “image” to people who aren’t really following them past 5 minutes anyway, are clearly people who have never used or truly interfaced with Twitter. And unless you speak directly to certain individuals, most of them will never see any of your tweets. Do you really not understand that having 30,000 followers does NOT mean 30,000 people are seeing your messages? I mean really? Do I have to spell this out with macaroni?
So please, stop. This is annoying. If you aren’t on Twitter to actually engage and interact and have a fun social experience and get to know people and exchange ideas, then go away. We don’t need more people who want to automate life and not have actual interaction with people. That’s so 2008.
Businesses are built one customer at a time. They are built by meaningful interaction with real people as a real person. If you want to automate while you are expecting others to give you their time to listen to your message that you tweeted thirty times in a row, sorry it just won’t happen.
You have to keep it real. It might take longer that way, but what you build through being real is built on a solid foundation, Get Twitch Quick is built on sand. Be smarter than that.
This isn’t a morality argument. This isn’t an argument for or against freemium (I still think it’s stupid to give something away JUST to keep someone from stealing it from you.) This is a look at the “why” of piracy. What are “direct alternatives” to reducing it? And don’t say DRM. DRM doesn’t really reduce piracy.
Here is an interesting article I came across.
Note how music piracy has gone WAY down. And movie/television piracy has gone way up. Here is the correlation… Music is not DRM’d now (for the most part). You can burn your MP3’s onto CDs. You can make back-up copies. You can put them on multiple devices. Movies and television are still DRM’d to death.
The issue is that when you buy something you should REALLY own it, not just “own it for a little while.” Like Amazon can take books off your Kindle. WTF? See, I’m not always on Amazon’s side. Just because I agreed with their choice with regards to Macmillan doesn’t mean I always do. There is ruthless then there is just plain immoral. The Macmillan decision was ruthless. Taking books people have already bought off their Kindles is immoral.
Exceptions of course include when someone has stolen content and is selling it on Kindle. (And that may actually be the only times Kindle takes things off your Kindle, in which case you get a refund.)
But the issue with DRM is that whole you don’t really own it principle. One of the arguments for DRM has been that you lock your house before you leave the house so other people can’t get into it. That makes sense. BUT do you sell a locked house to someone else and not give them the key? Didn’t think so.
DRM causes people to be locked out of their own house. So think about this a moment… While I know some people who pirate are just thieves and they suck… how many people are pirating DRM’d shit that THEY ALREADY OWN? I feel NO guilt about pirating something I bought officially. If I own it I should be able to back it up, put it on other devices, etc. This doesn’t make piracy as a concept okay, but it’s also not okay to SAY you’re selling something to someone when really you’re only leasing it.
And if you’re leasing it, you sure as hell should not be charging the same price you’d charge if you were really selling it. i.e. a DRM’d ebook REALLY should not cost more than the lowest print book. As far as I know if I move from one house to another, I can take my paper books with me. I don’t have to leave them behind. With DRM that’s not the case.
Last year my theme phrase was: “Fortune Favors the Brave.” It was over my computer monitor so I could see it. And remember it. You have to speak out. You have to do what you think you should do and not worry about what everybody else is doing. Likewise a theme phrase could have been: “Keep your eyes on your own paper.”
This year the theme phrase is: “There is no Try, Only Do.” I have a bad habit of thinking/saying “I’ll try to get this done.”
I’ll TRY to get my editing done. I’ll TRY to get Blood Lust released by this time. (I know I’ve ranted against arbitrary deadlines but there comes a point where you’re just procrastinating.) I’ll TRY to make this much money with my content writing this week. I need to remove TRY from my vocabulary and spend more time DOING. Doing is more empowering than trying. Doing is… you know you can do it, you just sit down and do it and stop making excuses. Try makes you believe it’s like some kind of mystical thing whether you can do something or not. Most things are all about action. Luck happens later, when you’ve taken action. If you’re busy just “trying” to get something done, you aren’t there yet. And believe me, I’m preaching at myself, not you. I don’t know if you do this. I know I do it.
This is my computer desktop background picture: (I love how cute and determined Yoda looks with his little light saber, HAHA!)
Okay so there has been a big Bru Ha Ha between Macmillan and Amazon.
Okay so to sum it up, the issue is that Macmillan has been in fights with Amazon for over a year with regards to Kindle book prices. They want to sell their ebooks for $15. Amazon finally got sick of it and in a massive power play pulled ALL of Macmillan’s books off of Amazon. Okay so people can whine about how evil Amazon is but hey, Amazon can set rules for the prices of the books for their proprietary devices. I mean come on. If you want to sell on Amazon you play by their rules.
And frankly this is just a stupid argument to begin with because NO ONE is going to pay $15 for an ebook, that’s just insane. I don’t know what crack they’re smoking. That’s twice the cost of mass market. Common sense dictates that your e-version should be less expensive than your cheapest print version. Otherwise it’s just epic fail. You don’t have printing costs to account for. This is just greed and stupidity.
I just want to say that I hope publishers will continue to do stupid shit like this with regards to ebooks because the more stupid they are,the easier it makes things for me as an indie. It gets much easier for an indie when all the big dogs are too busy drooling all over themselves to do anything halfway intelligent.
In a world changing as fast as the publishing world is right now, it does not behoove a publisher to do things like this. This is a losing battle. You either figure out how to swim in the new publishing climate or get out of the way for the people willing to play the game according to the actual rules. Wake up, welcome to the Internet, and realize you don’t have the power you once did. It’s only going to get worse, and the more you thrash about, the more it’ll hurt.
Put simply… I just don’t think it’s sexy. What’s sexy to me is the dynamic between the characters, the relationship, the banter. What happens between the sheets I don’t need it in surround sound and play-by-play. And maybe this is overly optimistic of me, but I feel like readers have a good enough imagination to not “need” it spelled out. I don’t want to write fiction that people skim, and given the fact that I skim about 90% of the sex scenes in romance novels because I just don’t like them, well there ya go.
To me, having sex overly described in every romance novel is like having a meal overdescribed or having character’s bathroom habits overly described. I understand it in erotica, because erotica is meant to turn you on. But not all romance is erotica, and frankly I’m a little bit disappointed that a growing segment of readers out there expect romance to be erotica and if it isn’t, they get upset about it. I wish there was a way to put a big warning label on my books: “Not graphic sex. If you aren’t here for the story itself, move on.” Not to be rude, but just because I hate having readers disappointed, yet at the same time, I’m not changing the way I write. I wish there was an easier way to help prevent readers who my fiction isn’t right for, from having to waste the time reading me.
I guess, in it’s way reviews where people say that all the good parts were skipped, or it wasn’t sexy enough for them, or “where’s the sex?” (It’s there, it’s just not explicit. Sex actually DOES happen in most of my fiction, I just am not drawing you a diagram. To quote Willow from Buffy, it’s more like a “blurry watercolor.”) Anyway I guess when people write reviews like this it prevents me from having to say: “This book probably isn’t for you if that’s what you’re looking for.” Not sure what else to do.
I hate the disappointment in a reader but I hope people can understand that I can’t please everyone, so ultimately I have to please myself and write what I want, and hope there are enough readers out there who like it too. I think there are, but I still hate it when someone has to find out the hard way that my writing isn’t right for them.
So I have wanted to break 1,000 in the Kindle store for overall Kindle store sales rank forever. I just went to check my stats and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, YAY. I don’t know why this means so much to me but it feels like such a milestone to be in the 3-digits. So when I checked, my Kindle store sales rank overall was: 783!
Subcategories:
#15 Kindle Store — Kindle books —- romance —- fantasty, futuristic, ghost
#16 Books —- Romance —- Vampires
#16 Books —- Romance —- Fantasy, futuristic, ghost
Highest numbers EVAR!
Here is the screen shot awesomeness (you has to click on it to see the win!)
With regards to the Apple iPad:
zoewinters: I think I could be seduced by a sexy, sporty little e-reader, but the iPad is just too big and makes me want to hide under my bed.
zoewinters: I can’t lose my e-reader virginity to THAT??? Zomg *hides* I’m delicate.
jackiebarbosa: @zoewinters You and I are waiting for the iMiniPad. 
zoewinters: @jackiebarbosa Well, not exactly MINI, but I can’t handle the monster for my e-reader virginity. I mean come on! I’m an ereader VIRGIN
zoewinters: @jackiebarbosa I’m waiting for the right e-reader to pop my digital cherry.
We’re dirty people. You can follow jackiebarbosa here: @jackiebarbosa
Okay so I have been in long discussions/arguments with @rosspruden on Twitter with regards to “free.”
Here was about how it went down: He told me all E should be free and sell hard copy.
I said that was stupid business because you devalue your own work and train your customers to NOT pay you, which is not a good idea. People will take advantage of you to the degree that you ALLOW them to take advantage of you. Some people will “still” try to take advantage of you, but that’s a reality of life. You don’t have to invite it by giving “everything” away.
If you walk down the street and come across someone who looks shady, do you pull out your wallet and hand it to him to avoid the “possibility” that he might mug you?
This discussion on Twitter seemed to get wrapped up in two parallel but different issues: Free giveaways and Piracy.
His view is that piracy helps both consumers (to get what they want out of companies, which is kind of like saying hostage situations help criminals to get what they want, or guns make rape easier) and the companies/artists themselves by boosting their exposure and increasing the sale of scarce goods. On the surface this sounds okay. But the problem with this is… when you start shouting from the rooftops how great piracy is for everybody then it trains consumers to see piracy as “okay” and to not buy things, just steal them.
While some sales from piracy are due to someone wanting a “scarce good” related to it, I would guess that a lot of it is just from more people hearing about it and the honest people buying it. I know I know, there are those studies that the people who buy the most music also pirate the most music, so? Does that make it okay? I don’t think it does.
Whether or not it helps or hurts everybody isn’t the issue of whether it’s right or wrong, but appealing to consumer morality is about as effective as a woman walking naked through a men’s prison saying “rape is wrong.” Either a consumer is honest or they are not. If they are, they don’t need a sermon from you. If they aren’t, your sermon will fall on deaf ears.
Also, piracy does not necessarily help everybody in every situation. There are situations and circumstances in which it hurts you, like when Nicole Peeler talked about how it could hurt her ability to get a new contract. Will piracy drive her print sales… maybe, maybe not. Will it hurt them? maybe… maybe not.
Not every pirated copy is a “lost sale” since chances are good the pirate wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. However, when we train a whole generation of consumers to expect everything for free, to not value the time and effort that goes into these types of products, to think “piracy helps” so they can steal and somehow “help the artist,” then we’re basically taking someone who otherwise WOULD have paid for something, and giving them permission to sin so they don’t have to feel guilty about it.
Most people have at one point or another participated in file sharing. But at the VERY least, you should feel guilty about it. You should know it’s wrong, you’re wrong, it’s not okay, and you should have waited until you could pay for it.
The issues of piracy and voluntary free content are not the same thing. Piracy is an unfortunate reality of life. However, when you show you don’t consider your writing of monetary value by giving it all away (and when you give away E, while charging for print, that is exactly what you’re saying. You’re saying the content itself is of no value and only the materials that went into packaging the content is), you’re just hurting yourself.
Also, if/when E becomes the primary delivery method and print is just a subsidiary right, people will need to charge for E to make money. If you’ve been giving it all away, you can’t really switch gears like that without pissing off your consumer.
I think SOME free is okay. MY free plan is: KEPT (full novella, first story in the Preternaturals Series), Free excerpts of all future books, and Free podcasts (because audio is such a different experience.) That’s it with the exception of “limited” freebies. Like “two weeks only, get this book free here” sorts of deals. A reader who expects even MORE free than THIS, is NEVER going to pay for your work, they’re just going to mooch off you forever. (Unless they are poverty stricken and can’t afford to pay for any entertainment, in which case they might buy your work later if their situation improves, but why would they if they don’t have to?)
So at this point @rosspruden begins to talk about how piracy doesn’t hurt e-sales. But he’d been talking about giving everything away for free. I’ve never disputed that piracy sometimes has a net positive effect, but that’s not the same thing as just giving things to potential thieves so they won’t steal from you. Then he started talking about how you can give away the PDF, but charge for Kindle editions. Actually Amazon is changing their policy on that from what I understand.
I had already been doing this. KEPT was free everywhere except on the Kindle, but that was because Kindle wouldn’t allow me as an indie author distributing directly through them to set my price at free. So I set it at a dollar. And that was because I wanted to get into the Amazon system. (We can rant all day about how evil Amazon is, but you really want your work in that distribution channel.)
So anyway… There are new opportunities opening up for how I can distribute my work through Amazon’s system, so once Blood Lust comes out, you can bet this $1 on Kindle, Free everywhere else issue will be solved. Because even though it’s “just a dollar” I do feel like there will be “some” people who will buy KEPT on Amazon, later find out it’s free in PDF, and then get upset about it and feel cheated.
Since more and more e-readers are cross-platform, and almost all of them read PDF, it’s not exactly true anymore to act like PDF is this whole other “thing.” It’s not. If someone has a Kindle, and they find your free PDF, they can convert it to their kindle for a dime. They save ninety cents that way.
Someone can argue all day that the reader shouldn’t feel cheated because it’s only a dollar, and if I gave them a good reading experience they should be willing to support my efforts monetarily. But what a person SHOULD feel and DOES feel are two separate things. However, my one consolation until this issue can be “fixed,” is that any reader who buys a book on Kindle can get a refund, no questions asked. So should a reader later find my book free, after they’ve paid a buck on Kindle, they do have recourse if for some reason they feel they can’t spare me a dollar.
Today’s Podcast is about this very issue of Free: “Freemium” NOT “Free Extremium”
